Failure of the Education System: Selection, Economic Interests and Inequality

The education system is often presented as a driver of progress and equal opportunity. Yet structurally it is organized around selection, competition and economic ordering. This analysis shows that this critique was already scientifically substantiated fifty years ago and remains recognizable today.

Education and Economic Interests

This fifty-year-old, science-based book describes how the education system was developed out of economic interests, not out of the interests of the child. That system took shape through selection, competition between students, and the limited space children are given to develop in their own way. By now we have become so used to this structure that it is often seen as self-evident and inevitable — a realistic reflection of “how the world simply works.” The book shows that this was not always the case. It was written during a period in which the education system was accelerating, and it makes clear what consequences that inevitably brings.

At the age of sixty, Ellen Heyting earned her doctoral degree in the United States in what was then the still young field of educational science. For her dissertation, she conducted research in Sweden into the relationship between upbringing and education on the one hand, and socio-economic and psychological developments on the other. Although the empirical research took place in Sweden, her analysis addresses structural characteristics of modern education systems more broadly. The findings from that research were developed into the book The Maiming of Man, published in the Netherlands by Meulenhoff.

Ten years later, a second book followed, written as a reflection on her earlier work and research. In An International Fraud; How the Schools Cheat Your Children, published in the United States by Vantage Press, she broadened her analysis and placed it explicitly within an international and economic context.

In this document, the findings from her first book and the reflections in her second book are placed alongside current educational practice and the broader social reality in which that education functions. The sources can be found at the end of this document.

You can read and download the analysis here for free: https://traumainformedthoughts.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/failure-of-the-education-system-economic-interests.pdf