Communia

Historically, working class movements understood education and training as a human need to be satisfied. The primary perspective of the bourgeoisie was and is, however, quite different. This can be clearly seen in Germany and Spain, two countries where the first two great bourgeois revolutionary waves (1789-1814 and 1848) failed. Both states instituted state control over education and public education way before the arrival of the bourgeoisie to political power: 1794 in Germany and 1857 in Spain, with the Moyano law, the pillar of the push of the liberal bourgeoisie together with the large estate and land privatizations. Both initiatives would be left without funds. In the case of Spain, the school was handed over to the municipalities -with no funding because of the land confiscations- which meant that in practice it remained in the hands of the Church. Thus, the education reaching the children of the working class and the peasants went little beyond the church's catechism until much later.

In fact, the inability to organize a state educational system reflected the weakness of the national bourgeoisie in the state. And the important word here is: national. It is no coincidence that the two events setting in motion the many and endless processes of educational reform in both countries were military defeats. In Germany, the defeat of Prussia at the Battle of Jena in 1806, and in Spain the 1898 war in Cuba. The Spanish and German bourgeoisies understood that the apathy of the workers and peasants in the face of the war, the massive desertions and their reluctance against patriotic discourses, were due to an insufficient nationalization and therefore to the deficiencies of an educational system which taught Sacred History instead of National History.

The school as the cradle of the nation

"Germania on the Watch on the River Rhine", Lorenz Classen, 1860.

culture

For this purpose the educational system had to complete the triad of bourgeois revolutionary values:

surplus value|sell their labor force

Training them from the very beginning in the legal equality between the nobility and the third estate that presented itself as the horizon of legal reform of a state that was striving to become national by unifying the set of German-speaking regions.

religion|bourgeois political religion

capital

As for the State's doubt about whether it can cover the costs of a national education, it could be convinced that this expenditure will cover most of the rest in the most economical way, and that, if it only commits itself to it, it will soon have no other large expenditure to make! Until now, most of the state's income has been spent on the maintenance of the standing armies. We have seen the result of that spending; that is enough; it is out of our plan to delve into the special reasons for that result, which lie in the organization of those armies. On the other hand, the State that would universally introduce the national education proposed by us, from the moment a new generation of young people would have experienced it, would not need any special army, but would have an army as it hitherto has not seen in any other era.

Every person would be fully exercised in all possible uses of their physical powers and would understand them immediately, becoming accustomed to bear all conflicts and difficulties; their mind, developed in direct perception, is always alert and in possession of itself; in their heart lives the love of the community of which they are a part, of the State and of their land, and this love destroys any other selfish impulse.

The State can summon and arm them whenever it wishes, and can be sure that no enemy will defeat them.

But the school would not only give the Prussian bureaucratic-military apparatus a national army, in doing so it would create the necessary pieces for the development of the great capitalist social automaton, turning, in the words of Fichte himself all social life into a great and ingenious clockwork pressure machine, in which each part will be continually driven by the whole to serve the whole. A machine made according to...

...a spring whose life comes from itself, and which has perpetual movement;...which will regulate and, continually keep social life in motion.

capital

The school and the spirit of the nation

1848 German Revolution

The educational system was the cradle of the nation and the parts factory for the automaton, above all because really existing capital at the time did not yet have the strength to shape the national sentiment and capitalist mercantile values in the great masses of the population. It was therefore necessary to give up scolding the adults who have already been spoiled by neglect in order to focus on educating the youth, who are still intact.

Only children could understand the new freedom and the market as something natural. Education should replace feudal obedience, based on fear of punishment and craving for reward, with the internalization of the state as the materialization of the common good and the vocation of sacrifice for the national interest. The child had to reach this understanding by himself, freely. A new obedience of a much more abstract and generic character.

empiricism|empiricists

In 1813, the Prussian army became the national army, moving from levies to compulsory conscription. A state version of the fichtean plan, with a different syllabus for each of the major social classes, became obligatory in practically all of Germany in 1825. Through bureaucratic hurdles and barriers, tutored by the nobility of the Old Regime, the German nation was taking shape within the state school and the barracks. It would emerge as a political reality in 1848, the spring of the peoples, but that is yet another story.

permanent revolution

"Popular education at the hands of the state" is absolutely unacceptable! It is one thing to establish, by means of a general law, the resources of the public schools, the ability conditions of the teaching staff, the subjects taught, etc, and, as is done in the United States, to ensure compliance with these legal prescriptions by means of state inspectors, whereas it is quite another thing to appoint the state as the educator of the people! Especially in the Prussian-German empire (and there is no point in getting away with the clumsy subterfuge of talking about a "future state"; we have already seen what this means), where it is, on the contrary, the state which needs to receive a very severe education from the people.

The lancasterian system

Shrewsbury, the first Lancasterian school for a thousand poor children.

Further school organization systems and pedagogical techniques followed one another based on Fichte with similar objectives. In practice, the problem of establishing a general national indoctrination was its cost, so many of the techniques and school systems designed for the working class - and the colonial peasants - focused on reducing costs.

One of the most widespread systems was the _Monitorial System_ created by the English Andrew Bell and John Lancaster. At the death of the latter, in 1838, it was used by between 1,200 and 1,500 schools in Anglo-Saxon countries, to which Catholic schools in the Philippine missions and the poor relief of Italy, Spain or Portugal had to be added. Considering that the system was designed for groups of up to 1,000 students, we can understand why it set an era.

The mechanicist vision of society is expressed with stunning clarity in the system. In the classroom, there was only one teacher. The slightly more advanced students acted as instructors, taking care of the different subgroups of students. Others simply watched over or handed out tasks and punishments. These excluded physical punishment, but were integrated into an elaborate set of honors and dishonors, rewards and fines, in a competitive system. Once a certain level was reached, students could exchange their points for gifts such as balls, marbles, spinning tops, combs, mittens, and other desirable - and usually unattainable - objects by a working class or peasant child of the time. Each point was valued at one eighth of a cent.

The defenders of the system emphasized that Lancasterian schools were perfect machines with an air of military order. The school was a miniature version of the social automaton fantasized by the bourgeoisie. In the manner of the market, the very anguish driven by the competition between pupils and the permanent requirement of new tasks and things to be memorized, made the children virtuous simply because they had no time to think for themselves or to consider doing other things.

The great moral advantage of this system is that it puts and keeps children in a condition in which there is little opportunity to do wrong. Their attention is constantly focused; they are never idle; they never deviate from a regular process, so a habit is formed of doing each thing at its proper time and place.

accumulation

Other people were happy with the system because of its cheapness, and were struck by the mechanical order and precision in the school exercises. The children went through their evolutions, according to a signal given by a child, as the different parts of the machinery of a factory are started by a crank. ‎...‎

To avoid expenses, classes in national and Lancasterian schools are taught by the children themselves, the teacher being more a governor than a teacher. This part of the system is admirably adapted to serve its purpose; but it has essential defects that make it unsuitable for general adoption. As the process of mechanical instruction is carried out by the boys, it becomes necessary to set out the duties of the teacher as thoroughly as those of the apprentice. In fact, the duties of every one must be made perfectly mechanical. There must be no doubt or hesitation on the part of either the teacher or the pupil, since doubt would produce delays and disputes and, consequently, disorder the whole machine. Therefore, one cannot appeal to the capacity of reasoning, because reasoning can never be reduced to a mechanism. From the need that exists for all boys to move exactly together, both individual order and individual inertia must be discouraged. Each boy must conform to the average movement of the school. In short, the system has all the virtues and all the defects of military discipline. It produces habits of attention, order and subordination, qualities very valuable to the class of society whose interests it has in mind.

The decentralized school system in the USA

During the 1830s, the United States underwent rapid changes in industry and social life. At that time there was not yet a proper educational system. Private tutors and lady's schools catered to the children of Southern landowners, high schools taught those aspiring to become civil servants or ministers, private schools taught the children of merchants and only charity schools were left for the poor. Teachers, needless to say, did not think of teaching as a career, but as a temporary job specially fit to preachers and priests, or even as a complement to the income of farmers in times of little work.

The fichtean idea will be imposed by Horace Mann and Calvin Stowe. Their goal was to establish a professional school system with a stable teaching staff, a standardized curriculum, the abolition of bodily punishment, tax-paid education and non-sectarian Christian education.

nationalism

But the U.S. was not an old regime with a bureaucratic state and a weak but growing bourgeoisie. The U.S. was a bourgeois country, in which the various factions of the ruling bourgeoisie still exercised political power through the states, with a federal government that would remain relatively weak until the Civil War. That is why the modernization and centralization of the system had to be carried out state by state and not, as befits the centralizing instincts of the bourgeoisie, through the central state. Even today, the tenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution states that decisions on education are the exclusive preserve of individual states.

The internationalists and the education system

Workers' schools in Mieres, originally created by the miners themselves in the People's House, now a state public school.

rising capitalism

But if the aim was to subtract the school from all influence of the state, the churches or the companies... Then who was going to organize schools for the children of the workers? The workers' movement itself, the organized working class. In fact the working class tried to do so over and over again, even among the most confused branches of the movement.

nationalism|nationalist

The end of the workers' school

Spanish manual of "Education for Citizenship-building"

proletariat

progress|falsely

For the bourgeoisie education is a question of state, its main goal is to manufacture citizens and train -according to their social position- children and youth in skills useful for production. For the workers, on the other hand, it is not a national problem. It is a question of necessity. The need to acquire the tools to resist a runaway steamroller that disqualifies us and destroys us immediately, and for the same reasons to also acquire them for our own emancipation.