Ascents and Descents

Abstract

The political, economic, and cultural integration of the population by means of the education state has taken centuries and has never been fully accomplished. Only gradually has the pride in education and insight into its usefulness characteristic of the upper and middle classes transcended to the lower ones. Due to the growth of mass secondary and higher education, the well-educated classes again and again added newly erected wings, floors, and annexes to their institutions of education to maintain advantages for their offspring. Against this historical trend of education becoming routine, democratic, commonplace, and trivial in everyone’s life, it is not surprising to observe a general weakening of faith in the blessing of education policy on the individual and state level, like the provision of individual achievements, national economic prosperity, political loyalty through meritocracy, and cultural integration. The reduction in education policy coverage, and particularly attention to international education policies on the front page of leading newspapers of the well-educated classes in the leading Western nations over the course of the twentieth century, reflects the historical transformation of the education state from a key instrument of victorious nations and rising bourgeois classes, to one of many means of the polymorphous welfare state to crystallize power and interests.