-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Reply:
It can confidently be said that in recent years education has been more often and more widely discussed than at any time since the public education system began.There is the perennial question of the clamour for “equality of opportunity”; there are the recurrent alarms about illiteracy, delinquency and blackboard jungles. At the same time, springing up in every city were the great glass- walled hives which were the new schools of the nineteen-fifties, visible symbols of changes which have taken and are taking place.
The granting of education and facilities for learning to the working class, even though it is for someone else's reasons, is of immense value. Within the framework of elementary education there have been many improvements and additional benefits over the years.
These, however, have resulted from the increased complexity of capitalism that has demanded more knowledge and more economic participation from even the least skilled worker, and so necessitated a widening of this education.True education, the developing of each individual towards his own well-being and that of society, has not yet been attempted. What is necessary for it is the re-organization not of schools, but of society.
The aim of socialists (not 'left-wing' or Labour nonsense but genuine revolutionary free access socialism) is to bring into being a society in which not only will the problems and privations of the present-day world be absent, but every person will lead a free and satisfying life.
What is wrong with our society is its basic condition of ownership by a class; the answer, therefore, is to establish a new social system based on the ownership by everybody of all the means of production. Can a society like this be achieved? Indeed it can.
The conditions needed for its establishment are with us now: the development of the means and methods of production that could create abundance if the profit motive did not stand in the way. All that is lacking is people to bring it to being.
Thus, the concern of Socialists under capitalism is education of a different kind - showing the facts about capitalism, and the only answer to the problems which it causes. The beginning of this kind of education is the realization that capitalism's educational systems must, because of what they are, hide the facts and direct attention away from the answer.
Here, then, is the great need of today: people to make a different world. People, that is, who have looked at capitalism critically - as one aspect of it has been looked at critically here - and seen that it has long ceased to be useful to man, and that Socialism is wanted now.
The granting of education and facilities for learning to the working class, even though it is for someone else's reasons, is of immense value. Within the framework of elementary education there have been many improvements and additional benefits over the years.
These, however, have resulted from the increased complexity of capitalism that has demanded more knowledge and more economic participation from even the least skilled worker, and so necessitated a widening of this education.True education, the developing of each individual towards his own well-being and that of society, has not yet been attempted. What is necessary for it is the re-organization not of schools, but of society.
The aim of socialists (not 'left-wing' or Labour nonsense but genuine revolutionary free access socialism) is to bring into being a society in which not only will the problems and privations of the present-day world be absent, but every person will lead a free and satisfying life.
What is wrong with our society is its basic condition of ownership by a class; the answer, therefore, is to establish a new social system based on the ownership by everybody of all the means of production. Can a society like this be achieved? Indeed it can.
The conditions needed for its establishment are with us now: the development of the means and methods of production that could create abundance if the profit motive did not stand in the way. All that is lacking is people to bring it to being.
Thus, the concern of Socialists under capitalism is education of a different kind - showing the facts about capitalism, and the only answer to the problems which it causes. The beginning of this kind of education is the realization that capitalism's educational systems must, because of what they are, hide the facts and direct attention away from the answer.
Here, then, is the great need of today: people to make a different world. People, that is, who have looked at capitalism critically - as one aspect of it has been looked at critically here - and seen that it has long ceased to be useful to man, and that Socialism is wanted now.
M.C.
No comments:
Post a Comment