Joanna wrote:
>
>> The whole idea that people get an education to work together to make a
> better world is gone. It's dead. People go to college to escape the
> abyss. That's reality right now.
Nostalgia can twist one's sense of history and hence of the present.
This idea has _nvever_ existed, not even in Athens or China or 13th-c Paris. Never. Nothing even close to it.
And the idea of making a better world is rather new, having originated in the 18th-c. And as it hase exidted in practice since then it is one of the central tendencies of Bourgeois ideology, the Idea of Progresds. That idea is created by false generalization from tefchnological development in the last two centuries and falsely projected on to human history.
Interestingly, Nostalgia for a lost past (which far predates capitalism) coexists 'peacefully' with the idea of steady progress ("building a better world" in capitalist ideology. One way (not the best but quite a good way) to read Pound's Cantos is as a heroic attempt to unite the capitalist ideology of Progress with the belief that the key to progress exists in recovering a lost Principle of Ordr, which is then identified with a hiddden Beauty.
But in any case there have been two dominant "ideas" of education.
One is the idea in hierarchal socities (tributary modes of production): Education is the reproduction of a herditary aristocracy.
One in capitalsim: Education is the means by which the child is fitted to the needs of capitalist production. Fulfilling that need, however, generates, as do many institutions in capitalist societies a dynamic of its own, which _does_ produce or encourage the production of real knowledge and even a desire for knowledge for its own sake. But this too is double-edged: one of its side effects is to create the illusion that that is the purpose of education, and that prupose not being actually srved for the most part, the conflict generates illusions such as are expressed in the paragraph from Joanna's post quoted above.
There is obviously a lot more to say about this. The thrust of Joanna's post is valid, but it has to be developed within a fuller undrstanding of education in a capitalist society, and understanding grounded historically rather than from a moralistic perspective.
A _start_. Capitalism _needs_ and _creates_ (as well as undermining) a non-capitalist institution, Education. But it may be that the dynamic of current capitalism _is_ destructive of the very instituion that is essential to capitalism. (Remember here that "capitalism" is an absdtraction not an agent. Keep moral judgments out of this.)
Carrol