Book description
In this fascinating and controversial collection of essays Ivan Illich,
Irving K Zola, John McKnight, Jonathan Caplan and Harley Shaiken
challenge the power and mystery of professions. Why do we put so much
resource into medicine, education and the law with so little apparent
result? Why do we hold the professions in awe and allow them to set up
what are in effect monopolies? By analyzing these questions and putting
forward radical answers, the authors make an invaluable contribution to
the public debate on the power of professions.
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.
