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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