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A critique of experts and expertise. Ivan Illich’s critique of experts and professionalization was set out in Disabling Professions (1977a) and in his exploration of the expropriation of health in Medical Nemesis (1975b). The latter book famously began, ‘The medical establishment has become a major threat to health’ (ibid.: 11). The case against expert systems like modern health care is that they can produce damage which outweigh potential benefits; they obscure the political conditions that render society unhealthy ; and they tend top expropriate the power of individuals to heal themselves and to shape their environment (op. cit.). Finger and Asún (2001: 10) set out some of the elements:

Experts and an expert culture always call for more experts. Experts also have a tendency to cartelize themselves by creating ‘institutional barricades’ – for example proclaiming themselves gatekeepers, as well as self-selecting themselves. Finally, experts control knowledge production, as they decide what valid and legitimate knowledge is, and how its acquisition is sanctioned.

A critique of commodification. Professionals and the institutions in which they work tend to define an activity, in this case learning, as a commodity (education), ‘whose production they monopolize, whose distribution they restrict, and whose price they raise beyond the purse of ordinary people and nowadays, all governments’ (Lister in Illich 1976: 8). Ivan Illich put it this way:

Schooling – the production of knowledge, the marketing of knowledge, which is what the school amounts to, draws society into the trap of thinking that knowledge is hygienic, pure, respectable, deodorized, produced by human heads and amassed in stock….. [B]y making school compulsory, [people] are schooled to believe that the self-taught individual is to be discriminated against; that learning and the growth of cognitive capacity, require a process of consumption of services presented in an industrial, a planned, a professional form;… that learning is a thing rather than an activity. A thing that can be amassed and measured, the possession of which is a measure of the productivity of the individual within the society. That is, of his social value. (quoted by Gajardo 1994: 715)

Learning becomes a commodity, ‘and like any commodity that is marketed, it becomes scarce’ (Illich 1975: 73). Furthermore, and echoing Marx, Ivan Illich notes the way in which such scarcity is obscured by the different forms that education takes. This is a similar critique to that mounted by Fromm (1979) of the tendency in modern industrial societies to orient toward a ‘having mode’ – where people focus upon, and organize around the possession of material objects. They, thus, approach learning as a form of acquisition. Knowledge become a possession to be exploited rather than an aspect of being in the world.