Ivan Illich Fifty Years Later: Situating Deschooling Society in His Intellectual and Personal Journey by Rosa Bruno-Jofré and Jon Igelmo Zaldívar (review)

Reviewed by: Ivan Illich Fifty Years Later: Situating Deschooling Society in His Intellectual and Personal Journey by Rosa Bruno-Jofré and Jon Igelmo Zaldívar Eben Levey Ivan Illich Fifty Years Later: Situating Deschooling Society in His Intellectual and Personal Journey. By Rosa Bruno-Jofré and Jon Igelmo Zaldívar. ( Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2022. Pp. xiii, 156. $60.00. ISBN 978-1-487-54506-2.) Capitalizing on the fiftieth anniversary of Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society, Rosa Bruno-Jofré and Jon Igelmo Zaldívar provide readers with a close examination of Illich, his theological and intellectual background, how he turned to critiquing modern educational institutions, and finally, a critical rereading of the text. This is not merely a personal and intellectual history of Illich and Deschooling Society. It is, of course, both of those. The book is also a product of our current moment—the possibilities and challenges that COVID-19 has wrought on society, technological change, democratic movements from below, and a resurgence of fascism in the Americas. As the authors note, Deschooling Society has long been interpreted through contemporary contexts that have shifted over the decades. Its staying power, despite and because of its flaws, invites "us to think across Western temporalities" (xx) from its genesis to the present implications of Illich's fierce critiques of institutions. [End Page 437] This slim volume covers a lot of ground. Over five chapters, the authors bring the reader from Illich's youth in Vienna and on the Dalmatian Coast, through his seminary training, to his positions in New York, Puerto Rico, and Cuernavaca, Mexico (where Deschooling Society was composed), and finally to Illich's rethinking of his critiques on modern educational institutions. They do not simply retrace the paths of other biographers, namely Todd Hartch and Lya Gutiérrez Quintanilla, who both focus on Illich's tenure in Cuernavaca. Previous readings of Illich's career identify his shift to education and the publication of Deschooling Society as a marked divergence from his theological work and his critiques of the Catholic Church. Instead, Bruno-Jafré and Igelmo Zaldívar invite the reader to think in continuities rather than ruptures. To do so, they argue that Deschooling Society must be read through a theological frame, through a "Catholic non-magisterial reading" (xix), rather than through a postmodernist analytical framework, even as Illich and postmodernists such as Michel Foucault overlapped in their critiques of institutions as sites that (re)produced hegemonic power. Here is where the authors leveraged the silver linings, slight as they were, of the COVID-19 pandemic. Institutional cooperation between Queen's University (Ontario) and El Colegio de México (Mexico City) supplied the authors with copies of the complete published archive from Illich's tenure in Cuernavaca. Illich arrived in Cuernavaca in 1961 as the director of the Center for Intercultural Formation (Centro de Formación Intercultural, CIF), a training program to prepare US missionaries for work in Latin America. Additionally, the center housed the Center for Cultural Research (Centro de Investigaciones Culturales, CIC, 1961-66), and the Center for Intercultural Documentation (Centro Intercultural de Documentación, CIDOC, 1963–76). The CIF published the CIF Reports in English and Spanish, CIC produced books and pamphlets, and CIDOC churned out the CIDOC Dossier, CIDOC Informa (CIDOC Report), CIDOC Cuadernos (CIDOC Notebooks), and other publications for audiences in the United States and Latin America. Together, the three institutions were a clearinghouse of reportage, theological development, and intellectual production that drew thinkers and theologians from across the Americas. In other words, Illich's institutions in Cuernavaca went far beyond a training program for aspiring missionaries. Bruno-Jafré and Igelmo Zaldívar draw widely on Illich's prolific output to argue for theological continuities in his posture toward the world, at times complicating the enduring image of Illich as a progressive associated with the blossoming of liberation theology in Latin America. In fact, they show how Illich, from his early writings through Deschooling Society, was fundamentally antimodern and theologically conservative in his consistent Thomism. Even Illich's explosive articles in the late 1960s, "The Seamy Side of Charity" and "The Vanishing Clergyman," which accused the Catholic Church of perpetuating neoimperialism and...

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