Chisick on Education
Policy among the Enlightened
French Enlightenment liberal thought begins with assertion
of the equality of all people in reason, and therefore educatability. And
it is reformist, claiming that improvement of social life is possible through
enlightened planning. What, then, did "the enlightened" propose for the
educational institutions of their own society? The answer is of course
complex, but here are some fragments of the conclusions drawn by Harvey
Chisick in his valuable 1981 The Limits of
Reform in the Enlightenment: Attitudes toward the Education of the Lower
Classes in Eighteenth-Century France (Princeton UP, pp.
278-9, 289-90.)
IN the preceding pages we have seen that popular
education was the subject of considerable discussion during the second
half of the eighteenth century. We have found that far from demanding that
the lower classes receive extensive instruction that would allow them to
develop a critical outlook and reach intellectual maturity, the great majority
of the enlightened community wished to see them taught to read, write and
count, and given a measure of physical, occupational and moral training.
The purpose of this instruction was thoroughly pragmatic, being aimed at
economic utility on the one hand, and social peace on the other. A current
of obscurantism persisted through the Enlightenment, and even those who
thought it proper that the laboring population receive a basic education
wished to keep that education within what they regarded as acceptable limits.
While asserting in theory that all men were equal, members of the enlightened
community looked upon the people as fundamentally different from themselves
in function and social standing.
...Certainly the forms that the discussions of physical
and moral education took were deeply influenced by the prominent beliefs
in depopulation, corruption and the nefarious consequences to be expected
from an ethic that legitimized self-interest. The popularity of education
as an agent of reform is in part explained by the fact that as a means
of change it was both gradual and peaceful. Members of the enlightened
community, for the most part well integrated into the ruling elites of
the time, believed in, and were committed to, maintaining the organization
and institutions of the old regime. A model of change that did not call
into question existing social or political structures had particular appeal
for them. Finally, the entire debate on popular education rested on the
assumption that there existed a people-condition, necessitated by an economic
system requiring endless and brutalizing labor on the part of the great
majority of men and women.
...the issue of the instruction of the people was
not definitively treated by the ruling classes of France and Europe in
the fifty or sixty years before 1789, but remained a subject of intense
interest and animated discussion for a good part of the nineteenth century.
The French Revolution did not finally end the condescension, mistrust and
hostility with which the wealthy and leisured viewed the laboring population...
...In contradistinction to the seventeenth century,
in which education...[was] dealt with from a religious point of view and
by ecclesiastical personnel, the eighteenth century largely secularized
the question. To be sure, pious men and women continued to show concern
for, and to write on, education down to, and into, the Revolution, but
the terms in which discussion of the subject was carried out in the eighteenth
century were essentially secular, putting social and economic considerations
before all others. Again unlike the seventeenth century, and perhaps, too,
unlike later periods, the eighteenth century had an excessive faith in
the power of education as an agent of reform. But like the men of the seventeenth
century, those of the eighteenth conceived of their society as a hierarchy,
and, most probably, assumed that all "advanced" or "civilized" societies
had necessarily to be formally hierarchical. That presupposition is not
widely shared today, and sets Enlightenment social theory off from that
of the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, on its most basic
conviction about popular education, namely, that the lower classes were
to receive a "fitting" education, and that what was fitting was determined
on social and economic criteria, the Enlightenment and our own age appear
to he in broad agreement.
Members of the enlightened community were, after
all, very much like our own politicians and administrators, hard-headed,
practically-minded people, and neither the ones nor the others would sanction
programs devoted to moral and spiritual improvement, the pursuit of knowledge
for its own sake, or the development of a critical and independent outlook
in the great majority of the population, at least if such programs could
not be justified in economic or administrative terms. Politicians of all
parties, administrators and even many educational theorists today speak
of education in terms of training students in marketable skills and at
lower instructional levels, of socialization. To be sure, primary education,
and especially that for the lower classes is far wider and its apparatus
more extensive today than it was two hundred years ago. But that this implies
a greater measure of generosity or liberality in contemporary social values
is probably not a just conclusion. The fact that we were born into a more
sophisticated society that necessitates a higher level of instruction is
an accident, not a virtue. It is curious, but nevertheless seems to be
the case, that the view that it is neither feasible nor desirable to enlighten
the greater part of mankind is part of our heritage from the Enlightenment.
But if this is so, it does not allow us to look with condescension on men
who, with resources infinitely inferior to our own, came to conclusions
on popular education in principle similar to those still maintained today.
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