If you are Arabic, I am mickey mouse.

:) -josh

— S Yasir Husain <husain@cyber.net.pk> wrote:
>
>
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/04/obituaries/04ILLI.html
>
> December 4, 2002, NYT
>
> Ivan Illich, 76, Philosopher Who Challenged Status
> Quo, Is Dead
> By DOUGLAS MARTIN
>
>
> Ivan Illich, a onetime Roman Catholic priest who,
> through a steady flow
> of books and articles preached counterintuitive
> sociology to a
> disquieted
> baby-boom generation, died on Monday at his home in
> Bremen, Germany. He
> was 76.
>
> Celia Samerski, a student of his at the University
> of Bremen, said the
> specific cause of death was not known. She said he
> also had a home in
> Cuernavaca, Mexico.
>
> Mr. Illich was perhaps best known for his 1971 book,
> "De-Schooling
> Society," which protested mandatory public education
> and the
> institutionalization of learning. Along with works
> like Paul Goodman's,
> "Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the
> Organized Society,"
> published in 1960, it provided grist for a society's
> growing ambivalence
> about educational institutions and much else.
>
> Mr. Illich was a priest who thought there were too
> many priests, a
> lifelong educator who argued for the end of schools
> and an intellectual
> sniper from a perch with a wide view. He argued that
> hospitals cause
> more
> sickness than health, that people would save time if
> transportation were
> limited to bicycles and that historians who rely on
> previously published
> material perpetuate falsehoods.
>
> His intellectual ordnance of anarchist panache,
> hatred of bureaucracy,
> Jesuitic argumentation, deep reverence for the past
> and watered-down
> Marxism, was applied to many targets, including
> relations between the
> sexes. More often than not, his conclusions were
> startling: he thought
> life was better for women in pre-modern times.
>
> Critics often picked holes in his complex, verbose
> arguments, but not a
> few hailed them as illuminating critiques of large
> problems. Anatole
> Broyard, writing in The New York Times in 1971, said
> that his nitpicks
> were "like criticizing the grammar of someone who
> has just delivered a
> speech that gave us goose pimples."
>
> But after his 1970's heyday, interest in Mr.
> Illich's ideas appeared to
> wane. Speaking invitations declined, and even some
> that still came
> dripped with nostalgia: Mayor Jerry Brown of
> Oakland, who was called
> Governor Moonbeam when he was governor of California
> and consorted with
> out-of-the-box thinkers like R. Buckminster Fuller
> and Mr. Illich,
> invited him to a conference in 2000.
>
> By 1989, Mr. Broyard wrote in an article about
> winnowing books from his
> library that he would "especially" discard Mr.
> Illich's works.
>
> Mr. Illich was born on Sept. 4, 1926, in Vienna. He
> is survived by two
> brothers, Micha, of Manhattan. and Sascha, of
> Nantucket, Mass.
>
> His father, a civil engineer, descended from
> Dalmatian royalty. His
> mother was a Sephardic Jew, and Ivan was expelled
> from a school in
> Vienna
> in 1941 because of her background. He went on to
> study in Florence and
> Rome and in Salzburg, where he wrote his doctoral
> dissertation on the
> historian Arnold Toynbee.
>
> Mr. Illich came to the Washington Heights
> neighborhood of Manhattan in
> 1952 after being ordained as a priest in Rome. He
> particularly attended
> to the needs of Puerto Ricans, helping establish an
> employment agency
> among other things. In an interview with The New
> Yorker magazine in
> 1970,
> the Rev. John Connolly, one of his colleagues,
> called him "their Babe
> Ruth."
>
> The article said that early in his career as a
> priest, Father Illich
> began to criticize the church for "its smugness, its
> bureaucracy and its
> chauvinism." But his energy and intellect propelled
> him to the position
> of vice rector of the Catholic University of Ponce
> in Puerto Rico. He
> was
> forced out in 1960 for opposing the local bishop's
> forbidding of
> Catholics to vote for a governor who advocated
> state-sponsored birth
> control.
>
> After being recalled briefly to New York, he was
> assigned to Cuernavaca,
> a small city 50 miles west of Mexico City where he
> established the
> Intercultural Center for Documentation to teach
> priests and laymen who
> wanted to become Latin American volunteers.
>
> Mr. Illich's criticisms of church doctrine ranged
> beyond his advocacy of
> birth control, and in 1969 he was branded
> "politically immoral" by the
> Vatican and left the priesthood.
>
> Among other things, he disagreed with the church
> policy of increasing
> the
> number of priests in Latin America. He believed that
> the church could be
> revived only by lay people, a populist view that he
> later applied first
> to education and then to other institutions.
>
> "Illich is not against schools or hospitals as such,
> but once a certain
> threshold of institutionalization is reached,
> schools make people more
> stupid, while hospitals make them sick," wrote
> Matthias Finger and Jose
> Manuel Asu'n in "Adult Education at the Crossroads:
> Learning Our Way
> Out"
> (Zed Books, 2001).
>
> "And more generally, beyond a certain threshold of
> institutionalized
> expertise, more experts are counterproductive