Competition is not
excluded, but instead of conflict-which in the given system
results in students who cut pages from books so that their
colleagues will fail-we ought to create an environment of
reciprocally advantageous cooperation. How far are we from such
an objective?
In the words of Jacques Barzun, a devoted educator committed to
literacy, education failed to "develop native intelligence." In
an interesting negative of what people think education
accomplishes, he points to the appearance of success: "We
professed to make ideal citizens, super-tolerant neighbors,
agents of world peace, and happy family folk, at once sexually
adept and flawless drivers of cars." All this is nothing to be
ashamed of, but as educational goals, they are quite off the
target. Citizenship in the society of the new pragmatic context
is different from citizenship in previous societies. Tolerance
requires a new way to manifest it, such as the integration of
what is different and complementary. Peace, yes, even peace,
means a different state of affairs at a time when many local
conflicts affect the world. As far as family, sex, and the
culture of the car are concerned, nothing can point more to the
failure of education. Indeed, education failed to understand
all the factors involved in contemporary family life. It failed
to understand sexual relations. Faced with the painful reality of
the degradation of sexual relations, education resorted to the
desperate measure of dispensing condoms, an extension of what
was gloriously celebrated as sex education.
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