Ivan Illich Fifty Years Later: Situating Deschooling Society in His Intellectual and Personal Journey

"Based on authentic, convincing, and impressive primary sources, the scholarship in Ivan Illich Fifty Years Later provides the foundation for a sound and compelling argument. There is a wide, diverse audience for this book including students and scholars in the fields of history, comparative history, philosophy, social and political science, and comparative education. The accessible, engaging style in which the book is written also transcends these areas and spills over into a wider lay audience."

Judith Harford, Professor in the School of Education, University College Dublin

"Ivan Illich has undoubtedly earned a place in the canon of great educational thinkers. Unfortunately, his Deschooling Society is currently often regarded as a cause of the alleged decline in the quality of schools. The excellent study Ivan Illich Fifty Years Later has the great merit of placing things in their historical and biographical context. It is to the credit of the authors that, in contrast to the mainstream of educational research, they have enrolled in the rich traditions of cultural-historical reflection to find out what schooling ultimately means to society."

Marc Depaepe, Former president of the International Standing Conference for the History of Education (ISCHE)

"This is an outstanding work by a number of the foremost authorities in the field. It does immense justice to the essential and perennial aspects of Freire and Illich’s thoughts on schooling. Moreover, presenting the exposition in relation to how their ideas unfolded within various contexts constitutes not only a sound work in the history of education ideas in its own right but also acts as a terrific heuristic device for making the work accessible not only to specialists but also to general educated readers on the matters investigated."

Thomas O'Donoghue, Emeritus Professor of Education, University of Western Australia

"Rosa Bruno-Jofré and Jon Igelmo ZaldÍvar offer an account of the intellectual journey of Ivan Illich leading up to his pathbreaking book, Deschooling Society, in 1971. The themes of that book seem prescient: a critique of the monopoly of the nation-state over education; an implicit call for vouchers or other forms of school choice; and most suggestively, the growing capacity of persons to learn outside the boundaries of schooling – what he called ‘Learning Webs,’ long before anyone thought about the internet or social media. Illich’s radical critique is still interesting, still relevant today."

Nicholas C. Burbules, Edward William and Jane Marr Gutgsell Professor, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign