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The corruption of the best is the worst. —Anonymous: Latin saying, found in English from the early 17th century

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Illich often used the Latin phrase ==Corruptio optimi quae est pessima==, in English ==The corruption of the best is the worst.==1

The corruption of the best is the worst. 2

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links: Latin aphorisms Ivan Illich

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  1. Ivan Illich | syndication link↩︎

  2. Oxford Essential Quotations (4 ed.), Susan Ratcliffe (ed.))↩︎

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I’ve come across about 20 reference for Ivan Illitch over the past month. Not sure what is driving it. Some mentions are coming out of educator circles, others from programmers, some from what I might describe as “knowledge workers” (digital gardeners/Roam Cult/Obsidian crowds). One tangential one was from someone in the hyperlink.academy crowd.

Here’s a recent one from today that popped up within a thread shared in IndieWeb chat:

[[Deschooling Society]] and [[Tools for Conviviality]] look very interesting. Perhaps they’ve distilled enough that their ideas are having a resurgence?

Just checked and the LAPL has several of his books in digital format with multiple copies. Only one is currently available. A quick Twitter search indicates several dozens of tweets with his name in the last 24 hours… hmmm.

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links: [[read]] [[Ivan Illich]] [[education]] [[tools for conviviality]] [[tools for thought]] [[industrial tools]] [[priests]] [[Catholic church]]

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  1. Ivan Illich | syndication link↩︎

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Industrialization and colonialism have exerted an overbearing effect on entire societies which have robbed them of their traditional lifeways, skills, and knowledge and replaced them with a new form of dependency and modernized poverty. Lacking their original identities they have been stripped of their humanity and turned into mechanical gears in a machine that is only destined for a miserable failure.

Original annotation: Amazon anyone?

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He wrote that “[e]lite professional groups … have come to exert a ‘radical monopoly’ on such basic human activities as health, agriculture, home-building, and learning, leading to a ‘war on subsistence’ that robs peasant societies of their vital skills and know-how. The result of much economic development is very often not human flourishing but ‘modernized poverty’, dependency, and an out-of-control system in which the humans become worn-down mechanical parts.”[13] Illich proposed that we should “invert the present deep structure of tools” in order to “give people tools that guarantee their right to work with independent efficiency.”[34]1

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  1. Ivan Illich | syndication link↩︎

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In 1971, in a pre-internet era, Ivan Illich prefigured many of the ideas of creating a personal learning network using social media and other methods in an idea like “connected learning”. There are many dating apps like Match.com or Tinder which take personal data and provide matches of people to create romantic relationships. Illich essentially asked how computers might match people with similar learning interests?

While we don’t have applications which do this explicitly yet, there are places in social media which facilitate this sort of discovery and interactions. I wonder how platforms like hyperlink.academy might take this to the next level in matching teachers and students or even co-learners.

Related Post: https://boffosocko.com/2021/11/12/55798328/

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Particularly striking in 1971 was his call for advanced technology to support “learning webs”:

The operation of a peer-matching network would be simple. The user would identify himself by name and address and describe the activity for which he sought a peer. A computer would send him back the names and addresses of all those who had inserted the same description. It is amazing that such a simple utility has never been used on a broad scale for publicly valued activity.1

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  1. Ivan Illich | syndication link quote from Deschooling Society↩︎

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A fairly reasonable summary of Ivan Illich’s thinking?

I wonder if Cathy N. Davidson references Illich in her writing? This sounds roughly similar to the idea of the humanism behind The New Education by Davidson.

Surely Illich would have been against the ills we’re seeing in the space of social media as well.

Definitely want to read this.

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His first book, Deschooling Society, published in 1971, was a groundbreaking critique of compulsory mass education. He argued the oppressive structure of the school system could not be reformed. It must be dismantled in order to free humanity from the crippling effects of the institutionalization of all of life. He went on to critique modern mass medicine. In the pre-Internet age, Illich was highly influential among intellectuals and academics. He became known worldwide for his progressive polemics about how human culture could be preserved and expand, activity expressive of truly human values, in the face of multiple thundering forces of de-humanization.1

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links: Ivan Illich Deschooling Society

connected ideas: The New Education

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  1. Ivan Illich | syndication link↩︎

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Ivan Illich argued that health “is the capacity to cope with the human reality of death, pain and sickness.” While it is a non-standard definition, it speaks to a base standard of care for humanity. Without health we lack the capacity to do much else in life.

Original annotation: An off-the-beaten-path definition (of the idea of health}.

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Health, argues Illich, is the capacity to cope with the human reality of death, pain, and sickness.1

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  1. Ivan Illich | syndication link↩︎

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