Trajectory of education can define the path of democracy, and the intention of its leader.

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• Education strengthens critical thinking, political awareness, and civic confidence, which often leads citizens to question authority and join movements for change.

• Democracies still depend on education because informed citizens help sustain civic norms, institutional trust, the rule of law, and resistance to authoritarianism.

• Authoritarian regimes have historically tried to weaken, control, or distort education because independent thought can fuel dissent, collective action, and organized resistance.

• The modern risk in democracies is not always open censorship, but the slow dilution of education through commercialization, inequality, distraction, and the loss of civic purpose.

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MAY 2026

In radical political philosophy, a critical argument holds that democratic governments do not genuinely desire an enlightened and critically engaged population. 

Hence, they don’t take education seriously. In fact, more the government is autocratic, more attack on the education system.

According to this theory, modern states prefer compliant, distracted, and administratively manageable citizens. Therefore, they underinvest in public education or dilute its intellectual quality to prevent citizens from seriously challenging entrenched political and economic power.

At first glance, history appears to support this suspicion. 

Educated populations are notoriously difficult to govern. Universities have repeatedly become breeding grounds for dissent, protest, and ideological rebellion. 

Intellectual classes question wars, expose corruption, organize movements, and destabilize ruling orthodoxies. 

Yet the historical evidence of the last century reveals a far more complicated and paradoxical reality.

It also means, modern democracies survive precisely because they produce educated citizens capable of critical thought. 

Education simultaneously stabilizes democracies and threatens governments

By contrast, long-running autocracies have historically depended upon ignorance, educational decay, censorship, and economic dependency to preserve power. 

The relationship between education and political order is therefore not simple. 

Education simultaneously stabilizes democracies and threatens governments within them.

The central paradox of modern politics is this: 

• democracies need critical citizens to survive, but 

• governments often fear the consequences of creating critical citizens.

Literacy as Political Rebellion

The proposition that education breeds dissent is strongly supported by political sociology and modern history. Higher education is not merely vocational training like engineering, medical science, accountancy. 

It actually alters cognitive frameworks, increases political awareness, increases the ability to process and interpret complex information, and develops the civic confidence necessary for organized opposition.

An educated citizen does not passively consume state narratives. 

Such a citizen 

• compares data, 

• questions official rhetoric, 

• identifies institutional contradictions, and 

• recognizes systemic concentrations of power. 

Consequently, critical thinking naturally generates friction with authority.

Throughout the twentieth century, expansions in higher education repeatedly coincided with waves of political unrest.

The most famous example remains the global student uprisings of 1968. 

In France, West Germany, Mexico, Italy, and the United States, rapidly expanding university systems created a new generation of politically conscious youth who openly challenged 

• militarism, 

• capitalism, 

• bureaucracy, 

• racial inequality, and 

• state authority. 

In France, the May 1968 protests grew so severe that President Charles de Gaulle briefly and secretly fled the country to Baden-Baden, West Germany, while millions of workers joined nationwide strikes that nearly paralysed the state.

Critical thinking naturally generates friction with authority.

In the United States, universities became the nerve centres of opposition to the Vietnam War. 

Student activism transformed campuses into battlegrounds over 

• civil rights, 

• imperialism, 

• free speech, and 

• racial justice. 

The Kent State shootings, also known as the Kent State massacre, occurred on May 4, 1970, when the Ohio National Guard shot unarmed students at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, killing four and injuring nine. 

The incident took place during a rally against the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia, as well as against the National Guard’s presence on campus and the military draft (conscription).

The pattern repeated itself across Asia. 

During South Korea’s Gwangju Uprising of 1980, university students stood at the forefront of resistance against the military dictatorship of Chun Doo-hwan. 

The Gwangju Uprising, known in South Korea as the May 18 Democratization Movement, was a series of student-led protests in Gwangju in May 1980 against Chun Doo-Hwan’s consolidation of power after the coup of May 17. 

Having already seized power through the December 12 coup in 1979, Chun imposed martial law, arrested opposition leaders, closed universities, banned political activity, and censored the press. 

The South Korean military violently suppressed the uprising when it retook the city, and between 600 and 2,300 people were killed.

In China, the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 were overwhelmingly led by educated urban students demanding political reform, transparency, and freedom of expression. 

The Chinese Communist Party’s violent crackdown demonstrated an enduring authoritarian lesson: educated citizens become dangerous once they begin organizing collectively.

The Arab Spring of 2011 followed a similar trajectory. 

In Tunisia and Egypt, a large class of university-educated but economically frustrated youth used digital networks, social media, and political coordination to challenge entrenched autocratic regimes. 

Many political scientists noted the irony that modernization itself had created the very citizens who would later revolt against authoritarian stagnation.

Empirical research supports these historical observations. 

Studies examining compulsory schooling reforms across dozens of countries found that additional years of education significantly increases, upto 6% - 8% higher participation in protests, demonstrations, and civic activism. 

Education raises 

• political interest, 

• institutional awareness, and 

• willingness to challenge governments.

Authoritarian systems understand this relationship instinctively. 

That is why nearly every dictatorship in modern history has viewed independent intellectual culture with suspicion.

Why Democracies Cannot Survive Without Education?

If education creates difficult, rebellious, and politically demanding citizens, why do democracies continue investing vast public resources into mass education?

Because democracies collapse without it.

Political scientists have consistently demonstrated a strong relationship between education and democratic stability. Democracies rely not merely on elections, but on civic norms, institutional trust, legal consciousness, and public restraint. 

These are learned behaviours. 

In democracies, political power and economic rewards are distributed across millions of people rather than concentrated within a narrow ruling elite. 

If there is a ‘K’ shaped growth, then there is a flaw in the democratic process.

Citizens hence require a deeper attachment to constitutional norms, rule of law, minority rights, and institutional legitimacy. Without these civic habits, democratic systems become vulnerable to 

• manipulators, 

• cronyism, 

• conspiracy movements, 

• sectarian polarization, and 

• authoritarian capture.

Education prevents precisely these de-stabilizing mechanisms. 

Schools do not merely teach literacy or technical skills. They socialize citizens into systems of cooperation. 

They create shared national narratives, encourage participation in public life, and cultivate tolerance for institutional processes.

Examples from History

The postwar democratic expansion of Western Europe illustrates this clearly. After the devastation of the Second World War, governments massively expanded public education systems, not only to create workers but to prevent a return to fascism. 

The architects of postwar Europe understood that democratic citizenship had to be consciously cultivated.

Even the United States, often celebrated as a free-market society, historically depended on enormous public investment in education. 

The ‘GI Bill’ after 1945 transformed millions of former WW-II soldiers into university graduates, creating one of the largest expansions of educated middle classes in modern history. 

This educational expansion became a pillar of American democratic stability and economic dominance during the Cold War.

But, the historical lesson is blunt. 

A democracy that systematically destroys public education may temporarily create a more passive electorate, but it ultimately undermines its own institutional foundations.

Ignorance may simplify governance in the short term. 

Over time, it produces extremism, polarization, institutional distrust, and democratic decay.

The Dictator’s Toolkit: Rule Through Ignorance

While democracies must carefully balance criticism and stability, autocracies historically pursue a far simpler strategy: keep the population politically weak, economically dependent, and intellectually fragmented.

The twentieth century offers repeated examples.

Under Augusto Pinochet in Chile, higher education funding was aggressively reduced after the 1973 coup. 

University enrolments were restricted, public institutions weakened, and educational costs shifted onto families. The strategy was not merely economic. 

Universities there historically served as centres of political resistance, labour mobilization, and ideological debate. Strategically, weakening public education by the dictator weakened organized opposition.

Mobutu Sese Seko followed a similar model in Zaire.  He was military officer who was the first and only president of Zaire for 26 years, from 1971 to 1997. While accumulating immense personal wealth, about $5Bn, Mobutu systematically hollowed out national institutions, including schools and universities. 

As a result, population trapped in economic desperation lacks both the time and organizational capacity necessary for sustained political resistance.

The Khmer Rouge in Cambodia carried this logic to its horrifying extreme. Pol Pot’s regime did not merely distrust intellectuals, it sought their physical elimination. 

Teachers, doctors, engineers, academics, and even citizens wearing glasses were executed because the regime understood a terrifying truth: critical thought itself is a threat to totalitarianism.

even citizens wearing glasses were executed

Nazi Germany similarly recognized the political importance of educational control. Universities were purged, independent scholarship suppressed, and curricula transformed into instruments of racial ideology and nationalist obedience. 

Totalitarian systems cannot tolerate autonomous intellectual spaces because independent thinking eventually produces moral resistance.

The Soviet Union under Stalin demonstrated another variation of the same principle. 

Education was heavily expanded, but tightly controlled. Technical expertise was encouraged only insofar as it served state power. 

Independent political inquiry remained dangerous. The regime desired skilled workers, not free intellectuals.

This distinction remains crucial today. 

Authoritarian governments do not necessarily oppose education itself. They oppose independent critical consciousness.

The Modern Democratic Manipulation

Yet modern democracies are not entirely innocent.

Few democratic governments openly oppose education. There is an international reputation to maintain.

Instead, the contemporary danger lies in the gradual transformation of education into a purely economic instrument stripped of civic purpose. High fees and overly posh infrastructure become the method to normalize expensive schooling and higher education. 

Across many democracies, universities increasingly function as credential factories. They focus more on branding than on real intellectual work, designed to produce fulfil white collar labour-market rather than politically informed citizens. 

Public debate is saturated by entertainment algorithms, TRP driven rhetorical discussions, social media outrage cycles, and attention fragmentation that weaken sustained critical reflection. 

Citizens may possess degrees while lacking historical literacy, philosophical depth, or institutional understanding.

Modern states dilute critical thinking with silent methods

This creates a subtler form of democratic vulnerability.

Modern states may not suppress critical thinking through overt censorship. 

Instead, they often dilute it through 

• commercialization, 

• privatization, 

• media overload, 

• rising educational inequality, 

• mild education as right to childhood and 

• the conversion of citizens into consumers.

The result is politically significant. A population distracted by endless spectacle becomes easier to manipulate without requiring outright repression.

The Roman poet Juvenal described this logic nearly two thousand years ago as “bread and circuses.” According to him, a government can distract an apathetic populace from civic duty of policy scrutiny by providing for their basic survival and constant, superficial entertainment. 

Modern democracies increasingly risk replacing civic education with digital circuses and basic wages to control the population from scrutinizing government policies.

The deeper historical lesson is therefore uncomfortable for both radicals and defenders of the establishment. 

The bottom line, democracies genuinely require educated citizens to survive. But governments with autocratic bend, big ambitious corporations, and entitled political elites also remain wary of populations capable of sustained independent thought.

That tension can never be permanently resolved. It is built into the architecture of perfect democracy.