Education Quote by Ivan Illich

Ivan Illich points to a social architecture that slices the human lifespan into a long period under institutional custody and a later period of supposed autonomy. The first grows as schooling expands downward into early childhood and upward into prolonged degrees, certifications, and retraining; the second shrinks or is colonized by the idea that one must keep learning to remain employable. When the segments become comparable in length, life is lived under the shadow of the classroom, with school not only initiating learning but defining what counts as learning at all.

Calling schooling custodial care reframes it as a technology of containment. Compulsory attendance, age grading, bells, report cards, and truancy laws do not just organize instruction; they park bodies and shape behavior. People are declared undesirable elsewhere when other spheres cannot or will not accommodate them: youth kept off the labor market and streets, the poor kept out of public space, the unemployed channeled into training, migrants and disabled students managed by specialized programs. The very act of building an institution manufactures a clientele. Like prisons and asylums, schools define needs they then monopolize meeting, and the hidden curriculum teaches punctuality, docility, and acceptance of ranking more than it cultivates curiosity.

Illich developed this critique in Deschooling Society in 1971, arguing that industrial institutions seize social functions and turn them into services only professionals can provide. School becomes a radical monopoly on education, crowding out mutual teaching, apprenticeships, libraries, and civic life as learning environments. By equating credentials with competence, it licenses exclusion and inflates barriers to participation.

The provocation is not an attack on learning but a demand to disentangle learning from custody. If building more school walls inadvertently declares certain people unfit for the commons, the task is to create open networks, tools, and spaces where knowledge flows without confining those who seek it. The question is whether a society can value education without making life a sentence served in institutions.