The first enslaving illusion is the idea that people are born to be consumers and that they can attain any of their goals by purchasing goods and ser… - Ivan Illich

I was recently told, 'You're a liar!' when I said to somebody I walked down the spine of the Andes. Every Spaniard in the sixteenth, seventeenth century did that. The idea that somebody could just walk! He can jog perhaps in the morning, but he can't walk anywhere! The world has become inaccessible because we drive there.

"A convivial society should be designed to allow all its members the most autonomous action by means of tools least
controlled by others. People feel joy, as opposed to mere pleasure, to the extent that their activities are creative; while the
growth of tools beyond a certain point increases regimentation, dependence, exploitation, and impotence. I use the term
"tool" broadly enough to include not only simple hardware such as drills, pots, syringes, brooms, building elements, or
motors, and not just large machines like cars or power stations; I also include among tools productive institutions such as
factories that produce tangible commodities like corn flakes or electric current, and productive systems for intangible
commodities such as those which produce "education," "health," "knowledge," or "decisions." I use this term because it
allows me to subsume into one category all rationally designed devices, be they artifacts or rules, codes or operators, and to
distinguish all these planned and engineered instrumentalities from other things such as basic food or implements, which in a
given culture are not deemed to be subject to rationalization. School curricula or marriage laws are no less purposely shaped
social devices than road networks. 5"

Institutional wisdom tells us that children need school. Institutional wisdom tells us that children learn in school. But this institutional wisdom is itself the product of schools because sound common sense tells us that only children can be taught in school. Only by segregating human beings in the category of childhood could we ever get them to submit to the authority of a schoolteacher.