While my schooling experience makes it attractive for me to agree with Illich accepting that we are failures at building public institutions isn’t something I can accept. I grew up among adults who supplemented my public education. My learning was a kind of social responsibility they felt and was not to be given up on because formal school was less than Ideal.
Making a social movement out of our failings is a simple and easy way out. My medical care is bad, yet accepting that condition as unchangeable is a form of rejecting the possibility of improvement–and all the people who seek improvement. Many people are fond of their own ideas and conclusions (like me for instance). But how “right” are they when the world they propose is beyond the reach of the majority of us?