Universal state provision for education is not a natural feature of society. The West managed long and contentedly with a provision that left a large minority of the public more or less illiterate. (A side note. Beware of statistics from the period. They consistently underrate the peasant class' acquaintance with documents and writing. Peasants had many reasons to disguise any learning they might have; in France, for instance, educated peasants might be subjected to onerous public duties. But at decisive moments such as the revolt of Wat Tyler in 1381, significant episodes show that peasants could tell the difference between genuine, ancient charters in Anglo-Saxon script and falsified modern ones imposing duties unknown to the earlier items; a quite sophisticated kind of knowledge one would have thought restricted to lawyers and scribes. Nonetheless, there can be no doubt that most of the labouring classes in pre-revolution Europe did not read and write, nor feel much need for it.)
What changed everything was the French Revolution. Building on ideas that had already become prevalent, and that had been partly realized in America, the French Revolution established a new model of government built upon the proposition that all adult male citizens (later, all adult citizens, period) were to be responsible parties in the governance of the country. In fact, the Revolution - which was nothing more or less than the collapse of royal governance, which left the nation to fend for itself - completely boxed the compass in terms of both forms of government and of principles; from the same set of events one can draw a model for an aristocratic republic led by an elite, for a one-party tyranny ruled by terror, and for a nationalistic and militaristic dictatorship based on mass support - what later would be called Fascism. In effect, the whole political future of Europe, in every direction, was set out in the generation between the collapse and the return of the Bourbon kings. But the one that made the most impression, that went the deepest, and that did the most to shape the future of Europe, was the republican and egalitarian model - the notion of free and responsible citizens equally involved in the governance of their native country.
This notion, to begin with, was found to develop enormous power. The world was stunned by the apparently irresistible advance of France's novel conscript armies, driving away from their own border coaltions formed by every major military power in Europe, then surging to the Rhine, and finally - under a lean Corsican adventurer with blazing eyes - ripping through Europe in every direction and humiliating every traditional army in their path. The conscript army was a new thing. Until 1789, European states hired and paid professional "standing armies" whose members were soldiers by trade and all their lives, and migbht well be found still lugging a musket at fifty or sixty if they could physically manage it; and which had no necessary connection with the country at all - France and Britain both hired foreign troops by the thousands, and half of the renowned Prussian army was not Prussian-born at all, often not even German. Apart from these professionals, some countries also had a militia, a local levy with only very basic training and that was rarely called out to fight except in the direst of emergencies. But the French revolutionary army was the strength of the whole male population of the country, yet armed and drilled by officers trained to the highest standards of the old military academies, and filled with a spirit of individual daring and collective responsibility that arose from the certainty that upon them, the citizen soldiers, rested the destiny of the country. They were as responsible for its future as their generals, and indeed there was no reason why at some point one of them should not become a general himself.
The ideal of the sovereign citizen, equal before the law and equally responsible for the country, was of course an ideal, which meant that in practice it would be possible to point to a million large and small breaches of it. But the immense military success of France after the revolution shows how practical a thing it was; it was the new spirit, the new belief in civic duty and virtue, in personal responsibility, in a direct connection between citizen and fatherland, that drove hundreds of thousands of men to enlist and train, to slog and freeze, to fight and die. A change in the idea of citizenship had meant a change in politics and an even bigger change on the battlefield.
The evident counterpart of universal citizenship is universal education. If the citizen is to be responsible for his country, he must be prepared for that responsibility, both by an understanding of his rights and duties, and by training in the suitable virtues that underlie those rights and duties. Universal elementary education was the almost immediate result of the Revolution, and remained a part of the French state ever after. It was, evidently and to everyone, the other half of the fundamental French institution of conscription, and it was correspondingly unpopular according to whether the ideas of the French Revolution were accepted or rejected. Universal elementary education was only accepted in Britain in the eighteen-sixties, in Austria and Russia even later; and Britain, Austria and Prussia all rejected the idea of the conscript army as long as they dared - in Britain it only existed from 1939 to 1958.
The purpose of elementary state-provided education, then, is to be the first half of the process which culminates in one, two or three years of military service, and which forms a citizen. Its presuppositions were that in a society which tended to be highly stratified, and in which economic and cultural forces tended to separate the members of society into highly distinct classes, a forceful and continuous intervention from the State was required to counter the effects of social status and to form, from the disparate elements of society, a number of potentially equal citizens. It must be understood that equality in this sense did not mean absence of social stratification, but rather that every citizen, rich or poor, is prepared and allowed to take a responsible role in society; that no citizen should be such as to allow a nobleman to say, as someone in Shakespeare does, "Out, dunghill!" if he dared to take an interest in public matters. But in order to do this, the natural clay of man - the clay that, left alone and to the heedless working of social forces, creates those "dunghills" that the old aristocracies were taught to despise - must be forged in a specific shape; a shape of responsibility and of at least basic education, able to read and write so as to be able to understand his duties and assert his rights.
The origin of universal education is nationalist and militaristic in nature. A peasant must be turned into a citizen, for only a citizen can and would be a conscript soldier.
But what of today, where the conscript is obsolete?
It was a heroic generation, or series of generations, worthy of an epic that perhaps has not been written yet. They created our world; without mass, standardized education, the modern world simply would never have happened, at least not as it has. But in doing so, they eventually made their own model outdated. Their time is gone. It simply is no longer true that to educate a child is to go against the grain of the society he or she lives in. The mass media, television, and the internet, have taken care of that; illiteracy, in modern societies, is for all practical purposes restricted to the criminal classes and to some groups of immigrants (by no means all). The ploughboy, even where he still exists, spends his free time on the internet, and the shepherd's boy whiles away the long hours with comics and videogames. Where once the forces of the lower half of society pulled away from all kinds of literacy, now they pull towards them. Farmers have to know how to fill forms, how to drive and repair machines, how to read textbooks in their own subjects, professional magazines, market news.
It follows that there is a crisis of legitimation for the schoolteachers. The students who want to study know that they can find out about things just as easily outside the schoolroom as inside; and those who do not are no longer subject to the discipline that once insured that they would scrape by whether they wanted to or not. And discipline, in turn, is no longer rigid, because the republican model of citizen in whose name the older generations of teachers worked and starved is no longer so certain and so admired an ideal. It has not gone away, of course, and nine parents out of ten would tell you that they want their children to grow up in something like its image. But its full force existed when it was bound up with a number of notions and experiences - the nation, the flag, the constitution, and the experience of conscription that made one a soldier in their service. These things began to be seriously criticized from the end of the first world war, and today it is difficult to even imagine, and impossible to recreate, the uniting emotional value they once had. An evident symptom of this is that the conscript armies that were once the other end of educational provision in every European country have been reformed out of existence. Most continental European countries now have professional standing armies, and I belong to the last generation that knew what it is like to spend a year or two in barracks, training for a war of great armies.
The modern teacher, now just one learning force among many in an age where her product, the citizen-soldier, is becoming more and more obsolete, must contend with the very tide of a stupefying history.
Read the rest of the blog post. I'll probably amend this post with further thoughts later.
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