Skip to content Assess the Marxist View of the Role of Education in Society According to Marxists, modern societies are Capitalist, and are structured along class-lines, and such societies are divided into two major classes — The Bourgeois elite who own and control the means of production who exploit the Proletariat by extracting surplus value from them.
In this way class inequality is reproduced Fourthly , schools legitimate class inequality. Leave a Reply Cancel reply. Previous Previous post: Non-Participant Observation. This website uses cookies to improve your experience.
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Where relationships exist, consciousness exists in my view. Animals do not have relationships with anything and in fact are unaware of relationships. For animals, relationships with others do not exist as relationships. Consciousness is therefore a social product and will continue to be so for as long as there are humans Marx and Engels, , p. Humans therefore are in a fully objective and subjective position to act consciously of their own free will, since it is this voluntary and universal nature of human activity that contrasts with the domain of naturalness and chance.
However, social relationships of production based on private ownership of the means of production alienate individuals from their capacity to act consciously. Consequently, such individuals no longer dominate the social relationships needed for their material and spiritual development. Through domination, they are not fully individual, but unilateral members of a given sphere and they live in the kingdom of necessity and not of liberty.
Marx and Engels showed that work lost all appearance of personal manifestation in capitalism. Therefore, only through appropriating all of the instruments of production would it be possible to achieve personal manifestation, i.
A fundamental point is reached here: the development perspectives for omnilateral individuals are put into effect precisely on the basis of work, i. This would only occur if presented as a division between manual labor and intellectual work, given that the latter requires free time for its full development, i.
Thus, the two images of divided humankind, each of them unilateral, consist essentially of manual workers and intellectuals, as created through the social division of labor within capitalist society. The German ideology is the key to understanding the meaning of omnilateralism in Marx and Engels, since it contains the elements for reflecting on the petrification of work within objective power that exerts domination, such that the work unexpectedly escapes from personal control.
According to Marx and Engels, from the time when work starts to be divided, each individual has an imposed exclusive sphere of activity from which there is no escape without losing the means of subsistence. Negative acceptance of work appears here, as clearly delineated in the Manuscripts.
In this work, Marx showed that workers were physically and mentally lowered to the level of machines and were made increasingly unilateral and dependent through the division of labor, thereby considered in terms of political economy to be like animals reduced to the strictest bodily needs. The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts denounced these conditions experienced by workers. In this, Marx wrote:. No doubt. Work produces marvelous things for the rich, but produces deprivation for workers.
It produces palaces, but caves for workers. It produces beauty, but deformation for workers. It replaces work with machines, but sends some of the workers back to brutal work and does the rest by machines. It produces spirit, but for the workers it produces stupidity and cretinism Marx, , p. Over the course of these works, the negative characterization of both the alienated workers and the capitalists can be seen. These are contradictory products of the same contradictory society and the characterization is only partially positive for certain aspects of one or other profile.
As interpreted by Manacorda , p. Marx indicated that private ownership leads to obtuseness and unilateralism. The latter is often used even to characterize capitalists, since everything shown among workers as acts of expropriation or alienation is shown among non-workers as states of appropriation or alienation.
This same concept appears in The Sacred Family :. The owners' class and proletarian class represent the same human alienation. However, the former feels good and approves of this alienation, knowing that it represents the power of this class, in which there is the appearance of human existence. In turn, the latter feels annihilated through the alienation and discerns its impotence and a reality of inhuman existence Marx and Engels, , p. Thus, it is division of labor that creates the reality within which spiritual activity and material activity, fruition and labor, and production and consumption are attributed to different individuals.
However, the privilege of spiritual activity, fruition and consumption is only apparent and partially positive because the power of capital subverts everything. Money converts the representation into reality and the reality into simple representation, as indicated by Marx in the Manuscripts :. As an invasive power, money also stands against individuals and against social ties, etc. It transforms faithfulness into unfaithfulness, love into hate, virtue into vice, vice into virtue, serfs into masters, masters into serfs, stupidity into understanding and understanding into stupidity Marx, , p.
For this reason, the fruition that the owners' class has available is a positive condition that is only relative, because everyone is subjected to the division of labor, without leaving room for omnilateralism, but at most, a multiplicity of needs and pleasures. Thus, the division of labor creates unilateralism and, under its sign, brings together negative determinations. In the same way, under the opposite sign of omnilateralism, positive perspectives of human beings are brought together. However, since Marx's studies relate to the means of capitalist production, many more explanatory elements are available for unilateralism than for omnilateralism.
Given the non-utopian nature of Marx's research, the outlines describing omnilateral individuals lack the precision of those for unilateral individuals. In summary, as assessed by Manacorda, the concept of omnilateralism in Marx includes elements of availability, variation and multilateralism, along with theoretical and practical capacities Manacorda, In the first case, the assertion in fully exemplified by opposition to divided society, as appears in this well-known page from The German ideology :.
In communist society, however, in which each individual would be able to improve themselves within fields that suited them, there would not be exclusive spheres of activity. Society would regulate the general production and would make it possible to do one thing today, another tomorrow, hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, herd in the evening and make criticisms after meals, and all of this as one pleases, without having to become solely a hunter, fisherman or critic Marx and Engels, , p.
In addition to this hypothesis of a communist society in which there would not be painters, but no more than people who also painted, the perspective of omnilateralism seems to be more closely tied to factory life, i. Although Marx's concept of education is opposed to the exclusive aim of technical training, it is often accused of being based on economic man, when in fact it is not Marxism, but capitalism that limits the workers to education on practical matters.
The concept of humankind in Marx and Engels completely demolishes the theory of mutilated beings. However, these two thinkers' ideological adversaries accuse them of being concerned merely with the material dimension of human existence, i. To refute this, a nice excerpt from the Third Manuscript of can be cited.
In this, Marx emphasized the subjective dimension of human existence, beyond alienation:. Taking humans to be humans and their behavior in relation to the world as human behavior, love can only be exchanged for love, trust for trust, etc.
If fluency of art is desired, one has to be artistically cultivated; if influence over other human beings is desired, one has to be able to act effectively on others in a stimulating and encouraging manner. All relationships with humans and with nature have to effectively go outside of individual life in some manner corresponding to the desired purpose. With unreciprocated love, i. Thus, the criticisms of the means of capitalist production and divided humans, in Marx, ultimately become a radical defense of full development of human subjectivity, given that individuals cannot develop in an omnilateral manner if they do not possess all of the productive forces and all of the productive forces cannot be dominated except by all of the individuals, freely associated.
Omnilateralism therefore represents individuals' achievement of full productive capacity and, at the same time, full capacity for consumption and pleasure, in which there should be special consideration for enjoyment of spiritual assets, as well as material goods, from which workers were excluded because of the division of labor. Even if this ideal has not yet been achieved, this does not invalidate it.
Above all, utopia serves as a reminder to always set the sights high, for better prospects in the future. The Marxist concept of education proposes omnilateral shaping for humankind. This is therefore a radically humanistic educational proposal. Thus, Marxism operates on the principle that individuals' bodies and spirituality need to develop harmoniously and concomitantly, i. According to Marxism, omnilateralism can only be achieved within the scope of a self-regulated society, from the point of view of production, organization and distribution of the things that are needed to ensure people's material and spiritual basis.
Therefore, achieving the omnilateral human depends on the existence, under equal conditions, of the free time needed for full development of their physical and mental potential. Homer, Plato and Aristotle, for example, described the importance of productive idleness in the process of historical materialization of complete individuals, i. In the context of their slave-based society, this became substantiated in preparation of the body for war and of rhetoric for politics.
However, with the end of Classical Antiquity and the rise of Christianity, the omnilateral concept of individuals broke down. In the religious saga of monotheism, Christianity denied relevance to the culture of the body, since flesh was regarded as an inexhaustible source of sin, notably sin founded in sexuality. Thus, for many centuries, the harmonious concept of humankind, i. Later on, with the advent of mercantile capitalism and renascent humanism, an ideological process of returning to the principle of conjugation of these arts as pedagogical foundations for shaping complete individuals was seen within the scope of modernity.
However, because of the influence of economic activities of the bourgeoisie, the art of doing had changed in nature: it was no longer preparation of the body through gymnastics, for war, rather, it was work, which initially was manifested by means of craftwork inside incorporated workshops and subsequently moved into the sphere of big industry with the appearance of modern machinery.
It was within the context of this historical inflection of the art of doing that Marxism gave new dimensions to the concept of shaping omnilateral individuals, even while recognizing that their manifestation could not be achieved within the context of capitalist society. However, at the same time, Marxism advocated that the process of omnilateralism for individuals would not take place from a "historical zero", i. Thus, according to Marxism, capitalism originated the historical possibility of omnilateral education, in embryonic form, through the combination of general education, technological education and gymnastics.
In other words, as stated by Mario Manacorda , p. Caderno 12 Carlos Nelson Coutinho. Marx e a pedagogia moderna. Newton Ramos-de-Oliveira. William Lagos. Gaetano Lo Monaco. MARX, K. Jesus Ranieri. Overall, the curriculum has become more openly designed to meet the needs of the economy. Get Full Access Now. See related essays. The education system disguises this with its myth of meritocracy.
Those who are denied success blame themselves and not the system. Their argument is based on studies that are conducted on people with their average IQs. They say that if education was meritocratic they would have similar outcomes, however they found a wide variety of outcomes. As a result of the fact that the workers will already be accustomed to seeking external gratification for tasks, they will use their wages as the driving force to encourage them to work within the industry that does not cater for their needs.
The belief in equality of opportunity masks the unfairness of the system. Bowles and Gintis claim that pupils with wealthy and powerful kin tend to acquire high qualifications in school and obtain high-powered jobs when they leave. Whereas working class pupils learn to unquestioningly adapt to the needs of the ruling class, therefore becoming conformist workers. Making money was seen as a sign of success and those who were successful did not lose grace in Gods sight. John Wesley quotes: "For religion must necessarily produce industry and frugality, and these cannot but produce riches.
We must exhort all Christians to gain what they can and to. Postmodernists would argue that science is unable to provide solutions to these problems. In the absence of grand narratives a belief system, such as religion or science, that claims the explain the world , individuals seek their own personal rationale. They become "spiritual shoppers", in that they try out various alternative religions until they find a belief system that they want.
This rests on the assumption that technical education is a productive investment - a means by which societies can bring about and sustain economic growth. Schools, Colleges and universities provide highly educated and trained workers who have the necessary knowledge and skills to make effective use of the advanced productive technologies found in modern industries.
Some people start engaging multiple credit cards which only lead them in to deeper debts, ending up in bankruptcy. Gramsci did not think of the state as a single institution but rather a dominant class in society; therefore, the ruling class the state needed to achieve hegemony to keep control over civil society. Furthermore, Jessop argues that the workfare state requires the unemployed to acquire skills and become employable. Want to read the rest? Sign up to view the whole essay and download the PDF for anytime access on your computer, tablet or smartphone.
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