On Growth

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32. Ivan D. Illich

Born in Vienna in 1926, Ivan Illich is director of the Center for Intercultural Documentation (CIDOC) in Cuernavaca, Mexico.
Ivan Illich studied in Vienna, Salzburg and Rome. He was ordained a priest and later named a monsignor. He voluntarily renounced his priestly functions and now heads the Cuernavaca center.
Among some of his best-known books are Celebration of Awareness (1970) and Deschooling Society (1971).

A recent study at Harvard by Christopher Jencks and others established that inequality in schools was not a major cause of economic inequality among adults. In other words, to fight poverty in rich nations (the study dealt with the US), fundamental changes should be made in economic institutions rather than ask schools to solve these problems.

I have never claimed that inequality in schools is a major cause of economic inequality among adults. My main attention is directed toward the ritual rather than the causative effects of schools. For this see the chapter ‘The Ritual of Progress’ in my book Deschooling Society. Like any compulsory mythopoetic ritual, the process of schooling hides from those who participate in it the divergence between the myth in which

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they believe and the social structure to which they are subservient. Schools foster the myth of equality and inevitably introject in its devotees a sense of belonging to a given age and grade-class. Fostering the equality of opportunities or shares in social products is among the chief goals, adopted by all societies which are committed to schooling. They all prescribe for their citizens a compulsory competition in climbing an open-ended ladder of educational consumption. The higher anybody climbs on this ladder - and the more he has supposedly ‘learnt to learn’ - the more costly it becomes for the community to continue his studies for another year. All societies which have adopted initiation through schooling, create a pyramid of certified classes or educational consumers. The early dropout, who is identified as the educational nonconsumer, becomes an economic untouchable. The adoption of schooling is therefore equivalent to the legitimation of a society in which people are classed according to their institutional capitalization of ‘education.’ As long as they believe in the value of standardized ‘education,’ ‘manipulation,’ ‘social conditioning’ or ‘socialization,’ they are blinded to the contradiction between myth and socioeconomic structure.

Of course, schools (1) reflect, (2) reinforce and (3) reproduce the particular class society in which they have been established. They do this independently of what happens between teachers and pupils, entirely by virtue of what I have called their ‘hidden curriculum.’¹ But more importantly, those who believe in the universal necessity of specialized, institutionalized education are blinded by the process of schooling to the inevitable class characteristics of any expanding industrial society.

William I. Thompson² of York University feels that your study Deschooling Society is more aimed at changing the authority of schools or teachers as ersatz parents, rather than dealing head-on with changing or rather upgrading consciousness towards reality.

I do not know Thompson's criticism. It is precisely an unfettered view of reality which concerns me.

I concentrated on schools because among the various industrial production systems, the educational system provided the best paradigm to unmask illusions which we hold about other agencies. This is so because until recently they served as the sacred cows of industrial society. I argued that if it were possible to focus on illusions about education, it would be equally possible to push illusions about transport, housing or medicine out of the blind spot of industrialized imagination.

1 See ‘Alternative to Schooling,’ Saturday Review, June 19, 1971.

2 See conversation no. 68.

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By 1970 at CIDOC³ we had been able to show that:

(1) Universal education through compulsory schooling is not feasible.

(2) Alternate devices for the production of universal education are more feasible and less tolerable. New educational systems, now on the verge of replacing traditional schools in many areas, are potentially more effective in manipulating, conditioning and capitalizing people than the traditional school systems of the last forty years. They are also more reliable in conditioning people for life in a capitalist economy. They are therefore more attractive for the management of our societies, more seductive for the population and more insidiously destructive of fundamental human values.

(3) A society committed to high levels of shared learning (in opposition to high levels of planned conditioning) must set pedagogical limits on fundamental parameters of industrial growth.

This analysis of schooling led us to recognize the mass production of education as a paradigm for other industrial enterprises: each producing a service commodity, each organized as a public utility, and each defining its output as a basic necessity. At first our attention was drawn to compulsory insurance of professional health care and to systems of public transport, which also tend to become compulsory once traffic rolls above a certain speed. We found that the industrialization of any service agency has destructive side effects that are analogous to the unwanted secondary results well known from the overproduction of goods. We had thus to face a set of inescapable limits to the growth of the service sector corresponding to the limits inherent in the industrial production of artifacts. We concluded that limits to growth are well formulated only if they apply both to goods and to services when these are produced in an industrial mode.

Far from dealing primarily with changing the authority of schools or teachers as ersatz parents, I have consistently used the paradigm of schools to upgrade a new consciousness about the contradictions of any form of compulsory consumption of industrial outputs.

Jean Piaget⁴ and B.F. Skinner⁵ seem to deeply disagree about the programming of children: Piaget rejects Skinner's controls as means of conditioning the child for the future. Piaget maintains that background and environment will to a large extent determine the pace at which the child learns: Progress should not be too fast; all children pass through phases of understanding; developing abilities should be constantly used and tested or the intellectual growth will be stunted.

3 Center for Intercultural Documentation, Cuernavaca, Mexico.

4 Swiss psychologist, among those working at the Institut J.J. Rousseau in Geneva, Switzerland.

5 See conversation no. 7.

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Educational psychologists usually focus on the process of initiating young humans into the society within which we live. My concern was to underline the obvious: It is impossible to condition people for a human life in an inhuman society. My main concern is not with new ‘education’ but with the need for negative design-criteria which abound in a world in which people can effectively learn.

I am increasingly more concerned with proposing the concept of a multidimensional balance of human life which can serve as a framework for evaluating man's relation to his tools. I believe that in several of many dimensions of this balance it is possible to identify a natural scale. When an enterprise grows beyond a certain point on this scale, it first frustrates the end for the achievement of which it was originally designed, and then rapidly becomes a threat to society itself. These scales must be identified, and the parameters of human endeavors within which human life remains viable must be explored. I believe that educational psychology can provide us with guidelines for identifying some of these scales, and thereby with concepts which can become useful to outlaw forms of organization, production or tools which render the psychological environment impenetrable, secret and forbidding.

While Aurelio Peccei⁶ and the Club of Rome are making efforts to transform the top of society, to make leaders and scientists see that the planet is in danger owing to limits to growth, could it be said that your work is aimed at efforts to make revolutionary changes at the very foundation of bourgeois society?

Peccei, Forrester, Meadows have rendered a very major service by their efforts to enlighten a large number of people about inevitable limits to growth in the production of goods. They have rendered the obvious evident, I would hope to complement their insight, by underlining that analogous inherent limits to growth exist also in the service sector.

In my opinion the specifically ecological limits to growth in the goods sector constitute only a subset in a broader set of multidimensional limits to the overall institutionalization of values. Society can be destroyed when further growth renders the milieu hostile, when it extinguishes the free use of the natural ability of society's members, when it isolates people from each other and locks them into a man-made shell, when it undermines the texture of community by promoting extreme social polarization and splintering specialization, or when cancerous acceleration forces social change at a rate that rules out legal, cultural and politi-

6 See conversation no. 70.

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cal precedents as guides to consentive procedures in the present. Tools with these effects cannot be tolerated. At this point of its growth, it becomes irrelevant if an enterprise is nominally owned by individuals, corporations or states, because no management can make such an enterprise serve a social purpose.

How do you view the future in the next two decades? Especially in view of the seemingly ever-growing gap between rich and poor people and rich and poor nations?

I believe that only the demythologization of science, the restoration of ordinary language and the recuperation of basic procedures can help us to bound institutional growth. This can be achieved only by an inversion of present political goals; these are usually oriented towards increasing the total output of a social system and with the more equal distribution of the product. This concern with distributive justice must be complemented with insight into the need for participatory justice; an equal claim to society's outputs must be complemented by concern with an equal distribution over controls of the new energies which we now can muster, even if this should lead to the realization that participatory justice demands a society with very radically limited energy consumption. In my next book, Tools for Conviviality, I try to deal with this problem.