Education and State Power

Education, Part 5c

Meeting of Doctors in the Medieval University of Paris

Education and State Power

From the time of the origins of the modern Universities about nine hundred years ago in Medieval Europe, a Doctor has been a person who has a licence to teach. At the beginning, the universal (Catholic) Church awarded the doctorates. Later, the universities became more autonomous, but at the same time more clearly part of the State, integrated with its bureaucracy, and inseparable from it in class terms. Napoleonic France codified the matter in 1808 by instituting the doctorat d'État (Doctorate of the State) as a monopoly.

Today, in South Africa, there is state control over education, and the Minister of Higher Education and Training is a communist, Doctor Blade Nzimande, who is also the General Secretary of the SACP.

The Communist University, however, is outside of this fold, unrecognised, and unsupported. It is a “school for life” in the sense of that term used by N F S Grundtvig and the Danish folk-high-schools. The CU requires no entry qualification, and it awards no certificates or degrees. It has no recognised Doctors. Yet it is certainly an institution of higher learning, where Marxism, the modern humanism, can be learned.

If the Communist University was to ask for contributions from its students, it would at once be suppressed as “bogus”. Likewise, if it tried to issue certificates, it would be crushed.

The dual, conflicted, condition of universities, including but not limited to the ones in South Africa, has been part of their nature from their beginning. What are they for? Who do they belong to? Who do they serve? This conflict is not over, and it will not be over until the free development of each has truly become the condition for the free development of all; until the university has been universalised; and until the class struggle has been left behind. Until communism arrives, and for as long as they have to exist in class-divided society, universities will remain internally conflicted, showing two faces to the world: the face of control, and the face of freedom. The face of enlightenment, and the face of restriction.

The attached essay, “Education and State Power”, by the late Doctor F.T. Mikhailov (1930-2006), divided into two documents for printing as booklets, was sent to the Communist University as a contribution to our course on Education.

N F S Grundtvig associated sterility with Latin studies, and advocated “Schools for Life” as an antidote. Freire denounced what he called “necrophilia” – love of death – in education, and promoted to its contrary a liberating, dialogical “pedagogy of the oppressed”. Mikhailov argues that in the old Russia of the Tsarist autocracy, bureaucratic control over the universities was dominant. There was a brief period following the Great October Revolution when, as we might say (although he does not use these words) “a hundred flowers bloomed”. But after that, and from the late 1930s, bureaucracy ruled again, he says; and this was the time when he was growing up and becoming a senior academic in the Soviet Union, in the discipline of psychology, where he played a role in the revival of studies of the work of Lev Vygotsky.

Mikhailov reports that after the enthusiasm of Perestroika, and after the subsequent “fall” of the Soviet Union, the bureaucracy re-asserted itself in exactly the same way, remaining dominant until the time of his writing (2006). We can safely assume that little has changed since then in this regard.

Mikhailov nevertheless reports (e.g. on pages 5 to 7 in the attached scheme of printing) that there were many centres of enquiring, true scholarship at all times in the life of the Soviet Union, running within, as well as in parallel with, the “system”.

On the other hand, and substantiating his point about the bureaucracy surviving from the Tsarist period, Mikhailov writes (p.13, under “How the past overflows into the present”):

“The most amusing thing is that in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century and very beginning of the twentieth century the clash between civil initiatives (and, consequently, of the corresponding forms civil society) and “state interests” took absolutely the same forms. The first citizens of Russia were fully aware of this. For purposes of illustration I shall cite models of the educational journalism of that time.”

And Mikhailov proceeds with some long quotations about that period. But what does he mean by “civil initiatives”? Later, under “So who governs our education today?” on page 3 of the second booklet, Mikhailov says the following:

“There is one simple and indisputable criterion of the real role that the community of scientists plays in the people’s life under the dominion of officialdom in a non‐civic state. This criterion is the place of scientific people in the structure of the all‐governing bureaucratic apparatus. If a place is most graciously established there for the community of scientists, then there can be no question of any innovatory self‐government in the sphere of education!”

It would be difficult for any free-thinking humanist not to sympathise with Dr Mikhailov’s essay, but what does he mean by a “non-civic state”, or a “civic” one for that matter?

Yes, there is a persistent and stifling blanket of bureaucracy in Russia, that did reassert itself within the Soviet Union, and which was not done away with by the “savage capitalism” of the 1990s in Russia. Far from disappearing, this bureaucracy remains entrenched up to this day, and particularly in education.

In South Africa, the academy remains quite uniformly conservative, even under a Communist minister. There is little or no room there for revolutionary ideas.

Mikhailov does not define his terms “civil initiatives”, or “civic state”, but he leaves us to imagine these things as constitutive of some kind of utopia, not very different from the South African conception of the “National Democratic Society”. The concept is absent any class content, and consequently, it lacks forward mobility. Thus, in the end, Mihhailov poses the anti-humanist trend of universities as a self-initiating curse, like a disease. Whereas the state does in fact serve somebody. It serves the ruling class. The ruling class in South Africa is a capitalist class.

But, universities can be places of learning, just as much as some ministers can be communists, even in these circumstances of capitalist class rule. Whether they are so, or not, can only be seen at the historical level, i.e. in practice.

Why was the Soviet Union unable to overcome bureaucracy? Mikhailov blames Stalin, and/or what he called “the retinue that manipulated the king”. This is a circular argument.

Perhaps it was having to do with the relations of production? In the Soviet Union, a job was still a job. Wages and salaries were paid as compensation for the labour power made available. The state was a capitalist. It expropriated surplus value. The dictatorship of the proletariat was not sufficient to destroy bourgeois relations of production, including the relations of production in education. The urgent, onward movement towards the withering away of the state, envisaged as a primary concern by Lenin in “The State and Revolution”, was blocked. With nowhere to go, the revolution had to mark time. This was the circumstance that made bureaucracy inevitable, and not the personality of Stalin.

If, instead of Stalin, Trotsky or Bukharin had become the first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the same problem was going to be there, and the result was going to be in essence, the same: bureaucracy. In the written record, it is only Lenin who appears to have articulated this problem (see “The State and Revolution”, 1917, Chapter 5), but Lenin was already incapacitated by the early 1920s, long before he died, nearly 90 years ago, on January 21st, 1924.

Mikhailov too, fails to see the route of escape from bureaucracy. A “civic state”, lacking forward movement, would be as much of a haven for bureaucracy as the Soviet Union was, or even more so. This holds true in the realm of theory, and of education, as well.

The Communist University, free as it is of any financial or intellectual obligations, can be a model of new relations of production. The Communist University is not an amorphous “crowdsource”, however. It is not eclectic. The Communist University is partisan, edited and monitored. The Communist University is committed and is not class-neutral. It is not “civil society”, and it is not an NGO. The Communist University is an artefact. It is both the consequence and the occasion of collaboration between teachers and learners. But is not neutral in the class struggle, like the late Mikhailov appears to have been. Because of what it is, and because of what it is not, the Communist University is able to hold out the prospect of forward movement towards communism, which is the classless and therefore the stateless society.

• The above is to introduce the original reading-texts: Education and State Power, Mikhailov, 2006, Part 1 and Part 2.

Educate to Liberate

Education, Part 5b

Educate to Liberate

“Essential service” is a technical term in labour relations and in the SA Constitution, whereby a designated type of worker can be forbidden by law from striking. When, in early 2013, the Secretary-General of the ANC proposed that education be made an “essential service”, this was immediately, loudly and very successfully opposed by the teachers’ union, SADTU.

The matter ended with the unequivocal statement by the President of the ANC and the Republic, Jacob Zuma, as part of the 2013 State of the Nation Address, that teaching would not be made an “essential service” in this sense, and that teachers would continue to have the same rights as other workers, including the right to strike.

The communist party, the SACP, had used the occasion to issue a press release that said that debating the loaded phrase “essential service” was a waste of time for all, but that there is a necessary debate to be had about the nature and purpose of education. The SACP statement says:

“The SACP is further of the view that we should not just provide an education that produces readily made goods for absorption by the labour market but that our education, an education that must be essential, must be underpinned by the vision of People’s Education for People’s Power! This vision requires that our schooling and post schooling education systems do not just produce skilled individuals but individuals who are able to interpret and make sense of their political, ideological and socio‐economic conditions and thus be actors to radically alter those conditions.”

One month earlier, the well-respected educationalist Michael Rice, in an article prominently published by the Johannesburg newspaper, The Star, used the occasion of the announcement of the Matric examination results to argue:

“Our obsession with exam results has devalued education to little more than a means of obtaining a certificate to gain entrance to some sort of professional training or a job. The cultivation of values, critical thought, cultural sensitivity and the wide spectrum of opportunities for personal, intellectual and moral development have become irrelevant in the pursuit of marks.”

“What is needed is a complete revisioning of education; what it is, what it is meant for, who it is meant to serve and how, and how to assess its worth. The abolition of the present public exam system would go a long way to making such a paradigm shift possible.”

Later on, Dr Rice says:

“Sticking with the present system is not an option.”

These two documents, the SACP press release and Dr Rice’s article from the Star, are reproduced in full in the attached file. Like the preceding item (the article by Prof Jeff Guy) these documents stand as evidence that that leading forces in society recognise that the very nature of education is currently at issue.

In the same State of the Nation Address of 14 February, 2013, President Zuma also said:

“We welcome the improvement each year in the ANA results, but more must be done to improve maths, science and technology.

“The Department of Basic Education will establish a national task team to strengthen the implementation of the Mathematics, Science and Technology Strategy.”

Dr Rice points out:

“Our present system was created to meets the needs of the first industrial revolution in the 19th century. It is demonstrably failing to meet the needs of the 21st century... Mass public education was first introduced in Prussia and later the rest of Europe to meet the needs of industrial competitiveness.”

In fact, mass public education has historically been a bourgeois, capitalist policy, designed to cheapen the cost, and therefore the market price, of commodity labour power. As much as you may think that you are getting educated for higher wages, in the scheme of the bourgeois, the intention is to lower your wages.

Whenever the mass education system tends towards what N F S Grundtvig called “education for life”, the collective bourgeoisie becomes restless and begins to agitate.

The bourgeois agitation for science is not for true science, which is a humanity, and is inseparable from philosophy. Their agitation for technology is narrow. Their agitation for mathematics is for “mathematics literacy” (“Maths Lit.”), which is intended to remove all intellectual content and leave only the barest and most impoverished kind of utility.

These measures are a reversion to something akin to the “Bantu Education” of old.

Above all, the South African bourgeoisie wants history taken out of schools, and politics taken out of the heads and out of the mouths of school teachers. Our purpose in this course is to frustrate that bourgeoisie, to restore history, to revive People’s Education for People’s Power, and bring back Education for Liberation from the Philistine, anti-human bourgeoisie.

• The above is to introduce the original reading-text: Educate to Liberate – SACP; Abolish Matric - Dr Michael Rice; 2013.

South African Education Crisis

Education, Part 5a

South African Education Crisis

Writing for the SACP’s Umsebenzi Online, in August 2012, and seeing a deep crisis, the distinguished South African History Professor, Jeff Guy, began as follows:

“We are confronted by it daily: the failure of education at every level: attempts to remove the stifling legacy of our educational past brought to nothing by inflexible pedagogies, inadequate teaching, stifling bureaucracy, and inefficient administration all contributing to the waste of the funds and material upon which young peoples' futures depend. In the press, at conferences and workshops, this contemporary crisis is in the public view. Open comment and criticism of this kind are essential attributes of the democratic approach, and will lead, one has to hope, in the direction of radical improvement. But in the past fortnight I have been confronted by another dimension of the crisis in education. While it might appear to be very different I believe it is one that also has its roots in our history, and is as difficult to solve.”

By writing in the Business Day, Professor Guy had suddenly become exposed to a furious, vindictive barrage of Philistine commentary, the nature of which he describes as: “ignorance of the great themes in modern history - that is, of the world that has made us and we have made.”

He goes on: “the reaction to my article has persuaded me that the crisis concerns not just the educationally disadvantaged, but the advantaged as well.”

Two things come to mind at once.

First is the confirmation that a general elevation of the educational level of the entire society needs to be contrived, whether in the manner of N F S Grundtvig and the Danish folk-high-schools, or in the manner of the committed intellectuals described by McLaren and Fischman, or in some other way, such as the political education programme envisaged in the “South African Road to Socialism” passed at the 13^th SACP Congress in Ongoye a month earlier than Guy’s article, in July 2012.

Second is the apparent fact that in the utilitarian rush to “improve maths, science and technology”, as President Zuma put it in his State of the Nation Address on 14 February 2013, history has been relegated in schools to the status of an optional subject, of no worth. President Zuma did not even mention history. This is what he said:

“We welcome the improvement each year in the ANA results, but more must be done to improve maths, science and technology.

“The Department of Basic Education will establish a national task team to strengthen the implementation of the Mathematics, Science and Technology Strategy.

“We urge the private sector to partner government through establishing, adopting or sponsoring maths and science academies or Saturday schools.”

So, far from repairing what Professor Guy described as “ignorance of the great themes in modern history - that is, of the world that has made us and we have made,” the actual prospect is of even deeper ignorance because of lack of incentive and because of the time being crowded out by the ostensibly market-sanctified trio of “maths, science and technology”.

• The above is to introduce the original reading-text: The Crisis in South African Education, Jeff Guy, Umsebenzi Online, 2012.

Organic Intellectuals

Education, Part 5

Peter McLaren and Gustavo Fischman

Organic Intellectuals

The attached item today, in this fifth partof our current course, has the long title: “Rethinking Critical Pedagogy and the Gramscian and Freirean Legacies: From Organic to Committed Intellectuals or Critical Pedagogy, Commitment, and Praxis”. It is by Gustavo Fischman and Peter McLaren, who are present-day exponents of Critical Pedagogy, or in other words the educational method of Paulo Friere.

The McLaren/Fischman article immediately starts to grapple with “the notion of teachers as transformative intellectuals”.

If you had a method of educating the masses, what else would you need in the way of revolution? Is there any difference between politics and political education? Or is it a trinity that is at the same time a unity, namely: Educate, Organise, Mobilise?

Paulo Freire concentrated his intellectual fire on the single most practical priority, which at the same time requires the deepest philosophical clarity: the education of the existing masses. He called it “The Pedagogy of the Oppressed”.

Fischman and McLaren make clear, by reference to Gramsci, that such a Pedagogy of the Oppressed is a direct form of class struggle. It is a direct confrontation with the interests of the bourgeois state. The Pedagogy of the Oppressed is an open contradiction of the bourgeois class dictatorship as applied through state-led education, as well as through the instructive function of the judiciary.

The authors note that Gramsci is often misappropriated (see also CU). They write:

“Because Gramsci identified civil society as an arena used by the ruling class to exert its hegemony over the society, the struggle for Gramsci was not to transform civil society but rather, as Holst points out, ‘to build proletarian hegemony’.”

That is to say: proletarian ascendancy, also known as the dictatorship of the proletariat. Fischman and McLaren are rejecting the view of “hegemony” as a “Third Way” that could by-pass revolutionary confrontation. Revolution cannot be by-passed, but is an unavoidable necessity.

After discussing Gramsci’s organic intellectuals they quote Gramsci as follows:

“Critical self-consciousness means, historically and politically, the construction of an elite of intellectuals. A human mass does not ‘distinguish’ itself, does not become independent in its own right without, in the widest sense, organizing itself; and there is no organization without intellectuals, that is without organizers and leaders, in other words, without the theoretical aspect of the theory-practice nexus being distinguished concretely by the existence of a group of ‘specialized’ in conceptual and philosophical elaboration of ideas.”

Fischman and McLaren go on to argue for the “committed intellectual”, with “an unwavering commitment to the struggle against injustice”.

These words aptly describe the revolutionary teachers necessary to a revolutionary society.

• The above is to introduce the original reading-text: Organic Intellectuals, 2005, McLaren and Fischman.

We must not voodoo the people

Education, Part 4c

Frantz Fanon, 1925 - 1961

We must not voodoo the people

In the well-known chapter from “The Wretched of the Earth” called “Pitfalls of National Consciousness”, Frantz Fanon says things like:

“In its beginnings, the national bourgeoisie of the colonial countries identifies itself with the decadence of the bourgeoisie of the West. We need not think that it is jumping ahead; it is in fact beginning at the end. It is already senile before it has come to know the petulance, the fearlessness or the will to succeed of youth.”

After such denunciations, it is quite easy to overlook the more positive, last third of this essay, in which Fanon the freedom fighter and psychologist seeks to prescribe what the newly-independent ex-colonial country, which he refers to as the under-developed country, should do; and this mostly has to do with education.

For example:

“Everything can be explained to the people, on the single condition that you really want them to understand.”

“Now, political education means opening their minds, awakening them, and allowing the birth of their intelligence; as Cesaire said, it is 'to invent souls'. To educate the masses politically does not mean, cannot mean making a political speech. What it means is to try, relentlessly and passionately, to teach the masses that everything depends on them; that if we stagnate it is their responsibility, and that if we go forward it is due to them too, that there is no such thing as a demiurge, that there is no famous man who will take the responsibility for everything, but that the demiurge is the people themselves and the magic hands are finally only the hands of the people.”

“The collective struggle presupposes collective responsibility at the base and collegiate responsibility at the top. Yes; everybody will have to be compromised in the fight for the common good. No one has clean hands; there are no innocents and no onlookers. We all have dirty hands; we are all soiling them in the swamps of our country and in the terrifying emptiness of our brains. Every onlooker is either a coward or a traitor.”

“The duty of those at the head of the movement is to have the masses behind them. Allegiance presupposes awareness and understanding of the mission which has to be fulfilled; in short, an intellectual position, however embryonic. We must not voodoo the people, nor dissolve them in emotion and confusion.”

“To educate the masses politically is to make the totality of the nation a reality to each citizen. It is to make the history of the nation part of the personal experience of each of its citizens.”

• The above is to introduce the original reading-text: Frantz Fanon, Pitfalls of National Consciousness, 1963, Part 3.

Here are some words from the Conclusion to Fanon’s “The Wretched of the Earth”:

“Let us try to create the whole man, whom Europe has been incapable of bringing to triumphant birth.

“All the elements of a solution to the great problems of humanity have, at different times, existed in European thought. But Europeans have not carried out in practice the mission which fell to them, which consisted of bringing their whole weight to bear violently upon these elements, of modifying their arrangement and their nature, of changing them and, finally, of bringing the problem of mankind to an infinitely higher plane.

“Today, we are present at the stasis of Europe.

“Two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe. It succeeded so well that the United States of America became a monster, in which the taints, the sickness and the inhumanity of Europe have grown to appalling dimensions.

“Comrades, have we not other work to do than to create a third Europe?”

  

Universalization of the University

Education, Part 4b

Cuba: A Nation Becoming a University

Universalization of the University

The central idea within the German Karl Marx’s “Capital”, and within the Brazilian Paulo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”, is the full restoration of the human Subject as an individual, within human society, making humanity out of a material world.

This dialectic of the individual and the collective was well expressed by Marx and his friend Frederick Engels when they wrote, in the Communist Manifesto of 1848:

“In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”

The SACP’s constitutional stricture is to “Educate, Organise and Mobilise”. Education is the means by which organising and mobilising are done. Education is more than a preparation for politics. Education is the method of politics and the substance of politics, which, when considered broadly, excludes all other substances. Education is the essence of humanism.

We have looked at N F S Grundtvig’s vanguard role in relation to the Danish Folk-High-Schools, institutions which played a major part in the reconstruction of that country as a modern nation, even though bourgeois, and even though still having a king or a queen.

In the present time another and more advanced illustration of the idea of education as the substance of political practice is Cuba, a country that has become one big university, and a “society of knowledge”.

Please see the article (download linked below) by the US philosopher Cliff DuRand for an exposition of this concept, including what is called the “Universalization of the University”.

“Raising the cultural and educational level of the entire [Cuban] population has become a central focus,” writes DuRand.

This is what South Africa needs to do, for all the reasons mentioned by DuRand, and for additional reasons having to do with our own history.

As is the case with China, in relation to town planning, for example, where the Chinese are the leaders in the world today, Cuban literature on educational theory is hard, or practically impossible, to find in English translation on the Internet.

Cliff DuRand has done a good job with this article in terms of problematising education in the Cuban context, and showing how education can be seen as the answer to nation-building problems even in what appear to be unfavourable circumstances, such as youth unemployment, and what he calls “class closure”.

In the next item, concluding this part, we will have Frantz Fanon’s (Martinique, Algeria) views about development and education, with reference to countries Africa that had newly become independent at the time of his writing..

As a taster, here is one sentence from Fanon that fits well with DuRand’s article:

“If nationalism is not made explicit, if it is not enriched and deepened by a very rapid transformation into a consciousness of social and political needs, in other words into humanism, it leads up a blind alley.”

• The above is to introduce the original reading-texts: Cuba - A Nation Becoming a University, DuRand, MRZine.

Grundtvig: Message, Achievement and Comparisons

Education, Part 4a

N F S Grundtvig, 1783–1872

Grundtvig: Message, Achievement and Comparisons

N F S Grundtvig built a nation, peacefully, through education.

This is a large but reasonable claim.

Not that Grundtvig built any folk high schools. But he was the “vanguard” of the folk-high-school movement and of the corresponding mass democratic movement that made Denmark the nation that it is.

Grundtvig’s message, in the excerpts that we are using, is made up of a few simple juxtapositions. The Dead and the Living. The Latin and the Danish. Development and Enlightenment versus their opposites. This is a dialectical method and therefore, a developmental method, where “development” is taken in the Hegelian sense.

German war on Denmark

In South Africa, we speak of People’s Education for People’s Power. We speak of Education for Liberation. This is in the context of our liberation struggle against apartheid and “colonialism of a special type”. Denmark also had a political context of national liberation.

Denmark is adjacent to the much more powerful state of Germany, which made war on Denmark in 1864, and seized the Danish Province of Schleswig-Holstein. This event caused a sense of great urgency in the mass education movement in Denmark. Education had become a matter of survival. Revival of old national symbols would not be enough to sustain national cohesion.

What these Danes successfully negotiated in the 19^th Century is in many ways analogous to what is happening now in South Africa, and in other countries, and the theories of Grundtvig are comparable to those of other liberation educationalists (and by the way, just to mention: liberation theologists, as well).

Freire and Tagore Compared to Grundtvig

A world-wide sense of crisis in education has stimulated continuing interest in the general provision of educational service to the existing populations as a whole.

In Cuba, there is talk of “The nation becoming a university”, and we will look at that in our next item.

Our own South African “Communist University” is another such attempt.

We continue to look for other examples, and other strands of discourse to learn from.

One of these is the Grundtvigian scholarship that continues to be centred on Denmark, but with correspondents around the world. The Danish language in which much of this special dialogue has taken place over the last two centuries remains a barrier. Grundtvig’s own extensive writings, speeches and sermons are hardly published in English at all. We are lucky to have access the one-volume collection called “The School for Life”, plus some copies of learned specialist magazines that have some articles in English.

Some of these compare Grundtvig’s approach in popular education to that of Paulo Freire, author of “The Pedagogy of the Oppressed”, and to that of Rabindranath Tagore, the famous exponent and moderniser of Bengali culture, who was also a contemporary, friend and collaborator of M K Gandhi’s.

These comparisons are helpful. The three are complementary. Comparison illuminates by contrast the peculiar positive characteristics of each of them (this was also Grundtvig’s view).

What they all had in common was that they gave tactical substance to the strategic impetus towards general education of their respective populations as a whole.

Freire

The Brazilian, Paulo Freire, who was strongly associated with the mid-to-late 20^th-century “Liberation
Theology” movement centred on South America, with both Protestant and Catholic strands, confronted a similar problematic to the one that faced Grundtvig.

This was a peasant or “campesino” population, left behind, in a situation where an older order was crumbling.

The Communist University has relied upon the teachings of Paulo Freire from its beginning, and we have dealt, separately and in more depth during this course, with Freire’s particular contribution.

Here, we can remark that Freire’s dialogical principle of education corresponds almost exactly to the Grundtvigian statement provided at the top of the introduction to the previous item (noting of course that the statement comes from Wikipedia, and not from Grundtvig’s own pen).

What is different is Freire’s reference to the political oppression of the learners. Freire says that education cannot properly happen without constant, consistent recognition of the oppressive circumstances surrounding the educational initiative and process. We take that from Freire.

Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore was the one out of these three who, as a relatively wealthy man, started and funded a school from his own pocket – Patha Bhavana at Santiniketan. Whether its principles were similar to those of Grundtvig and Freire is hard to tell. Patha Bhavana does seem to have owed a lot to Tagore’s rather idiosyncratic and spontaneous inspirations, varying from time to time.

What Tagore seems to have done in general in his life is to bring his own exquisite and highly-developed Brahmin culture to the masses of Bengal.

Particularly in terms of the songs that he wrote, and which became enormously and lastingly popular, Tagore is credited with creating a modern (Bengali) nation through education and culture.

This is really what Tagore has in common with Grundtvig and with Freire, and what is most useful for our CU course on education. Because we are seeking by any and every means possible, to expand the common and general culture of the South African population.

Summary, on formality and informality

In South Africa we find a relentless and apparently insurmountable urge to destroy the informal and to replace it with the formal. This is not only in education, but it is especially strong in the field of education. It is something shared between the old and the new regimes of South Africa, pre-and post-1994.

For communists, who seek a society without class, and therefore without a state, the rush towards the formal and away from self-management is dismaying. But in practice the informal, the general, is the stuff of daily life and cannot in that sense be suppressed. Nor is formal education going to be suppressed. What N F S Grundtvig showed was that the formal and the informal could co-exist, and that it was necessary for them to do so. This was the foundation of the Danish nation.

The Communist University has never been sponsored, but it has always been supported by learners. It is informal in the way of the Danish folk-high-schools.

The struggle continues.

• The above is to introduce the original reading-text: The School for Life, 1838, N F S Grundtvig, Excerpt #2.

School for Life

Education, Part 4

N F S Grundtvig, 1783–1872

School for Life

“A folk high school becomes what it is because of the individuals of which it is made. Learning happens across social positions and differences – the teacher learns from the student and vice versa in a living exchange and mutual teaching. For Grundtvig dialogue across differences was essential – the ideal was that people must learn to bear with the differences of each other before enlightenment can be realized.”

(Wikipedia entry on Folk High School)

N F S Grundtvig was the pioneer of the idea of the “Folk High School”, the first of which was established by some of his followers, in Denmark, in 1844.

The Danish Folk High Schools continue to flourish up to today and are now more numerous than ever.

As we would expect, Denmark’s history is both different and similar to that of other countries.

In step with other Western European continental countries, Denmark passed through two major transitions: abolition of serfs, co-incident with the French revolution in the late 18^th Century; and institution of bourgeois democracy, co-incident with the widespread revolutions of 1848.

Insofar as these were unilateral reversals of previous power and property relations, they were violent. But Danes are apt to say that they never had any revolutions; by which they mean that the bloodshed and carnage that accompanied revolutionary change elsewhere, was absent in the case of Denmark.

Denmark moved, in the 19^th Century, from being an extremely divided population of which the larger part was rural, uneducated, poor and insecure, to being a modern and much more homogenous society of near-universal literacy.

Denmark became a nation, in the sense of the word “nation” that we in South Africa use when we speak of nation-building, which is to say both democratic, and educated. Or, we might more pointedly say: educated, and thereby democratic.

For the purposes of this CU course on Education, the most remarkable, typical characteristic of the Folk High School is that there is no prior educational requirement for entry to the school, and no “qualifications” are issued by the school. This is also how the Communist University works: no entry barrier, and no certificate on exit.

The Danish Folk High Schools did not, and still do not, replace formal education, and did not compete with it or diminish formal education in any way. Quite to the contrary, the informal Folk High Schools complement the formal academic establishment in an entirely benevolent and beneficial manner. This complementarily was part of Grundtvig’s intention when he wrote of the “School for Life”.

What the Folk High Schools did in total was to provide a way in which the level of education among the entire population could be raised in the present time. The formal education system alone could not do this.

Formal education is by nature compartmentalised. Each topic stands apart from all of the others. Formal education as such is predominately confined mainly the early years of life. The vast provision of resources to formal education must of necessity be concentrated in this way.

This being the case, and in the absence of any other process, it becomes a matter of wishful thinking, or else of resignation to a process lasting many generations, to speak of a general raising of the educational level, if no other thing is done.

In South Africa, the formal education system is fully developed and all children are enrolled for entry to school. The system does produce engineers, doctors and other professionals, sufficient for the country’s needs. But the drop-out rate is enormous, and even of those who complete schooling, a large proportion remain functionally illiterate and innumerate.

In short, the formal educations system is failing to raise the general level of education in the country. This has been the case for generations past, and although there change for the better in the system, yet those who have been and are still being abandoned are many.

Common expressions of desire for “life-long learning” in South Africa are not matched by corresponding practical provisions, most of the time. Employers are often reluctant to provide

The strong faith in formal education that exists in bureaucratic and in political circles in South Africa, has up to now driven down all attempts to establish informal and general educational initiatives, whether on the lines of the Danish Folk High Schools, or any other.

• The above is to introduce the original reading-text: The School for Life, 1838, N F S Grundtvig, Excerpt #1.

Hegel, ‘The inventor of historical relativism’

Education, Part 3c

Hegel and students

Hegel, ‘The inventor of historical relativism’

Concept of racism impossible without Hegel

It is time to start preparing for where we are going with this course on “Education”. So in preparation for the third part of our course I consulted Andy Blunden, philosopher, educationalist, secretary of the Marxists Internet Archive, world authority on Hegel, and good friend of South Africa. Here is an edited version of our correspondence. I am “VC”; Comrade Andy is “AB”.

VC

For the third week [of the CU “Education” course], I am going to split Cole's "Cross-cultural and historical perspectives &c" into three, and then for the fourth item in that week I want to use your "The Young Hegel and what drove him".

I think that the two initial weeks will serve to describe, as well as to distinguish, "education" in the pre-historic and in the historic, and finally hint at the location of Hegel as the necessary philosopher of human development, which strand can then be picked up later on.

What I would ask from you if at all possible is that you help me to find the source of the allegation of Hegel’s alleged racism, which you refer to in the following paragraph in "The Young Hegel and what drove him":

"His misogyny and racism, which led him to exclude women and the peoples of uncivilized nations from being creators of culture, derived from his blindness to the fact of the cultural construction of the human form itself. Although this is a limitation in his philosophy, it is one which is very easy to correct for given all that we know today, 200 years later, and has had little impact on his Logic."

Working in the South African context we probably need a bit more than this. It's time to bite this bullet, show up all of Hegel's racism if it in fact exists, and then to show how in spite of this weakness, Hegel managed to produce a universal theory of human development which rendered the justification of racism impossible. And that so far, this one of Hegel's is the only extant universalist theory of development that can take us forward, and underpin revolution once again, as it did in 1848.

Simply: if I am not mistaken, it is from Hegel that the universal view of history that Engels, for example, expressed so confidently [e.g. in “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State”], gets its philosophical underpinning. This vital connection is threatened, or undermined, by the allegation that Hegel was a racist.

AB

The problem is: how to draw a line between Nature and Nurture. All the time we are learning more about how what has always been taken as natural, is in fact a product of culture. In Hegel's day, he presumed like everyone else, without exception, that the differences between genders and between peoples were given by Nature once for all. He knew that people made their own history, but he did not realise that the human form itself was a product of labour. That was Marx and Engels' insight, thanks to Darwin. Hegel had been dead for 45 years by then.

Hegel is in fact the inventor of historical relativism and the idea that truth is a cultural and historical product. So there is a real irony in someone writing in the 2000s accusing Hegel of being a racist. The very concept of racism would be impossible without Hegel.

I'll give you some links from Hegel: [here, here, here and here.]

VC

Thanks Andy [for references in Hegel’s work]. If this is as bad as it gets, then I don't think there is really a problem.

This bit of Hegel: "a pastoral people may treat hunters as barbarians, and both of these are barbarians from the point of view of agriculturists, &c. The civilised nation is conscious that the rights of barbarians are unequal to its own and treats their autonomy as only a formality" is a very familiar story to Africans. It's also surely more descriptive than didactic

I remember when we were in Mazimbu at the ANC school ("SOMAFCO"), one of the Tanzanians who had grown a crop, when it was demolished by the cattle of the Masai nomads who used to come there at a certain time of the year, killed one of the Masai because of it.

The hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari are only a few hours from Johannesburg.

"The civilised nation is conscious that the rights of barbarians are unequal to its own and treats their autonomy as only a formality" describes the French, this week, in Mali. It's nothing but the truth. There is no sense of approval from Hegel, unless I am missing something.

Hegel is correctly describing these matters in "economic" terms, and that is not the same as describing them in racial terms. Africans have generally understood the difference, I think.

Thanks especially for your unequivocal "The very concept of racism would be impossible without Hegel." This is where we are at, still relying on Hegel after all these years, yet hardly able to see him or be aware of him there in the basement, holding up the whole structure.

AB

The relation between the descriptive and the normative, i.e., whether Hegel is just describing how history works, or whether he actually approves this, is not simple. When Hegel says this is how history works, there is a fair measure of implicit approval in that. As in the words "progressive" and "reactionary." This kind of "master narrative" accusation does stick against Hegel, but it is easy to read Hegel for our times with a greater understanding of these problems than was possible for a European philosopher who had never been outside of a monocultural Germany, and relied on the reports of missionaries and colonists to know about life outside of Europe and North America.

What is important here, for our course on Education, is the confirmation that there is one humanity, and that this humanity is developed by the humans themselves, in labour. The humanist foundation of these ideas left by the Ancients, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment was built upon by G W F Hegel, and further built upon by two students of Hegel’s work called Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.

Hegel is the necessary philosopher of human development, and hence, of education.

Marx and Engels, though well familiar with philosophy, did not write very much philosophy. They relied upon Hegel. Andy Blunden, in the attached essay, writes: “Hegel drew the conclusion that the German Revolution would have to be made with philosophy rather than with guns and mobs.”

This is in fact largely how things turned out in the 1840s, a decade after Hegel’s death, as described by Engels in 1886 in “Ludwig Feuerbach, Part 1: Hegel”, where Engels writes: “...it was the period of Germany’s preparation for the Revolution of 1848; and all that has happened since then in our country has been merely a continuation of 1848, merely the execution of the last will and testament of the revolution. Just as in France in the 18th century, so in Germany in the 19th, a philosophical revolution ushered in the political collapse.”

The 1848 spate of revolutions, which engulfed Germany among many other countries, was powered by the philosophical controversies that preceded it, which were in turn the legacy of G W F Hegel.

The legacy of Hegel has never been surpassed and it remains capable of powering revolutionary actions. In particular, Hegel’s legacy still has the potential to revolutionise education. For this reason, we will return to Hegel later in the course.

Andy Blunden’s Home Page is here. His index page of links to his writings is here.

• The above is to introduce the original reading-text: The Young Hegel and what drove him, 2007, Andy Blunden.

Schooling Never Neutral

Education, Part 3b

Schooling Never Neutral

Mike Cole’s conclusions, given here as the last of three parts to his essay, includes the following paragraph:

“Formal schooling is never socially neutral. Even presumably neutral skill acquisition presumes the value-laden activities they were designed to accomplish, and it is usually accompanied by ideological considerations that exaggerate the actual use value of the knowledge acquired.”

Not all of Cole’s conclusions are as unambiguous as the one above. For example, the first of his conclusions is:

Formal schooling arises as part of the division of labor in societies when they reach a certain scale in terms of number of people.

Societies “reach a certain scale” as a consequence of changes in production. Formal schooling is one of those things that are consequences of change in relations of production. The initial change in the relations of production had to do with the division of society into antagonistic classes. This is something Mike Cole barely hints at.

The corresponding fall of the women from first among equals, to subordinates of men, took place at the same time, but Mike Cole does not mention this. Schooling is gendered, as much as it is “classed”.

At the same time as the division of society into antagonistic classes and the fall of women arrive, so do private property and the law of contract, the State to enforce the law of contract, and writing. This is the beginning of history.

Cole says:

“Formal schooling mediated by print and other sign systems produces age segregation and the institutionalized forms of hierarchy that articulate with the state or ecclesiastical institutions of which they are a part in a variety of ways.”

But schooling does not produce the State. The State is reproduced in the school.

The fact that classrooms universally, and from the time of the Sumerians, are laid out in the spreadsheet form of rows and columns, is not an accident. It “articulates with the State”. The medium is the message.

A Pedagogy of the Oppressed requires a dialogue format, or what is called a “boardroom”, as opposed to a “classroom”, or “theatre”.

Having missed so many things, or deliberately omitted them, Cole proceeds to problematise “enculturation” as something outside of or parallel to the formal schooling system, that requires to be brought back in, or to be managed in some other way.

One can easily understand the narrowness of the schooling that Cole describes. But whether what he calls “nature’s multicolored, multicultural, enormously heterogeneous forms” can be added on, is questionable. On the contrary, what is required is a return to humanism, where humanism is not corrupted by class struggle. This would be a true Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It would be a Pedagogy of Revolution.

The attached text includes the references relating to the other two parts of the full essay that have already been given.

The next item is one of Andy Blunden’s writings about Hegel, where we may discover the beginnings of a more humanistic way of reclaiming education for the oppressed.

• The above is to introduce the original reading-text: Cole, Perspectives, Part 3, Way Forward, 2005.

Education, Neo-Colonial Style

Education, Part 3a

Education, Neo-Colonial Style

In the second part of his essay called “Cross‐Cultural and Historical Perspectives on the Developmental Consequences of Education”, Mike Cole is telling us quite plainly that the ideology underlying education in the era of neo-colonialism is racist and patronising, based on the assumption that unschooled people are not adults and what makes them adults is schooling.

“C.P. Hallpike summarized decades of psychological research comparing the intellectual performance of educated and non-educated people of various ages on Piagetian and a wide variety of other cognitive tasks. With very few exceptions, the schooled participants outperformed those who had not attended school. These differences between schooled and non-schooled children led him to conclude that most of the time, ‘primitives’ do indeed think like small children [Hallpike, 1979].”

Whereas Cole’s own findings, together with his colleagues Sharp and Lave, following research in Yucatan, Mexico, were:

“... the information-processing skills which school attendance seems to foster could be useful in a variety of tasks demanded by modern states, including clerical and management skills in bureaucratic enterprises, or the lower-level skills of record keeping in an agricultural cooperative or a well-baby clinic.”

In other words, school prepared the children for a capitalist society, and not for life in general.

The remainder of the text describes various means of “managing diversity” in schools. The four scenarios given by Cole towards the end of this excerpt are not hopeful.

• The above is to introduce the original reading-text: Cole, Perspectives, Part 2, Post-Colonial Consequences, 2005.