Ivan Illich and Liberation Theology

The SAGE Handbook of Critical Pedagogies Ivan Illich and Liberation Theology Contributors: Samuel D. Rocha & Martha Sañudo Edited by: Shirley R. Steinberg & Barry Down Book Title: The SAGE Handbook of Critical Pedagogies Chapter Title: "Ivan Illich and Liberation Theology" Pub. Date: 2020 Access Date: June 16, 2020 Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd City: 55 City Road Print ISBN: 9781526411488 Online ISBN: 9781526486455 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781526486455.n36 Print pages: 310-319 © 2020 SAGE Publications Ltd All Rights Reserved. This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book. SAGE © Barry Down and Shirley R SAGE Reference Ivan Illich and Liberation Theology Samuel D. Rocha Martha Sañudo Introduction Who was Ivan Illich? It is easy enough to confuse him with the protagonist of Leo Tolstoy's novella, The Death of Ivan Ilych. Unlike Tolstoy's Ilych, however, Ivan Illich's life was not ‘most simple and ordinary and most terrible’ (Tolstoy, 1909: 10). The latter may be the subject of some debate among his critics, but ‘most simple and ordinary’ is a phrase that no one would apply to the life of Ivan Illich. Austrian by birth in 1926, he was educated in Rome, Florence, and Salzburg, ordained a Roman Catholic priest and made a Monsignor by age 28, and appointed Vice Rector of the Catholic University of Puerto Rico by age 30. The bulk of Illich's intellectual reputation stems from his years in Cuernavaca, Mexico, where he ran a language school, CIF (Centro Intercultural de Formación) and then CIDOC (Centro Intercultural de Documentación), from 1961 to 1976. His 1971 book, Deschooling Society, was of particular and provocative significance to educational discourse. This period of time coincides with the articulation of Liberation Theology in Latin America by Gustavo Gutiérrez (2002) in A Theology of Liberation and, more broadly, with the enthusiasm for deeper change brought about in the Catholic Church by the councils of Medellin and Puebla in 1968 and 1979, respectively. These councils attempted not only to continue the momentum started in the Second Vatican Council in 1964, but took them a step ahead in bringing the Christian message of salvation into people's daily reality, particularly by emphasizing the political vocation of Christians to alleviate poverty and work for social justice. Theologians in this tradition include Paulo Freire (who is often cited as the founder of the Anglophone tradition of ‘critical pedagogy') and he, along with many other theologians, gathered at Illich's language school in Cuernavaca during these years. Illich's relationship to the Liberation Theologians was historical and collegial but his theological ideas remained rooted in his Thomistic training under Jacques Maritain. For this reason, this chapter's focus will be more on Illich while allowing Liberation Theology to contextualize his ideas. The ideal chapter for a more fully liberationist theologian would be Freire. However, Illich's ecclesial priesthood seems to invite more overt theological comparisons, and perhaps for good reason. After Illich voluntarily closed his center in Cuernavaca in 1976, he went on to work as an independent scholar and educator for another three decades, writing many of his most original works. One can find many useful historical and biographical accounts of Illich's work. Recent ones include articles by Rosa Bruno-Jofré and Jon Igelmo Zaldívar (2012) and a recent book by Todd Hartch (2015), along with the CBC interviews by David Cayley (1992). An even wider variety of historical and religious accounts of Liberation Theology exist as well, including a number of critiques. In this chapter, by contrast, we will consider the philosophical significance of Illich life and thought through a periodic overview in relation to his most popular educational book, Deschooling Society (1971), concluding with parting thoughts on his somewhat difficult relationship to Liberation Theology and critical pedagogy. Before Deschooling After completing his graduate studies and being ordained to the Roman Catholic priesthood in 1950, Illich left Europe for Princeton University to study the alchemical works of the 13th-century Dominican Bishop and Doctor of the Roman Catholic Church, Albert Magnus. Soon after his arrival in New Jersey, Illich discovered, and fell in love with, the first wave of Puerto Rican immigrants settling into the northern Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights in New York City. He left his scholastic work behind and requested to be transferred to do pastoral work in Washington Heights; his request was eventually accepted. His support of the emerging Puerto Rican community in New York City was such that by 1956 he was made Vice Rector of the Catholic University of Puerto Rico and moved to San Juan, Puerto Rico. It was there that Illich first confronted the realities of schooling in Latin America. It was also there where Illich began to think through these issues by Page 2 of 10 The SAGE Handbook of Critical Pedagogies SAGE © Barry Down and Shirley R SAGE Reference dialoguing with radical educational theorist Everett Reimer. Reimer's book, School is Dead: An essay on alternatives in Education, was also published in 1971, to somewhat less acclaim than Illich's Deschooling Society. This very brief and partial biographical progression carries important clues about Illich, offering us insight into the trajectory and motivations behind his trenchant critiques of schooling and modern institutions. It especially clarifies the negative point that, initially, Illich's interests were not primarily focused on, or related to, educational or institutional questions in any direct sense. It may be the case that one can find an oblique or implied relation to education and schooling in Illich's early studies, but it is not controversial to assert that his early interest in crystallography and alchemy, along with studies in Thomistic theology and philosophy, does not bear any immediate association or application to schools or society. This negative point also reveals the more positive reality that Illich's interest in education, like his affection for the Puerto Rican community, emerged from his personal encounter and communion with people. In the Americas – from Washington Heights to San Juan – Illich found a new passion that would eventually replace his academic interests and even his public ministry as a priest. A similarly noteworthy point from this short biographical account is that Illich did not bring his intellectual pursuits from Europe to bear on the social challenges he encountered in Latin America – his initial personal motivation was to conduct archival studies. That is, he did not export himself from his native Europe as a colonial missionary or an intellectual philanthropist to Latin America. To the contrary, Illich's response to the social demands of the Americas forced him to exchange his scholastic studies for the administrative tasks of vice rectorship and, after he was dismissed, took him to the task of operating a language school in Cuernavaca, Mexico. In other words, Illich's European intellectual formation served him well in many ways, but it did not predetermine or even significantly inform the signature social critique he became known for. His more scholarly and historical works would emerge later, after Cuernavaca. His social criticism was built from the ground up after contact with the social realities of the Americas. This account of his formative studies being detached from his pastoral work in the Americas explains many of the paradoxes of his work, including his somewhat tense and even disinterested attitude toward Liberation Theology and other movements in Latin America during that time, including the pedagogical work of Paulo Freire. Illich was neither an insider, in the sense of being a Latin American by birth and education, nor an outsider, by fully accepting his new life in Latin America which allowed him to sternly criticize outsiders’ naive ‘good intentions’ and desire to impose modern myths of development from industrialized countries into Latin America. This might help us to understand both the negative and positive terms of what one might consider his particular relation to critical pedagogy to be within the radical pedagogical ideas of his time. This also suggests the degree to which Illich's thought, perhaps more than anyone else, remains enigmatic and largely misunderstood or ignored within educational discourse in his own time to this very day. There is also an important theological insight we can take from this account of Illich's newfound passion for the Americas during his years as a young priest. His sudden change of direction from Princeton to Washington Heights to San Juan, bears all the marks of a profound experience of spiritual conversion. That is, Illich's transition from exegetical studies to pastoral involvement to educational administration was not merely a result of new, redirected interests. The Puerto Rican Catholic community was not an interesting anthropological or sociological phenomenon for Illich to study. He was not a social scientist. Rather, his encounter and communion with people and their social problems transformed Illich as a person and as a priest. It was nothing short of a religious conversion. Moreover, Illich was not so much transformed through the renewal of his mind; he was transformed through the renewal of being-with the people of the Americas. This transformative theme of personal conversion can be readily found within the tenor and rhetoric of Illich's works. However, if one forgets his personal experience of conversion, one can easily mistake his works for an abrasive and detached evangelicalism. For instance, in ‘To Hell with Good Intentions', his provocative address to the Conference on InterAmerican Student Projects (CIASP) in Cuernavaca, Mexico on April 20, 1968, Illich's rhetoric is in the prophetic, hyperbolic style of a jeremiad. He implores and convicts his audience: Page 3 of 10 The SAGE Handbook of Critical Pedagogies SAGE © Barry Down and Shirley R SAGE Reference I am here to suggest that you voluntarily renounce exercising the power which being an American gives you. I am here to entreat you to freely, consciously and humbly give up the legal right you have to impose your benevolence on Mexico. I am here to challenge you to recognize your inability, your powerlessness and your incapacity to do the ‘good’ which you intended to do. (Illich, 1968: para. 34) This prophetic passage is not only reminiscent of the Old Testament prophets, it is also deeply Pauline, calling these altruistic volunteers from the United States to ‘recognize your inability, your powerlessness', to ‘voluntarily renounce', and ‘give up’ ‘freely, consciously and humbly’ (ibid.: para. 34). The fire and brimstone – Illich uses the word hell theologically – of this speech is remarkable in many ways, but its general critique can be read in fuller detail in his 1967 essay, ‘The Seamy Side of Charity', first published in America magazine, also addressing the concrete missionary effort to aid Latin America by the Catholic Church in the United States and Canada. In this essay, Illich's strong words were not only directed outwardly toward the United States through a critique of secular social development initiatives, rather, we find Illich as a vocal critic of the charitable initiatives of the Roman Catholic Church. As we will see, this puts Illich's critical voice in concert with the spirit of Liberation Theology of Latin American during this time but in a somewhat idiosyncratic and even dissonant way. His essay ‘The Vanishing Clergyman', first published in The Critic of Chicago in 1967, delves further into his internal critique of the state of the Roman Church, specifically, the state of the Catholic priesthood. Here the prophetic rhetoric carries the additional aspect of being deeply futuristic, with Illich rhetorically foreseeing a number of radical changes in the future Catholic Church's organizational composition from pastoral clergy to theological instruction and beyond. It is also notable that in this essay Illich constantly groups together philanthropic organizations with multinational corporations like General Motors and Chase Bank. Instead of making demands or placing explicit critiques, Illich works in an aggressive yet oblique way through suggestion and prediction. To many, Illich's future church was a hyperbolic expression of his desire for ecclesial destruction, but in many respects it was a return to a simpler ideal, not so different from other notable reformists, like Francis of Assisi. Both of the aforementioned essays were later published in his 1969 collection, Celebration of Awareness, that in many ways preceded and prepared his readership for Deschooling Society in 1971. This book, like all of his works of social criticism, began as separate essays and speeches. Today's explosion of digital think-piece literature, blogs, and other essayistic popular and journalistic outlets would find Illich's style extremely accessible. His chief concern in these works was to communicate as broadly as possible. This tone, when added to the specific content of Deschooling Society, firmly places Illich into the category of ‘critical pedagogy', and in what follows we will outline why by looking to the text that is most commonly placed within that tradition's canon. Deschooling Few books are so fortunate to be able to convey in their very title a provocative, new-fangled worldview. With Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society it seems that the title says it all. So why read the whole book? Moreover, ask anyone to read a book with ‘deschooling’ in its title and you will often find a receptive mind with a cheeky facial expression. How enticing to know that someone a long time ago in 1971 has already attempted to rock the boat of a recurrently loathed institution! However, just as an auspicious title has its rewards, so it has its downfalls. In this case the drawback has been that many believe to know the content of Illich's book, by just interpreting its title. Many progressive minded educators and concerned scholars around the globe will recognize the existence of Illich's book, but Page 4 of 10 The SAGE Handbook of Critical Pedagogies SAGE © Barry Down and Shirley R SAGE Reference know little more than its title. What is interpreted by its title varies, but most likely it would be something such as ‘that schools have to be eliminated', ‘that schools are part of the social problem instead of being its solution', ‘that schools prevent social advancement', ‘that schools require a reform', etc. Yet, the book contradicts these quick interpretations and offers many relevant considerations to today's pedagogical discussions. Deschooling Society is divided into seven chapters, and in most editions (and there have indeed been many and in many languages) it is around 100 pages. The first chapter, ‘Why the School Must Be Disestablished', sets the context of the whole enterprise. Firstly, it tells you what it means by ‘schooled', which mainly refers to a person's participation in an institution, which, either surreptitiously or straightforwardly, forces that person to confuse an institutional process with what are real human values and human ends. Thus, Illich drastically asserts that through attending school a pupil confuses: teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is ‘schooled’ to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question. (Illich, 1971: 1) The problem with ‘schooling', for Illich, is thus set clearly from the very start. ‘Schooling’ is undesirable because it means the institutionalization of values (which is in itself controversial), left in the hands of technocrats accustomed to diagnose and control processes, with no entrusted concern for the promotion of creativity and personal interactions that would lead to people's autonomy and liberation. This opening chapter also states several times that what happens in schools must be taken as a paradigm of what happens in other institutions. Among the more succinct summaries is this line, ‘Not only education but social reality itself has been schooled’ (ibid.: 2). School was a perfect example for Illich in his time because nation-states in the 60s were pushing the political agenda of ‘universal education’ (ibid.: xix) as a panacea of all social problems. The claim, popular at the time and still very much in use by contemporary politicians, was that education would solve the gap of social and economic inequalities. This declaration was, and still is, seldom an invitation to think together how we can bring about education for all and particularly for the unprivileged, but rather functions as a discussion about how much money should be poured into the institutions that manage education. Illich's focus of criticism is the institutionalization of values by a bureaucracy that monopolizes and manipulates the social imagination and sets standards of what is to be socially expected and appreciated. Therefore, to follow Illich's argument thoroughly means to be an axiomatic critic of every single institution, not only of schools. Governments, churches, hospitals, NGOs, clubs, whatever association of humans there is that creates a language and an environment in which humans lose the distinction between processes and ends, must be held suspect according to Illich. This chapter also discloses the alternative that Illich has in mind to the ‘schooled’ society. That is, in this book there is no question that education is a value, since learning new information or skills allows humans to display more fully their potential. Later on, (see, for instance, his 1973 book Tools for Conviviality) Illich would question the extreme weight society puts into learning and education and looks into the historicity of this overestimated value of education. But in this book, his interest is in showing that the institution of schooling is an inefficient and sometimes pernicious way of packaging education. What alternatives can we think of? In this chapter Illich briefly depicts two alternatives that he develops later in his chapter 6, ‘Learning Webs', matching skilled teachers with people wanting to learn a skill and fostering the creativity of people gathered around one common interest. Page 5 of 10 The SAGE Handbook of Critical Pedagogies SAGE © Barry Down and Shirley R SAGE Reference In chapter 2, entitled ‘Phenomenology of School', with philosophical purity, Illich tells us that instead of theorizing and arguing over what a school is or searching into the history of the school system, he will describe how the school appears a phenomenon. His description of a school is as follows: ‘the age-specific, teacherrelated process of requiring full-time attendance at an obligatory curriculum’ (1971: 25–6). The chapter, then, is an analysis of the premises contained in this definition. Regarding the concept of ‘age-specific', Illich asserts that we have become accustomed to the idea that ‘children go to school', but he immediately reminds us that the category of childhood didn't exist until the 19th century and its development is tied within the development of industrialization and the institutionalization of education. In other words, he suggests that children were made for school and schools were made for the newly invented child. Contrasting the belief that children need to be schooled, he asserts that all ages need education and we must question the imposition made to infants of meekly obeying a school teacher. With respect to the relationship between teachers and pupils, Illich affirms that most of what we have actually learned can be tracked to experiences outside of the schooling system and learnt often in spite of the teachers; so why insist that learning must be done through teaching? About full-time attendance, Illich notes that teachers spend so much time with infants that they end up playing many more roles than educators; they become custodians, preachers, and therapists. The fault with playing so many roles, Illich argues, is that the authoritative figure of the teacher becomes ubiquitous: Under the authoritative eye of the teacher, several orders of value collapse into one. The distinctions between morality, legality, and personal worth are blurred and eventually eliminated. Each transgression is made to be felt as a multiple offense. The offender is expected to feel that he has broken a rule, that he has behaved immorally, and that he has let himself down. A pupil who adroitly obtains assistance on an exam is told that he is an outlaw, morally corrupt, and personally worthless. (Illich, 1971: 32) Finally, about an obligatory curriculum, Illich shows that the content taught in school is so removed from real life that it creates a ‘primitive, magical and deadly serious’ (ibid.: 32) environment that prevents pupils from understanding how what is learned can be of use to real adult life. In chapter 3, ‘The Ritualization of Progress', Illich outlines a remarkable characterization of the rituals inside and around schooling, that allows the perpetration of prejudice and discrimination even by the best teachers. To Illich, the school system: performs the threefold function common to powerful churches throughout history. It is simultaneously the repository of society's myth, the institutionalization of the myth's contradictions, and the locus of the ritual which reproduces and veils the disparities between myth and reality. (Illich, 1971: 37) Phrases like the one quoted make the reader wonder what will remain standing after Illich has done away with so many of our accepted beliefs. Illich illustrates how we have created myths of the need of schools, of the possibility of measuring the unmeasurable, of believing we have a formula for learning difficulties, of progress, of class and equality, etc. According to Illich, we have then ritualized these myths to such extent that it is impossible to stand outside their scope to challenge them; we are enslaved to believe that outside the school system there is no salvation. We are trapped in the schooling system and its rituals hide the ways in which we are indoctrinated into their system. In chapter 4, ‘The Institutional Spectrum', Illich attempts to soften the fears of the reader who may suspect that indeed nothing will remain standing. In this analysis, Illich confesses that some institutions are worse than others. An Illichian spectrum is something to be discerned; in this discernment, hope for the survival of institutions enters the scene. He tells us that on the right extreme of the spectrum is the ‘manipulative institutions', whereas on the left extreme, we can place the ‘convivial institutions’ (1971: 54). The manipulative Page 6 of 10 The SAGE Handbook of Critical Pedagogies SAGE © Barry Down and Shirley R SAGE Reference institutions sell their clients the idea that they are being helped or protected in return for their money, freedom, and even their lives. These institutions, such as the military, prisons, mental hospitals, nursing homes, and orphan asylums ‘provide their clients with the destructive self-image of the psychotic, the overaged, or the waif, and provide a rationale for the existence of entire professions’ (ibid.: 54). ‘Convivial institutions’ such as subway lines, public markets, parks, etc., are institutions used without us having to be convinced in advance of their advantages. We need rules, Illich claims, to protect these institutions, but not rules that manipulate our desire to consume them or participate in them. The former institutions are addictive: the latter ones are liberating. Now, the spectrum means that there is a continuum: institutions can develop practices that takes them from the left or from the right to the center, or to the opposite extreme from which one may have naively considered that they belonged. Take the case of the highway system that Illich mentions. It would seem that the highway system belonged to the left spectrum as a convivial institution, but Illich points out that since it is a system that privileges private cars, it becomes the paragon of what right-wing thinkers’ claim: the need for individuality, speed, and fashion. Schooling has similarly deceiving elements; it appears to be a system open to anyone, but actually it is open only to those with either credentials to teach or in need of instruction. This leads Illich to conclude that: [s]chools are not only to the right of highways and cars; they belong near the extreme of the institutional spectrum occupied by total asylums. Even the producers of body counts kill only bodies. By making men abdicate the responsibility for their own growth, school leads many to a kind of spiritual suicide. (Illich, 1971: 60) Chapter 5, ‘Irrational Consistencies', consists of a short seven-page essay that Illich delivered at a meeting of the American Educational Research Association in New York on February 6, 1971. Its inclusion breaks the flow of the book and repeats with different analogies and allusions, ideas that are hinted in the previous four chapters. He points out to educational researchers that little will be gained for education by elaborating novel programs and innovative packaging of the same product: an institutionalized process of instruction. His call is for a radical movement to deschool society and start research on alternative structures to create environments in which each person can define themselves ‘by learning and by contributing in the learning of others’ (ibid.: 71). In chapter 6, ‘Learning Webs', Illich presents unambiguously what he sees as alternative to the schooling system. What is at stake is essentially a social upheaval: ‘a new style of educational relationship between man and his environment’ (ibid.: 72). The emphasis, Illich asserts, must shift from teaching to facilitating selfmotivated learning. This would imply the overturn of deeply rooted ways of organizing society: no imposed curriculum, no certifications of completion of studies, no imposed definition of progress. Here one becomes aware of Illich's ambitious scheme: deschooling amounts to a political revolution more incisive than any other known so far. Deschooling aims at destroying the grip that the market economy has on all of us: capitalists, communists, Indigenous cooperatives alike. By proposing a different social arrangement, Illich believes that we will be able to successfully oppose the contemporary belief that we all are consumers in a world of commodities. His proposal is to liberate humans from these clutches, freeing them to search for the autonomy and growth each one desires. The different social arrangements that Illich proposes are encompassed in proposing four webs for facilitating learning: the first to allocate educational objects throughout communities (i.e., objects that can be manipulated by anyone wanting to understand their inner mechanisms or logic). These objects can be in any public or private space, ensuring of course free access to anyone, and may include activities and games alluring people passing by to understand their inner workings. The second web of learning is to interconnect specifically skilled people with people desiring to acquire those specific skills. Illich seems to foresee the possibilities of webpages, Facebook, and blogs that would bring people with common interests of learning and passing skills together. The third web is a wide variety of clubs where learning happens peer to peer. The fourth web of learning is to bring back the figure of a master, a true leader of knowledge, that may create a master–disciple relationship that is mutually rewarding and an end in itself. These four webs Page 7 of 10 The SAGE Handbook of Critical Pedagogies SAGE © Barry Down and Shirley R SAGE Reference of learning include administrative, technological, and legal arrangements of a totally different character than ones of the schooling system. After the Internet, YouTube, TED Talks, Coursera, MOOCs, Makerspaces, etc., one can say that Illich was a prophet of the democratization of education present today, but, as we will see, he was not naïve about the extent to which ‘the system’ is able to gobble up any challenge to its unsatisfied consumerist stomach. In the final chapter, ‘Rebirth of Epimethean Man', Illich retells the myth of Prometheus, preferring the virtues of Prometheus’ brother Epimetheus, who married Pandora. This mythic storywork bears out the distinction between the Epimethean uncertainty of hope (trust in the goodness of nature experienced as a gift) and the Promethean certainty of expectation (reliance on results which are planned and controlled by man). He closes the chapter and the book searching for a name: ‘We need a name for those who value hope above expectations. We need a name for those who love people more than products … We need a name for those who love the earth on which we can meet the other’ (Illich, 1971: 115–16). Illich ends this search in homiletic fashion: ‘I suggest that these brothers and sisters be called Epimethean men’ (ibid.: 116). In final analysis, Deschooling Society is nothing short of a call for personal and social conversion and transformation from expectation to hope, from greed to generosity, from cynicism to love for the person, the earth, and each other. After Deschooling After the publication of Deschooling Society in 1971, Illich published a short follow-up essay titled ‘After Deschooling, What?’ in 1973. This essay first appeared as a pamphlet distributed by the Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative (WRPC), was republished as a book with an introduction by Ian Lister, and was later published by Harper & Row in 1973 under the same title, along with nine essays by educational scholars like Neil Postman, Maxine Greene, and Herbert Gintis. Many of these essays are fiercely and even personally critical of Illich and dismissive of his idea of deschooling. Greene's contribution, ‘And It Still Is News', is notably cavalier about Illich's popular ideas. Others, by contrast, are enthusiastic but nonetheless cautious. It is unfortunate that most of the scholars and intellectuals in the follow-up to Deschooling Society so poorly understood Illich's original proposal and appear to have not read his titular essay of the collection either. In ‘After Deschooling, What?', Illich cautions using the term ‘deschooling’ as an empty slogan, added to the heap of slogans and other empty rhetoric well known within educational discourse. To avoid this, he suggests a new concept of learning that closely resembles many of the critiques made by Paulo Freire. Illich also critiques the notion of ‘free schooling', charging it as another form of elitism and echoing in this case many of the critiques of constructivism made by Hannah Arendt in her 1954 essay, ‘The Crisis of Education’ (Arendt, 2006). After this follow-up publication, Illich wrote nothing in English about education until 1976, the same year in which he closed his own school in Cuernavaca. He did, however, publish Diálogo in Spanish in 1975 with Paulo Freire. In this book, Freire and Illich both critically analyze their respective concepts of ‘deschooling’ and ‘conscientization'. (For Frierian scholars, it is notable that Freire has no issue with using the Spanish term ‘conscientización’ in this text, a term that many Anglophone scholars gnostically insist cannot be translated from Portuguese.) In 1976, the WRPC published two essays, one written by Illich and another he co-authored with Etienne Verne, under the title Imprisoned in the Global Classroom. In this slim volume, Illich does not merely warn against the overdetermination of deschooling; he aggressively attacks the embrace of deschooling by industry and describes this as ‘a most dangerous and well-concealed trap’ (1976: 12) for deschooling. He continues by asserting that ‘[a]s an embodiment of schooling, a permanent education policy will never be anything but a trap for any plan for deschooling society’ (ibid.: 13). Illich again echoes Arendt's 1954 essay, critiquing all efforts to extend education into adulthood as forms of ‘puerilization’ (ibid.: 14) for adults to make them more docile and malleable by the interests of the powerful. In this critique we find Illich making a classic argument familiar to critical pedagogues. Page 8 of 10 The SAGE Handbook of Critical Pedagogies SAGE © Barry Down and Shirley R SAGE Reference Illich's work continued into the 1980s and the themes of education reappeared often, but not under the terms of a pet term – deschooling, or otherwise. In 1988, he published with Barry Sanders ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind, where they argue: Our efforts to understand the effect that parchment and seal, ink and pen had on worldview eight hundred years ago led us to the discovery of a paradox: literacy is threatened as much by modern education as by modern communication – and yet, adverse as the side effects of compulsory literacy have been for most of our contemporaries, literacy is still the only bulwark against the dissolution of language into ‘information systems'. (Sanders and Illich, 1988: Back cover) This study and its argument does not so much develop Illich's deschooling work of the 1970s as it goes deeper into historical roots of the problems that Illich outlined a decade earlier. This particular theme is repeated by Illich's 1993 In the Vineyard of the Text, a commentary on Hugh of St. Victor's 1128 Didascalicon, a text that Illich claims to be the first book written on the subject of reading. This interest in a recovery of lost arts of literacy is not only of historical interest to Illich, he refers to them as a way to better diagnose the present threats he sees in modern technology and society at large. While he does not overly rely on his term deschooling, and even expresses his doubts of its value, Illich's thought continued to develop and renew itself until he passed away at the age of 76 in December of 2002. Conclusion Liberation is a thread that knits Illich with the philosophical (see Enrique Dussel) and theological movements of Latin America. Liberation Theology and the notion of critical pedagogy that was coined by Anglophone readers of Freire can be seen through a common idea of liberation that is recognizable both in the historical period and in the actual ideas of Illich's life and thought. This refers to the liberation of a person's spirit not only from the chains of a system, an institution, or an ideology, but also the liberation that allows a mind to positively engage with a social conception of justice broadly conceived. For instance, taking on board the known distinction of Isaiah Berlin of negative freedom (liberation from) and positive freedom (liberation for), Illich's work reminds us that liberating a person from schooling is only the first step on the way to engaging people with the real question of what it would mean to be a truly free person in today's society. There is no Illichian freedom without social justice in this formulation, and thus the discussion of ideas geared toward unmasking social injustices, in any setting, not only in pedagogy, must inevitably lead us to questioning how are we to best organize society to diminish this injustice. These ideas may not be rooted in the exact same theological tradition that was born in Medellin and Puebla, but its deeper roots reflect the common idea of social justice that grew out of Catholic social teaching from the 19th century forward. While this has not been the most wellknown tradition within social justice efforts in critical pedagogy and the secular field of educational research, its relative absence is historic and anachronistic for an approach that often prides itself on contextualized and historicized knowledge. For Illich, this work was never to be done on the strength of strong words or durable institutions alone. First and foremost, his life and thought was conceived in the flux of social relations in and between Europe and the Americas. These ideas were lived through his vocation and shown through the marks of his deep and dynamic conversion into a deeper and deeper search for the moral and spiritual significance that so many then and now feel to be desperately missing. This anchored his social criticism and distinguished his approach from all the others of his time. We have been unable to mention the many languages Illich spoke or the full variety of his works that studied labor and city planning, critiqued urbanism and technology, analyzed the economy of gender, and satirized modern professions, healthcare, and more. Suffice it to say that among all the eligible ouvres of radical thought during this period, there may be none as unique and direct in its intellectual, political, and spiritual powers. Page 9 of 10 The SAGE Handbook of Critical Pedagogies SAGE © Barry Down and Shirley R SAGE Reference References Arendt, H. (2006). The crisis in education. In H. Arendt (Ed.), Between past and future (pp.170–193). London: Penguin. (Originally published in 1954) Bruno-Jofré, R., & Zaldívar, J. I. (2012). Ivan Illich's late critique of deschooling society: ‘I was largely barking up the wrong tree'. Educational Theory, 62(5), 574–592. Cayley, D. (1992). Ivan Illich in conversation. Toronto, ON: House of Anansi Press Ltd. Freire, P., & Illich, I. (1975). Diálogo: análisis critico de la ‘desescolarizacion’ y ‘concientizacion’ en la conyuntura actual del sistema educativo. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Búsgueda. Gutiérrez, G. (2002). A theology of liberation: History, politics, and salvation. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. (Originally published in 1973) Hartch, T. (2015). The prophet of Cuernavaca: Ivan Illich and the crisis of the west. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Hugh of St. Victor (1961). The Didascalicon of Hugh of St. Victor: A medieval guide to the arts (J. Taylor, Trans.). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. (Original work published in 1128) Illich, I. (1968, April 20). To hell with good intentions. An address presented at the Conference on InterAmerican Student Projects in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Retrieved November 21, 2019 from http://www.uvm.edu/~jashman/CDAE195_ESCI375/To%20Hell%20with%20Good%20Intentions.pdf Illich, I. (1969). Celebration of awareness. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company. Illich, I. (1971). Deschooling society. New York, NY: Harper & Row. Illich, I. (1973). After deschooling, what? In A. Gartner, C. Greer, & F. Riessman (Eds.), After deschooling, what? (pp. 1–28). New York, NY: Harper & Row. Illich, I. (1973). Tools for conviviality. New York, NY: Harper & Row. Illich, I. (1993). In the vineyard of the text: A commentary to Hugh's Didascalicon. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Illich, I., & Verne, E. (1976). Imprisoned in the global classroom. London: Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative. Reimer, E. (1971). School is dead: An essay on alternatives in education. Harmondsworth, London: Penguin. Sander, B., & Illich, I. (1988). ABC: Alphabetization of the popular mind. New York, NY: Marion Boyars Publishers. Tolstoy, L. (1909). The death of Ivan Ilych. New York, NY: H. Wolff. (Original work published in 1886) Retrieved October 25, 2019 from https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.c080984238&view=1up&seq=10 • liberation theology • Ivan Illich • Latin America http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781526486455.n36 Page 10 of 10 The SAGE Handbook of Critical Pedagogies