To kick-off our Best of the Best Global Service Learning series, we present a familiar source: To Hell with Good Intentions by Ivan Illich.

Title: To Hell with Good Intentions
Author: Ivan Illich
Target Audience: Students
Date: 1968

Succinct Summary: Ivan Illich challenges students to consider the implications of often-paternalistic service and volunteerism. Through careful rhetoric that is difficult to escape, he insists that volunteers cannot avoid serving as unwilling advertisements for the middle class US lifestyle – and suggests that students should not, under any conditions, engage in international service.

Reviewer quotes:

1. “In his usual biting and sarcastic style, Illich’s address, for whom his audience is a group of U.S. volunteers, depicts the dangers of paternalism inherent in voluntary service, but especially in any international service “mission.” Just as he brought American volunteers’ motives, values, and capacity to ‘do good’ into question in 1968, Illich equally brings volunteers’ motives, values, and capacity to ‘do good’ into question today. Is national and/or international service pretentious? Do we impose our own way of life on the people we serve? How do we serve people if we cannot communicate in the same language as them? Is this possible?”
   – Center for Civic Reflection

2. “Here, first of all, is a thinker set in a specific historical context—that of the 1960s—a period characterized by radical criticism of capitalist society and its institutions, among them the school.  Furthermore, the personality we are dealing with is a complex one. In those years it was said of Ivan Illich that he was an intelligent man who liked to surround himself with gifted people and did not suffer fools gladly. He could be the most cordial of men, but was also capable of the most devastating ridicule of those who questioned his ideas. He was an indefatigable worker and a multilingual, cosmopolitan man whose ideas, whether on the Church and its reform, culture and education, medicine or transport in modern societies ignited controversies that made him one of the outstanding figures of our time. But those controversies were also triggered partly by Illich himself: by his personality, his style, his working methods and the radical nature of his ideas.”
   –Marcelo Gajardo

Counterpoint: Lest Best Intentions become the Enemy of the Good