Education as a Syetem of

Human Exploitation

"Education today, more than ever before, must see clearly the dual objectives:
education for living and education for making a living"

James Mason Wood

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Within the context of modern secular civilization and on the ground and background
of its political, cultural, and ideological directions, a kind of education has
been set up, giving birth to a new generation out of extremist and petrified
livers. Education in the new sense is no more than a system of exploitation within
which young people are to be made as robots and assigned to fulfill some specific
limited tasks. This raises the question: what sort of education humanity is really
in need of? And for what sake schools as social fabrics should be directed to
ensure that humanity will witness a happy new future?

During the dark ages, the prevailing education in Europe was religious. It was the
starting point of a people wishes to get saved and purified from sins. Their
teachers were a group of popes, priests, and preachers, who pretend to play the
role of mediation for they know God and understand his knowledge as embedded in
the scriptures. Such education is extremist in the sense that it restrains
peoples' productivity and imposes a total control over their minds and
intellectual drives. Yet the claim of mediation and salvation which the church and
those behind the screen spent most of their time living on, turned, by the time,
into a very sophisticated system of religious, political, and economic
exploitation.

It is from this turning point that most of westerners lost their trust in religion
and religious beliefs. The change was so extreme and has resulted in some fallacy
in the western mind structure and methods of thinking, learning, and living. For
instance, the unsuccessful and tragic experience of western man with religious
persecution led him to revolt against religious beliefs in general. This involves
two unconscious mistakes: First, western man failed to make a clear cut
distinction between beliefs and practices; he thought that beliefs and practices
should be identical, and hereby the problems he faced with religious practices
drove him to revolt them and against religious beliefs in general. This false
projection involves ignorance of the fact that practices are no more than
approximate images of beliefs and they may even operate as an exploitation of
beliefs to hypocritically attain some political, ideological, or economic
interests. Second, the mistaken conception of the relationship between, perhaps,
theory and practice generated a negative value judgment toward religion in total.
This overgeneralization, in turn, paved the way to the spreading of new-old
fallacies including atheism, secularism, rationalism…etc.

One wonders: what is the additional value of the modern ideological content to the
educational record? None denies it purely technical. We admit the west has taken a
very wide step as far as technology is concerned; it has made up, thanks to
technology, new ways of learning and therefore opened new horizons for lifelong
learning and continuing education. Yet I cannot personally see any equilibrium in
the personality of a learner brought up at the bosom of wild capitalism and
globalism. The only education that must take place there in such atmosphere is
that which satisfies one's bodily needs at the expense of human spiritual demands.

How Man, therefore, can get saved if grown up at the palm of a non-moderate
education, and education that idolizes the pair ($ & Sx) (Dollar & Sex) and spends
the highest premium, labour, and time to glorify them? It's high time now to
confess by concrete argument that education will never save unless it responds
physically and morally, to the law of ethics and global moderation.

Oulgout Abdelouahed

05-08-2007