The GENERAL CONTEXT of such use is:
self-elimination and the 'interest of society': in reducing the role of self-elimination (or self-exclusion, from higher education) at the end of primary schooling, in favor of deferred elimination or elimination by examination alone, the educational system fulfills its conservative function yet more successfully, if it is true that, to perform this function, it must DISGUISE CHANCES OF ENTRY AS CHANCES OF SUCCESS. Those who invoke 'the interest of society' to deplore the economic cost of 'educational wastage' contradict themselves in failing to take into account the profit accruing from it, namely the advantage the social order derives from spacing out and so concealing the elimination of the working classes. It is clear why, in order to carry out in full this function of social conservation, the school system must present the 'moment of truth' of the examination as its own objective reality: the elimination, subject solely to the norms of educational equity, which it undertakes and conducts with formal irreproachability, conceals the performance of the function of the school system (to reproduce the hidden social inequities of class in society) by masking, behind the examination's opposition between the passed and the failed, the actual relation between the candidates and those whom the school system has de facto excluded from the ranks of the candidates, and so concealing the societal links between the school system and the structure of class relations.