Tuesday, September 6, 2011

ivan illich

from tools of conviviality:

p. 54:
More money spent under the control of the health profession means that more people are operationally conditioned into playing the role of the sick, a role they are not allowed to interpret for themselves. Once they accept this role, their most trivial needs can be satisfied only through commodities that are scarce by professional definition.

radical monopoly
schools tried to extend a radical monopoly on learning by redefining it as education. as long as people accepted the teacher's definition of reality, those who learned outside school were officially stamped "uneducated."   p. 52
p. 53
radical monopoly imposes compulsory consumption and thereby restricts personal autonomy

each political party in the debate make sick-care a burning public issue and thereby relegates health care to an area about which politics has nothing important to say.
such power in the hands of a minority will produce only an increase in suffering and a decrease in personal self-reliance.

the establishment of radical monopoly happens when people give up their native ability to do what they can do for themselves and for each other, in exchange for something "better" that can be donen for them only by a major tool.
it introduces new classes of scarcity and a new device to classify people according to the level of heir consumption. this redefinition raises the unit cost of valuable service, differentially rations privilege, restricts access to resources, and makes people dependent.

bleeding of schooling the world - carol black

p. 63
the presence of a new school, a paved road, and a glass and steel police station defines the professionally built house as the functional unit, and stamps the self-built home a shanty. the law establishes this definition by refusing a building permit to people who cannot submit a plan signed by an architect.  people are deprived of heir ability to invest their own time with the power to produce use-value, and are compelled to work for wages and to exchange their earnings for industrially defined rented space. they are deprived also of the opportunity to learn while building.

bleeding of program or be programmed - douglas rushkoff