WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF SCHOOL?

Un regard historique

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SOCIALIZE THROUGH SCHOOL 

In most Western European and North American countries, schooling for common children dates back to the 19th century. It is clearly contemporary with the industrial revolution. It is therefore easy to believe that this industrialization would have required a rise in the qualification levels of the workforce and, consequently, a demand for education and training. Nothing could be further from the truth. If the passage to machinismo, that is to say to industrial capitalism, is going to transform the nature of work, it is not in the direction of a higher qualification but in the exact opposite direction. 

The decomposition of the complex work that a single worker used to do in the workshop or factory, its replacement by a multitude of workers chained to the new production tools and charged with repeating each one a simple, fragmented task, at the rhythm imposed by the machine, all of this implies a formidable de-skilling of proletarians. « By substituting mechanical processes for manual skill and costly vocational training, and by allowing in the long run the replacement of the craftsmen and workers of the domestic system by the crowd of laborers of the modern factory, [le machinisme] truly opens a new era in the exploitation and profitability of human labor « (1). Capitalist industrialization has thus radically transformed the relationship between man and technology, enslaving the worker to externally imposed and inaccessible technical processes. Industrialization and mechanization have established a barrier, both social and intellectual, between the conception of production techniques and their use. From now on, the proletarian acts only under the imperatives of laws (economic, technical, scientific…) which escape his understanding. He no longer imposes his rhythm on the machine, the machine imposes its own. The non-qualification of the worker, his ignorance, his intellectual stultification, become the very condition of his « employability » in the new production processes.

It is striking to note that, at first, machinismo and the industrial revolution did not lead to a rapid development of school education 

Marx: « The machine, which has the marvelous power to shorten work and make it more productive, causes the labor force to wither away at the same time as it sucks it to the core. (…) It even appears that the serene light of science can only shine on the background of ignorance. All our inventions and all our progress seem to have no other result than to endow material forces with life and intelligence, and to dumb down man by reducing him to the level of a purely physical force « (2).

It is a double « alienation » that the worker of the industrial era undergoes. Like all proletarians before him, he has to sell a part of himself, his labor power, to survive. But this new worker is also deprived of the intellectual control of the production process. He is now only an auxiliary of the machine. It is subject to the bosses, not only because it does not possess the means of production, but because it does not even possess the capacity to control this new industrial production. 

It is striking to note that, at first, machinism and the industrial revolution did not lead to a rapid development of school education. The data available for England, the first nation to embark on this revolution, are illuminating. By the mid-18th century, two-thirds of English men and 40% of women could read. However, almost a century later, in 1840, we observe that these rates are almost identical. It even seems that between these two dates there was first a decline in education and then a recovery from the beginning of the 19th century(3).

At the same time, there was a logical decline in the traditional training method of apprenticeship. Proportionally, fewer and fewer jobs required a real qualification and, when it was nevertheless essential, it was often acquired « on the job ». Apprenticeship continued to exist and even developed in some small occupations such as instrument making. But it quickly declined in the trades conquered by industrialization and mechanization, such as ironworking and textiles. The apprenticeship also lost its former character as a place of socialization. Henceforth, it was reduced, at best, to the acquisition of a rudimentary technical know-how, in a time that the parents of the young person wanted to see as short as possible. 

At the same time, the old large rural family is disarticulated and replaced by a small urban family nucleus. And even this core is rapidly disintegrating with the advance of women and children’s work. In the factory, the old paternalism of the rural factory owners gives way to the cold, unequal and ephemeral contractual relationship between the owner of the means of production and the owner of a work force, the capital and the worker. 

When, from the middle of the 19th century onwards, rapidly industrializing capitalist societies finally decided to send working-class children to school on a massive scale, it was not primarily to meet a need for technical or vocational training. Even less for the sake of democracy or emancipation. 

The real reason was to be found in this superb sentence of Victor Hugo: « Toopen a school is to close a prison ». The intellectual alienation of the proletariat, the brutal loss of cultural references for a population torn from rural life and plunged into urban misery, the disintegration of traditional places of education and socialization,… all this had ended up causing a moral stultification of the working classes. In the big urban entities, where social and clerical control was less constraining than in the countryside, where temptations were numerous, where, above all, exploitation, misery and blatant social inequalities tended to legitimize any means of gaining a little happiness, a part of the proletariat sank into vice, alcoholism, violence, criminality and prostitution. In doing so, the working class not only reflected the brutality they suffered at work and in their living conditions, but also became a threat to « law and order. » 

The bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century did not want to tackle the real causes of this decline, namely the squalid living conditions and the shameless exploitation of the working class, but considered solving the problem through education.  » Education is the best branch of the social police, » said John Wade in 1835,  » because it attacks the main seeds of the crime of envy and ignorance (…) Releasing an uneducated child into life is no better than releasing a rabid dog or a wild animal into the street « .(4). As for the Belgian Edouard Ducpétiaux, he estimated that « the degree of education of a country always represents in a more or less exact way the state of its morality « .(5).

Socializing and educating the children of the people: this was, historically, the primary function of mass schooling. What was taught? Morals and religion, reading and writing, arithmetic, the system of weights and measures. That was all. No history, natural science or geography. « Reading, writing and counting is what you have to learn », declared Adolphe Thiers, « as for the rest, it is superfluous. We must be careful not to discuss social doctrines in school, which must be imposed on the masses.(6)  »

The school was born, not because the triumphant capitalism needed educated workers, but precisely for the opposite reason: because it needed unskilled and docile workers. 

IDEOLOGICAL STATE APPARATUS 

In the eyes of many French progressives, Jules Ferry is still considered today as the brilliant founder of the secular and republican school. But what were his motivations? Let’s listen to him: « If this state of affairs [l’emprise cléricale sur l’école] is perpetuated, it is to be feared that other schools will be constituted, open to the sons of workers and peasants, where diametrically opposed principles will be taught, inspired perhaps by a socialist or communist ideal borrowed from more recent times, for example from that violent and sinister period between March 18 and May 24, 1871(7) « It is indeed after having lived through the debacle of the French troops in 1870 and after having participated in the bloody crushing of the Paris Commune that Ferry founded the republican school with a view, he said, to « maintain a certain state morality, certain state doctrines that are important to its preservation .

At the same time, the King of the Belgians, Leopold II, pleaded the cause of compulsory education in these terms: « Education given at the expense of the State will have as its mission, at all levels, to inspire in the young generations the love and respect of the principles on which our free institutions rest.

In the last third of the 19th century, the educational mission of the school thus took on an increasingly ideological content. The profound origin of these changes must be sought in powerful technological advances. Before the caesura of the years 1870–1880, we were in the era of industrialization based on steam, iron and cotton. « Beyond that, it is the economy of chemicals, electricity, steel and aluminum, the telephone and theautomobile(8) « .

New processes in the steel and chemical industries require huge industrial facilities. Production and productivity are exploding: a Thyssen blast furnace from the beginning of the 20th century produces in about 30 hours what a Silesian blast furnace produced in one year a hundred years earlier(9). The concentration phenomenon is general. From 1866 to 1896, despite the extraordinary growth in production, the number of metallurgical plants in Europe fell from 1,786 to only 171. In the same period, the number of textile establishments decreased by 75%. But while the number of companies is decreasing, their production and workforce are growing out of control. The French metallurgical companies of the Schneider group employed 2,500 people in 1845, 6,000 in 1860, 10,000 in 1870(10).

This gave a dangerous consistency to the « specter » that had been haunting old Europe for several decades: a large working class, disciplined by industry, better and better organized, and with an ideology dangerous to power: socialism. The Paris Commune had already sounded like a thunderclap. But between 1880 and 1910 the revolutionary socialist parties saw their numbers (and votes, where they were allowed to run for office) grow steadily. 

To this internal threat was quickly added an external one: the industrial concentration of the years 1870 to 1914 brought capitalism into the era of the great imperialist powers. At the dawn of the 20th century, the German economist Rudolf Hilferding, wrote: « The need for an expansionist policy revolutionizes the worldview of the bourgeoisie, which ceases to be pacifist and humanist. The old free traders believed that free trade was not only the best economic system, but also the beginning of an era of peace. But finance capital abandoned this belief long ago. He has no confidence in the harmony of capitalist interests; he knows only too well that competition has become a matter of political power struggle. The ideal of peace has lost its lustre and in place of the humanist ideal we see the emergence of a glorification of the grandeur and power of the state « (11).

It was no longer enough, under these conditions, for the school to teach reading, writing and respect for moral or religious precepts. From now on, it was to teach love of country and institutions. History and geography are therefore entering the curriculum. 

In Germany, Emperor Wilhelm II, faced with the rise of socialist forces, described his view of the new tasks of compulsory education in these terms:  » For a long time I have been concerned with the idea of using the School, in each of its subdivisions, to counteract the spread of socialist and communist ideas. The school should first of all lay the foundations for a healthy conception of public and social relations, instilling the fear of God and love of country « (12).

In France, the radical republican Paul Bert, member of the Academy of Sciences, famous for his work on the physiology of scuba diving, but also for his racist theses, published in 1883 a practical manual on « Civic education at school (fundamental notions) ». It is necessary, » he wrote in the introduction to this work intended to enlighten the « Black Hussars » of the Republic, « that the love of France not be for (the child) an abstract formula, imposed on his memory like a religious dogma, but that he understand its motives, that he appreciate its greatness and its necessary consequences. For it is by loving her and by reasoning this love that he will learn to give himself entirely to her, and, fulfilling to the end his duty as a citizen, to devote himself, if necessary, either for the salvation of the Fatherland, or for the defense of the principles whose triumph has made him a free man and a citizen. Thus will be truly founded the National Education ». 

The mass graves of 14–18 bear witness to the dramatic effectiveness of the school in its new function as an ideological state apparatus. 

SELECT AND TRAIN THE WORKING ELITE 

While in the 19th century it had been a socialization and ideological apparatus at the service of the state, in the following century the people’s school was gradually transformed into an instrument of selection and training at the direct service of the economy. 

Even before World War I, advances in industrial technology, the growth of government and the expansion of commercial employment led to a renewed demand for more skilled labor. Of course, for the majority of workers, a basic socialization was still sufficient; but a growing number of them had to acquire a specialized know-how: mechanics, electricians, typists, wireless operators… 

This may come as a surprise. Aren’t we in the midst of « Fordism », which was undoubtedly the most advanced form of parceling out of workers’ tasks and therefore of workers’ de-skilling? Of course, but production is not everything. In his Histoire du travail et des travailleurs, Lefranc reminds us that in 1948, out of 315,000 workers in the automobile industry in France, only 110,000 were active in production, 25,000 manufactured accessories, 30,000 were bodybuilders and 150,000 were employed in repair companies (two thirds of which were craft companies)(13). However, the car repairman or the worker in an electrical installation company must intellectually master the technologies they work with. 

 » Between the wars, Thévenin and Compagnon write, technical education will experience a remarkable expansion. (…) The adjustment and use of machines, the control and finishing of products, require workers who are both manually skilled and know how to handle precise measuring instruments, read sketches and machining ranges designed by the design offices… »(14)

The demand was such that a return to the old forms of traditional learning would not have been sufficient. Moreover, the theoretical requirements of these new qualifications could not be satisfied with an exclusively practical training. The educational system then opened up to « modern », technical or professional sections. The « cream » of the sons and daughters of the working class were recruited to become the skilled workers, technicians, employees and civil servants that society required. This was the era of « social promotion » through school.

While in the 19th century it had been a socialization and ideological apparatus at the service of the State, in the following century the school of the people was gradually transformed into an instrument of selection and training at the direct service of the economy 

Between the two world wars, the school thus became an essential instrument in the production of qualified labor forces. But also in their selection and hierarchy, on a meritocratic basis. 

REPRODUCE SOCIAL INEQUALITIES 

In the aftermath of the Second World War, capitalism experienced a period of extraordinary economic growth. It is of course the result of the post-war reconstruction as well as of the social progress wrested by a working class that emerged politically strengthened from these years of conflict. But it is also the result of major, long-term technological innovations — electrification of railroads, port and airport infrastructures, highways, nuclear power, telephony, petrochemicals. Unskilled employment is steadily declining as a result of the mechanization of agriculture and the increasing automation of repetitive tasks in industry. These lost jobs are largely compensated by the dynamics of growth: jobs are created in the administration and in the services, the technological development requires more and more qualified workers for shipbuilding, aeronautics, energy… 

Thus, in Belgium, agriculture lost 52% of its salaried jobs between 1953 and 1972. Coal mines (-78%) and quarries (-39%) followed the same trend. But these losses are largely compensated by the steel industry (+10%), chemicals (+36%), electronics and electrical engineering (+99%), printing (+39%), banks (+131%), garages (+130%) and public administration (+39%).

Economic success and the changing structure of the labor market therefore required raising the general level of training of workers. And we had to move fast. In a hurry, what had once been the secondary school of the elite, namely the general education of the atheist schools and the high schools, opened its doors — at least those of its first years — to children of popular extraction. 

These are good times for generous talk about democratizing education. For Léo Collard, Belgian Minister of Education in 1957, « it is a question of making sure that the child of the people, at the end of the unique way of the elementary school, finds a school environment such as it can pursue there without constraint and without embarrassment of any kind any section of studies which it finds in conformity with its tastes and to change it possibly without great difficulty(15) « . In France, the Langevin-Wallon Plan proclaimed in 1946 that the meritocracy had to go: « education must offer equal possibilities of development to all, open access to culture to all, democratize itself less by a selection that keeps the most gifted away from the people than by a continuous elevation of the cultural level of the whole Nation. « [Langevin-Wallon Plan, 1946]. 

But these dreams will not stand up to reality. Certainly, we will stop « keeping the most gifted away from the people » by selecting them at the end of primary school. But this selection will have to be made later. That is to say, within the secondary education system itself. This will mean the implementation of a negative selection, a selection based on academic failure. The « best elements » of the working classes are no longer directed to the qualifying education, but the « least good students » of the general education. 

Yet, by a remarkable pedagogical miracle, this selection continues to be a selection based on social origin. Sociology — Bourdieu, Passeron — suddenly discovers that school has become — in the same way as inheritance and marriage — an instance of the reproduction, from one generation to the next, of social inequalities. 

CORE COMPETENCIES AND MARKET SUPPORT 

Since the end of the 1980s, with the entry of world capitalism into the era of globalization and repeated cycles of crisis, the demands of the economic world on the education system have undergone new changes. The school is being asked to change in order to better adapt to the expectations of employers. 

Three essential elements mark this break(16). First, globalization has led to competition among states to attract investors, and thus to reduce the tax burden on capital, income from securities, high wages and corporate profits. Thus, the state’s budgetary leeway is diminishing, which subjects education policies to a strong austerity constraint. 

Secondly, the shift of jobs from industry to services and technological development in the « advanced » economies is leading to a polarization of the labor market. « The greatest job creation should be expected, on the one hand, in management positions and very high-level professional and technical jobs, but, on the other hand, also in jobs in the service sector requiring medium or low qualifications(17) « .

Thirdly, economic instability and the rapid pace of technological innovation, but above all the anarchic nature of the capitalist economy, make it impossible to have a forward-looking policy on training and qualifications. 

In this context, the majority of employers are less interested in precise and specific qualifications than in vague « employability », which should be guaranteed by the « basic skills » and flexibility of workers. The OECD and its PISA survey serve to push education systems in this direction (see article on page 10). We also understand better, in this context, the official infatuation for the educational conception(18) based on the « competency-based approach ». 

This matching of education to the expectations of employers is one of the forms of the « commodification » of school, i.e. its placing at the service of the markets. This movementThis includes many aspects: the commercial privatization of education, private investment in tutoring activities, the competition between schools, their managerial management in the manner of a private company, the conquest of schools by advertisers and other marketing specialists, etc… 


Nico Hirtt

Teacher, essayist, head of the study service of the Appeal for a Democratic School

Notes et références
  1.  Rioux, J‑P, La Révolution Industrielle, Paris: Ed. du Seuil, 1971.
  2. Marx, K., Discours prononcé lors de la commémoration de l’anniversaire de l’organe chartiste People’s
Paper, 19 avril 1856, in Werke, 12.
  3. More, Charles. Understanding the Industrial Revolution. Routledge, 2000.
  4. Wade, John. History of the Middle and Working Classes,Wilson, 1835, p. 496.
  5. Ducpétiaux, E., Des progrès et de l’état actuel de la réforme pénitentiaire et des institutions préventives aux Etats-
Unis, en France, en Suisse en Angleterre et en Belgique (Bruxelles: Hauman, Cattoir et cie, 1837), Tome 3, p. 82.
  6. Terral, H., Les Savoirs Du Maître, Éditions L’Harmattan, 1998
  7. Cité Foucambert, J., L’École de Jules Ferry, Paris, 1986.
  8. Broder, A., L’économie française au XIXe siècle, Editions Ophrys, 1993.
  9. Hilferding, R., Das Finanzkapital; Eine Studie Über Die Jüngste Entwicklung Des Kapitalismus, Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1968.
  10. Dupeux, G., 1976, French society, 1789–1970, Taylor & Francis.
  11. Brewer, A, Marxist Theories of Imperialism. Routledge, 1990.
  12. Erlaß Kaiser Wilhelms II. vom 1.5.1889, in « Verhandlungen über Fragen des höheren Unterrichts », Berlin, 4.–17. Dezember 1890. Im Auftrage des Ministers der geistlichen, Unterrichts- und Medizinal- Angelegenheiten, Berlin 1891, S. 3–5.
  13. Lefranc, G., 1957, Histoire du travail et des travailleurs, Paris: Flammarion.
  14. Compagnon, B. & Thévenin, A., 1995, L’école et la société française, Éditions Complexe.
  15. Collard L., Un programme d’éducation nationale démocratique, cité par Van Haecht A., L’enseignement rénové, de l’origine
à l’éclipse, Éditions de l’ULB, Bruxelles, 1985, p. 172.
  16. Pour une analyse globale de la marchandisation de l’enseignement, on lira notamment Nico Hirtt, Les nouveaux maîtres de l’école, Éditions Aden, Bruxelles 2005. Pour une critique de la conquête commerciale de l’école, on lira Nico Hirtt et Bernard Legros, L’école et la peste publicitaire, éditions Aden, Bruxelles, 2007.
  17. Sels, L. et al., 2006, Inzetten op competentieontwikkeling. Discussietekst gericht op de ontwikkeling van een Competentieagenda
  18. Nous disons «conception éducative» et non «pédagogie» parce que la plupart des défenseurs de l’approche par compétences (APC) eux-mêmes se défendent d’être les porte-paroles d’une pédagogie. Et en effet, l’APC ne dit nullement comment il convient d’enseigner mais apporte une réponse à la question «que faut-il enseigner?».

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