Mankind cannot overcome its condition because for thousands of years the educational pattern has not changed. Strangely though, the perception is reversed: everybody is taught to believe in the equal chance to success; all the while, through public order (a sort of cord which envelopes everyone's power of understanding) we convey that it is normal, meaning natural, for the distinguished to lead. These people hold an ancient aura either coming from virtue - which would be somewhat natural - but also from elitist conventions, reserved for the 1 or 2 percent of the population, insistently promoted by propagandistic institutions.

It would not be sufficient in observing current reality if we didn't describe the crude dimension of present society, which is totally perverted by the lack of political culture and the precariousness of education with respect to civilized rules. In the modern fury for the equality of chance, which functions as a curtain of the real moral constitution of people, the need for the different is perversely speculated in order to obtain - miraculously for the model, but catastrophic for human kind - the alignment to behavioral standards insistently or presented as being attainable.

In fact, it happens not differently from what used to take place in ancient Rome, where the melodrama of power had imposed seducing images and rhetorical triads which have marked our want for the altitude of the presence. What is truly symptomatic (anyway being a too eloquently a precipitate of the unnatural acceleration of hominization demanded by the Enlightenment project) does not reside in the burning of stages toward and existential formula standing apart from Nature, but lies in the expectance that the superior state will be inevitably reached without resorting to the rational rules of performance. It is essentially the modern expectation of the absolution of success, after the reflex conditioned by kid's cartoons, and not by the ideated ensemble of the context meant to trigger the intimate resorts of the identification with performance.

Somewhat condemnably, education did not break with the ancient precepts, best fixed by Plato as the initiation of the chosen (chosen by either fate, nature, gods, people), while political experience became the laboratory for validating the elitist education.

The failures of democracy (from those expressed by the permissiveness of the totalitarian path to those of the de-regulation of morality) are only explained as a direct effect of unequal education under the condition of propagating the equality of chance. The consciousness of the claimed rights in a society constitutes the very quintessence of the democratic model. Educational disparities are expressed as a gradual intensity with respect to the rational appeal to social roles, especially the appeal to the consciousness of the dynamic of rights and responsibilities. The basis for this dynamic contains its cementing ingredient, called discernment. Or, the problem of discernment is at the same time a target of education and a result of social action, while in the situation where both education as well as society guard themselves against the force of the conscious, rational reactions contained by discernment, the experiencing of democracy as a formula for the equality of chances is undermined.

The educational formula of the equality of chances contains both the crisis of equality and the tangible horizon of inequality, because it is a practical impossibility for the consciousness of rights and responsibilities to be awaken in every man without exception. The dual content of the equality of chances is underlined by its implicit suggestion: it has to take place the private individual's option for the accessing of the available chances of equality. But when the miracle happens, the chance is dealt with from different perspectives and with different intellectual force, so different that they actually define inequality. Within these determinants, democracy slips toward the method of representation, a formula of political correctness through which the elitist curtain is drawn over inequality.

Even the inclusion of representative democracy within the quantum universe of the modern theory of the sovereignty of the people cannot completely hide the disfunctionalities of the educational steps, Platonically made and conserved by the Enlightenment (when the need for the creation of the Royal Society was being felt, for instance). The fashion of national schools which consecrate the technology of the access to leadership (in the French case for example, through the École Nationale d'Administration) points to the endurance of the Platonic type of elitist education in the era of maximal belief in the advantages of the democratic political system. It's in the elitist atmosphere (e.g. City College of New York) that the ideas regarding the use of power to moral ends has been forged, including here the use of power for the overthrowing of political regimes in the name of values such as freedom (and this in situations where the emblem of international life is democracy). These are the tangible leads of the tutelary vision of education at odds with the frontispiece of expectations of a world normalized by political action.