"This idea [of education in the service of a better world] has _nvever_ existed, not even in Athens or China or 13th-c Paris. Never. Nothing even close to it."
I don't know Carrol. Have you read Piers Plowman? Have you looked at some of the writings of the high middle ages....stuff like Dante's De Vulgaria? The classical period is not devoid of it either; the notion of a connection between education and a meaningful democracy is certainly there in Socrates, say Phaedrus, and in Thucydides' impluse to tell the story of the Pelop. war in the way he did.
"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."
Well, no. You're certainly right that the mainstream has associated progress with technological development. But there's more to that story: there have been many thinkers who have associated progress with a growth in consciousness, in becoming aware of our conditioning, in abandoning blind allegiance to ideology or superstition. You find a lot of this in seventeenth century English drama, also in France in Diderot,in Hume, in Swift, ...I don't know; it's not fully articulated until Marx, but he didn't dream it up.
I certainly grew up with a passionate belief that the only point of being intelligent and learned was to help others make a better life. I mean, otherwise, what possible content would there be to intelligence and learning? If the direction is not enlightenment, then intelligence is just another form of money; it would not connect you to anything other than self interest.
Here's Donne in the second Satire writing about Poets and the good they do:
Though Poetry indeed be such a sinne As I thinke that brings dearths, and Spaniards in, Though like the Pestilence and old fashion'd love, Riddlingly it catch men; and doth remove Never, till it be sterv'd out; yet their state Is poore, disarm'd, like Papists, nor worth hate: One, (like a wretch, which at Barre judg'd as dead, Yet prompts him which stands next, and cannot reade, And saves his life) gives ideot actors meanes (Starving himself) to live by'his labor'd sceanes.
Is this moralism?
Joanna