McClintock's Essay

< Back to table of contents

Toward a Place for Study in a World of Instruction

Robbie McClintock

Institute for Learning Technologies
Teachers College — Columbia University
December 2000


 

Section 4 — A World of Instruction
¶ 51
 		 Since the mid-eighteenth century, the Comenian vision has been progressively actualized. A complicated constellation of causes, many of which began working in the Renaissance or before, helped to create the present world of paternal instruction. A hasty rehearsal of the more salient of these will show how our reliance on teaching has behind it a powerful impetus. 
 
¶ 52
 		 During the late seventeenth century, European population, especially in the north, declined as the result of the recurrent demographic pressures, which were caused by the ineluctable positive checks that Malthus described -- poor climate, epidemic, war, and famine. Around 1700, demographic advance again got underway, and despite occasional halts and minor regressions, it is still going on. [ 49 ] The population of Europe is estimated to have been about 110 million in 1720, 210 million in 1820, 500 million in 1930, and 614 million in 1968. [ 50 ] A general rise in per capita wealth accompanied the increase in population; and since the demand for formal education is partly a function of the wealth people command, a growing percentage of the growing population in Europe has been seeking formal education. This fast acceleration in the demand for education fostered increased reliance on the pedagogical agency of mass production, the instructional program of the school.
 
¶ 53
 		 At the same time that the demographic expansion increased the demand for education, it made the school a more convenient educational agency and weakened the effectiveness of certain long-standing alternatives to the school. Europeans had long before cleared their meager complement of the world's land, and consequently the growth of population meant an increase in its density: larger cities, more towns, fewer areas of rural isolation. Population per square mile in Western Europe in 1720 was 92, in 1820, 150, in 1930, 247, and in 1968, 306. The figures for those years for the British Isles were 66, 173, 406, and 488. In the Netherlands, population density was 231 in 1840, 480 in 1914, and almost one thousand in 1966. [ 51 ] With this growth in density, the day school became a more feasible, efficient, and convenient institution, for even most rural areas were sufficiently well populated to sustain schools without grave problems of transportation. The same increase in population density and growing ease of travel that made the school more feasible had the opposite effect on the school's major competitor, apprenticeship, for young people, having put in a year or two learning the skills of their trade, found it increasingly easy to then jump their contracts, a la Rousseau, and to melt into the sea of people, ready to earn a living without having to work off their debts to their teachers. [ 52 ] 
 
¶ 54
 		 Over time, these demographic causes greatly increased the reliance on schools as the main agency of education. Other causes contributed to transforming the school from a place of study into a means of instruction. Such was the effect of diverse philosophical and psychological developments. Lockean empiricism, especially as it was developed in France by the sensationalists and ideologues, gave rigor to the view that man was a teachable animal, for it held that ideas and intellectual qualities were not inborn, but that these were etched into the receptive human slate by the hand of experience. With packaged experiences, the school could etch fine minds and upstanding characters. [ 53 ] Nor was empiricism the only metaphysic to hold such a view; similar results came from quite different tendencies in German thought. On the one hand, Herbartian realism postulated the conditioned formation of mind as a person's subjective phenomenal awareness was continually disrupted by the interventions of objective realities; the claim that experimental psychology should be the scientific base for instructional technique rests primarily on Herbart's philosophy. [ 54 ] On the other hand, absolute idealists such as Fichte avoided postulating the perfect solipsism, towards which they tended, by pointing to the practical effect of language conditioning, observing how each ego became locked into a definite community by the inevitable acquisition of one or another mother tongue, its concomitant culture, its characteristic style of life and thinking; this theory of language conditioning provided the theoretical basis for developing national systems of education, that is, education for and through a nationality. [ 55 ]
 
¶ 55
 		 As these divergent theories of man all coincided in depicting him as highly teachable, a number of divergent historic visions all concurred in requiring that men be taught paternally. In the mid-eighteenth century, spokesmen for the state and its prerogatives began to see that investment in the training of the population was a good way to increase the power of the state. Whatever its result, the intent behind the Landschulreglement that Frederick the Great instituted in Prussia in 1763 was to increase the power of the state by improving the productive skills of the people and sharpening the acumen of prospective officers and civil servants. Likewise, raison d'état was the rationale for the educational reforms imposed by Joseph II in Austria in the 1780s. In his attempt to institute compulsory, secular education, he stressed an elementary and secondary training that would improve the productivity of the population and carefully limited higher education so as not to produce a flock of underemployed, meddlesome intellectuals. [ 56 ] 
 
¶ 56
 		 Others, who advocated pedagogical programs not much different from those of Frederick the Great or Joseph II, did so with quite different motives, yet despite these differences, the motives all led to a paternal pedagogy. One rationale came from the spreading fascination with the possibility of progress: day by day, so it seemed, men were discovering ever better ways to order their affairs, and if some agency such as the school could systematically disseminate this knowledge, men could look forward to steady, unlimited improvement in the quality of life on earth. Such was the vision inspiring educational planners like Condorcet. Another view, closely related to the progressive, might be called the philanthropic; here men like Robert Owen and Johann Pestalozzi looked to schooling, not only as a means of ensuring continuous future improvement, but, further, as a means of correcting the human degradation that presently resulted from economic exploitation and social dislocation. Still another view, which could partake of both the progressive and the philanthropic, was that of the political idealists; thus one found both French revolutionaries and German patriots who resisted Napoleonic domination arguing that the educator must train the perfect citizen of the perfect polity. [ 57 ] In these ways, statists, progressives, philanthropists, and political idealists all looked to a system of compulsory instruction and state influence in higher education as an important, positive means of implementing their historic visions. Add to this the fact that most everywhere those who controlled dynamic industrial wealth were easily convinced that educational reform would be to their economic interest, and one should not be surprised that universal, compulsory schooling has indeed become universal.
 
¶ 57
 		 Once these systems of schooling were set up, secondary causes began to work, making the schools increasingly places for instruction, rather than for study. Whatever the rationale behind it, the principle of compulsory schooling automatically put the student in a subservient relation to his teachers, and it became most difficult to maintain the conviction that the student provides the motive force of the whole process. The principle of compulsion proclaimed to each and every person that there was something essential that he must allow one or another school to do to him between the ages of six and sixteen. Such a proclamation did not encourage initiative on the part of the student, but it did give the professional educator a very strong mandate and considerable responsibility to shape his wards according to one favored pattern or another. Thus, a large teacher corps has come into being in every Western country; it is accorded professional status and is charged with a clear-cut mission: it must produce, and in order to produce, it must assert initiative. Student servility is an integral function of professional accountability in compulsory systems of schooling.
 
¶ 58
 		 As the principle of compulsion and the drive towards professionalism both decreased the student's initiative and increased the reliance on instruction, so too did the ancillary functions that were added on to the instructional system once it came into being. One such function was the practice of making school attendance and performance the basic means of certifying the competence of people in every Western society. With this practice the student has not only become legally subservient to his teachers for the better part of his early years, he has also become socially and economically dependent on them, and on his ability to perform as they command, for the general outline of his life prospects. As communities come to rely on schools to certify the competencies of their people, they project onto those schools a productive mission to mold mechanically the populace; and students, who have increasingly seen schooling as a huge machine for stamping them with success or failure, have acquiesced, eagerly or hopelessly according to their prospects, and have been content to be taught. Consequently, the social uses to which an apparatus of instruction could be put reinforced the single-minded reliance on instruction within that apparatus. From this stemmed the following paradox: at no time in the West have there been greater resources for self-education available to all than in the twentieth century, yet at no time has there been more extensive reliance on formal instruction for the education of all. 
 

 

 

 

Endnotes
Note 49 For a good, brief discussion of this turning point, see K. F. Helleiner, "The Vital Revolution Reconsidered," in D. V. Glass and D.E.C. Eversley, eds. Population in History: Essays in Historical Demography, London: Edward Arnold Publishers, 1965, pp. 79-86. [Back]
Note 50 W. Gordon East, "The Historical Background," in George W. Hoffman, ed. A Geography of Europe, 3rd ed. New York: The Ronald Press, 1969, p. 83. [Back]
Note 51 Figures for Western Europe (France, Low Countries, and Luxembourg) and for the British Isles are from Ibid., p. 83; for the Netherlands, from Guido G. Weigand, "Western Europe," in Ibid., p. 250. For comparison, population density in the United States was 5.5 in 1820, 41.2 in 1930, and 56 in 1968. Colonial population in 1720 is estimated to have been about 466,000 in comparison to the 110,000,000 for Europe. [Back]
Note 52 For Rousseau's apprenticeship, see Les Confessions, in Oeuvres complètes. Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1959, Vol. I, pp. 30-44. [Back]
Note 53 For an excellent study of the ideologues, see Sergio Moravia. Il tramonto dell'illuminismo: Filosofia e politica nella società francese, 1770-1810. Bari: Editori Laterza, 1968, esp. pp. 315-444. [Back]
Note 54 On Herbart, see Fritz Seidenfaden. Die Pädagogik des Jungen Herbart. Weinheim: Verlag Julius Beltz, 1967; Arthur Bruckmann. Pädagogik und philosophisches Denken bei J. Fr. Herbart. Zurich: Morgarten Verlag, 1961; and Alfredo Saloni. G. F. Herbart: La vita -- Lo svolgimento della dottrina pedagogica, 2 vols. Florence. La Nouva Italia Editrice, 1937. [Back]
Note 55 See for the basic conception, Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Addresses to the German Nation, trans. R. F. Jones and G. H. Turnbull. Chicago: The Open Court Publishing Co., 1922. Fichte was not the originator of inquiry into the relation between language and the idealistic ego; the history of the subject is dealt with in great detail by Brune Liebrucks. Sprache und Bewusstein, 5 vols. Frankfurt: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft, 1964 ff. [Back]
Note 56 See A. V. Judges, "Educational Ideas, Practice and Institutions," in A. Goodwin, ed. The American and French Revolutions, 1763-1793 (The New Cambridge Modern History, Vol. VIII). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1965, esp. pp. 167-9. [Back]
Note 57 For Condorcet and other French examples, see Frank E. Manuel. The Prophets of Paris. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965; H. C. Barnard. Education and the French Revolution. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1969; E. Allain. L'Oeuvre scolaire de la Revolution, 1789-1902. New York: Burt Franklin, 1969; and Paul Arboursse-Bastide. La doctrine de l'éducation universelle dans la philosophie d'Auguste Comte. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1957. For the Owenites and other English figures, see John F.C. Harrison, ed. Utopianism and Education: Robert Owen and the Owenites. New York: Teachers College Press, 1968; and W.A.C. Stewart and W.P. McCann. The Educational Innovators, 1750-1880. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1967. For political idealism in Germany, see the excellent study by Andreas Flitner. Die politische Erziehung in Deutschland: Geschichte und Problem, 1750-1880. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1957. [Back]