Centro Intercultural de Documentación

The Centro Intercultural de Documentación (CIDOC) was founded by Ivan Illich in 1965 as a higher education campus for development workers and missionaries. It was located in Cuernavaca (Mexico), at the Rancho Tetela.

Early history

In Celebration of Achievement, Illich writes that the intention of the school was to counteract a Papal command of 1960 which enjoined US and Canadian religious superiors to send 10% of their priests and nuns to South America. Illich was convinced that this project would do more harm than good. He intended the Centro to serve as a training station for such clergy and development workers, aiming to educate them about the negative effects of their development and education agenda. He called it "a center for de-Yankeefication" [1] The school also offered Spanish language courses. Illich credits Feodora Stancioff and Brother Gerry Morris as co-founders. Funding of the school is under investigation.

Achievements

The center pursued a significant publication program in various formats: Dossiers, Sondeos, Documenta, etc. It also issued catalogues of its publications. The Centrum für Internationale Entwicklung in Vienna now holds the a comprehensive collection of publications from the center. This collection which was previously held by the Österreichisches Lateinamerika-Institut.

Teachers and Alumni

Paulo Freire was a regular guest at the Centro. Other visitors, students and staff include Valentine Borremans, Everett Gendler, Robert S. Leiken, Jean Robert, Paul Goodman, Susan Sontag, Erich Fromm, Peter L. Berger, John Holt, Joel Spring, Carl Mitcham, Leo Gabriel, Augusto Salazar Bondy, André Gorz, Lini De Vries, Robert K. Logan, Sylvia Marcos, etc.

Current

The site is currently used as Cuernavaca Language School (CLS)[2]

Literature
gollark: This might be fixable if you have some kind of zero-knowledge voting thing and/or ways for smaller groups of people to decide to produce stuff.
gollark: If you require everyone/a majority to say "yes, let us make the thing" publicly, then you probably won't get any of the thing - if you say "yes, let us make the thing" then someone will probably go "wow, you are a bad/shameful person for supporting the thing".
gollark: Say most/many people like a thing, but the unfathomable mechanisms of culture™ have decided that it's bad/shameful/whatever. In our society, as long as it isn't something which a plurality of people *really* dislike, you can probably get it anyway since you don't need everyone's buy-in. And over time the thing might become more widely accepted by unfathomable mechanisms of culture™.
gollark: I also think that if you decide what to produce via social things instead of the current financial mechanisms, you would probably have less innovation (if you have a cool new thing™, you have to convince a lot of people it's a good idea, rather than just convincing a few specialized people that it's good enough to get some investment) and could get stuck in weird signalling loops.
gollark: So it's possible to be somewhat insulated from whatever bizarre trends are sweeping things.

References
  1. Sergio Méndez Arceo#CIDOC
  2. http://cuernavacalanguageschool.com/
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