LIKE everything else in a class-divided society, education is a battleground. Earlier answers in this series have argued that what is taught, how and to whom, is a function of the economic system that education has developed to serve.  

Over a century-and-a-half ago, Marx and Engels declared: “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, ie the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.”  

Communists, they stated: “Have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.”