Abstract
School today is caught in the dilemma of being expected to educate young people so that they can be integrated into modern industrial society. Because of structural injustices in society, not all students have equal chances in this integration process. Education in school is also expected to impart proficiency in skills which go beyond the functional skills which a productive society needs. These softer skills can threaten the aims of modern society because they have the potential to question its underlying rationale. Young people learn these skills in their everyday lives with their peers outside of school. They form part of the cultural wealth which students bring with them to school. It is up to school to draw on this cultural wealth of students and to foster the various forms of cultural capital contained therein so that students learn not to be victims of a one-sided schooling which reproduces those injustices that pervade modern society by placing excess value on cultural assets which are favored by dominant groups in society.
Highlights
School today is caught in the dilemma of being expected to educate young people so that they can be integrated into modern industrial society
It is up to school to draw on this cultural wealth of students and to foster the various forms of cultural capital contained therein so that students learn not to be victims of a one-sided schooling which reproduces those injustices that pervade modern society by placing excess value on cultural assets which are favored by dominant groups in society
An important aspect of justice has to do with how much individuals are masters of their own place in this world. It has to do with the capacity of individuals to act in a self-determined way and education has the task of empowering people to be agents in this sense. This corresponds to some extent with an inherent need in modern industrial societies for schooling to go beyond the imparting of purely functional skills and qualifications
Summary
One has the feeling that this famous line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet could be applied to any state in the world today. The reports on financial, political and other scandals throughout the world which flood the media nearly every day give the impression that there is something very wrong about the state of the present world. This is not the place to enumerate the countries, the institutions, the persons involved. Education has the task of facing up to this contradiction and of striving to empower young people to control their own destinies This task has to be addressed as a structural problem in educational theory and as a moral issue in the classroom
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