Educing Ivan Illich

John Baldacchino is Professor of Art & Education in the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A graduate of the University of Malta (B.Ed.) and Warwick (MA & PhD) he was faculty at Columbia University in New York, and the universities of Dundee, Falmouth, Robert Gordon and Warwick in Britain. He authored thirteen books, including Education Beyond Education (2009), Makings of the Sea (2010), Art’s Way Out (2012), John Dewey (2014) and Art as Unlearning (2019). He is the editor of Histories and Philosophies. The International Encyclopaedia of Art and Design Education (2019).

• Introduction – Books – Las Meninas – Reading as Stranger – A Boat that Sailed? – The Tyranny of Empirie – Tables of Friendship – Immanence – Conversos – Humanistic Peripheries – Hiddenness – Educing Illich – Utopia – As “It” Perpetuates – Freedom and Intelligence – Milking the Family Goat – Dreamers – A Promise – Quandaries – Tradition – Epoche – After Deschooling … – … What? – The Laic and the Ecclesial – Processed Emancipation(s) – Beneath God’s Nose – “Progressive conservative” – Philosophia Perennis – The Convivial Challenge – Learning – Equality, Liberty and Meaning – Theory, Choice and Common Sense – Damned Assumptions – Opinionated Evidence – The Three-Legged Stool – Kant’s Futuring – Lewis and Marx – Within the Spheres – Reform – Idolatrous Hypotheses – Colored Circles – Returning (to) Form – Shadow-Less Affairs – Abolished Worlds – Contingency – Golgotha’s khora – Kenotic Tools – After Contingency’s Sunset – Metaphor and Agency – Watersheds – Synchronically Possible – Franciscan Hope? – Disestablishment – A Journey’s Ends – Tools of Possibility – A Changed Nemesis – Myth and Transparency – Constructed Equity – Fabled Worlds – A Tomorrow without a Future – Responsibility – Algorithms – Neighbors and Foreigners – Maritain’s Beautiful Face – Beyond Sinful Planning – Bibliography – Index.

“In this magnificent book, John Baldacchino has imaginatively returned Ivan Illich to the intellectual ground of his life and ideas. Not only does Baldacchino present a rich philosophical reading of Illich, that goes beyond the decontextualized or anecdotal treatments that plague Illich’s legacy, Baldacchino also manages to theorize a constructive relation to tradition in a sympathetic and radical way.”—Samuel D. Rocha, Associate Professor, Department of Educational Studies, University of British Columbia