Haile Selassie, Western Education and Political Revolution in Eth ...

Marx has also stated:

In a Marxist paradigm, ideas and ideologies are presented by the ruling classes as if they are universal and dispassionate. Durham and Kellner are more literal in explaining this phenomenon when they assert, “ideologies reproduce social domination, they legitimize rule by the prevailing groups over subordinate ones, and help replicate the existing inequalities and hierarchies of power and control”.³¹ All Marxists agree that the types of education that are imparted to perpetuate a certain ideology serve as protective weapons of social interests. They are, in other words, kept in place to prop up the systems that create them.

For Marx, social knowledge, ideas, and thoughts are never neutral. They are always determined by the existing relations of production and the economic structure of society. Educational ideas change according to the interests of the dominant class at a particular time. The Eurocommunist theoretician, Antonio Gramsci, has coined the phrase “ideological hegemony” to describe the power the ruling class has over knowledge.³² For Marxists as well as neo-Marxists, the hegemony Gramsci mentions is exercised through the institutions of education or the media which the neo-Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser calls “Ideological State Apparatus”.³³ Unfortunately for the ancien régime, Haile Selassie had surrendered this important instrument of political socialization to the metropolitan powers and ultimately had no choice but to suffer the consequences.

The question of alienation in school and society is one major variable to consider in other types of radical political analysis. The latter assumes that under a non-socialist organizational structure, man is separated from his activity, the products he makes, and his fellow human