Crisis and the Paradoxes of Modernity in the Thread of Scholarly Discourse

Symptoms of crisis in modernity & in the modern schooling project are described. The crisis is based in the commoditization of all objects & social relations & in the loss of referents to make sense of life. A review of schooling discourse along the themes of formal equality vs meritocracy, authority vs autonomy, & knowledge vs technique reveals the contradictory nature of the two projects feeding modern public schooling: the Enlightenment project that links education to the development of an informed & critical public, & the rational-technical project that uses education for selection & functional differentiation in modern industrial societies. 43 References. Adapted from the source document.