| Chapter 2: | Pattern of the Insurrection and Modernity |
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effects? Class and sex stereotyping, according to Hyman and Easton, are reinforced by political learning. For example, because of political socialization, most political participants are male. The upper classes are more active in politics than the workers. Schools, according to this view, perpetuate social and political stratification, and are, by design, the main pillars of the system within which they function.
Whereas all the above studies are Western-liberal in orientation, their detractors approach it differently. Karl Marx, for example, was clear when he said “life (or actual material activity) is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life”.30 For him, human thought is rooted in human activity not the other way around. In this concept, the way we are organized in our daily life is always reflected in the way we think about objective and subjective situations and the type of world we have helped to create. The institutions we build, the philosophies we advance, the prevailing ideas of the time, the culture of a group in question are all dependent on the economic base of a given society to a significant degree. The political structure, the legal system, the family, the press, and the education system are all rooted in the class nature of society, which in turn is a reflection of the economic base.
For Marx, the economic base or the infrastructure generates a superstructure that keeps it in place. The education system, part of the superstructure, is a reflection of the economic base and serves to reproduce it. In other words, the institutions of society that produce school curricula are reflections of the world created by human activity and all ideas pertaining to it arise from and reflect the material conditions and circumstances in which they are generated.
In his book The German Ideology, Marx maintained that “the class which is the dominant material force in society is at the same time its dominant intellectual force.” What he meant is that the ruling classes always determine the agenda of survival and control. They rule as sages and as manufacturers of thoughts that get noticed. They command and direct what we call “common sense.” Ideas that are presented as normal reflections of human nature and as a collective belief system are given a veneer of objectivity when, in fact, they are simply reflections of the superstructure of a class-based society.