Politics and Higher Education in the 1980's

Abstract

This author sees a misplaced emphasis on the crises in education as being primarily the acquisition of elementary skills. The real job to be done in the years ahead is in helping students to see their own lived experience as the place where ideology begins. The growing social and economic inequality with its political impotency is the source of the prevailing functional illiteracy. The social changes that the survival of a free society demands will be made possible by the critical and conceptual literacy intrinsic to collective power and knowledge.