in Esperanto
Chapter 6: SKETCH OF COMMUNIST SOCIETY -- EDUCATION
2. Emphasis is placed on fostering of imagination and originality.
2.1. Removal of prejudiced image
The role of the formal education system is to nurture the citizens who will lead the future society. This is almost the same in capitalist societies.
However, if someone were to say the same thing from a communist standpoint, the prejudiced image of "brainwashing education" that tends to accompany communism might be superimposed on it. In other words, there is a suspicion that the students will be thoroughly instilled with communist ideas through school education, and will be trained to become "fanatic communists."
Communist education is essentially unrelated to uniform ideological education. A communist society is a society of social cooperation and mutual aid, but from the perspective of knowledge, it is a society in which the people gather their knowledge to create a society for the future. In other words, it is not a society that is guided by intellectuals and experts who are filled with existing knowledge. In such a society, uniform cramming education will not work under any pretext.
2.2. Capitalist intellectual class system
On the other hand, the reality of the developed capitalist society is that, on the premise of a high degree of knowledge division, various specialists are assigned to various fields, and such intellectuals and experts lead society on top of the general public. From this social structuire emerges a kind of intellectual hierarchy. In other words, those who survive the knowledge competition become the leading elite class of society, and those who lose become the class to be led.
In this respect, modern capitalist society differs from modern bourgeois society, which still retains the legacy of the feudal status system, and seems to be a society dominated by ability rather than nature.
In such a society, the qualities required of the leadership elite are memory and responsiveness based on it. In other words, those who have memorized the established body of knowledge, and who have demonstrated accurate and prompt responses to questions with pre-determined correct answers in various tests based on that knowledge, are selected and certified as intellectual elites.
In short, capitalist education is nothing more than a series of administrative procedures separated by certification exams to select such memory-reactive intellectual elites - although there are some differences between countries. In this respect, can we not say that capitalist education is truly uniform?
However, it is desired in a capitalist society. This is because the capitalist economy is a profit-seeking system through the chain of commodity production and money exchange, and all social activities are incorporated somewhere in this system. Knowledge of this system and the ability to apply it are therefore necessary and sufficient to become an intellectual elite.
2.3. From knowledge capitalism to knowledge communism
In contrast, education in a communist society is not so simple. Since a communist society is centered on social cooperation with neither money nor a state, the activities of the whole society can stagnate without the collective wisdom of everyone. In a communist society, the existing body of knowledge is of little use, if not useless. Rather, it is supported by imagination rooted in each person's life experience and originality based on it.
The intellectual class system does not work in a communist society. Even the empirical knowledge of the manual worker will be useful in this society. A communist society cannot function if it is left to intellectuals and experts.
Of course, this does not mean fanaticism, such as that of Cambodian Khmer Rouge, who viewed intellectuals as hostile and purged them on a large scale. Intellectuals and specialists are, of course, indispensable in a communist society, and their training will continue, but their role will likely change from that of social leaders to that of advisors.
The contrast between capitalist education = memory - responsiveness and communist education = imagination - originality is not absolute. Even within the framework of capitalism, there are trends in educational reforms that reflect on the overemphasis on memory and reactivity and emphasize imagination and originality.
However, as long as capitalism remains capitalism, it cannot be expected that education on the memory-reactivity line will essentially be abolished. Under such capitalist education, knowledge itself turns into a kind of cultural capital. From there, an intellectual class system is established by being directly linked to each family's ability to invest in education and inheriting it from generation to generation. Naturally, this structure works favorably for the children of the property class, whose families have a high level of investment in education.
In this way, education reveals that modern capitalist society, which is disguised as a "meritocratic system," is essentially a class society in which people's lives are largely determined by where they were born.
On the other hand, under the communist education of imagination and originality, knowledge is also communized, accumulated and released as "everyone's", so the intellectual class structure under the knowledge capital system will collapse.
