3. EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS AND POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS.
By Francesco Spoltore
The Federalist, 1994, Number 1
No national school system today succeeds in guaranteeing the transmission of culture, training for the new professions and promotion of scientific education adequate to the requirements of the new society. This situation, as we have seen, is bringing all countries to start profound scholastic reforms which are moving towards a greater integration of national educational systems in a broader international and global edu-cational network. We are, in other words, entering a new phase in the history of education, in which the powers of various levels of government in scholastic matters, and the characteristics and functions of school, are once more coming into discussion. In the past such transformations have already been seen in the history of education, particularly western, at the level of cities, regions or states. Today we are on the threshold of the creation of a world education system.
From urban to national education.
In the eleventh and twelfth centuries the task of providing a broader secular education was undertaken on by the cathedral schools (particularly in France), under bishops and abbots; these, starting from their embryonic forms in the sixth and seventh centuries, spread rapidly to satisfy the need for learning and scholarship in the period of lively economic and intellectual activity which followed the European renaissance of the tenth century. In almost the same period, under the impulse of the social forces of commercial Europe which were leading students to seek appropriate professional training, a completely new educational institution was born, the universitas: this was typically corporate in character, and its chief aim was not to impart all knowledge, but only that part of knowledge useful to specific professions.6 This organization of the education system proved insufficient on its own to meet the growing needs first of Italian renaissance society and then of European renaissance society. Thus there be
gan to spread, starting from the cities, some permanent scholastic institutions, not reserved only for nobles: these were organised into different levels of instruction from small boys up to adults, and based on the teaching of humanistic culture for practical ends. European cities, unlike oriental ones, thus began to integrate into their urban fabric a new structure and a new function. In addition to the city walls, which were built for defensive purposes, the shops and squares, which were indispensable for carrying on commercial functions, and religious buildings, European cities began to include buildings specifically for public education. Up until the nineteenth century, that is until the advent of the Napoleonic state and the spread of the industrial revolution, scholastic institutions remained substantially under the control of civic institutions. But by the end of the nineteenth century, the majority of children in Europe and America were already studying the history of the birth of their nations and
of their national heroes and were learning to write, read and speak the national language. This type of instruction became widespread, during the same period, in the Balkans and Russia. In the twentieth century, with the spread of the nation-states control over the upper levels of secondary education above all in continental Europe a class of leading cadres was formed, educated to be loyal to the national power and national interests.
This educational model began to enter in crisis in western Europe at the end of the Second World War, but became more established however in the USSR and in the US until the end of the Cold War. Today it survives in Asia, and in the educational systems which the states born of the disintegration of the ex-Soviet empire are trying to organize.
The end of the age of national education.
With the progressive loss of military and economic sovereignty in European countries, and with the profound social transformations introduced by the scientific mode of production, the national character of education has become an obstacle to overcome on the road to forming a new type of citizen. In less than fifty years, the dominant figure in advanced society has changed from being the peasant to the worker, from the worker to the technician, and from the technician to the student: today the European Union numbers over sixty million students and four million teachers. For this reason too, the European Union has indicated the creation of the European citizen as the chief objective to be followed by the schools of the European Union. An objective clearly in contradiction with the educational systems which for years developed with a view to forming good English, German, French and Italian citizens, but which obviously cannot reduce themselves to merely replacing national education with European nationalistic e
ducation. The increased heterogeneity of society, increasingly multiracial, multireligious, multilingual, the economic mobility and the birth of professional profiles which by now only make sense if they are recognized internationally, present every school system with a choice: either to close in on itself in defence of anachronistic national and/or local traditions, or to accept the challenge of a cosmopolitan education. In the past, when the protection of fundamental human rights was not yet guaranteed constitutionally in the majority of countries, the first road was followed by all those minorities in a city or a nation who sought, through the institution of independent schools with a predominantly denominational character, to defend traditions, language and religion. Examples of this can be found in the Anglo-Saxon world, in the schools which emerged in American cities in the nineteenth century on the initiative of groups of immigrants who wanted to safeguard their Jewish, Catholic, national or other ori
gins, or in the most expensive British independent schools, which were established and developed to maintain the elitist training of a minority of society.7 The nation state, mythologizing the history, linguistic tradition and common origins of the populations who lived in it, extended to the national community the educational systems which had been typical, up until the last century, of only small minorities or elites. The definitive victory of the nation states in affirming in the scholastic field the exclusivity and superiority of their respective national cultures is, as the historian Hobsbawm has shown, a relatively recent phenomenon, and in practice coincides with the national administrations winning control over secondary education towards the end of the last century. The internationalisation of the production system and the revolution in the communication of information, now available to all in virtually the same moment, has torn away the nationalist veil which had prevented recognition of the limits
of the education system founded on the exaltation of national culture and scientific discoveries and on the exaltation of national monolingualism. Today the mission of the school can no longer be seen as the transmission of a national or sub-national ideological, linguistic or cultural creed. The mission of the school is increasingly identified with the task of balancing a cosmopolitan training with the need to connect and harmonise school and educational policies from the town to the international level.8
The age of cosmopolitan education.
It is a frequently-neglected fact that educating people is a difficult process. As Kant has noted, "man can become man by education alone. He is merely what education makes of him. It is worth noticing that man is only educated by other men, and by men who in their turn have been educated. Were some being of higher nature than man to undertake the task of our education, we should then be able to see what man might become. It is however difficult accurately to estimate mans natural capabilities, since some things are imparted to man by education, while other things are only developed by education. Were it possible, by the help of those in high rank and through the united forces of many people, to make an experiment on this question, one might even by this means be able to gain some information as to the degree of eminence which it is possible for man to attain. (But... those in high rank generally care only for their own concerns, and take no part in the important experiment of education.)"9 The scientific mo
de of production is finally forcing people and institutions to occupy themselves more and more with the "experiment of education", on pain of risking the decline of civilization. But this is still happening more in consideration of the present world than of the future world and of the destiny of mankind. In this connection, Kant notes how parents usually bring their children up with a view to them taking their place in the present world, and only so that they should succeed. On the other hand, Kant adds, he who rules the state takes education to heart only from the point of view of the transformation of subjects into docile instruments to pursue their own plans. "Parents think of home, the princes of the State. Neither the ones nor the others have as final objective the universal good and the perfection for which mankind is destined and they are gifted. And yet the concept of an educational plan must have a cosmopolitan bent. Does this perhaps mean that the universal good is an idea which can harm the partic
ular good? By no means. Because even if it may seem that it is necessary to sacrifice something to it, thanks to this idea one also works better for the present good. Good education is the true source of all the good in this world." These intuitions may finally become reality as a result of the need for all people to take account of the value of cosmopolitanism in an era in which the global dimension of problems, in particular those of ecology and of peace, daily takes on very visible and dramatic connotations.
As regards content, there is now an almost unanimous consensus on the fact that we must adapt the average level of education of all citizens to the degree of advancement of the great cultural disciplines.10 This implies that new generations should learn to have simultaneously a physical and biological image of the world they have inherited and of that which they will leave to future generations; that they should have a vision of the historical process from the point of view of the human species as a whole, and not of any particular national tribe; and finally, that they should acquire a basic knowledge of the mechanisms which govern individuals political and economic behaviour and the elements through which they can retrace the difficult path followed by mankind to create a rational vision of the universe in which it lives. As regards institutions, since education must become the instrument through which all the citizens of a state must learn to cooperate with the citizens of other states, rather than to hat
e and fight them, school will be one of the principal fields of application of the coordination of national policies.
