ABSTRACT
This chapter is a reiteration and an extension of a theme which has been running through this book, that reality speaks louder than rhetotic, and that explicit teaching must be congruent with implicit learning if education is to be successful. Educators are apt to forget this and concern themselves with aims or the content of what is taught rather than the more difficult problem of what is learnt. It would be simplistic to attribute this to their vested interest in the extension of schooling. Nor should one forget that with the spectacular failure of mass secondary schooling in the rich urban areas of the metropolitan countries many educators have been forced to ask fundamental questions (among them Reimer, Illich, Holt, Goodman, and perhaps the closest to the marxism explicated here, Friere). The marxist criterion of educational success being the self-conscious, self-determining man, the question is to what extent experience of the social-political reality encourages the development of such a man and to what extent it frustrates it. To what extent does reality produce open, questioning minds interested in a wide variety of subjects, and to what extent does it foster closed, incurious minds shut into the confines of parochial conservatism? To what extent does it reinforce the ruling ideology and to what extent does it suggest contrary ideas? Does it foster co-operation or competition? Some aspects of this problematic have been studied by non-marxist scholars under the rubric of political culture, or political socialisation, though so far rather little has been done on either the USSR or China. (J.W. Lewis has a chapter on China in J.S. Coleman, Education and Political Development; Myrdal, 1963;Lifton, 1967;Barnett, 1967; Solomon, 1971; and the Harvard Project, reported variously by Inkeles and Bauer, are all relevant.)
