POSTED 5:19 7/2/2012

*squats over tumblr*

Schools, originally, were for educating clergy and were based on reverence for God as an arbitrary, all powerful master of society. This is also reflected in the violent spectacle of punishment, which served the purpose of maintaining order among those who were witness to the spectacle. This should be obvious in the case of the Philippines, where the Catholic church maintained the same feudal school system well into the bourgeois era and only the Americans replaced it with modern education. I doubt any of you would say that the USA came to the Philippines to improve living standards or liberate the Philippines, and yet why did they bother to set up universal education? This is the transition from the pre-modern to the modern world, and the realization that the spectacular, elitist, and unscientific method of hegemonic control was insufficient for the bourgeois era. The transition from the modern era to the post-modern era is the same. the modern period of social control, which used oppressive, all powerful systems to separate and control people was insufficient for the finance capital era in which the material base of wealth no longer existed in the 1st world and so the welfare state model had to be dismantled without losing hegemony. Power is now exercised primarily through liberal-democratic ideology, the state has need for neither segregation and homophobia nor welfare systems and labor aristocracy. The fight you guys are fighting for, the elimination of homophobia and racism in school is one the state can get behind and cheer on. The reverse trend (which is not a trend at all it is simply a media narrative doing what I just said) is simply the emergence of fascism among the scraps of the 1st world labor aristocracy as the manufacturing base which supported it dies. That fight is one for liberals. We must fight for a new world to surpass both the dying modernism and the new post-modernism. What education will look like I can’t say, we must destroy all idols before making new ones, liberal democracy being the golden calf.