Celebration of Awareness. A Call For Institutional Revolution. Open Forum

As a formidable critic of some of society's most cherished institutions, such as compulsory education and organised religion, Ivan Illich has attracted world attention. His commitment to a radical humanism against conventional institutions and esatablished ideas of social virtue make for compelling, and convincing, reading. This book brings together for the first time many of his lectures and articles bearing out Illich's invigorating challanges to the status quo.

Ivan Illich was born in Vienna to a Croatian father and Sephardic-Jewish mother, and had as native languages Italian, French and German. He later learnt Serbo-Croatian, the language of his grand-fathers, then Ancient Greek and Latin, as well as Spanish, Portuguese and Hindi. Thereafter, he studied histology and crystallography at the University of Florence (Italy), theology and philosophy at the Pontifical Gregorian University in the Vatican (1942-1946) and medieval history in Salzburg. He is the author of Tools for Conviviality, The Right to Useful Unemployment, Energy and Equity, Limits to Medicine, Shadow Work, Gender, H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness, ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind, Deschooling Society and In the Mirror of the Past: Lectures and Addresses 1978-1990. Illich lived much of his life in Mexico and the United States, he died in 2002.