The Organisation of Education and Culture
In modern civilisation all practical activities have, generally speaking, become so complex and learning so interwoven with life that every kind of practical activity tends to create a school for its own leaders and specialists, and hence to create a group of specialised intellectuals of a higher level to teach in these schools. Thus, alongside the older, traditional type of school which we may call "humanistic", and which was directed towards developing an as yet undifferentiated general culture in each human individual (the fundamental ability to think and guide oneself in life), there has been growing up a whole system of separate schools at various levels for whole professional branches or for already specialised and precisely differentiated professions. Moreover, today's widespread educational crisis can be precisely linked to the fact that this process of differentiation and specialisation has taken place chaotically, without clear and precise principles, without a well thought out and consciously fixed plan. The crisis in educational programmes and organisation, that is, of the general direction of a policy for developing modern intellectual cadres, is to a large extent an aspect and a complication of a more comprehensive and general organic crisis.
The basic division of schools into classical (i.e. grammar) and trade schools was a rational scheme: trade schools for the instrumental classes, classical schools for the ruling classes and intellectuals. The development of the industrial base in both town and country led to a growing need for a new type of urban intellectual: alongside the classical school there developed the technical school (professional but not manual), and this brought into question the very principle of the concrete orientation of general culture, of the humanist orientation of general culture based on the Greco-Roman tradition. This orientation, once brought into question was in fact doomed, since its formative capacity was largely based on the general and traditionally indisputable prestige of a particular form of civilisation.
Today the tendency is to abolish every kind of "disinterested" (not immediately interested) and "formative" school and to leave only a reduced number of them for a tiny élite of ladies and gentlemen who do not have to think of preparing themselves for a professional future, and to spread ever more widely the specialised professional schools in which the destiny of the pupil and his future activity are predetermined. The crisis will find a solution which rationally should follow these lines: a single humanistic, formative primary school of general culture which will correctly balance the development of ability for manual (technical, industrial) work with the development of ability for intellectual work. From this type of single school, following repeated tests for professional aptitude, the pupil will pass either into one of the specialised schools or into productive work.
Attention must be paid to the growing tendency by which every kind of practical activity creates its own specialised school, just as every kind of intellectual activity tends to create its own cultural circles, which acquire the function of post-scholastic institutions specialised in organising the conditions under which it may be possible to keep up to date with progress in their own branch of science.
Deliberating bodies are tending more and more to distinguish two "organic" aspects of their activity—the purely deliberative which is their essential function, and the technico-cultural by which questions requiring solution are first examined by experts and scientifically analysed. This latter activity has already created a whole bureaucratic body with a new structure, since in addition to the offices of professional experts who prepare technical material for the deliberating bodies, there has been created a second body of more or less "voluntary" and disinterested functionaries chosen from time to time from industry, the banks, finance. This is one of the mechanisms by which the career bureaucracy has ended by controlling democratic and parliamentary régimes; now the mechanism is extending itself organically and absorbing into its own circle the leading specialists of private practical activity which thus controls both régimes and bureaucracies. Since this is a question of a necessary organic development which tends to integrate the personnel specialised in political technique with the personnel specialised in concrete questions of the administration of practical activities essential to large complex modern national societies, all attempts to exorcise this tendency from outside only result in moralising sermons and rhetorical moans.
The question arises of modifying the training of the technical political personnel, integrating its culture according to new necessities, and of developing new types of specialised functionaries who shall integrate their deliberating activities in a collegiate way. The traditional type of political "ruler", trained only for formal-legal activities, is becoming an anachronism and represents a danger to State life: the ruler must possess that minimum of general technical culture to enable him, if not to "create" the correct solution autonomously, at least to judge between the solutions put forward by the experts and to select the correct one from the "synthetic" viewpoint of political technique.
One type of deliberating college which seeks to incorporate the necessary technical competence to work realistically has been described elsewhere,1 where I spoke of what happens on the editorial boards of certain reviews, which function as cultural circles at the same time as editorial boards. The circle criticises in a collegiate way and so contributes towards developing the work of individual members of the editorial staff, whose own task is organised according to a rationally worked out plan and division of labour.
Through discussions and joint criticism (consisting of suggestions, advice, indications of method, constructive criticism directed towards mutual learning), by which each man functions as a specialist in his own subject to improve the collective competence, the average level of each individual is raised. It reaches the height or the capacity of the best trained and assures the review not only of ever better selected and organic contributions but creates the conditions for the rise of a homogeneous group of intellectuals trained to produce regular and methodical "literary" activity (not only in livres d'occasion and partial studies, but in organic general works as well).
Undoubtedly in this kind of collective activity each job produces the capacity and possibility for new work, since it creates ever more organic conditions of work: card indexes, bibliographical notes, collections of basic specialised works, etc. A rigorous struggle is required against habits of dilettantism, improvisation, "oratorical" and declamatory solutions. It is important for reports, and this applies to criticisms, to be made in written form, in short succinct notes. This can be ensured by distributing material in good time, etc. Writing notes and criticisms is a didactic principle rendered necessary by the need to combat habits of prolixity, declamation and sophistry created by oratory. . .
An important point in the study of the practical organisation of the unitary school concerns the various levels of the scholastic career corresponding to the age and intellectual-moral development of the pupil and the ends which the school itself wants to achieve. The unitary, humanistic school (humanist in the broad sense and not only in the traditional meaning), or school of general culture, should set out to introduce young people to social activity after having brought them to a certain level of maturity and ability, of intellectual and practical creation, independent in orientation and initiative. The fixing of the leaving age depends on general economic conditions, since these may impose a certain immediate demand for productive ability. The unitary school requires that the State should take over the expenses of maintaining the scholars which today fall on the family. It transforms the budget of the education department from top to bottom, extending and elaborating it in unparalleled ways. The whole task of educating and forming the younger generation becomes public instead of private, since only in this way can it involve the whole generation without distinctions of group or caste. But this transformation of scholastic activity requires an unparalleled enlarging of the practical organisation of the schools, i.e. of the buildings, scientific equipment, teaching staff, etc. The teaching staff especially must be increased, because the efficiency of the school is the greater the closer the relationship between teacher and pupil—a fact which raises other problems which cannot be solved easily or quickly. The question of school buildings is also not a simple one, because this type of school ought to be a school-college (boarding school), with dormitories, dining-rooms, specialised libraries, rooms suited for seminar work, etc. Therefore, to begin with, the new type of school must and can only be open to restricted groups of young people selected by competition or nominated by suitable institutions.
The unitary school should correspond to the period represented by the elementary and middle school (i.e. 7 to 15—Trans.), but reorganised not only in teaching content and method, but also in the arrangement of the various stages of the school career. The elementary grade should not be more than three-four years, and together with the teaching of the first "instrumental" notions of education—reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, history—special attention must be paid to a side which is ignored today—"rights and duties", i.e. the first notions of State and Society as basic elements of a new conception of the world which conflicts with ideas derived from different traditional social environments, ideas which belong to what may be termed folklore. The teaching problem to be solved is that of tempering and fertilising the dogmatic methods, which cannot be dispensed with in this age group. The remainder of the course should not last more than six years, so that at fifteen to sixteen years the child should have completed all the grades of the unitary school.
The objection may be made that such a course is too difficult, because too rapid, if one wants effectively to attain the results that the present day organisation of the classical school sets before itself but does not reach. But it can be said that the conditions under which the new organisation must function will include factors which will make the course in fact too slow for at least a part of the pupils. What are these factors? In a number of families, especially those of the intellectual strata, the children get some training at home, an extension and integration of school life; they absorb, so to speak, from the "atmosphere" a whole number of notions and attitudes which make their school career proper a good deal easier. They already possess and may develop further an awareness of literary language, i.e. a means of expression and awareness technically superior to the means possessed by the average child between the ages of six and twelve. Thus town pupils simply through living in towns have already absorbed, even before they are six, a number of ideas and attitudes which make their school career easier, quicker, more useful. The internal life of the unitary school must offer the basis at least for these factors to take effect, in addition to the fact that presumably a whole network of nursery schools and other institutions will be developed parallel to the unitary school where, even before school age, the young children will acquire pre-schooling notions and attitudes. In fact the unitary school should be organised like a college with a twenty-four hour collective life, free from present-day forms of hypocritical and mechanical discipline. Studies should be conducted collectively with help from the masters and best pupils, even in the hours of so-called private study, etc.
The basic problem arises in that phase which in the present day school career is represented by the liceo (fifteen to eighteen years). So far as the kind of teaching goes, this is today in no way different from the earlier school, apart from the abstract assumption of the pupil's greater intellectual and moral maturity, corresponding to his being older and more experienced.
In fact today from liceo to university, or from school proper to life, there is a jump, a real break in continuity, not a rational transition from quantity (age) to quality (intellectual and moral maturity). From almost purely dogmatic teaching, in which memory plays a large part, one moves on to the creative phase of independent work; from school with its imposed and authoritatively controlled study discipline one moves on to a phase of study or professional work where intellectual self-discipline and moral independence are theoretically unlimited. And this happens immediately after the crisis of puberty, when the flame of instinctive and elementary passions has not yet stopped struggling against the checks of a character and moral conscience still in formation.
It is just this final phase of the unitary school which must be conceived and organised as the decisive stage in which one is trying to create the fundamental values of "humanism", intellectual self-discipline and moral independence, preparatory to later specialisation either of a scholarly (university study) or immediate practical-productive character (industry, bureaucracy, trade organisation, etc.) The study and learning of creative methods in science and life must begin in this last stage at school and no longer be the monopoly of the universities or be left to chance in everyday life; this stage at school must already help to develop the elements of independent responsibility in individuals. It must be a creative school. But the distinction must be made between creative and active schools even in the form given by the Dalton method. The whole of the unitary school is an active school, though limits must be placed on anarchistic ideologies in this field and energy be devoted to vindicating the duties of adults, i.e. of the State, to make the new generations "conform". The active school is still in its romantic stage, where the arguments used to attack mechanical and Jesuitical kinds of education are being extended fanatically for purposes of opposition and polemic. It must now enter its "classical", rational phase. It must seek in the ends to be achieved the natural source for developing its forms and methods.
The creative school is the consummation of the active school. In its first stage it tends towards discipline, and hence towards levelling, so as to obtain some kind of "conformity" which could be called "dynamic"; in its creative stage, on the basis of the "collectivisation" of the social type, it seeks to expand the personality which has become independent and responsible but with a solid social and homogeneous moral conscience. Thus, the creative school does not mean a school of "inventors and discoverers"; it means a stage and method of research and knowledge, not a predetermined programme with the obligation of originality and innovation at all costs. It means that learning takes place mainly through a spontaneous and independent effort by the student, in which the teacher only acts as a friendly guide, as happens or ought to happen in the universities. Discovery of a truth by oneself without suggestion or outside help is creation, even though the truth is an old one. It shows mastery of the method; it indicates that one has entered a phase of intellectual maturity where it is possible to discover new truths. Therefore in this phase the basic scholastic activities will take place in seminars, libraries, laboratories. The necessary information will be gathered for orientation in a profession.
The advent of the unitary school marks the beginning of new relations between intellectual and industrial work, not only in school but in the whole of social life. The unitary principle will therefore be reflected in all organs of culture, transforming them and giving them a new content.
Notes
- Not included in this selection.—Trans.↩