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

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

Moulay Ismail University,

Méknes

Morocco

Tel: +21274273247

05-08-2007