Lineaments of an equitable and democratic national education policy

Salimullah Khan

The reform in education must present itself, first, as a rigorous economic reform programme. Otherwise, it will necessarily remain rhetorical, hyperbolic, even hypocritical. A meaningful reform of education for social transformation cannot be implemented without an equitable and democratic economic programme to elevate the subaltern classes, to put an end to their condition of subalternity.

I am reminded, in other words, of the truism that a meaningful transformation of economic and social conditions is a precondition for creating a new national system of common schools at the elementary and fundamental stages, that is up to twelve years of schooling. By the same token, it is necessary to reform the nature of education imparted in schools to grant the new system a lease of longer life. In this note we do not have enough space to cover the question of curriculum.

Why is education necessary for the human being? The shortest answer is: to sustain the will to resist the processes of dehumanisation, to enable organic development of the human being to take place, to become human in the full sense of the word.

By “organic” development we suggest a power to overcome conditions imposed by social division of labour leading to fragmentation and separation of mental (i.e., moral and intellectual) and manual labour. The development of capitalism on a world scale, especially in its industrial incarnations, tends to radically dehumanise and alienate the human being, and turns workers into commodities and machine prostheses. Education (also called culture), fortunately, has the potential to create means of resistance to such divisions of labour which are inimical to organic nature of the human being.

The functions of the school in historical societies are, at least, twofold. The school, in those societies where the capitalist mode prevails, plays an important role in establishing the hegemony (i.e., the moral high-ground) of the ruling system. It, on the one hand, consolidates relations between rulers and the ruled, supplying a labour force for keeping material production go on and, on the other, produces the intellectual representatives of the ruling class for the future. As education in capitalist formations is neither altogether free, nor all the way public, even in elementary and fundamental stages, that is to say, not free from the social conditions of exploitation, equal opportunities for all are not ensured. As a result, young people from the exploited, subaltern classes only find a place for themselves in the entire production system, or alternate from one sector to another due to social demands or their own inclinations, by way of exception. An equitable and democratic system of education can thus only be founded on the possibility of choosing the direction of one’s own existence, of disabling the predestination of inherited class relationships. Only then can democracy come anywhere near to fulfilling its grand old promise: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!”

A tendency that characterises the incumbent system of education worldwide, not just in the periphery, is the introduction of “technical and vocational training”, coupled with a smattering of religious instruction, very early on, before one completed a rigorous classical or humanistic (i.e., general and scientific) education. The case of a four-year “non-formal education”, widely propagated by the reactionary ruling classes as a panacea, is a natural corollary of this pedagogy, originally designed by the fascist philosopher Giovanni Gentile, Mussolini’s minister for education. Through a system of examinations, Gentile’s reform in Italy, introduced in 1923, made sure that “technical and vocational training” stays separated from “classical education” reserved for select students who are predestined to move on to the universities.

The division between classical school and vocational school performed a role in line with the productive needs of bourgeois society. Gramsci elucidated the complexity. The school organisation emerging from the medieval world of Europe, he indicated, sought both to deepen and expand the “intellectuality” of each individual, and to increase specialisations and refine them. That resulted in educational institutions of varying degrees, even organs to promote the so-called “high culture,” in all fields of science (in the sense of branches of learning) and technology.

The school, according to Gramsci, served as an instrument for producing intellectuals of different degrees. “The complexity of the intellectual function in various states,” he scribbled, “can be objectively measured by the number of specialised schools and their hierarchy: the larger the school area and the more numerous the ‘vertical’ ‘degrees’ of the school, the more complex the cultural world, the civility of a particular state.” Education of intellectual groups and classes does not take place in abstract terrains, but rather in concrete social conditions, within “concrete traditional historical processes” that, through the school, guide the division and specialisation of labour. Schools have the precise function of shaping society, separating chosen intellectual classes from the great mass of instrumental workers. Sometimes the process results in a rural-urban divide, as between the peasant South and the industrial North in Italy.

However, the emergence of a system of specialised schools of varying degrees shook the traditional school structure. This later specialisation was related not only to the “technical and vocational” schools but also to the selection of intellectual classes with an increasingly specialised and less universalist, general, or humanistic education. It led to a crisis, historically speaking, of which peripheries of the world capitalist order perforce took the worst burden. The crisis of the system of schools in capitalist countries led to the overcoming of “disinterested” and purely formative, humanistic schools. Gramsci suggested a single elementary school of general, humanistic and formative culture, capable of harmoniously balancing manual labour skills and intellectual functions, as an alternative to the fascist school separating manual labour from intellectual pursuits, as implemented after the Gentile reform of 1923.

In opposition to the Fascist school, what Gramsci proposed was a new kind of school, which may be called “unitary” or “integral” as it would ensure organic (physical as well as moral or intellectual) development of all students, without exception, by instructing them in humanities in the first phase and by directing their genius to autonomous, self-reliant, creative in a second phase. In the integral school that Gramsci envisaged in his Prison Notebooks, at the end of the first phase, following reiterations of professional orientation, students would go to a secondary school of specialisation, according to students’ attitudes and inclinations.

Gramsci insisted that the unitary school must be public (or national), in the sense that it must receive an economic and organisational commitment from the state to form part of an educational network from kindergartens to universities, because only public schools can involve all generations with no differences of group, stratum or class. In Gramsci’s parlance, this phase of education may be named “active school”.

In the second phase, to be called the “creative school”, it should be possible to encourage the specific development of each student, to make him/her responsible, autonomous and morally self-conscious. It should be a full-time school, and collective in orientation, free from all hypocritical and rhetorical forms of discipline (requiring collective study as mandatory).

“Creative” in Gramscian lexicon does not mean a school of inventors and discoverers, but rather designates a specific, secondary phase of fundamental education, characterised by research and training methods that can stimulate spontaneous student effort, where teachers serve only as guides: “to discover for oneself, without suggestions and external help, a truth and creation, because the truth is old and demonstrate the process of the method; it indicates that, in any case, [they] entered the stage of intellectual maturity, in which new truths can be discovered” through seminars, experimental work and bibliographic research.

The traditional school, both in its aristocratic and colonial incarnations, was radically oligarchic, entrenching the good old master-slave relations between the ruling and subaltern classes and perpetuated conditions of subalternity of the subaltern. Even professional specialisation of the school, despite an outwardly democratic appearance, has been deeply oligarchic, actually helping make social differences perpetual.

Once again, an egalitarian solution to this contradiction between intellectual and instrumental varieties of education calls for changing the old “naturalistic schemes” in the relationship between ruling classes and the ruled. New ways of being an intellectual should be necessarily inclusive and organic, that is to say, these must encompass both scientific techniques and a humanistic worldview, transforming each individual simultaneously into a specialist and a citizen, or if you prefer, in Gramsci’s coinage: “specialist + politician”.

Let me yield Gramsci the last word: “Intrinsically, the democratic trend cannot only mean that manual workers get qualifications, but that every citizen can become a ruler and that society gives them, albeit “abstractly,” the general conditions to be able to do it; democracy tends to make rulers and those ruled coincide (in the sense of government with the consent of those governed), ensuring that each and every person governed can freely learn the skills and techniques generally required for such purpose.”

Salimullah Khan is professor of general education at the University of Liberal Arts

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