A mod may declare my post off topic and hide it but this is relevant to what “education” means to these people. I’ve posted it before but here it is again… from Richard Pipes’ chapter on the intelligentsia in his book “the Russian Revolution”. An excerpt…
For several decades after its appearance, the influence of Locke’s Essay was confined to academic circles. It was the French philosophe Claude Helvétius who, in his anonymously published De l’Esprit (1758), first drew political consequences from Locke’s theory of knowledge, with results that have never been adequately recognized. It is known that Helvétius studied intensely the philosophical writings of Locke and was deeply affected by them. He accepted as proven Locke’s contention that all ideas were the product of sensations and all knowledge the result of man’s ability, through reflection on sensory data, to grasp the differences and similarities that are the basis of thought. He denied as categorically as did Locke man’s ability to direct thinking or the actions resulting from it: for Helvétius, his biographer says, “a philosophical treatise on liberty [was] a treatise on effects without a cause.”8 Moral notions derived exclusively from man’s experience with the sensations of pain and pleasure. People thus were neither “good” nor “bad”: they merely acted, involuntarily and mechanically, in their self-interest, which dictated the avoidance of pain and the enhancement of pleasure. Up to this point Helvétius said nothing that had not been said previously by Locke and his French followers. But then he made a startling leap from philosophy into politics. From the premise that all knowledge and all values were by-products of sensory experience he drew the inference that by controlling the data that the senses fed to the mind—that is, by appropriately shaping man’s environment—it was possible to determine what he thought and how he behaved. Since, according to Locke, the formulation of ideas was wholly involuntary and entirely shaped by physical sensations, it followed that if man were subjected to impressions that made for virtue, he could be made virtuous through no act of his own will.
This idea provides the key to the creation of perfectly virtuous human beings—required are only appropriate external influences. Helvétius called the process of molding men “education,” by which he meant much more than formal schooling. When he wrote “l’éducation peut tout”—“education can do anything”—he meant by education everything that surrounds man and affects his thinking, everything which furnishes his mind with sensations and generates ideas. First and foremost, it meant legislation: “It is … only by good laws that we can form virtuous men.”
From which it followed that morality and legislation were “one and the same science." In the concluding chapter of L’Esprit, Helvétius spoke of the desirability of reforming society through legislation for the purpose of making men “virtuous.”
Pipes goes on and makes the link between this kind of thinking and the Russian intelligentsia. It is a perfect picture of the prog leadership’s thinking today. These progs here have been “molded” . And a thorough job was done, I must say.
