Antonio Gramsci 1916
Men or machines?
Unsigned, Piedmont edition of Avanti!, 24 December 1916, under
the banner "Socialists and Education."
The brief discussion which was held at the last council meeting
between our comrades and some representatives of the majority,
on the subject of vocational education programmes, deserves some
comment, however brief and succinct. Comrade Zini’s
observations (“There is still a conflict between the humanistic
and vocational currents over the issue of popular education: we
must endeavour to reconcile these currents, without forgetting
that a worker is above all a man, who should not be denied the
possibility of exploring the widest realms of the spirit, by
being enslaved from his earliest youth to the machine.”) and
Councillor Sincero’s attacks against philosophy
(philosophy finds people opposed to it especially when it states
truths that strike at vested interests) are not just isolated
polemical episodes: they are necessary clashes between people
representing fundamentally opposed interests.
1. Our party has still not settled on a concrete education
programme that is in any way different from traditional
ones. Until now we have been content to support the general
principle of the need for culture, whether it be at an elementary,
or secondary-technical or higher level, and we have campaigned in
favour of this principle and propagated it with vigour and
energy. We can state that the reduction in illiteracy in Italy is
due not so much to the law on compulsory education, as to the
intellectual awakening, the awareness of certain spiritual needs
that socialist propaganda has succeeded in arousing amongst the
ranks of the proletariat in Italy. But we have gone no further
than that. Education in Italy is still a rigidly
bourgeois affair, in the worst sense of the word. Grammar
schools and higher education, which are State-run and hence
financed from State revenues, i.e. by the direct taxes paid by the
proletariat, can only be attended by the children of the
bourgeoisie, who alone enjoy the economic independence needed for
uninterrupted study. A proletarian, no matter how intelligent he
may be, no matter how fit to become a man of culture, is forced
either to squander his qualities on some other activity, or else
to become a rebel and autodidact – i.e. (apart from some notable
exceptions) a mediocrity, a man who cannot give all he could have
given had he been completed and strengthened by the discipline of
school. Culture is a privilege. Education is a privilege. And we
do not want it to be so. All young people should be equal before
culture. Using the funds of all citizens, the State should not be
financing the education of the children of wealthy parents no
matter how mediocre or deficient they may be, while it excludes
even the most intelligent and capable children of
proletarians. Grammar-school and higher education should be open
only to those who can demonstrate that they are worthy of it. And
if it is in the public interest that such forms of education
should exist, preferably supported and regulated by the State,
then it is also in the public interest that they should be open to
all intelligent children, regardless of their economic
potential. Collective sacrifice is justified only when it benefits
those who are most deserving. Therefore, this collective sacrifice
should serve especially to give the most deserving children that
economic independence they need if they are to devote their time
to serious study.
2. Members of the proletariat, who are excluded from grammar
schools and higher education as a result of the present social
conditions – conditions which ensure that the division of labour
between men is unnatural (not being based on different capacities)
and so retards and is inimical to production – have to fall back
upon the parallel educational system: the technical and vocational
colleges. As a result of the antidemocratic restrictions imposed
by the State budget, the technical colleges, which were set up
along democratic lines by the Casati ministry, have undergone a
transformation that has largely destroyed their nature. In most
cases they have become mere superfetations of the classical
schools, and an innocent outlet for the petty-bourgeois mania for
finding a secure job. The continually rising entrance fees, and
the particular prospects they open up in practical life, have
turned these schools too into a privilege. Anyway, the
overwhelming majority of the proletariat is automatically excluded
from them on account of the uncertain and random life which the
wage-earner is forced to lead – the sort of life which is
certainly not the most propitious for fruitfully following a
course of study.
3. What the proletariat needs is an educational system that is
open to all. A system in which the child is allowed to develop and
mature and acquire those general features that serve to develop
character. In a word, a humanistic school, as conceived by the
ancients, and more recently by the men of the Renaissance. A
school which does not mortgage the child’s future, a school that
does not force the child’s will, his intelligence and growing
awareness to run along tracks to a predetermined station. A school
of freedom and free initiative, not a school of slavery and
mechanical precision. The children of proletarians too should have
all possibilities open to them; they should be able to develop
their own individuality in the optimal way, and hence in the most
productive way for both themselves and society. Technical schools
should not be allowed to become incubators of little monsters
aridly trained for a job, with no general ideas, no general
culture, no intellectual stimulation, but only an infallible eye
and a firm hand. Technical education too helps a child to blossom
into a man – so long as it is educative and not simply
informative, simply passing on manual techniques. Councillor
Sincero, who is an industrialist, is being too meanly bourgeois
when he protests against philosophy.
Of course, meanly bourgeois industrialists might prefer to have
workers who were more machines than men. But the sacrifices which
everyone in society willingly makes in order to foster
improvements and nourish the best and most perfect men who will
improve it still more – these sacrifices must bring benefits to
the whole of society, not just to one category of people or one
class.
It is a problem of right and of force. The proletariat must stay alert, to
prevent another abuse being added to the many it has already suffered.