Dangers of education

The readings for this week were very interesting because they presented in a new way the impact of education on civic participation. Indeed, we often stop at the conclusion that more education is linked with more civic participation. Of course, education gives to people a “higher” social status, and we've seen in the past readings/discussions that the participation in democracy is highly linked with the status of the citizen in the society.

I think that we should also be careful about education and its impact on civic participation. I totally agree with Pauline Lipman when she says that the frames of the American education policy shape the general way of thinking of the citizens. She uses the example of the discourse of containment after 9/11, but it reminded me of another example. At the beginning of this fall semester, I went to a discussion for a class of foreign policy. The theme of discussion was: “Do we have to interfere in the conflict in Korea and in Pakistan?”. In reality, this was only written in the paper, and the debate turned to be on how U.S. should interfere. I think this is a good example that shows how education can be dangerous for democracy, because in this case it directly presented the intervention as the only way to handle a conflict.

In the past few weeks, we have seen the dangers of the mis-information, but we can consider that education can be worst than mis-information. Indeed, when you are a student, even if you try to take a critical look at the information given to you -searching for other sources as an example-, it's hard to resist to the common schemes that education give you.

That's why I clearly agree with the famous quotation of Stuart Hall about education as politics by other means. We have seen that politicians can win new votes with rhetoric, and that some newspapers and organizations use mis-information in order to convince voters, readers or consumers, but education is a more powerful tool for politics because it is hard to take a step back when you are a student, especially in high school. Even if you can critic the informations and data given to you in class, it is really difficult be critical of the structure of education, and the values that education promotes.