Gregory's Server
Conclusion
Ivan Illich’s concern for conviviality – on the ordering of education, work, and society as a whole in line with human needs, and his call for the ‘deprofessionalization’ of social relations has provided an important set of ideas upon which educators concerned with mutuality and sociality can draw. His critique of the school and call for the deschooling of society hit a chord with many workers and alternative educators. Further, Ivan Illich’s argument for the development of educational webs or networks connected with an interest in ‘non-formal’ approaches and with experiments in ‘free’ schooling. Last, his interest in professionalization and the extent to which medical interventions, for example, actually create illness has added to the critique of professions and a concern to interrogate practice by informal educators – especially those in more ‘community-oriented’ work. As Gajardo (1994: 717) has commented, ‘if… we separate Illich’s thought from its emotional context, it is interesting to realize how thought-provoking some of his suggestions and proposals are’.
Erich Fromm, in his introduction to Celebration of Awareness (Illich 1973: 11) describes Ivan Illich as follows:
The author is a man of rare courage, great aliveness, extraordinary erudition and brilliance, and fertile imaginativeness, whose whole thinking is based on his concern for man’s unfolding – physically, spiritually and intellectually. The importance of his thoughts… lies in the fact that they have a liberating effect on the mind by showing new possibilities; they make the reader more alive because they open the door that leads out of the prison of routinized, sterile, preconceived notions.
Ivan Illich’s critique of the process of institutionalization in education and his setting of this in the context of the desirability of more convivial relationships retains considerable power. As Finger and Asún (2001: 14-15) have argued, the ‘forgotten Illich’ offers considerable potential for those wanting to build educational forms that are more fully human, and communities that allow people to flourish. For Illich, and for Finger and Asún (2001: 177), ‘De-institutionalization constitutes the challenge for learning our way out’ of the current malaise.