Ştefan Borbély
Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
stefan.borbely@gmail.com

 

 

Utopian Schooling

 

 

Abstract: Clive Harber said that “all too often the hallmarks of conventional schooling are authoritarianism, boredom, irrelevance, frustration and alienation. Authoritarian schools are schools that reproduce and perpetuate not only the socio-economic and political inequalities of the surrounding society, but also the violent relationships that often go with them.” In Talleyrand’s words: “the end of instruction is politics. The child is an apprentice citizen.” The paper analyzes several negative perceptions associated with conventional schooling and a few alternative or utopian projects meant to improve education. The text starts from the assumption that a few forms of schooling today (see École 42, inParis, for instance) resemble what yesterday was called utopia. It is also true that practical school regulators do not like utopias…

Keywords: Schooling; Education; Utopia; Dalton Schools; Waldorf Schools; Quentin Skinner; Henry David Thoreau; Walden.

 

 

Historically speaking, utopian schooling has paralleled classical, class- and teacher-centered education, but it has benefited from a lower attention than formal instruction. It is so because formal schooling has always been associated with power and its more or less direct means of social dissemination, while alternative, utopian, innovative education relies on discrepancy, anarchy, individualism and, eventually, freedom. Another difference relies on the willingness whether to accept the child as he or she is, that is, as an innocent, special, autonomous and growing human being, or to only perceive him as an unaccomplished adult. Seminal psychohistorian Lloyd deMause (Foundation of Psychohistory; History of Childhood, etc.) has said that there have been epochs which acknowledged the existence of children, perceiving them as different from their parents, and other epochs or cultural perspectives which denied such difference, considering that the child is nothing but an adult-to-be, without any further specification. Great men of history shared this belief, alongside a vast cohort of parents whose only interest was to get rid of their noisy creatures and to yoke them by silence and discipline. Talleyrand, for instance, considered that “the end of instruction is politics. The child is an apprentice citizen.” According to the fathers of the French Revolution, the main aim of schooling is to train the child “for an occupation useful to the general public.”[1] The National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church, a British Utilitarian institution founded in 1811 proclaimed that the goal of schooling is “to discipline the infant poor to good and orderly habits,”[2] while in early modern France the schooling program explicitly formulated the task “to Christianize and to tame the children of the poor.”[3]  

Mary Jo Maines says that huge efforts were made in early modern Europeto “confiscate” education from particulars and concede it to the State, which became a formidable machine of human standardization and equalitarianism, and the fierce enemy of everyone who dared to be atypical. Due to this process, a subtle, socially approved equation built a paradoxical resemblance between school, prison and army, as their primary aim was to “tame” and discipline the subjects. The already quoted author remarked “the close connection between the particular development of the state in Germany, its military and fiscal concerns, and the development of the school system.” To achieve this, a new institution was founded, the Lehrseminarien, to the benefit of the future teachers and educators, who were such endowed with the certainties of an organized and centralized training. Mary Jo Maines remarks: “The Lehrseminarien, made obligatory for all male teachers in 1836, were designed to teach their pupils not to think independently, but to analyze new information in a safe context, to integrate it into the ordained system of values.”[4]

According to Pierre Bourdieu and his followers, the main aim of the state concerning education is to build a “cultural capital” and control it. Discipline and punish – as Foucault said. Accordingly, the classroom was organized in such a way as to express power – as well as obedience and humiliation. The French school laws of the 1830s made no exception in structuring the classroom as a ritual of receiving and obeying power. “In full view of the pupils – Mary Jo Maines summarizes the idea – [was] an image of Christ and a bust of the king, bearing the inscription Domine, Salvuum Fac Regum. The teacher’s desk was supposed to be mounted on a high platform to facilitate surveillance of the entire class.”[5] The future communist regimes repeated the pattern, hanging Lenin’s, Stalin’s and other communist leaders’ portraits in each classroom. So was the case ofRomania: I grew up having Nicolae Ceauşescu’s portrait above the front desk, whatever the place was, a school classroom or a university seminary room.

Hannah Arendt concluded that education “by its very nature cannot forgo either authority or tradition.”[6] Its very substance means staying conservative, which adds a paradox, fairly visible in every school reform of the 19^th and the 20^th centuries: the best school reformers were the conservatives. Liberal schooling was either inefficient or directly marginal and utopian. Coming to pupils, one had to choose between Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s natural, multi-sided “little monster” (gently tamed in his awfully long Émile) and the 19^th-century stiff and implacable school planners, who considered that the only role of education was to reduce the “monster” to a plausible and well-disciplined citizen. Which, we may say, can be socially useful, but it is quite boring and one-sided for the subjects involved, because it suppresses any joy, creativity or playing. Within the mass psychoses of the 19^th century (only the 20^th century had more sophisticated maladies than the previous one) school started to be associated with hierarchical anxieties, the fear generated by the urge to achieve and neurosis. Thomas Hodskin was right in saying in the 1820s: “Men had better be without education than be educated by their rules; for the education is but the mere breaking in of the steer to the yoke; the mere discipline of the hunting dog, which, by dint of severity, is made to forego the strongest impulse of his nature, and instead of devouring his pray, to hasten with it to the feet of his master.”[7] 

Toward the end of the 19^th century, two of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Untimely Mediations, On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life and Schopenhauer as Educator, dealt with education. Let’s start with the second one. Schopenhauer as Educator traces a sharp distinction between the cautious, conservative form of schooling and the formative one. The former focuses on anti-biological and anti-life techniques of pedagogical mortification, while the latter on the educator seen as a “liberator.” Mortifying educators – Nietzsche asserts – have as their goals to suppress the spontaneity of the pupils, and to mould them into valid, functional and social tools. The other word for “mortification” is discipline; each state or political power loves disciplined subjects and hates those who disobey. On the contrary, the educator who “liberates” unleashes the complex energies inside their pupils and urges them to feel that they are actually not monomaniac, but pluralistic individuals, prone to ever-generating alternative roles within a provocative and diverse environment. By the midst of the 20^th century, Herbert Marcuse had denounced the alienation of the “one-dimensional” man, referred to as “square” by Norman Mailer in his formidable The White Negro. Let’s quote, for the moment, Nietzsche: “Your true educators and formative teachers reveal to you that the true, original meaning and basic stuff of your nature is something completely incapable of being educated or formed and is in any case something difficult of access, bound and paralyzed; your educators can be only your liberators.”[8]

Nietzsche’s previously published Untimely Mediation, entitled On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, names three ways of culturally and scholarly manipulating historicity: the monumental, the antiquarian and the critical way of living and perceiving the past. Either we talk about the monuments opposed to the constructions of the present, or we mention the “antiquarian” perception of history, based on the uncritical assumption that what belongs to the past is necessarily better or more valuable than what we have in our present, both the “monumental” and the “antiquarian” forms of history suffocate the time being by continuously stuffing it with “dead” substances driven from the past. This is the perception that proclaims that our ancestors and the “dead people” who preceded us were by definition better and superior than us; it also says that the events of the past were necessarily greater than those given to us now, and that the past functions as an “almost-impossible-to-reach-now” standard, which makes us feel dwarfed and miserable. School – Nietzsche suggests – is the principal herald of such discrepancy. The past functions here as an overpowering educator, one that has got all the privileges and answers and, of course, the blessing of the disciplinary state it serves.

School tends to “over-saturate” the present with the past, Nietzsche says. As an institution belonging mainly to the “antiquarian” form of depositing and transmitting knowledge, “it knows how to preserve life, not how to engender it; it always undervalues that which is becoming, because it has no instinct for divining it.” Let’s quote him again, extensively: “The over-saturation of an age with history seems to me to be hostile and  dangerous to life in five respects: such an excess creates that contrast between inner and  outer which we have just discussed, and thereby weakens the personality; it leads an age to imagine that it possesses the rarest of virtues, justice, to a greater degree than any other age; it disrupts the instincts of a people, and hinders the individual no less than the whole in the attainment of maturity; it implants the belief, harmful at any time, in the old age of mankind, the belief that one is a latecomer and epigone; it leads an age into a dangerous mood of irony in regard to itself and subsequently into the even more dangerous mood of cynicism: in this mood, however, it develops more and more a prudent practical egoism through which the forces of life are paralyzed and at last destroyed.”[9]

Barely a century later, Clive Harber said that “all too often the hallmarks of conventional schooling are authoritarianism, boredom, irrelevance, frustration and alienation. Authoritarian schools are […] schools that reproduce and perpetuate not only the socio-economic and political inequalities of the surrounding society, but also the violent relationships that often go with them.”[10] Charles Handy – quoted by Clive Harber on the 28^th page of his provocative pamphlet – is a Professor of Business Organizations, specialized in seeing society and economy in terms of “organizational models.” Well, when analyzing the “model of organizational style specific to the British secondary school” system, he concluded that it resembled to a prison. We may remember that in the relatively recent remake of a classical movie, St. Trinian’s (2007, starring Rupert Everett, Talulah Riley, Gemma Arterton, etc.; directors: Oliver Parker and Barnaby Thompson), the Minister of Education played by Colin Firth used to be the headmaster of the national prison system, being shifted to the new assignment because of his former hardline “training.” Clive Harbor’s chapter titles are directly illuminating; let’s quote some: Authoritarian Schooling; School and Violence; Schooling as Terrorism; Schooling can make you ill; Schooling and learning to hate ‘the other’; Learning to Kill. He also concludes: “Historically, a key purpose for the creation of mass systems of formal schooling in industrializing countries was control and surveillance and preparation for subordinate roles in the workplace and wider society. This is why schooling was based on authoritarian modes of organization.”[11]

 You might remember the famous conveyor belt scene from the Pink Floyd’s The Wall movie (1982; director: Alan Parker; screenplay by Roger Waters), which accompanied the song Another Brick in the Wall. Four sets of images succeed one another. Being traumatized at school by a dictator type professor because he was writing poems during class, the protagonist named Pink sees a train carrying depersonalized, faceless humans, in a way similar to what the Nazis had done when transporting the Jews to the concentration camps, and after that the Another Brick in the Wall song scene comes, showing a totalitarian, dictatorial school, where pupils are deprived of their identity (they all finish by wearing grotesque masks), made to march and to fill standardized, colorless boxes, before finally falling into a huge, expressionist meat grinder, which transforms them into the docile “plaster” desired by the system. A fourth set of images suggest the coming countercultural revolt: the pupils rise against oppression, smashing their desks, the class furniture and everything else related to the “prison.”

It becomes easily understandable why the utopian schooling constantly challenged the traditional one, offering their fans the sense of self- and collective fulfillment they were not able to find elsewhere. In Democracy and Education (1916), John Dewey insisted on the necessity of “creative education,” starting from the Hegelian assumption that the role of the education is to construct the future, by ensuring an ever-increasing social continuity. In Hegel’s famous evolutionary model, history and civilization can be compared to an ever-growing spiral. Accordingly, the creative, rational minds make the spiral larger and larger, which means that the very essence of humanity is not so much conservation as progress. School is, in Nietzsche’s diagnosis, a conservative institution, and one cannot expect to be reformed from within. As a consequence, those who dare to contradict inertia by breaking the rules become essential to the system, especially because they carry out the negativity and revolt which are the key attitudes of any reformation.

Paulo Freire, one of the leading figures of the contemporary school emancipation, said in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1990) that the difference between traditional and innovative schooling lies in the role assigned to the teacher. The traditional system, which reproduces the formula of power, is teacher-centered, while the new way is pupil-centered, the shift being not at all easy to perform, because what is essential in this equation is not pedagogy, but the mechanism of power behind it. The role of the school is generally decided from beyond, functioning as a system of social and political persuasion which cannot be easily dismantled. Add to this the narcissistic, mirror syndrome. A good society – regulators say – is the society whose education functions smoothly. That is: any dysfunctional education mirrors back to the system which harbors it.  This is the motif – Paulo Freire says – that cautious societies love teacher-centered systems: “The teacher is the Subject of the learning process, while the pupils are the mere objects.”[12] Moreover, “the teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his own professional authority, which he sets in opposition to the freedom of the student.”[13] It is almost impossible to step further without saying that there is a certain Marxist spice in all these and other similar considerations. I have already quoted Gayatri Spivak who said that the essence of education lies in sharing or not what is “subaltern.” Similar to her, in Paulo Freire’s view, pedagogy is a “revolutionary initiative from below.”

The most common argument related to the urge that traditional schooling must be dismantled asserts that it has lost its contact with everyday life. Schools have impenetrable walls, and so have convents. Nietzsche said that the European educator and philosopher are the direct offspring of the priest, because they preach “pure” knowledge, devoid of reality, and are extremely reluctant to acknowledge what is really going on around them. The strongest myth of the European philosophical way of life is Kant: he never left Königsberg, and was so precise and ritualized even with his leisure walks that the locals could fix their watches after his daily apparitions. Another myth is that of the “learning province” (Goethe, Hesse, etc.): a fully ritualized enclosure full of smart high achievers, whose main anxiety is to keep disturbances and history outside the crystal fences of their construction. Again, Nietzsche was the pioneering figure who denounced apprentice mystification. The seemingly identitarian obsession of Classical Greece was Socrates, he said; that is, the man who separated intellect from nature (physis), telling their compatriots that thinking is more important than living. That is why you cannot see a Greek responsible person “sub tegmine fagi”: everyone stays within  the walls and is concerned with dialectics.

There are two types of utopian schooling. The first is specific to utopias and dystopias: the free and marvelous breeding of emancipated and perpetually happy children, who do not think that schooling is a burden, but a source of joy and self-realization. The second type is the practical one, directly challenging reality and its constituent system: Maria Montessori’s Casa dei bambini (1907, Rome), the Swiss Adolph Ferrière’s anti-book-based schooling, Jean-Ovide Decroly’s “project work” or Helen Parkhurst’s famous “Dalton Plan Schools,” launched in New York in 1914 after Parkhurst had spent a few months in Italy as Maria Montessori’s assistant. Several traits were shared by all these experiments, aside from the fact that they were not simple intellectual projections.

The first is plurality, starting from the assumption that children have pluralistic perceptions and even multiple personalities, due to their pluralistic role-playing. A child, Jean-Ovide Decroly said, cannot be contained into a single garment, and he cannot focus with the same attention on all the subjects taught in class. A class is an entity governed by diversity, not by uniformity; accordingly, some children can be attracted by the abstract and fascinating world of logarithms, but others might be completely opaque to such a fascinating topic, being interested in alternative disciplines like geography, humanities and even art. Decroly’s “project work” system proposed pluralistic “centers of interest,” built around flexible timing units, which is a second characteristic of this type of innovative education. Generally speaking, time is an exquisite tool for social and personal manipulation. Before reaching the calendar, time is politics. Dictators were fond of timing: those who control time control power. Caesar, for instance, launched a new calendar, the Catholic Church repeated the gesture in 1582 (that is: after the Reformation) and so did the French Revolution. In Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest the frightening Miss Ratched controls time behind the glass windows of her seemingly impenetrable booth, stopping, slowing down or hurrying the clock whenever needed. Sectioning time into pre-determined, one-hour units in school, Decroly considered, is a means of exerting despotism over students by limiting their curiosity and pleasure. To challenge time anxiety, he conceived flexible, “natural” timings for different activities, inviting pupils to “take their time,” to feel that school timing was something else than impersonal rigidity and handcuffing.

Utopian schools have been, generally speaking, experimental teaching units. In her seminal Education on The Dalton Plan (1922), Helen Parkhurst stipulated that “broadly speaking the old type of school may be said to stand for culture, while the modern type of schools stand for experience.”[14] Making school an enjoyable and playful activity was the Daltonists’ main concern. No bells, no rigid timetables, no interruptions, but flexible time units, allowing pupils to concentrate on their experiments as long as they wanted to. Personal interests are twofold in a child, Helen Parkhurst concluded: the “strong” subjects highly challenge his interest, while the “weak” ones make him vegetate. No prejudice or punishment for that, nevertheless, because experiment relies on energy, whose captions are the things and forms existing around us, which invite us to accomplish plenitude. Schopenhauer’s and Nietzsche’s ideas lie behind this invitation to roundness, plasticity and fulfillment; I do not wish to assert that Ms. Parkhurst directly read those philosophers, but merely that their ideas were “in the air,” accessible to everyone.

Focusing on energy means that we have to leave aside Locke’s idea about the allegedly initial “tabula rasa” of conscience, which is to be filled with knowledge and experience during a person’s biological evolution. On the contrary, energy is something deep, like Jung’s archetypes, which predetermines the individual, making him part of an archaic, cosmic “mould.” It is encapsulated in each person from birth, being liberated through education, experiment and – a new word from the mythical ages – initiation. Actually, there is no such thing as energy conceived as a single, unifying entity. There are series of energies, in a pluralistic world marked by discrepancy and difference. Rudolf Steiner, the father of anthroposophy, published his The Education of the Child in 1907, insisting that education should be conceived as a spiritual activity, not as a process of simply gaining knowledge through listening and memorization. The new tools of schooling are intuition, inspiration and imagination. Building up a developmental scheme for the child, structured in three successive steps (sensorial perception, imagination, judgment), Steiner insisted on the fact that “judgment” is reached through sensorial implication and imagination. When launching the firstWaldorfSchool in 1919, pupils were not ranked according to their grades and to their already accomplished results, but were grouped on criteria based on their temperament (sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic, melancholic). In a way which resembled the archaic understanding of the Indian castes, Waldorf teachers asserted that each temperament has its own particular way of attaining spiritual plenitude. Schooling was conducted by the free and playful principles of diversity, which eliminated the frustration derived from the will to level and standardize every subject.

Henry David Thoreau’s biggest dissatisfaction rose from his belief that birth had thrown him into a “dull society.” “I have lived some thirty years on this planet – he bitterly remarks in Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854) -, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors. They told me nothing, and probably cannot tell me anything.”[15] For the great majority of people, life is not liberty but “serfdom,” Thoreau sighed: they have become “serfs of the soil,” serfs of the commerce and, generally speaking, the serfs of their desire to be accepted by the others, to gain fortune and esteem. As such – Thoreau suggested – life around him resembled to a frantic track-and-field competition, which separated the victors from those who ran behind, and generated a huge amount of negativity and despair: “The mass of man lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country…”[16] 

The author did not go “to the desperate country” but to the woods, building a cabin by Walden Pond, Mass., on the remote shore of a wonderful lake, “a mile away from any neighbour,” where he spent two years and two months in a relative complete reclusion. His aim was to attain purity, simplicity and innocence in contact by directly sharing the energies and rhythms of nature.[17] Thoreau’s inspiration came from one of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous essays, Nature, published in 1836. Anticipating Nietzsche, Emerson denounced in the first lines of his text the inhibitive passion for the past his generation had: “Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories and criticism.”[18] Schools and everyday people teach us categories and words, how to label things and how to structure them into systems. But “words – Emerson wrote – are finite organs of the infinite mind. They cannot cover the dimensions of what is in truth. They break, chop, and impoverish us.” The same is valid for society as a whole, which offers us nothing more than “degradations.” The only solution is Nature, together with its unity and subtle mystery, conceived by Emerson as a “plantation of God.” Nature is twofold, material and spiritual, and so is our existence. By searching the material layers of the universe we acquire a “degraded” knowledge indicating that there is something beyond it. In order to reach above, we need a secondary, spiritual knowledge, based on symbols, on a special feeling of Platonic “beauty” and on receptive innocence: “The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eyes and the heart of the child.”[19]

B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two (1948) is a re-written, almost classical utopia, based on a generally admitted composition stereotype of many utopias, namely the travel or the visit. It can be found in different forms through all times, from the sailing to the unknown waters to the shipwreck or the immersion into an unknown cave. Thomas Morus’s Utopia is such a visit: the sailor Raphael Hythloday travels to the “New World” and tells the author about the marvellous isle he visited there. In Skinner’s novel, several academics (one of them is sharply sceptical) visit a utopian community run by one of their former colleagues, T. E. Frazier. Apart from what they expected when recalling the hippies and their filthy abandonment, the rooms and social venues in Walden Two are glamorous, the inhabitants are elegantly – but not lavishly – dressed and clean. The community is ruled by the Board of the Planners (three men, three women), which structure members into four functional branches: planners, managers, scientists and workers. Although free, they are not democratic in choosing careers. Rulers are not elected, but named, in order to avoid inappropriate or wrong nominations. There is no leisure class and no resentment or frustration, because what is negative has been removed from the community: “The main thing is, we encourage our people to view every habit or custom with an eye to possible improvement. A constant experimental attitude toward everything – that’s all we need.”[20]

By carefully planning the “cultural engineering” of the community, the rulers avoid letting it become a typically regressive, “mythical” hippy society. “Our point of view here – the host Frazier says – isn’t atavistic. […] We avoid the temptation to return to primitive modes of farming and industry.”[21] Propriety is not formally forbidden, but it is considered simply unnecessary by the members. They pay with labour credits for being there, but nobody complains: work is another word for pleasure: “We simply avoid uncreative and uninteresting work.”[22]

Childrearing and education are specific chapters in Walden Two, and are carefully planned. Infants are kept undressed in warm, community “cubicles,” with nothing around them but diapers. It might seem odd to a visitor to see the naked kids strolling around in collective “aquariums,” but the Waldensiens consider that “clothing and blankets keep the babies from exercising,”[23] and are therefore discarded. Maternal love is replaced by radiant and sincere collective tenderness, because everyone can come into the cubicles and play with the children. When growing up, kids are taught “techniques of learning,” which first of all mean practical teaching. For instance, pupils learn biology in the garden or in the woods, and anatomy in the slaughterhouse. Unnecessary, abstract knowledge is discarded, and so are the millions and millions of volumes of world literature, reduced by the planners to an “essential library.” Teaching is non-political: “Keep out of politics and away of government, except for practical and temporary purposes.”[24] Teenagers marry early and procreate immediately after their wedding, because of a thorough and minute procreation planning concerned to find the perfect match for partners. In other to avoid mistakes, the future mothers and fathers contact the Manager of Marriages, who checks their records and charts in order to identify their aptitudes. If their records do not fit (because of intellectual discrepancy, for instance, but there are also tens of similar reasons), they are advised to give up or to postpone marriage until a most suitable partner is found.

Three special characteristics of Walden Two education resonate with several ideas we have already touched upon in different sections of this paper. The community functions as an open-minded society, which says that it is opened to the surrounding world and to modernity. “Utopias usually spring from a rejection of modern life,” Frazier asserts.[25] This is not the case with Walden Two, where children are shown the big cities, technology or leisure, but they simply feel not attracted by them. On the other hand, the community does not provide or require any religious training. If they want to, the parents can teach the children about God, but it is not compulsory. Anyhow, we could imagine that God has a different representation in Walden Two than our Almighty Father from the Bible: He does not punish, does not reprimand and does not exert anxiety, functioning, wherever He shows up, somehow like a tender and soft-handed brother. Sin is unknown in Walden Two, where the Genesis is an optional, generally neglected subject to read. Another underrated school topic is history, which is “honoured in Walden Two only as entertainment.”[26] The ancestor-generated anxiety does not function in the community.

Remember, in order to sense the contrast, what Talleyrand said about education: “the end of instruction is politics. The child is an apprentice citizen.” The already quoted Stanley Aronowitz (Against Schooling. For an Education That Matters, 2008) is a master of alternative, utopian schooling, being directly involved in several non-conventional teaching institutions. His book provides details concerning a special experimental school, Park East High, opened in the basement of a Catholic Church located not far from Harlem, in New York City in the fall of 1970. The school started with no principal, and recruited its staff outside the restrictions imposed by the teachers’ union. Its aim was to provide a free, enjoyable and creative education, which meant that “classroom practice was more than supplemented by extensive use of the vast resources of the city.”[27] For instance, biology classes moved out toCentral Park. You might guess how the experiment concluded: with the arrival of a conventional principal…

 

 

Acknowledgment

This work was supported by a grant of the Romanian National Authority for Scientific Research, CNCS – UEFISCDI, project number PN-II-ID-PCE-2011-3-0061.

 

 

Notes

Ştefan Borbély
Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
stefan.borbely@gmail.com

 

 

Utopian Schooling

 

 

Abstract: Clive Harber said that “all too often the hallmarks of conventional schooling are authoritarianism, boredom, irrelevance, frustration and alienation. Authoritarian schools are schools that reproduce and perpetuate not only the socio-economic and political inequalities of the surrounding society, but also the violent relationships that often go with them.” In Talleyrand’s words: “the end of instruction is politics. The child is an apprentice citizen.” The paper analyzes several negative perceptions associated with conventional schooling and a few alternative or utopian projects meant to improve education. The text starts from the assumption that a few forms of schooling today (see École 42, inParis, for instance) resemble what yesterday was called utopia. It is also true that practical school regulators do not like utopias…

Keywords: Schooling; Education; Utopia; Dalton Schools; Waldorf Schools; Quentin Skinner; Henry David Thoreau; Walden.

 

 

Historically speaking, utopian schooling has paralleled classical, class- and teacher-centered education, but it has benefited from a lower attention than formal instruction. It is so because formal schooling has always been associated with power and its more or less direct means of social dissemination, while alternative, utopian, innovative education relies on discrepancy, anarchy, individualism and, eventually, freedom. Another difference relies on the willingness whether to accept the child as he or she is, that is, as an innocent, special, autonomous and growing human being, or to only perceive him as an unaccomplished adult. Seminal psychohistorian Lloyd deMause (Foundation of Psychohistory; History of Childhood, etc.) has said that there have been epochs which acknowledged the existence of children, perceiving them as different from their parents, and other epochs or cultural perspectives which denied such difference, considering that the child is nothing but an adult-to-be, without any further specification. Great men of history shared this belief, alongside a vast cohort of parents whose only interest was to get rid of their noisy creatures and to yoke them by silence and discipline. Talleyrand, for instance, considered that “the end of instruction is politics. The child is an apprentice citizen.” According to the fathers of the French Revolution, the main aim of schooling is to train the child “for an occupation useful to the general public.”[1] The National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church, a British Utilitarian institution founded in 1811 proclaimed that the goal of schooling is “to discipline the infant poor to good and orderly habits,”[2] while in early modern France the schooling program explicitly formulated the task “to Christianize and to tame the children of the poor.”[3]  

Mary Jo Maines says that huge efforts were made in early modern Europeto “confiscate” education from particulars and concede it to the State, which became a formidable machine of human standardization and equalitarianism, and the fierce enemy of everyone who dared to be atypical. Due to this process, a subtle, socially approved equation built a paradoxical resemblance between school, prison and army, as their primary aim was to “tame” and discipline the subjects. The already quoted author remarked “the close connection between the particular development of the state in Germany, its military and fiscal concerns, and the development of the school system.” To achieve this, a new institution was founded, the Lehrseminarien, to the benefit of the future teachers and educators, who were such endowed with the certainties of an organized and centralized training. Mary Jo Maines remarks: “The Lehrseminarien, made obligatory for all male teachers in 1836, were designed to teach their pupils not to think independently, but to analyze new information in a safe context, to integrate it into the ordained system of values.”[4]

According to Pierre Bourdieu and his followers, the main aim of the state concerning education is to build a “cultural capital” and control it. Discipline and punish – as Foucault said. Accordingly, the classroom was organized in such a way as to express power – as well as obedience and humiliation. The French school laws of the 1830s made no exception in structuring the classroom as a ritual of receiving and obeying power. “In full view of the pupils – Mary Jo Maines summarizes the idea – [was] an image of Christ and a bust of the king, bearing the inscription Domine, Salvuum Fac Regum. The teacher’s desk was supposed to be mounted on a high platform to facilitate surveillance of the entire class.”[5] The future communist regimes repeated the pattern, hanging Lenin’s, Stalin’s and other communist leaders’ portraits in each classroom. So was the case ofRomania: I grew up having Nicolae Ceauşescu’s portrait above the front desk, whatever the place was, a school classroom or a university seminary room.

Hannah Arendt concluded that education “by its very nature cannot forgo either authority or tradition.”[6] Its very substance means staying conservative, which adds a paradox, fairly visible in every school reform of the 19^th and the 20^th centuries: the best school reformers were the conservatives. Liberal schooling was either inefficient or directly marginal and utopian. Coming to pupils, one had to choose between Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s natural, multi-sided “little monster” (gently tamed in his awfully long Émile) and the 19^th-century stiff and implacable school planners, who considered that the only role of education was to reduce the “monster” to a plausible and well-disciplined citizen. Which, we may say, can be socially useful, but it is quite boring and one-sided for the subjects involved, because it suppresses any joy, creativity or playing. Within the mass psychoses of the 19^th century (only the 20^th century had more sophisticated maladies than the previous one) school started to be associated with hierarchical anxieties, the fear generated by the urge to achieve and neurosis. Thomas Hodskin was right in saying in the 1820s: “Men had better be without education than be educated by their rules; for the education is but the mere breaking in of the steer to the yoke; the mere discipline of the hunting dog, which, by dint of severity, is made to forego the strongest impulse of his nature, and instead of devouring his pray, to hasten with it to the feet of his master.”[7] 

Toward the end of the 19^th century, two of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Untimely Mediations, On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life and Schopenhauer as Educator, dealt with education. Let’s start with the second one. Schopenhauer as Educator traces a sharp distinction between the cautious, conservative form of schooling and the formative one. The former focuses on anti-biological and anti-life techniques of pedagogical mortification, while the latter on the educator seen as a “liberator.” Mortifying educators – Nietzsche asserts – have as their goals to suppress the spontaneity of the pupils, and to mould them into valid, functional and social tools. The other word for “mortification” is discipline; each state or political power loves disciplined subjects and hates those who disobey. On the contrary, the educator who “liberates” unleashes the complex energies inside their pupils and urges them to feel that they are actually not monomaniac, but pluralistic individuals, prone to ever-generating alternative roles within a provocative and diverse environment. By the midst of the 20^th century, Herbert Marcuse had denounced the alienation of the “one-dimensional” man, referred to as “square” by Norman Mailer in his formidable The White Negro. Let’s quote, for the moment, Nietzsche: “Your true educators and formative teachers reveal to you that the true, original meaning and basic stuff of your nature is something completely incapable of being educated or formed and is in any case something difficult of access, bound and paralyzed; your educators can be only your liberators.”[8]

Nietzsche’s previously published Untimely Mediation, entitled On thhose philosophers, but merely that their ideas were “in the air,” accessible to everyone.

Focusing on energy means that we have to leave aside Locke’s idea about the allegedly initial “tabula rasa” of conscience, which is to be filled with knowledge and experience during a person’s biological evolution. On the contrary, energy is something deep, like Jung’s archetypes, which predetermines the individual, making him part of an archaic, cosmic “mould.” It is encapsulated in each person from birth, being liberated through education, experiment and – a new word from the mythical ages – initiation. Actually, there is no such thing as energy conceived as a single, unifying entity. There are series of energies, in a pluralistic world marked by discrepancy and difference. Rudolf Steiner, the father of anthroposophy, published his The Education of the Child in 1907, insisting that education should be conceived as a spiritual activity, not as a process of simply gaining knowledge through listening and memorization. The new tools of schooling are intuition, inspiration and imagination. Building up a developmental scheme for the child, structured in three successive steps (sensorial perception, imagination, judgment), Steiner insisted on the fact that “judgment” is reached through sensorial implication and imagination. When launching the firstWaldorfSchool in 1919, pupils were not ranked according to their grades and to their already accomplished results, but were grouped on criteria based on their temperament (sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic, melancholic). In a way which resembled the archaic understanding of the Indian castes, Waldorf teachers asserted that each temperament has its own particular way of attaining spiritual plenitude. Schooling was conducted by the free and playful principles of diversity, which eliminated the frustration derived from the will to level and standardize every subject.

Henry David Thoreau’s biggest dissatisfaction rose from his belief that birth had thrown him into a “dull society.” “I have lived some thirty years on this planet – he bitterly remarks in Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854) -, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors. They told me nothing, and probably cannot tell me anything.”[15] For the great majority of people, life is not liberty but “serfdom,” Thoreau sighed: they have become “serfs of the soil,” serfs of the commerce and, generally speaking, the serfs of their desire to be accepted by the others, to gain fortune and esteem. As such – Thoreau suggested – life around him resembled to a frantic track-and-field competition, which separated the victors from those who ran behind, and generated a huge amount of negativity and despair: “The mass of man lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country…”[16] 

The author did not go “to the desperate country” but to the woods, building a cabin by Walden Pond, Mass., on the remote shore of a wonderful lake, “a mile away from any neighbour,” where he spent two years and two months in a relative complete reclusion. His aim was to attain purity, simplicity and innocence in contact by directly sharing the energies and rhythms of nature.[17] Thoreau’s inspiration came from one of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous essays, Nature, published in 1836. Anticipating Nietzsche, Emerson denounced in the first lines of his text the inhibitive passion for the past his generation had: “Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories and criticism.”[18] Schools and everyday people teach us categories and words, how to label things and how to structure them into systems. But “words – Emerson wrote – are finite organs of the infinite mind. They cannot cover the dimensions of what is in truth. They break, chop, and impoverish us.” The same is valid for society as a whole, which offers us nothing more than “degradations.” The only solution is Nature, together with its unity and subtle mystery, conceived by Emerson as a “plantation of God.” Nature is twofold, material and spiritual, and so is our existence. By searching the material layers of the universe we acquire a “degraded” knowledge indicating that there is something beyond it. In order to reach above, we need a secondary, spiritual knowledge, based on symbols, on a special feeling of Platonic “beauty” and on receptive innocence: “The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eyes and the heart of the child.”[19]

B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two (1948) is a re-written, almost classical utopia, based on a generally admitted composition stereotype of many utopias, namely the travel or the visit. It can be found in different forms through all times, from the sailing to the unknown waters to the shipwreck or the immersion into an unknown cave. Thomas Morus’s Utopia is such a visit: the sailor Raphael Hythloday travels to the “New World” and tells the author about the marvellous isle he visited there. In Skinner’s novel, several academics (one of them is sharply sceptical) visit a utopian community run by one of their former colleagues, T. E. Frazier. Apart from what they expected when recalling the hippies and their filthy abandonment, the rooms and social venues in Walden Two are glamorous, the inhabitants are elegantly – but not lavishly – dressed and clean. The community is ruled by the Board of the Planners (three men, three women), which structure members into four functional branches: planners, managers, scientists and workers. Although free, they are not democratic in choosing careers. Rulers are not elected, but named, in order to avoid inappropriate or wrong nominations. There is no leisure class and no resentment or frustration, because what is negative has been removed from the community: “The main thing is, we encourage our people to view every habit or custom with an eye to possible improvement. A constant experimental attitude toward everything – that’s all we need.”[20]

By carefully planning the “cultural engineering” of the community, the rulers avoid letting it become a typically regressive, “mythical” hippy society. “Our point of view here – the host Frazier says – isn’t atavistic. […] We avoid the temptation to return to primitive modes of farming and industry.”[21] Propriety is not formally forbidden, but it is considered simply unnecessary by the members. They pay with labour credits for being there, but nobody complains: work is another word for pleasure: “We simply avoid uncreative and uninteresting work.”[22]

Childrearing and education are specific chapters in Walden Two, and are carefully planned. Infants are kept undressed in warm, community “cubicles,” with nothing around them but diapers. It might seem odd to a visitor to see the naked kids strolling around in collective “aquariums,” but the Waldensiens consider that “clothing and blankets keep the babies from exercising,”[23] and are therefore discarded. Maternal love is replaced by radiant and sincere collective tenderness, because everyone can come into the cubicles and play with the children. When growing up, kids are taught “techniques of learning,” which first of all mean practical teaching. For instance, pupils learn biology in the garden or in the woods, and anatomy in the slaughterhouse. Unnecessary, abstract knowledge is discarded, and so are the millions and millions of volumes of world literature, reduced by the planners to an “essential library.” Teaching is non-political: “Keep out of politics and away of government, except for practical and temporary purposes.”[24] Teenagers marry early and procreate immediately after their wedding, because of a thorough and minute procreation planning concerned to find the perfect match for partners. In other to avoid mistakes, the future mothers and fathers contact the Manager of Marriages, who checks their records and charts in order to identify their aptitudes. If their records do not fit (because of intellectual discrepancy, for instance, but there are also tens of similar reasons), they are advised to give up or to postpone marriage until a most suitable partner is found.

Three special characteristics of Walden Two education resonate with several ideas we have already touched upon in different sections of this paper. The community functions as an open-minded society, which says that it is opened to the surrounding world and to modernity. “Utopias usually spring from a rejection of modern life,” Frazier asserts.[25] This is not the case with Walden Two, where children are shown the big cities, technology or leisure, but they simply feel not attracted by them. On the other hand, the community does not provide or require any religious training. If they want to, the parents can teach the children about God, but it is not compulsory. Anyhow, we could imagine that God has a different representation in Walden Two than our Almighty Father from the Bible: He does not punish, does not reprimand and does not exert anxiety, functioning, wherever He shows up, somehow like a tender and soft-handed brother. Sin is unknown in Walden Two, where the Genesis is an optional, generally neglected subject to read. Another underrated school topic is history, which is “honoured in Walden Two only as entertainment.”[26] The ancestor-generated anxiety does not function in the community.

Remember, in order to sense the contrast, what Talleyrand said about education: “the end of instruction is politics. The child is an apprentice citizen.” The already quoted Stanley Aronowitz (Against Schooling. For an Education That Matters, 2008) is a master of alternative, utopian schooling, being directly involved in several non-conventional teaching institutions. His book provides details concerning a special experimental school, Park East High, opened in the basement of a Catholic Church located not far from Harlem, in New York City in the fall of 1970. The school started with no principal, and recruited its staff outside the restrictions imposed by the teachers’ union. Its aim was to provide a free, enjoyable and creative education, which meant that “classroom practice was more than supplemented by extensive use of the vast resources of the city.”[27] For instance, biology classes moved out toCentral Park. You might guess how the experiment concluded: with the arrival of a conventional principal…

 

 

Acknowledgment

This work was supported by a grant of the Romanian Natio