ABSTRACT
In our previous chapter we argued only one thing: that education in a capitalist liberal democracy instils in people a distorted misrepresentation of the world. We did not mean to suggest that this process was unique to capitalist liberal democracies (although some particular features are), or that education in capitalist liberal democracies lay towards the negative pole on some continuum of distortiveness and misrepresentation. Education provided by some totalitarian states, such as that initiated by Hitler, and education in certain primitive tribes, based as it is on myth and superstition, would be distortive and misrepresentative too, although in somewhat different ways (the latter would be unlikely to be deliberately exploitative in a class-serving manner). There would be little to be gained, however, in congratulating ourselves in that our education is 'better' than theirs; but comparative studies are not to our point - our only point is that we give our children a distorted and misrepresentative way of perceiving and knowing the world; a structured misrepresentation of reality, which favours one section of society and works against the interests of other sections, and yet does not seem to be that way.
