The SQA is a local root of the problem with concern to the learning process. The point of learning was once to educate pupils/students about the world and to allow them to form ideas and opinions of that world in the hope of bettering it. The education system, disappointingly including college, is geared toward method rather knowledge - How I answer the question is far more important than actually knowing what it is I'm answering. Classes are based around learning what the teacher/lecturer says and writing it verbatim in the next test. Education is now about perpetuating capitalism.
The belief that Knowledge and Understanding is different from Problem Solving is an illusion. KU is only there because pupils need to write about something to demonstrate their PS skills - how does that person cope with a situation? Some will argue that at least KU features somewhere in the curriculum - but what of the intent?
Pupils and students and the working population are viewed as robots who just happen to be distracted by various trivialities, such as the quest for knowledge (I'd contend that everyone who reads prolefeed/watches "reality" television is being distracted from more important issues like False Consciousness). Yes, we could use robotics to produce an unlimited supply of products and feed the Third World, but how good is a robot at coping with new situations?
The human condition is a sentient program for processing resources and producing products
To go on a tangent for a minute, progression to a Technocracy would result in (ideally) 0% employment and thus 100% free time. This would mean corporations would not have to pay workers (since there are none in this situation) - good for the corporations (higher profit margin). It would also mean money, artificial scarcity and the reserve unemployed would be abolished - bad for the corporations (since there is no profit because there is no money).Thus, the highly inefficient human worker will always triumph over the maximum-efficiency machine because the former self-adapts, is driven by urges, and is totally fallible. It may be completely obvious that we can become a technocracy easily and end the conflict, but the corporations wield one weapon - the reserve unemployed. They are driven by needs and will work for anything. If unskilled manual workers strike for better pay, who cares? We'll draft in the reserve unemployed who are so desperate for money, they'll work for pittance in a McJob. They'll work shit jobs just to buy shit they don't need, which is why the Welfare System has never worked properly and will be axed piece by piece by successive governments.
If it's a skilled apprenticeship, they'll pay for your upgrades... eh, training. The point is, for all that you've learnt and discussed about contemporary issues and events and so on, you will never be allowed to enact your formulated ideas - your lecturers might be the liberal bogeymen the right is always banging on about, but they are restricted by constantly evaluating the upgrading of the future work force. It matters not if you can think for yourself and happen to improve human life in the following time, what matters is that you sell yourself; your time, your strength, your knowledge, your skills, your passion, your labour; like a prostitute.
Marx classed prostitutes, amongst others, as Lumpenproletariat. They didn't even have their own labour to sell and they did not operate within the established and legal market. The sole reason prostitutes are in a different subset of The Proletariat is because Marx was writing in the confines of economics. From my sociological perspective, there is no difference. As prostitutes sell their bodies, so do workers - prostitution just happens to be deviant in almost every terrestrial culture.
The only people who are allowed to receive a 'free' education, are the bourgeoisie, but they'll never abolish the system which afforded them that freedom. You can argue about Lenin being middle-class, regardless he and all the other revolutionaries in university were expelled for challenging that system and therefore never received the 'free' education. Still, the general population under False Consciousness will not revolt unless they can afford the free education, and the bourgeoisie are not exactly going to pay to free their slaves.
What it has all added up to is the decay of the value of human existence. Neo-imperialism, as Lenin wrote, ensured the loyalty of workers by having 'the natives' do all the dirty work and easing the pressure on the proles by creating the illusion of greater leisure time. Colonialism has long been abandoned by states and replaced with economic and cultural imperialism, which transferred into the hands of multi-national corporations, resulting in two situations:
1) States have nothing to keep the workers happy short of psuedo-socialism.
2) Corporations don't have any reasons to base themselves in the Developed World when it's far cheaper in those desperate countries where everyone is reserve unemployed. The Service Sector will replace manufacturing in the West, but even this is going South because those damn robots want paid. Thus, fascism (state coercion of labour) will be implemented in the South to ensure industrial stability (and this is not a contradiction if you are aware of fascism's derivation from socialism).
I've drawn conclusions on the future based on the trend of outsourcing: the West will become increasingly opulent whilst Corporate-Imperialism will ensure the peasantry of the Third-World will do all the hard work. This can result in a bizarre form of Socialism appearing in the West as Westerners sustain their opulent lifestyles without work in a Utopian/Hedonistic society. In essence, the entire planet will be polarised into Proletariat and Bourgeoisie.
Lenin's point about Western workers not revolting will reach a new height in the above possibility. However, the 'Eastern' worker will be under far greater control than in the 20th Century colonies. Any revolution in Latin America, Africa or Asia would be brutally crushed to preserve the West and, importantly, no Westerner would care. How could they possibly regret their unprecedented lifestyle?
Originally written and published on July 6th 2005 based on discussions with students and lecturers. This essay may not reflect my current knowledge of Marxism
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