Democracy and Education

It seems difficult to deny that a vote in American elections is frequently, as Plato anticipates it, a conditioned response to some superficial phenomena.  Now, 'education', qua a familiarization with names and dates, as American Humanities programs often serve as, offer little to disrupt that common Heterocratic scenario.  More promising is Plato's concept of Education as the cultivation of the envisioning of Forms, though his Ideal-Real dichotomy leaves unclear the applicability of such envisioning to actual practices.  In contrast, Spinozist Education involves the exposure of the causal relations underlying surface Political imagery, such as Marx's thesis that Economic relations constitute the ultimate substratum of such imagery.  Dewey extends the Spinozist approach to the concept of voting as the voter's participation in the reconstruction of Society.  So, if Education is to be effective in empowering the member of a Democracy, academic institutions themselves require liberation from their essentially career-oriented roles that they currently tend to play, undermining Dewey's program.