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

Chapter 2:  Pattern of the Insurrection and Modernity
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Illich’s and Friere’s explanation are revisionist views and do not follow Marx’s original explanation of the concept of alienation in political economy analysis. Marx had clearly described his concept of “alienated labor,” which specifically deals with the worker as follows:

According to the laws of political economy, the alienation of the worker in his object is expressed as follows: the more the worker produces, the less he has to consume; the more values he creates, the more valueless and worthless he becomes; the more formed the product, the more deformed the worker; the more civilized the product, the more barbaric the worker; the more power­ful the work, the more powerless becomes the worker; and the more cultured the work, the more philistine the worker becomes and more of a slave to nature.36

In Friere’s analysis, “consumerism” is built into the school system—a system that follows the example of “banking.” Knowledge, in the traditional method, is consumed, not made and remade. Illiterates are treated like objects-oppressed and dehumanized. Friere therefore attempts to introduce a new teaching and learning system which creates “conscientization.” The method, according to him, would liberate the learner. The major flaw in this view is, however, the implied assumption that a new type of educational approach can redress society’s ills regardless of the political system within which it functions. Whereas “conscientization” is his short-term aim, Friere is also curiously silent on the long range goals of his method. In other words, “conscientization,” instead of being a means to revolutionary change to combat alienation, becomes an end in itself.

Careful investigation of the literature on education and politics shows that neither the political socialization scholars, nor the de-schoolers and the Friereans, have addressed the explanation of the relationship between education and revolution. This analysis will, therefore, explore the role of education as an important variable in the sociopolitical transformations of Ethiopia which culminated in the far-reaching revolutionary upheaval of 1974.