Authors:
Cristovam Buarque, João Luís Homem de Carvalho
Entry type:
Scientific paper
Year of publication:
2014
Publishers:
Degrowth Conference Leipzig 2014
Language:
English
Tags:
Abstract: The end of the 20th century showed the failure of ideologies. The ideologies of industrial civilization - capitalism, socialism and developmentalism - became prisoners of production and of income distribution, plundering the environment and offering, without delivering, accessible consumption to the masses. The failure of industrial-civilization utopia suggested that the very sense of utopia was dying. The 21st century brought the idea of the death of ideologies, but reality keeps hope alive for a new utopia. The alternative ideology would be Educationism: the doctrine through which the utopian future can be built by assuring each human being the instruments necessary for his/her intellectual and material liberation through education. Educationism considers industrial civilization to be headed for a catastrophe due to individual inequities and environmental degradation. This march toward disaster can be interrupted by replacing the dream of economic equality with educational equality: the worker’s child in the same school as the boss’s. Educationsim defends the reorientation of the civilizatory project and may facilitate the understanding of the Degrowth proposal.