Illichs Philosophy is a moderate realism in the Thomistic tradition of radical humanism. Illichs criticized contemporary modern school system and advocate discontinuation of schools because of the ills he associated with contemporary school system as a global phenomenon.
These ills, according to Ivan Illichs are that schools do not equalize education opportunity, but rather produce dropouts who see themselves as failures in society. Schools are being viewed as agents of cultural alienation. The school system makes education a scarce commodity out of the reach of the poor and that there is a remarkable dichotomy between school and real life experiences.
The ills described by Ivan are present in Nigerian education system. The use of conceptual analysis as the philosophical basis for those ills in the Nigerian education system revealed that the root cause is the total abandonment of traditional education for the western education. Since the traditional society was a deschoooled one, the need has been described for the principle of complementarity between traditional education and western education system.
In view of the philosophical problems of value orientation and ethos , a three dimensional approach to education has been proposed for Nigeria which would be the application of the pedagogical and epistemological methodology of traditional, western and Illichian educational ideas to education in Nigeria. This traditional-western-Illichian process would bring about end product education. This end-product education brings about the self-actualization of an educated person as a cultured person. To operate this three dimensional process is to extend learning activities to together agents of education other than the school system.