"I believe that a desirable future depends on our deliberately choosing a life of action over a life of consumption, on our
engendering a lifestyle which will enable us to be spontaneous, independent, yet related to each other,
rather than maintaining a lifestyle which only allows to make and unmake, produce and consume – a style
of life which is merely a way station on the road to the depletion and pollution of the environment.
The future depends more upon our choice of institutions which support a life of action than on our developing
new ideologies and technologies" - Ivan Illich.
His critique of modernity was founded on a deep understanding of the birth of institutions in the 13th
century, a critical period in church history which enlightened all of his work, whether about gender,
reading or materiality. He was far more significant as an archaeologist of ideas, someone who helped
us to see the present in a truer and richer perspective, than as an ideologue.
There was the historicity of materials (H2O And The Waters of Forgetfulness, 1985), literacy (ABC, The
Alphabetisation Of The Popular Mind, 1988, co-written with Barry Sanders) and the origins of book-learning
(In The Vineyard Of The Text, 1993). The latter volume was, he said, an attempt to understand the transition
from the book to the computer screen through the prism of the changes in 13th-century reading practice.
Deschooling Society
Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in
a meaningful setting. Most people learn best by being "with it," yet school makes them identify their
personal, cognitive growth with elaborate planning and manipulation.
http://www.preservenet.com/theory/Illich/Deschooling/intro.html
Tools for Conviviality
For the building of societies in which modern technologies serve politically interrelated individuals
rather managers. Such societies are ‘convivial’, they entail the use of responsibly limited tools.
http://www.preservenet.com/theory/Illich/IllichTools.html
Vernacular Values
http://www.preservenet.com/theory/Illich/Vernacular.html
To Hell with Good Intentions
http://www.swaraj.org/illich_hell.htm
Celebration of Awareness
Fascinating collection of essays exploring violence; the eloquence of silence; the seamy side of charity;
the powerless church; the futility of schooling; sexual power and political potency; a constitution
for cultural revolution.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1001279.Celebration_of_Awareness
After Deschooling, What?
Includes a substantial opening essay ‘Deschooling revisited’ by Ian Lister.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/929414.After_Deschooling_What
The Dark Side of Literacy
http://www.swaraj.org/shikshantar/darksideintro.htm
This book presents more cogently and in greater detail the argument Ivan Illich made in "Deschooling Society":
School undergirds the totalitarian tendencies inherent in global capitalism by socializing us to think
of learning as a packageable commodity, and by disguising the fallacy underlying capitalism: that we
live in a world of scarcity. School perpetuates social class hierarchies by reproducing the class structure,
while claiming to be an engine of egalitarianism.
School makes learning a scarce commodity by a whole series of inefficiencies (which parallel the inefficiencies
of industrial capitalism). Furthermore, by its attaching learning to grades and certificates, it heightens
the illusion of scarcity in knowledge and learning. School absorbs more and more resources, mirroring
the infinite appetite of capitalism. It is not possible to educate everyone up to even the current level
deemed adequate; anyway, as soon as that level is approached, "competition" bids up the minimum level
of "necessary" schooling. The affluent always manage this minimum, the poorest never can, with few --always
celebrated! -- exceptions. That's all I can cram into this space, but there's lots more! Alternatives
to the entire school nexus are outlined. Reimer is vaguer here, but still valuable.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/929414.After_Deschooling_What
“India’s destiny lies not along the bloody way of the West, of which she shows signs of tiredness, but along
the bloodless way of peace that comes from a simple and godly life. India is in danger of losing her
soul. She cannot lose it and live. She must not therefore lazily and helplessly say, ‘I cannot escape
the onrush from the West.’ She must be strong enough to resist it for her own sake and that of the world.
European civilization is no doubt suited for the Europeans, but it will mean ruin for India, if we endeavor
to copy it.”
http://www.gandhiashramsevagram.org/swadeshi/definition-of-swadeshi.php
http://www.mkgandhi.org/ebks/hind_swaraj.pdf
Claude Alvares
He is Coordinator of the Multiversity Project, Director of the Goa Foundation, Editor of Other India
Press and Director of the Organic Farming Association of India. Claude Alvares is the author of Decolonizing
History; Science, Development & Violence, Fish Curry and Rice and The Organic Farming Sourcebook.
He considers himself a political activist and street-fighter, but has also filed over 100 PILs (public
interest litigations) on environmental issues in India.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/491534.Decolonizing_History
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5_qUkMyRkI&t=947s
Shri. Ravindra Sharma on Indian Perspective of Education & Rural Ecconomy
Kala Ashram is one of the most unassuming yet very happening places. Kala Ashram founded in 1979 by Shri
Ravindra Sharma fondly known as ‘Guruji’ is a melting pot of culture, heritage, india’s rural social-economics,
art, science and anything that is associated with India and the way of life that was naturally led
by people here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-pMQeKe8GI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wURdlVH8F7M
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEmqI7p5Ejs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_nerclv53s
Simplicity and Originality | a Lecture by Pawan Gupta at IIT-BHU | Hindi
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHo6qbU-Ivc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfZwwKVCUp4
The general effect of Dharampal's work among the public at large has been intensely liberating. However,
conventional Indian historians, particularly the class that has passed out of Oxbridge, have seen his
work as a clear threat to doctrines blindly and mechanically propagated and taught by them for decades.
Dharampal never trained to be a historian. If he had, he would have, like them, missed the wood for the
trees. Despite having worked in the area now for more than four decades, he remains the quintessential
layman, always tentative about his findings, rarely writing with any flourish. Certainly, he does not
manifest the kind of certainty that is readily available to individuals who have drunk unquestioningly
at the feet of English historians, gulping down not only their 'facts' but their assumptions as well.
But to him goes the formidable achievement of asking well entrenched historians probing questions they
are hard put to answer, like how come they arrived so readily, with so little evidence, at the conclusion
that Indians were technologically primitive or, more generally, how were they unable to discover the
historical documents that he, without similar training, had stumbled on so easily.
http://www.infinityfoundation.com/mandala/t_es/t_es_agraw_dharampal_frameset.htm
An encounter, which affected Dharampal greatly in this context, is best recounted here in his own words:
Around 1960, I was travelling from Gwalior to Delhi by a day train, a 6 or 7 hour journey in a 3rd class
compartment when I met a group of people and I think in a way that meeting gave me a view of India, the
larger India. The train was crowded. Some people however made a place for me. And there was this group
of people, about twelve of them, some three or four women and seven or eight men. I asked them where
they were coming from. They said that they had been on a pilgrimage, three months long, up to Rameshwaram,
among other places. They came from two different villages north of Lucknow. They had various bundles
of things and some earthen pots with them.
I asked, what did they have in those pots. They said that they had taken their own food from home. They
had taken all the necessities for their food-atta, ghee, sugar - with them, and some amounts of these
were still left over. The women didn't seem to mind much people trampling over them in the crowded compartment,
but they did feel unhappy if someone touched their bundles and pots of food with their feet. And then
I said they must all be from one jati, from a single caste group. They said, 'No, no! We are not from
one jati, we are from several jatis.' I said, how could that be? They said that there was no jati on
a yatra-not on a pilgrimage. I didn't know that. I was around 38 years old, and like many others in this
country who know little about the ways of the ordinary Indian-the peasants, artisans and other village
folks. And then I said, 'Did you go to Madras? Did you go to Bombay?' 'Yes! We passed through those places,'
'Did you see anything there?' 'No, we did not have any time!' It went on like that. I mentioned various
important places of modern India. They had passed through most, but had not cared to visit any.
Then I said, 'You are going to Delhi now?' 'Yes!' 'You will stop in Delhi?' 'No, we only have to change
trains there. We're going to Haridwar!' I said, 'This is the capital of free India. Won't you see it?'
I meant it. I was not joking. They said, 'No! We don't have time. May be some other day. Not now. We
have to go to Haridwar. And then we have to get back home.'
We talked perhaps 5 or 6 hours. At the end of it I began to wonder, who is going to look after this
India? , India are we talking about? This India, the glorious] of the modem age, built by Jawaharlal
Nehru and c people, these modem temples, universities, places of scholarship! For whom are we building
them? Those people their pilgrimage were not interested in any of this. And were representative of India.
More representative of II than Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru ever was. Or I and most us could ever be.
The encounter shook Dharampal then, as much as memory of it bothers him even today. This particular
experience more than any other, drove him to look for the causes of the profound alienation of India's
new leaders from the preoccupations of the common people and to investigate whether this had always been
so.
Introduction to Dharampal Works
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B27IBNotwpE
Walter Ong’s book explores some of the profound changes in our thought processes, personality and social
structures which are the result, at various stages of our history, of the development of speech, writing
and print. And he projects his analysis further into the age of mass electronic communications media…the
cumulative impact of the book is dazzling. Read this book. Literature will never be the same again. And
neither will you.’
http://dss-edit.com/prof-anon/sound/library/Ong_orality_and_literacy.pdf