This education, which still echoed Plato, though only to a certain extant, was associated primarily with the educated class, the aristocracy that was in power, a characteristic which would later result in the first failure of education: it is in this aristocracy and bourgeoisie’s blossom that was also created the ideology of nationalism and colonialism. To this elite, a perfected education was to include a strong component of Classical studies, including Greek and Latin; yet, if the ideal of perfection remained, its coexistence with those other characterizing elements (nationalism, colonialism, capitalism) would prove lethal. At times, through the educated elites who ruled over the colonies, and who were also associated by many with the capitalistic class, education would become the tool that differentiated at home this upper-middle class form the rest of the population, and, in the world, the one that would become the cultural model justifying the colonial enterprise, setting Western European culture as the only criteria of culture (“la mission civilisatrice”). In spite of itself, then, this education, provided by higher education institutions, became not a way to conform one’s soul to the divine, but a political and cultural tool which would necessarily fall once the institutions it was seen to justify fell. When colonialism was discarded, when the frenetic capitalism of the 19th century became rejected, the elite who promoted these fell, and its education with it.
As we said above, it was not necessary for many in the past to attend such schools, because these schools provided an intellectual education that was not available elsewhere; craftsmen and artisans, on the other hand, needed not attend school since no class provided courses to teach what they did: it was done under the roof of a master, or, with the industrial revolution, no skills were necessary at all. Theoretically, the idea of providing as many children as possible with a primary and, even better, secondary education, is a good idea. Yet, the problem is that this movement became intertwined with the failure of traditional education of the political and social elite. When the ideal of citizenship had clearly failed, schools lost much of their substance, and their curriculum was redirected towards more immediate needs, especially economic needs. Perhaps the mistake here was to ‘popularize’ schools in a way that only concerned itself with numbers: the more graduates come out of schools, the more successful things will be. And as economic needs required more and more flexibility, schools, and especially universities, lost most or all of the ideal of citizen perfection that had helped create them to become rather agents of the new economic system, providing it with skilled intellectual and manual workers.
When one enters the university, the main focus is the career: one enrolls in a business program, in a science program, or psychology program, with a view to get a job and then climb the social ladder. this, is turn, breeds competition. We have often heard that schools and universities are places where the student “learns life,” meaning by this competition with one another. If one wants to work as a sales person, as a manucure specialist, as a business person, etc, one must beforehand obtain a degree form a specialized institution, i.e. a university, where one would have, in the past, received direct, perhaps better, training with a working person. In this way, where schools and universities previously had offered education, they now provide specialized training rather than true education, as Plato remarked in the quote above. It is doubtful whether we may rightly be justified in having more graduates than ever before: it is brushing off the value of diplomas.
