Community Service & Service-Learning Blog Post. To Hell with Good Intentions: A Reflection on International Service By: Elizabeth Coder. In 1968, Monsignor Ivan Illich, an Austrian philosopher and Catholic priest, gave an address to the Conference on InterAmerican Student Projects (CIASP) to American volunteers serving in villages in rural Mexico.
In 1968, Monsignor Ivan Illich gave a speech, “To Hell with Good Intentions”, to the Conference on InterAmerican Student Projects in Cuernavaca, Mexico, in which he addressed voluntary service activities, especially those on an international level.
One student built a playground in her community. She left, satisfied with this impact, this “improvement” she left that community with.
We boast of diversity but do not accommodate it. Within and without the U.S., minorities suffer.
Though much of the news we hear is focused on how polarized America is, by getting involved in volunteer work, a person can instead focus on how we come together so beautifully for those in need. We are a country and community that wants to help others pull themselves out of tough situations. We want to see the elderly enjoying hot, nutritious meals after a lifetime of working. We want to help ambitious students who are working two part-time jobs make it through college. We want all of our community’s youth to have exposure to enriching programs like art and theater in addition to the three R’ s. We want the abused wife to be counseled and supported as she finds a way to change her situation and the trajectory of her children’s lives.
Our forefathers didn’t have the science then, but perhaps they implicitly knew that it is good for you to volunteer. Recent research has confirmed that volunteering brings with it discernable health benefits. Feeling depressed? Volunteer! In fact, according to a BMC Public Health study published online July 11, 2017:
First of all, it’s important to recognize that this isn’t a local issue; it’s a national issue. Take a quick study of The Bureau of Labor and Statistics data on volunteering and you will see that volunteering is on the decline in the United States. It’s not dire, but it is clearly on a downward trend. Dig a little deeper, and you will see that organizations with deep roots in American volunteerism (think Rotary International, the Elks, Assistance League, Boy Scouts, and Girl Scouts) have also suffered from declining membership over recent years.
In the volunteer's dilemma, each player has a tough strategy and a weak strategy. Disaster occurs when both players play their tough strategy. What type of game is the volunteer's dilemma?
D} We cannot determine the likelihood of finding a volunteer with the information given.
Despite this display of insubordination and an order from Paul Francis Tanner, then general secretary of the National Catholic Welfare Conference, forbidding Illich from any official role in the organization's Latin American bureau, Illich maintained the support of the influential priest John J. Considine, who continued to push for Illich to have a role in training the Church's missionaries, personally funding trips to Mexico in order for Illich to scout locations.
He also taught at the University of Bremen and University of Hagen. During his last days of his life he admitted that he was greatly influenced by one of the Indian economists and adviser to M. K. Gandhi, J. C. Kumarappa, most notably, his book, Economy of Permanence.
His first book, Deschooling Society, published in 1971, was a groundbreaking critique of compulsory mass education. He argued the oppressive structure of the school system could not be reformed. It must be dismantled in order to free humanity from the crippling effects of the institutionalization of all of life. He went on to critique modern mass medicine. Illich was highly influential among intellectuals and academics. He became known worldwide for his progressive polemics about how human culture could be preserved and expand, activity expressive of truly human values, in the face of multiple thundering forces of de-humanization.
Ivan Illich called himself "an errant pilgrim", "a wandering Jew and a Christian pilgrim", while clearly acknowledging his Dalmatian roots. He remarked that since leaving the old house of his grandparents on the island Brač in Dalmatia, he had never had a home.
A polyglot, Illich spoke Italian, Spanish, French, and German fluently. He later learned Croatian, the language of his grandfathers, then Ancient Greek and Latin, in addition to Portuguese, Hindi, English, and other languages.
Illich followed the tradition of apophatic theology. His lifework's leading thesis is that Western modernity, perverting Christianity, corrupts Western Christianity. A perverse attempt to encode the New Testament's principles as rules of behavior, duty, or laws, and to institutionalize them, without limits, is a corruption that Illich detailed in his analyses of modern Western institutions, including education, charity, and medicine, among others. Illich often used the Latin phrase Corruptio optimi quae est pessima, in English The corruption of the best is the worst.
Illich finished high school in Florence, and then went on to study histology and crystallography at the local University of Florence.
One student built a playground in her community. She left, satisfied with this impact, this “improvement” she left that community with.
We boast of diversity but do not accommodate it. Within and without the U.S., minorities suffer.