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Article Excerpt
[section]1. ...One may say, in general, that in modern civilization all practical activities have become so complex and the sciences (1) so intertwined with life that each practical activity tends to create a school for its own administrators and specialists and, hence, to create a group of advanced specialist intellectuals to teach in these schools. Thus, alongside the type of school that may be called "humanistic"--namely, the oldest traditional type of school whose purpose it was to develop in each individual human being an as-yet-undifferentiated general culture, the fundamental power to think and to find a direction in life--a whole system of special schools is being created at various levels for entire vocational branches, or for professions that are already specialized and precisely defined.
Indeed, one may say that the educational crisis raging today is linked, precisely, to the fact that this process of differentiation and specialization is taking place chaotically, without clear and precise principles, without a carefully studied and consciously established plan. The crisis of the curriculum and organization of the schools--that is, of the general orientation of a policy for the formation of modern intellectual cadres--is, to a great extent, an aspect and a complication of the more general and comprehensive organic crisis.
The fundamental division of schools into classical and vocational was a rational scheme: the vocational school for the instrumental classes, the classical school for the dominant classes and the intellectuals. The development of an industrial base in both city and country increased the need for the new type of urban intellectual: the technical school (vocational but not manual) was developed alongside the classical school. This, in turn, called into question the very principle of the concrete pursuit of general culture, of the humanistic pursuit of general culture based on the Graeco-Roman tradition. This pursuit, once questioned, can be said to be destroyed, since its formative capacity was largely based on the general and traditionally unquestioned prestige enjoyed by a particular form of civilization.
The tendency today is to abolish every type of school that is "disinterested" (not motivated by immediate interests) and "formative"; or else, to leave only a scaled-down specimen of such a school for a tiny elite of gentlemen and ladies who need not bother with preparing themselves for a future career. The tendency is to continue propagating specialized vocational schools in which the student's destiny and future activity are predetermined. The crisis will have a solution, which, logically, should be along the following lines: to start with, a common school of general, humanistic, formative culture that properly balances the development of the capacity for working manually (technically, industrially) with the development of the capacities for intellectual work. From this type of common school, the students, having gone through repeated tests in vocational orientation, would move on to one of the specialized schools or to productive work.
One must bear in mind the growing tendency of every practical activity to create for itself a special school, just as every intellectual activity tends to create its own cultural associations. These associations assume the function of post-scholastic institutions that specialize in setting up the conditions that enable one to keep abreast of advances made in one's field of expertise. One may also point out that, increasingly, decision-making bodies tend to separate their activity into two "organic" aspects: the deliberative activity, which is of the essence to them; and the technical-cultural activity wherein questions that need to be resolved are first examined by experts and analyzed scientifically. The latter activity has already created an entire bureaucratic corps of a new structure; for in addition to the specialized bureaus of experts who prepare the technical materials for the deliberative bodies, a second body is created, made up of functionaries who are, more or less, disinterested "volunteers" selected from industry, banking, and finance companies.
This is one of the mechanisms by which the career bureaucracy ended up controlling the democratic regimes and parliaments; the mechanism is now extending itself organically and it is absorbing within its circle the great specialists of private enterprise, which thus controls regimes as well as bureaucracies. This is a necessary, organic development that tends to integrate personnel specialized in political technique with personnel specialized in the concrete problems of administering the essential practical activities of the great and complex societies of modern nations. Any effort to exorcise these tendencies from the outside is, therefore, futile; it only gives rise to moralistic sermons and rhetorical jeremiads.
One must consider the question of modifying the training of the technical-cultural personnel, completing their culture in keeping with the new exigencies, and of developing new types of specialized functionaries so that, collectively, they would complement deliberative activity. The traditional type of political "leader," whose only training was for juridical-formal activities, is becoming anachronistic and represents a danger to the life of the State: the leader must possess that minimum of general technical culture that will enable him, if not to independently "produce" the right solution, at least to assess the solutions proposed by the experts and then choose the correct one from the "synthetic" viewpoint of political technique....
An important issue that needs to be examined when dealing with the practical organization of the common school concerns the various school grades that correspond to the age and the intellectual-moral development of the students and the goals that the school strives for. The common school, or the school of humanistic formation (with "humanism" understood broadly, and not just in the traditional sense) or general culture, should aim to insert young people into active life after bringing them to a certain level of maturity, of intellectual and practical creative ability, and of an independent sense of direction and initiative. The fixing of the age for compulsory education depends on the general economic conditions; for the economic conditions may make it necessary to demand of youngsters and of children some immediate productive contribution. The common school depends on the ability of the State to underwrite the expense of the schoolchildren's maintenance currently borne by the family; in other words, it transforms the budget of the nation's ministry of education from top to bottom, complicating it, and enlarging it to an unprecedented degree.
The whole function of educating and forming the new generations becomes public instead of private, because only thus can it embrace all the generations without divisions of group or caste. This transformation of scholastic activity, however, requires an unprecedented expansion of the practical organization of the school system; that is, of buildings,...
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