etc., etc. To sum up, the higher and middle schools teach the children of the capitalists all the data that are requisite for the maintenance of bourgeois socicty and the whole system of capitalist exploitation. If any of the children of the workers, happening to be exceptionally gifted, should find their way into the higher schools, in the great majority of instances the bourgeois scholastic apparatus will serve as a means of detaching them from their own class kin, and will inoculate them with bourgeois ideology, so that in the long run the genius of these scions of the working class will be turned to account for the oppression of the workers.
Turning, finally, to the third task of capitalist education, we find that the school fulfils it as follows. In a class society where capitalism is dominant, science is divorced from labour. Not only does it become the property of the possessing classes. More than this, it becomes the profession of a small and comparatively narrow circle of individuals. Scientific instruction and scientific research are divorced from the labour process. In order that it may avail itself of the data of science and may turn them to account in production, bourgeois society has to create a number of institutions serving for the application of scientific discoveries to manufacturing technique; and it has to create a number of technical schools which will facilitate the maintenance of production at the level rendered possible by the advance of “pure” science — by which is meant science divorced from labour. Furthermore, the polytechnic schools of capitalist society do not merely serve to supply capitalist society with technical experts; they supply in addition those who will act as managers, those who will function as “captains of industry.” In addition, to provide the personnel which will supervise the circulation of commodities, there have been founded numerous commercial schools and academies.
In all these organizations, whatever is linked up with production will endure. But everything which is concerned merely with capitalist production, will die out. There will persist everything which promotes