Education and Class Struggle, Sketches by José Carlos Mariátegui

On educational reform and socialist strategy

Introduction to a Study about the Problem of Public Education

On the disputes between Catholic and public education.¹

I

The debate on the planned Ibero-American Congress of Intellectuals raises, among other problems, that of public education in Latin America. The questionnaire of the magazine Repertorio Americano contains these two questions: "Do you think that education should be unified, for certain racial purposes, in the Latin countries of our America? Do you think it prudent for our Latin América to take a certain attitude in its teaching in the case of the United States of the North?" The Argentine group that advocates the organization of a Latin American Union declares its adherence to the following principle: "Extension of free, secular and compulsory education and comprehensive university reform." Invited to comment on the Argentine formula, I want to specify, in two or three articles, some essential points of view regarding the whole problem that this formula proposes to solve.

II

The formula, in itself, says and is worth little. "Free, secular and compulsory education" is a well-worn recipe of the old democratic-liberal-bourgeois ideology. All the radicaloids, all the liberaloids of Hispano-América have enrolled it in their programs. Intrinsically, then, this ancient principle has no renewing meaning, no revolutionary power. Its strength, its vitality, resides entirely in the new spirit of the intellectual nuclei of La Plata, Buenos Aires, etc., which sustain it this time.

These nuclei speak of "extension of secular education." In other words, they represent a reform to secular education already acquired by our América. They do not agitate it as a new reform, as a virginal reform. They understand it as a system that, incompletely established, needs to acquire all its development.

But, then, it should be considered that the question of secular education is not posed in the same terms in all Hispanic-American peoples. In several cases, this method or this principle, however you prefer to call it, has not yet been tested and the religion of the State retains its teaching privileges intact. And, therefore, it is not a question of extending secular teaching there, but of adopting it. That is, to engage in a battle that can lead the vanguard to concentrate its energies and its elements on a front that has lost its strategic and historical value.

III

In any case, the European experience should be examined on the matter of secular education. Among other reasons, because the formula "free, secular and compulsory education" literally belongs not only to that Western culture that Alfredo Palacios declares to be in decomposition but, above all, to its capitalist cycle in obvious bankruptcy. In the democratic-liberal-bourgeois school (whose crisis generates the relativistic and skeptical humor of contemporary Western philosophy that provides us with the only evidence we have of the decline of Western civilization), the Ibero-American democracies have learned this formula.

The secular school appears in history as a natural product of liberalism and capitalism. In the countries where the Reformation helped to create a historical climate favorable to the capitalist phenomenon, the Protestant church, imbued with liberalism, offered no resistance to the spiritual domination of the bourgeoisie. Consubstantial historical movements could not be interfered with or opposed. Rather, they tended to spontaneously coordinate their direction. On the other hand, in the countries where Catholicism maintained its positions more or less intact and, therefore, the historical conditions of the capitalist order were slow to mature, the Roman church, in solidarity with the medieval economy and aristocratic privileges, exercised an influence hostile to the interests of the bourgeoisie. The profane church—coherent and logical—protected the ideas of Authority and Hierarchy on which the power of the aristocracy was based. Against these ideas, the bourgeoisie, striving to replace the aristocracy in the role of ruling class, had invented the idea of freedom. Feeling opposed by Catholicism, it had to react sourly against the church in the various fields of his spiritual ascendancy and, in particular, in that of public education. Bourgeois thought, in those nations where it did not ignite the Reform, could not stop at free examination and therefore easily arrived at atheism and irreligiousness. The liberalism, the Jacobinism of the Latin world acquired, because of this conflict between the bourgeoisie and the church, an acutely anti-religious spirit. This explains the violence of the struggle for the secular school in France and Italy. And in Spain itself, where the languor and laziness of liberalism—which coincided with an incipient capitalist development—did not prevent liberal statesmen from carrying out, despite the influence of a Catholic dynasty, a secularist policy. This also explains the weakening of secularism that, in France as in Italy, has followed the decline of liberalism and its belligerence and, in particular, the successive commitments of the Roman church to democracy and its institutions and the progressive democratic saturation of the Catholic flock. Finally, this explains the tendency of reactionary politics to re-establish religious education and classicism in schools. A tendency which, precisely in Italy and France, has acted out its purposes in the [Giovanni] Gentile reform and the [Léon] Bérard reform. When the historical roots of Christianity and its opposition have decayed, the secular state and the Roman church reconcile on the issue that previously separated them the most.

The term "secular school" designates, consequently, a creature of the democratic-liberal-bourgeois state that the new men of our América undoubtedly do not propose to aspire to as the maximum ideal for these peoples. The liberal idea, as the Ibero-American youth often proclaim, has lost its original virtue. It has fulfilled its historical function. There is no sign of a possible revival of liberalism in the contemporary crisis. The radical-socialist episode in France is particularly instructive in this respect. [Édouard] Herriot has been beaten, in part, because of his effort to remain faithful to the secularist tradition of radicalism. And yet that effort was measured and elastic in its ends and in its means.

IV

The balance sheet of the "secular school" does not justify, on the other hand, an excessive enthusiasm for this old piece of bourgeois repertoire. Georges Sorel, several years before the war, had already denounced its mediocrity. Secular morality, as Sorel observed with a profound philosophical spirit, lacks the spiritual elements indispensable for creating heroic and superior characters. It is powerless, it is incapable to produce eternal values, sublime values. It does not satisfy the need for the absolute that exists at the bottom of all human restlessness. It does not give an answer to any of the great questions of the spirit. It aims at the formation of an industrious, mediocre and sheep-like humanity. It educates it in the cult of flimsy myths that are shipwrecked by the great temporary tide: Democracy, Progress, Evolution, etc. Adriano Tilgher, an acute Italian critic, nourished on this subject of Sorelian philosophy, makes in one of his most substantial essays a penetrating review of the responsibilities of the bourgeois school. "Now that the formidable crisis, triggered by the world conflict, is gradually revolutionizing the modern state from its foundations, the moment has come for the State school to produce before public opinion the titles that legitimize its right to existence. And it must be recognized that if the spectacle of a war has been possible, in which all the greatest peoples of the world have been engaged and which, nevertheless, has not revealed any of those heroic, masterful individuals of energy, which the wars of the past, insignificant by comparison, revealed in very great numbers, this is almost exclusively due to the State school and its spirit of the barracks, gray, leveling, suffocating." And, examining the very essence of the bourgeois school, he adds: "The state school is one of three institutions, characterized by economic monopoly, administrative centralism and bureaucratic absolutism, ruining the modern state, subverting it from its foundations. The barracks and the bureaucracy are the other two. Thanks to them, the State has managed to annul in the individual the freedom of will, the spontaneity of initiative, the originality of movement and to reduce humanity to a very docile flock that does not know how to think or act except according to the sign and according to the will of its pastors. It is, above all, in the school where the modern State possesses the strongest and most irresistible compressing roller, with which it flattens and levels every individuality that feels autonomous and independent.”

V

If we take into account that, in terms of relations between the State and the Church, the Ibero-American peoples, who inherited the Catholic confession from Spain, also inherited the germs of the problems of the Latin States of Europe, it is perfectly understandable how and why "secular education" has been, as I recall at the beginning of this article, one of the vehement reforms advocated by all the radicaloids and liberaloids of our America. In the countries where a Western-type democracy has come to function, the reform has necessarily been acted upon. In countries where a regime of caudillaje supported by feudal interests has subsisted, there has not been the same need to adopt it. This regime has preferred to align itself with the Church, a good teacher of the principle of authority, whose conservative influence has been skillfully used against the subversive influence of liberalism. The embryonic liberal states born of the independence revolution, slow to consolidate and develop, weak to impose their own myths on the masses, have had to combine and ally themselves with a religious rite.

The issue of "secular education" should be discussed in Our América [Nuestra América] in the light of all these antecedents. The new Ibero-American generation cannot be content with a flat and worn-out formula of liberal ideology. The "secular school”—bourgeois school—is not the ideal of youth possessed of a powerful desire for renewal. Secularism, as an end, is a poor thing. In Russia, in Mexico, in the peoples who are being transformed materially and spiritually, the renewing and creative virtue of the school does not reside in its secular character but in its revolutionary spirit. The revolution there gives to the school its myth, its emotion, its mysticism, its religiosity.

Freedom of Teaching

On bureaucracy in education.²

I

The freedom of teaching. Here is another program or another formula that has many accessions and much consensus. But there is also another idea, the practical value of which should be more deeply pondered. The freedom of teaching seems, at first glance, the desideratum towards which all efforts for renewal must tend. But the ideology of the men who propose to transform our América cannot be nourished by fictions. In history, nothing matters about the abstract value of an idea. What matters is its concrete value. Especially for our América that has so much need for concrete ideals.

About the current significance of the "freedom of teaching" we are not without instructive facts. One of the most significant is undoubtedly the enthusiastic adherence given to this principle by Catholic politicians in Italy and France. The Italian Popular Party has upheld it as the most substantive of its demands. The Roman church, shrewd and flexible in its movements, presents itself as one of the greatest champions of the "freedom of teaching." The secular school is opposed to the free school. Does it happen, perhaps, that in the twilight of liberalism, the Roman church, the traditional defender of authority and hierarchy, in turn becomes liberal? Let's not dwell on subtle inquiries. The Church's policy towards the democratic-liberal state was defined many years ago in [Louis] Veuillot's famous response to the evil liberal who was amazed that a Catholic of orthodox and rigid lineage should become a sectist of heretical freedom: "In the name of your principles, I declare it to you; in the name of mine, I deny it to you." In complete agreement with Veuillot, the Catholics of this time do not demand the freedom of teaching except where they have to fight against secularism. Where the teaching is not secular but Catholic, the Church categorically excommunicates the free school.

Of course, this fact does not in itself devalue the "freedom of teaching.” But it helps us to understand the relativity and the convention of this formula, in whose defense the archaic custodians of Tradition and not a few knights errant of Utopia agree in various ways. Let's see the fate of the works of these renovators.

II

France offers us an interesting case in this regard. Who doesn't know something about the movement of the compagnons of the New University? This movement was born in the trenches. It was a phenomenon of demobilization. Many university students and combat teachers, shaken by the excitement of war and victory, returned from the front animated by a vigorous eagerness for renewal. They felt destined for the construction of the New University. In the compagnons of ancient France, in the workers of the cathedrals of the Middle Ages, they looked for inspiration and models. The new University designated, in its spirit and in its intention, the building of the whole teaching and the whole school. The compagnons intended to completely reorganize public education. And to completely remake, at school, French democracy. The war had made them heroic and strong. The war had given them combative will and revolutionary élan. "It is necessary”—they wrote—"to rebuild the house from the foundations to the roof. Do not get your hopes up, teachers. It is necessary to innovate everything, unite and cement everything. Ideas, programmes, methods and recruitment need to be redone. It is better to help us than to oppose the force of inertia: to help us organize our reform than to impose your experience on us. Your experience is your tradition and your tradition dies with the Great War. Let's be clear. It is not the teachers of 1900 who will make the France of 1950."

How to carry out this reform? "The new doctrine," replied the "comrades,” "wants a new institution. Between the omnipotent and centralizing state, indifferent to interior lives, and the powerless, isolated, embittered citizens, it is necessary to introduce a middle ground: the association, the corporate organization. Between the State and the individual, it is necessary to corporate education, all education, primary, secondary, higher, professional, corporation in each region, as well as, between the centralized and abstract capital and the departments, others that the new provinces prepare for us. Next to a political parliament, which is an anachronism, and a revolutionary syndicalism, which is an unknown, we want to create new powers. We don't want that past and we don't want that violent future. We do not want life to be fixed on political formulas, nor to rush into instinctive triggers. We want it to be organized into a corporation."

This program of the compagnons, although it proclaimed the shortcoming of the Parliament and advocated the reorganization of education on a syndicalist basis, was far from being a revolutionary program. A similar disqualification of the parliament came, without effort, from not a few government men of Europe. Walter Rathenau, for example. Rathenau precisely, in his outline of the new State, posed the need to create the educating State as an organism distinct from the economic state and the political state. The "comrades" at the New University seemed to find everything wrong with teaching, but only with teaching. Its awareness of France's problems was too general, too corporate. Educated in the school of democracy, they kept all their superstitions. They had not managed to get rid of almost any of their prejudices. "We want a democratic education. Ours really wasn't, even if it tried very hard to look like it." Thus wrote these reformers evidently full of good and wholesome intentions, but no less evidently naive as to the means of translating them into acts. They did not find out how, once the teaching corporation was organized, their program could be implemented. They were pleased to make this observation: "The State has failed in its effort to make and centralize everything, asking nothing of the individual but his obedience and submission. Its immense enterprise of management has surpassed its strengths and capabilities, but it has not given up on his pretensions. That is why today, instead of acting as a stimulant, it is often an obstacle and the interests whose protection it has been entrusted with languish. This is a general phenomenon." Were the compagnons waiting for a voluntary abdication of the state in favor of their union? Did they think that the state, out of love for pure democracy, would end up depositing in their hands the power to reform education?

History, in any case, had a very different course. The Victory elections handed that power in 1919 to the politicians of the national bloc, drunk with chauvinism and authoritarianism. And these politicians, in the government, absolutely did not take into account the generous plans of the supporters of the New University, crossed out a priori for their concomitance with the ideas of men like Edouard Herriot and Ferdinand Buisson, then in disgrace. Léon Bérard reformed secondary education, without consulting the friendly compagnons, not in the democratic sense that they advocated but in a conservative sense, in accordance with the tastes of the reactionary and aristocratic fauna. The national bloc was already preparing to move on to the reform of primary education when the voters, tired of their dominance, decided to throw them out of the government. But neither did last year's elections inaugurate the democratic era envisaged by the compagnons. These elections elevated to the presidency of the cabinet an eminent normalist, a friend of the New University, a supporter of the single school. But he was put in front of too many urgent problems. And Herriot could not devote much time to teaching.

Reviewing the battle of the compagnons, C. Freinet recently wrote the following in a French magazine: "The Comrades of the New University are not a force, that is, they are not capable of imposing their points of view. And this depends on the fact that they have not been able to organize the unity of the teacher corps. They had established, in all its details, the plan of the future cathedral. But they have lacked the compagnons who had to edify stone on stone. And it could not be otherwise, for it was in the name of dying principles that it called the workers to action."

III

In Germany, the revolution created a favorable situation for educational reform. It invited the teachers and pedagogues—in whom a new consciousness had been maturing since before the war, especially with regard to elementary and post-elementary education—to try out its most daring ideals. The revolution had overthrown the old regime. On its ruins, it was going to raise a new building. In teaching, as in all fields, the renewal could be total. The Weimar Constitution was inspired by the mentality and ideology of the most conspicuous reformers of the German school. It established compulsory and free popular education up to the age of 18. It proclaimed the right of the most capable to secondary and university education. It admitted the principle of freedom of teaching.

But even in theory this principle did not gain full acceptance in Weimar. The new German constitution carefully demarcates its boundaries. A commentator on this chapter of the Weimar Charter specifies this limitation as follows: "In fact, what the Constitution guarantees in this declaration of Article 142 is that the State will ensure that every citizen and every child is guaranteed the education that he believes is in accordance with his philosophical concepts and with his religion or that parents deem necessary, and also, that teachers educate in accordance with their science and conscience, without breaking those same particular concepts. But there is also a limit to this, since the constitution mandates that efforts be made in all schools to develop, in the spirit of German nationality and the reconciliation of peoples, moral education, civic feelings, personal and professional value. That is to say, that there are philosophical concepts whose teaching does not fit within the constitution, which sets specific purposes for it, and the purposes marked by this provision coerce the freedom of teaching in a great way." (School Reform in Germany. Reading Edition. "Contemporary Education" Series).

On the other hand, it is interesting to note that the greatest innovations of the German educational reform have been those carried out in primary and complementary education: "the work school,” "the school community", etc. In this sector the will to renewal has found many collaborators.

And the reformation has progressed, above all—as the book I have just quoted highlights—in Saxony, Thuringia and Hamburg. That is, in the states where the political influence of socialists and communists has prevailed.

The spirit of the old regime has persisted at the University. Energetic and courageous minorities of teachers and students have tried to replace it with the spirit of the new Germany. But the University has remained the citadel of reaction. The University and the Republic have not managed to understand each other. And there has been no shortage of those who declare a temporary closure of the Universities of the Reich indispensable for the health of the republican regime. All this despite the principle of freedom of teaching sanctioned in Weimar.

IV

The freedom of teaching is therefore nothing but a fiction. It is a utopia that history ejects. The State, whatever it is, cannot give up the direction and control of public education. Why? For the notorious reason that the state is the organ of the ruling class. It has, therefore, the function of conforming education with the needs of this social class.

The State school educates contemporary youth in the principles of the bourgeoisie. The religious denominations have adapted their teaching to the same principles. In all conflicts between the interests of the ruling class and the method or ideas of public education, the State intervenes to restore the balance in favor of the former. It is only in periods when the aims of the State and of the School are intimately and regularly concerted that the illusion of an autonomy, spiritual and intellectual at least, of teaching is possible.

The avant-garde men of Spanish-América should not fall in love with a mirage. They must sink their gaze into reality. Every mental effort to conceive of the apolitical school, the neutral school, is in vain. The school of the bourgeois order will remain a bourgeois school. The new school will come with the new order. The most reliable proof of this truth is offered to us by our time. The crisis of education coincides universally with a political crisis.

Teaching and the Economy

On intellectual and manual labor in education.³

I

The problem of education cannot be well understood because it is not considered as an economic problem as well as a social problem. The error of many reformers has resided in their abstractly idealistic method, in their exclusively pedagogical doctrine. Their projects have ignored the intimate interplay between economics and education and have sought to modify the latter without knowing the laws of the former. Therefore, they have not succeeded in reforming anything except to the extent that economic and social laws have allowed them.

The debate between classics and modernity in education has been no less governed by capitalist development than the debate between conservatives and liberals in politics. Public education programs and systems have depended on the interests of the bourgeois economy. The realistic or modern orientation, for example, has been imposed, first of all, by the needs of industrialism. It is not for nothing that industrialism is the peculiar and substantive phenomenon of this civilization that, dominated by its consequences, claims more technicians than ideologists and more engineers than rhetoricians from the schools. When Rabindranath Tagore, looking with his Eastern eyes at capitalist civilization, discovers that it has made man a slave of the machine, he does not reach an exaggerated conclusion.

II

But these consequences of capitalism have generally not provoked, on the part of intellectuals, an effort inspired by an effective purpose to restore the balance between the moral and the material. The intellectuals, for the most part, have played the game of reaction. They have not known how to oppose the present except in the name of the past. Permeated with a conservative spirit and an aristocratic mentality, they have supported, directly or indirectly, the same ideas of the heirs or successors of the feudal regime. They have subscribed to its old and simple recipe for idealism: classical studies.

And the decadent European bourgeoisie, without realizing that it was adopting a thesis contrary to its historical function, has sought in this recipe a remedy for its ills. It has combined classical teaching with realistic teaching. It has differentiated the education of its politicians and literati from the education of its engineers and merchants. Politics and literature, powerless to govern the economy, have thus become infected with rhetoricians and humanists whose work has been one of the most active agents of the contemporary crisis, which is characterized precisely by a series of contradictions between politics and economics.

Georges Sorel in one of the chapters of his book The Ruin of the Ancient World denounced the parasitism of literary talent as one of the most serious causes of the corruption of the enlightened classes. "The parasitism of literary talent—writing—has not ceased to fester over Europe and it does not seem that it will disappear; it changes forms, but it is fed by a very powerful tradition that boasts very ancient and very unique principles of education.”

The modern experience of classical studies absolutely does not accredit the thesis or, rather, the dogma that attributes to them the privilege of forming idealistic and superior spirits. The idealism they engender is a reactionary idealism. An idealism that is contrary to or alien to the direction of history and that, consequently, lacks any value as a force for human renewal and elevation. Lawyers and literati coming from the faculties of Humanities have almost always been much more immoral than technicians coming from the faculties and institutes of Science. And the practical and theoretical activity of the latter has followed the course of economics and civilization, while the practical, theoretical or aesthetic activity of the former has frequently contrasted it, to the influence of the most vulgar conservative interests and feelings. On the other hand, the value of science as a stimulant of philosophical speculation cannot be ignored or disregarded. The atmosphere of ideas of this civilization surely owes to Science much more than to the Humanities. Classicism, in short, has not looked so much at Greece as at Rome. In Latin or so-called Latin countries, above all, it has striven to maintain the cult of Roman rhetoric and law. And of what Romanism specifically represents in our time, the new Hispanic-American generation, to whom these articles are addressed, finds an exact and thorough explanation in Italy. Italian fascism totally inspires its theory and its praxis in Roman history. Moreover, it is supposed to be predestined to resurrect the Roman Empire.

The conservative tendency of classicism in teaching has long been clarified. The leftists, consciously or instinctively, have always opposed an excessive restoration of classical studies, although, in truth, this opposition was born, rather than from a clear revolutionary orientation, from that optimistic positivism, staged and discredited today, which expected science to solve all human problems.

Among the thinkers of socialism, Georges Sorel has undoubtedly been the one who has best perceived the mechanism of the conservative influence of classical studies. Sorel has formulated his thought this way: "The child does not know how to observe or observes badly; it is necessary, therefore, to instill in him habits of observation, and that should be the main concern of the teacher. As a result of this natural vice, we have a constant tendency to misunderstand principles, to allow ourselves to be deceived by false reasons, to content ourselves with vulgar and unscientific explanations. But classical education develops these defects of our nature in enormous proportion and we can expect a state that I call a state of ideological dissociation, in which we have lost the sense of the reality of things. When education is directed towards a practical end, when it aims to lead us to occupy a place in economic life, that deplorable result cannot be achieved in a complete way. Ideological dissociation not only makes sophisms easily acceptable, but also prevents us from exercising any criticism on our intellectual operations; it is, therefore, very favorable to that inversion of elective functions that allows us to justify all our actions. It develops a monstrous selfishness that subordinates all consideration to the desires of our appetite and makes us appreciate the resources put at our disposal as a feeble tribute paid to our talent. In the economic environment we can claim an equal share socially to our work; but by ideological dissociation we get out of the economic environment: we claim a share in relation to our talent, that is, we intend to bear on production what we appreciate to be in relation to the dignity of our ingenuity."

III

The proponents of classicism make almost all of their doctrine rest on a rigid and dogmatic basis. They claim that philology and classical rhetoric, the only generators of idealism, are also the best discipline for intelligence. But these assertions are not absolutely proven. Authorized modern pedagogues, who cannot be accused of revolutionary sectarianism, confuse them with valid reasons, nourished by their professional observation. Albert Girard, president of the compagnons of the New University, polemicizing with the supporters of Latin to the extreme, writes the following: "Undoubtedly this discipline is excellent; but who proves to us that others were not equally valuable? The inferior results of the section without Latin are objected to. But first of all, excellent students are found there, and if they are rarer today than before, isn't it because the best ones are promoted to the Latin sections? Who knows what would be gained by equal recruitment? Even if, in this case, the modern section were to be revealed as inferior, one would still have to wonder if it was not because the methods for teaching living languages are still further from perfection. The modern section, either by its recruitment or by its methods, has still not yet reached the end of its educational possibilities. Are we entitled by this to conclude hastily against it? Scientifically this is impossible. Nothing proves that the faculties of the mind cannot be exercised by analogous means; and thus realize one of the conditions of the unity of culture."

These essentially technical points of view are echoed by the educators who have created a new type of secondary school in Germany: the Deutsche Oberschule. "The supporters of this type of school believe that the Greek-Latin culture has no educational privilege, that young Germans can find in a more direct, more popular and more democratic way, in the same country where they were born, a culture equal to that of any other secondary education institution." (The School Reform in Germany by M.P. Roques).

IV

The solidarity of the Economy and Education is revealed, concretely, in the ideas of the only educators who have truly set out to renovate the school. [Johann Heinrich] Pestalozzi, [Friedrich] Froebel, etc., who have really worked for a renovation, have taken into account that modern society tends to be, above all, a society of producers. The modernists’ conception of teaching is substantially modern. The School of Labor represents a sensibility of workers. The capitalist state has been careful not to adopt it and fully actualize it. It has limited itself to incorporating "educational manual work" into primary education—classroom teaching. It has been in Russia that the School of Labor has been elevated to the forefront in educational policy.

In Germany the tendency to try it has been based mainly on the socialist predominance of the time of the revolution.

It is particularly illustrative and symptomatic that this reform has emerged in the field of primary education. This fact clearly shows us that, dominated by the spirit of their proponents, secondary education and university education still constitute an unfavorable terrain for any attempt at renewal and little sensitive to the new economic reality.

A modern concept of the school places in the same category manual labor and intellectual labor. The vanity of the stale humanists, nourished by Romanism and aristocratism, cannot be reconciled with this leveling. Despite the repugnance of these men of letters, the School of Labor is a genuine product, a fundamental conception of a civilization created by labor and for labor.

V

How does this question arise in Our América [Nuestra América]? The people on this continent who think and talk with less originality about American problems, already manifest a certain frivolous inclination to recommend to us the principles of the [León] Bérard reform and the [Giovanni] Gentile reform. Part of the incoherent and disoriented deliberation of the respective section of the last Pan-American Scientific Congress is a vote calling for the extension or restoration of Latin in secondary education. It is to be feared, in short, that the managers of public education in Our America, not satisfied with the experience of the methods inherited from Spain, which have so effectively hindered the development of the Hispanic-American economy, consider it necessary to graft a little of Bérard brand or Gentile brand classicism into the chaotic and inorganic teaching programs of these peoples.

But the new men of Hispanic-América should not turn their backs on reality. Our América needs more technicians than rectors. The development of the Spanish-American economy requires a practical and realistic orientation in teaching. Classicism would not create better mental and moral aptitudes. (This idea, in the last analysis, turns out to be a new reactionary superstition). Instead, it would sabotage the formation of greater industrial and technical capacity.

The Teachers and the New Currents

On the role of teachers in socialist political strategy.⁴

I

No category of intellectual workers appears so naturally destined to give their adhesion to new ideas as that of primary school teachers. In my previous articles, I have referred, more than once, to the class spirit that distinguishes and separates primary education from secondary and higher education. The school, because of this spirit, not only differentiates the bourgeois class from the poor classes in culture and in life. It also differentiates the teachers of one class from the teachers of the other. The primary teacher feels close to the people. The teacher of the Lyceum or the University feels themselves inside the bourgeoisie. It is also in primary education that the pure type, the professional type of educator, is generally produced. The primary teacher is only a teacher, they are only a teacher, while the Lyceum or University teacher is, at the same time, literary or political. Secondary and university teaching, both by its function and by its structure, tends to create a conservative bureaucracy

In the Hispanic-American countries, especially in the less evolved ones, this difference is accentuated and deepened. Dilettantism dominates in secondary and university teaching. The university professor, above all, is simultaneously a lawyer, a parliamentarian, a latifundista. The chair constitutes a mere station of their daily life. Teaching is a supplement or an intellectual complement to their practical, political, forensic or commercial activity. The primary teacher, meanwhile, even if only modestly and imperfectly, always has a professional life. Their education and their environment disconnect him, on the other hand, from the selfish interests of the conservative class.

The Hispanic-American primary teacher comes from the people, more specifically, from the petty bourgeoisie. The Normal School prepares and educates them for a self-sacrificing function, without ambitions of economic well-being. It allocates them to give poor children the elementary education—free and compulsory—from the State, the normalist knows, in advance, that the State will poorly remunerate their fatigue. Primary education—education for the proletariat—proletarianizes its officials. The State condemns its teachers to a perennial pecuniary constraint. It almost completely denies them any means of economic or cultural elevation and closes off any prospect of access to a higher category. On the one hand, teachers lack the possibilities of economic wellbeing; on the other hand, they lack the possibilities of scientific progress. Their studies at the Normal School don't make it through the doors of the university. Their fate can confine them to a primitive village where they will vegetate darkly, at the mercy of a cacique or a deputy, without books or magazines, segregated from the cultural movement, devoid of elements of study.

In the spirit of these intellectual workers, alien to all commercial longing, all economic careerism, the ideals of the foragers of a new social state easily catch on. Nothing ties them to the interests of the capitalist regime. Their life, their poverty, their work, confuses them with the proletarian mass.

It is to these workers, sensitive to revolutionary emotion and open to innovative ideas, that the vanguard’s intellectuals and students should therefore turn. The vanguard will recruit more and better elements in its ranks than among the pedantic professors and literary egotists who command the official representation of Intelligence and Culture.

II

We have many and very reliable proofs of the sensitivity of educators to the yearnings for social renewal. The normal schools have supplied socialism with a conspicuous number of organizers and conductors of both sexes. Ramsay MacDonald, for example, has been a preceptor. In Italy I have found in the highest ranks of the proletariat countless male and female teachers. I have observed the same phenomenon in France. Several educators of revolutionary affiliation collaborate at Clarte. The magazine L'Ecole Emancipée, organ of the Federation of Education, directed by a group of young teachers, has the same affiliation. The students of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris have recently been the first to respond to the hysterical fascist boasts of the students of the reactionary faculty of law of the Sorbonne, disciples of the monarchist writers of "L'Action Francaise.”

The movement of the Comrades of the New University itself reveals the body of French educators as having a state of mind full of restlessness. This movement has been indecisive in its means, diffuse in its propositions, but categorical in its desire for renewal. It has not been able to break with tradition and, in particular, with conservative interests. It has not managed to free itself from the bourgeois superstitions nested in the psychology and mentality of its animators. But it has clearly declared his adherence to the idea of a social democracy, of a true democracy, although it has not managed to define the way to realize it.

The doctrine and the pedagogical method of [Johann Heinrich] Pestalozzi and [Friedrich] Froebel—nourished by the feelings and inspired by the needs of a civilization of producers—have had, as it is remarked in the light of contemporary experience, a profound revolutionary significance.

And the education reformers in Germany have also come out of the ranks of educators.

III

The idea held by the compagnons de l'Université Nouvelle that a new teaching organization should be, technically at least, the work of a union, in which all categories of teachers are grouped, is not in itself a misconception. It is so when it assumes that a revolution in education can be operated within the framework of the old social order. It is so when it places the teachers' union, or the teaching corporation, on a higher and different level from other workers' unions. In order for educators to be able to reorganize teaching on a new basis, it is necessary that they first know how to be a union, to move like a union, to function like a union. And it is necessary that they know how to understand the historical solidarity of their corporation with the other corporations that are working to reorganize, on new bases as well, the entire social order.

This question should be the subject of the dialogue of vanguard intellectuals with vanguard educators. (In the teachers' corporation the existence of a vanguard is evident, it is undoubted). The program of a comprehensive university reform would be incomplete if it did not understand the demands of this corporation. University studies should be opened to graduates of the Normal School. The fences that isolate primary teachers from the University, blocking them within the rigid confines of primary education, must be broken down. Let the normalists enter the University. Not to gentrify their classrooms, but to revolutionize them. Here is a beautiful program for the youth of Hispanic América, for the Latin American Union. To differentiate the university problem from the school problem is to fall into an old class prejudice. There is no university problem, independent of an elementary and secondary school problem. There is a problem of public education that covers all its compartments and includes all its grades.

IV

The modest teacher, the obscure teacher of the worker's and peasant's child needs to understand and feel their responsibility in creating a new order. Their work, depending on its direction, can hasten and facilitate it or it can delay it. This new order will ennoble and dignify the teacher of tomorrow. It has, therefore, the right to the adhesion of the teacher of today. Of all the human victories, it is the teachers who, to a large extent, get the credit. For all human defeats, on the other hand, they are to a large extent responsible. The servitude of the school to a provincial cacique does not only weigh on the dignity of those who learn. It weighs, first of all, on the dignity of those who teach. No honest teacher, no young teacher, who meditates on this truth, can be indifferent to its suggestions. Nor can they be indifferent to the fate of ideals and of men who want to give society a more just form and civilization a more human meaning.

United Teaching and Class Teaching

On class tracking in education.⁵

I

One of the contemporary aspirations that the organizers of the Latin American Union should incorporate into their program is, in my opinion, that of united teaching. In the tendency to united education, all the other tendencies of the adaptation of public education to the currents of our time are resolved and condensed. The idea of the united school is not, like the idea of the secular school, essentially politically inspired. Their roots, their origins, are absolutely social. It is an idea that has germinated on the soil of democracy; but it has been nourished by the energy and thought of the poor layers and their demands.

Education, in the democratic-bourgeois regime, is characterized, above all, as a class education. The bourgeois school distinguishes and separates children into two different classes. The proletarian child, whatever their ability, has practically no right, in the bourgeois school, but to an elementary education. The bourgeois child, on the other hand, regardless of their ability, has the right to secondary and higher education. Teaching, in this regime, is therefore in no way useful for the selection of the best. On the one hand, it stifles or ignores all the intelligences of the poor class; on the other hand, it cultivates and credentials all the mediocrities of the rich classes. The offspring of a rich man, new or old, can conquer, however microcephalous and stolid he may be, the degrees and the brevets of official science that most suit or attract him.

This inequality, this injustice—which is nothing but a reflection and a consequence, in the world of education, of the inequality and injustice that rule in the world of economics—have been denounced and condemned, first of all, by those who fight the economic and bourgeois order in the name of a new order.

But they have also been denounced and condemned by those who, without caring about the fate of proletarian and socialist demands, are concerned with the means of renewing the spirit and structure of public education. Reformist educators sponsor the united school.

And the politicians and theorists of bourgeois democracy themselves recognize and proclaim it as a democratic ideal. [Édouard] Herriot, for example, is one of its supporters.

These words belong to [Charles] Péguy, a notable and honest democrat, inscribed in his program for the compagnons of the New University: "Why the inequality in education and culture; why this social inequality; why this injustice; why this iniquity; why higher education almost closed; why high culture almost forbidden to the poor, the miserable, the children of the people? If only secondary education were monopolized, there would be only a lesser evil; but in France and in modern society it is the almost inevitable path to ascend to higher education, to high culture.”

II

In Germany, where, as I have already remarked, the revolution of 1918 inaugurated an era of renewing experiments in teaching, the united school was placed at the forefront of reform. The idea of the united school appeared to be consubstantial and in solidarity with the idea of a social democracy. Examining the general principles of school reform in Germany, one of its critics writes in a book quoted in one of my previous articles: "The motto of the reformers is that of the Einheitschule. As the name implies, the Elnheltschule is a unitary school system. The democratic idea does not allow one to maintain in society watertight compartments, castes. Individuals are free and equal and everyone has the same right to develop through culture. Children should therefore be educated together in the communal school; there should be no schools for the rich and schools for the poor. After a few years of common instruction, the child's abilities are revealed and a differentiation and multiplication of schools into upper elementary schools, technical schools and classical or modern lyceums must then begin. But it will not be by the fact of birth or fortune that the child is sent to this or that kind of school; everyone will attend that one in which, given their natural dispositions, they can bring their faculties to the maximum of development."

The plan of the reformers of public education in Germany mistook the highest degrees of culture for the most capable. It conceived primary and complementary studies as a means of selection. And, in its effort to save all the intelligences entitled to a chosen destiny, it did not even grant a definitive value to this selection. They considered it necessary that mediocre secondary school students could be returned to popular schools and that the communication from one compartment of the teaching to another was not to be interfered with in any way.

But the success of this educational reform was not independent of the success of the political revolution. The educational reformers in Germany could draw up these plans and outline these systems thanks to the assumption of power by the socialists. Its program of equality in public education managed to be implemented thanks to the fact that its proletarian mass party, interested in its implementation, governed Germany. The reaction in politics had to bring with it the reaction in teaching.

III

The compagnons of the l'Université Nouvelle of France also advocate, with a wealth of reasons, the democratization of education through the united school, aimed at abolishing class privileges. The united school is the first and the most essential of their demands. But they make the mistake of supposing that this reform, or rather this revolution, can be carried out indifferently to politics. They support the singular school "to mix in the same family of brothers the mass of the French of tomorrow, to give them all the same social religion, and also so that the selection of the intelligences, an essential operation to the life of a democracy, is exercised on the whole of our children, without distinction of origin.” The compagnons have the ingenuity to believe that the bourgeoisie can, almost willingly, give up its privileges in public education.

Contemporary history, meanwhile, offers too much evidence that the unique school will be reached only in a new social order. And that, as long as the bourgeoisie retains its current positions of power, it will also retain them in education.

The bourgeoisie will never surrender to the eloquent moral reasons of the educated and the thinkers of democracy. An equality that does not exist at the economic and political level cannot exist at the cultural level either. This is a logical leveling within a pure democracy, but absurd within a bourgeois democracy. And we are aware that pure democracy is, in our times, an abstraction.

Practically and concretely, it is only possible to speak of bourgeois or capitalist democracy.

[Anatoly] Lunacharsky is the first minister of public instruction who has fully adopted the principle of the united school. Does this historical fact say nothing to the pedagogues who work on the same principle in capitalist democracies? Among the statesmen of the bourgeoisie, the united school will find more than one Platonic lover. You won't find anyone who knows and can marry it.

IV

In our America, as in Europe and as in the United States, education obeys the interests of the social and economic order. The school technically lacks net orientations; but, if it is not mistaken in something, it is in its function as a classroom school. Especially in the economically and politically less evolved countries, where the class spirit is usually, brutally and medievally, a caste spirit.

Culture is an even more absolute privilege of the bourgeoisie in our América [nuestra América] than in Europe. In Europe, the state has to give, at least, a formal satisfaction to the democrats who demand fidelity to their democratic principles. Consequently, it grants some students in the free and compulsory school of the poor the means to climb the secondary and university education grades. In these countries the scholarships do not have the same purpose. They are exclusively a favor reserved for the clientele and the bureaucracy of the ruling party.

The very thinkers of the Spanish-American bourgeoisie who are most concerned about the cultural future of the continent do not take care to disguise, in terms of teaching, their class feelings. Francisco García Calderón, in a chapter of his book The Creation of a Continent about education and the environment, after pondering, with French restraint, the advantages and the defects of a realistic orientation and an idealistic orientation of teaching and after balancing prudently between one and the other tendency, arrives to this conclusion: "In short, a double movement of culture of the upper classes and popular education will transform the Spanish-American nations. The instruction of the multitude in arts and crafts schools, the numerical superiority of engineers, farmers and merchants over lawyers and doctors; specialists in all orders of administration, cultivators of serious culture, a trained elite in universities, poets and prose writers the result of severe selection—such is the ideal for our democracies."

Let us correct this. Such, undoubtedly, is the ideal of the "enlightened" bourgeoisie of Latin América and of its distinguished thinker. This is absolutely not the ideal of the new Ibero-American generation. García Calderón,—unequivocally conservative in his ideology, in his temperament, in his intellectual formation—, wants culture to continue to be monopolized, with a little more method, by the "upper classes.” For the "crowd" he asks only for a little popular education. The ultimate goal of the people's education should be, in his concept, the schools of arts and crafts. The author of The Creation of a Continent unmistakably militates in the enemy ranks of the united school.

The new Hispanic-American generation thinks differently. This is clearly witnessed by the vanguard nuclei of Mexico, Argentina, Uruguay, etc. They are accredited by Popular Universities and student concerns. The balanced recipe of García Calderón can serve for an ideology of external use by the conservative bourgeoisie. It is foreign to the thought and spirit of the youth of Hispanic América.

1. José Carlos Mariátegui, “Introducción a un estudio sobre el problema de la educación pública,” Mundial, May 15, 1925, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/temas_de_educacion/paginas/introduccion%20a%20un%20estudio.htm.

2. José Carlos Mariátegui, “La libertad de la enseñanza,” Mundial, May 22, 1925, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/temas_de_educacion/paginas/la%20liberta%20de%20la%20ensenanza.htm.

3. José Carlos Mariátegui, “La enseñanza y la economía,” Mundial, May 29, 1925, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/temas_de_educacion/paginas/la%20ensenanza%20y%20la%20economia.htm.

4. José Carlos Mariátegui, “Los maestros y las nuevas corrientes,” Mundial, May 22, 1925, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/temas_de_educacion/paginas/los%20maestros.htm.

5. José Carlos Mariátegui, “Enseñanza única y enseñanza de clase,” Mundial, June 5, 1925, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/temas_de_educacion/paginas/ensenanza%20unica.htm.