13
Introduction
It is sometimes suggested that education should be kept out of politics. This is an impossible demand because education necessarily involves making choices, such as who should be educated and what should be taught, and these choices are determined by values, including political values. Part of the purpose of this chapter will be to see how political ideas have influenced the history of educational ideas.
Perhaps the strongest political values influencing education throughout the world today are those connected with fairness, equality and democratic government. However, this age of democracy is a recent development which emerged gradually. Throughout the nineteenth century there was a steady growth in educational opportunity and in political enfranchisement in the West. In England during the eighteenth century, schools had been regarded as largely middle-class institutions, with some notable exceptions. In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, very few working-class children in England had access to schools of any kind. One of the reasons for increasing the number of elementary schools and later for the establishment of secondary schools was the idea that every man (and eventually every woman) had the right to vote and to participate in the government of the country; they should also have the right to education, not least so that the electorate should be educated and informed. Such democratic values did not go unchallenged, but they were accepted and developed by Robert Owen (1771-1858) for example, who not only preached the gospel of socialism but built schools for children of the workers in his factory in New Lanark. In his day Owen's ideas were seen as eccentric or even revolutionary - certainly a threat to established order. During the twentieth century in England, democracy has been accepted by all major political parties, although, as we shall see, they might define it differently. In the nineteenth century, classical liberal thought was laissez faire rather than democratic; conservatism only reluctantly accepted the extension of the franchise, still tending to look back nostalgically to a world which never really existed, where everyone knew their place in a feudal or semi-feudal society.
By the end of the First World War (1918) it seemed that democracy was the dominant political ideology in the West, if not in the whole world, but two points should be noted. First, democracy often failed to be practised in schools which retained many nineteenth-century features. Second, there were various anti-democratic movements in Europe that not only held back the development of democratic education but also presented ideological visions of education to be striven for. The first part of this chapter will be concerned with democracy and education; the second part will discuss the communist vision of education in the USSR, fascist policies on education in Italy and Nazi versions of totalitarian education in Hitler's Germany.
Democracy and Education
In a series of books, Brian Simon1 has shown the relationship between the development of education in England and the slow growth of democratic practices from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Raymond Williams has theorised, especially in The Long Revolution,2 about the development of democratic education and the various kinds of resistance to it. We will not attempt to summarise that narrative in this chapter, except to note once again the fact that education was lagging behind other democratic developments, and probably still is. We should not be surprised by this: education is to some extent necessarily backward-looking, being concerned partly with cultural heritage, and is also conservative in many of its practices.
T.H. Marshall3 also discussed the development of democratic institutions in terms of three elements in his appropriately titled essay 'Citizenship and Social Class: civil, political and social'. Marshall put the elements in that order deliberately, giving an 'elastic'framework of civil in the eighteenth century, political in the nineteenth and social in the twentieth century. Civil rights, such as freedom of speech and thought, property rights and the right to justice came before the political right to vote and to participate in government. Finally, Marshall defined 'social' as rights to economic welfare and social heritage - 'to live the life of a civilised being'. The right to education was clearly included as a very important aspect of the final element. (It is interesting that the appropriateness of the three-element classification was good enough to withstand the test of time and appear as three headings for citizenship education in the English revised curriculum 1999-2000.) Marshall also made a far-sighted distinction between the right of a child to go to school and the right of an adult citizen to have been educated:
The duty to improve and civilise oneself is therefore a social duty, and not merely a personal one, because the social health of a society depends upon the civilisation of its members.4
Although democratic government in its present form is relatively new, it is now regarded almost everywhere as the norm, and at a late stage of the process of democratic development it has generated a number of educational ideas such as education for all, equality of opportunity in education, mixed ability teaching, and comprehensive schools (the avoidance of unfair selection and segregation). At an even later stage other concepts are incorporated: schools' councils, participation, student rights, contracts and the idea that every student is equally worthwhile - no child is ineducable. However, schools have found it difficult to become institutions which live up to the ideals of a democratic society. They often get stuck at the stage of nineteenth-century institutions.
We have seen that in England it was not useful to associate the development of education with any one individual. Education grew within a developing framework of democracy, but slowly and without an explicit philosophy or ideology. In the USA the situation was different because John Dewey (1859-1952) was not only a philosopher who wrote about democracy, education and the relation between them, he also put his ideas to the test in a model school. More importantly he brought together three kinds of theory: political theory about democracy, and philosophical ideas about both knowledge and education.
Dewey was writing at a time of contradictions. The USA claimed to be a society based on freedom and equal opportunities in education, but in reality society was deeply divided between the rich and the poor, and the education service was failing to provide satisfactory education for large numbers of young people, despite an ostensibly democratic educational structure stressing equality. It has often been pointed out that Dewey was born in the year that Darwin published On the Origin of Species and Marx produced The Critique of Political Economy. It would not be an exaggeration to suggest that in the more limited field of education Dewey was destined to become as influential as the other two. There was another connection between Marx and Dewey: both were influenced by Hegel and both eventually rejected his ideas, including the metaphysical notion of the State being superior to the individual.
Dewey considered education to be one of his highest priorities. When he was invited to the Chair of Philosophy in Chicago University in 1894, he accepted on condition that he could also lecture on education. By this time Dewey had progressed from Hegelian philosophy to some of the more practical ideas of anthropology, sociology and psychology as well as the pragmatism being expounded by C.S. Peirce (1839-1914). For this reason Dewey has been attacked by critics, especially in England, for relativism. This will be discussed in more detail below. Dewey began to see philosophy as 'the generalised theory of education' and by applying pragmatic criteria to what went on in schools, he came to the conclusion that education was not working and much of it was meaningless. Dewey's condemnation of the schools of his time was based on the fact that most schools were operating in very traditional ways, attempting to use formal instruction to teach academic 'subjects'. Dewey attacked this traditionalism on a number of fronts. First, he disagreed with the traditional notion of knowledge as a fixed body of information parcelled up into discrete subjects. Second, he did not accept the view of the mind as a blank slate or an empty vessel that needed to be filled. Dewey wanted to change the focus of education away from memorisation of 'subject-matter' to understanding the processes by which problems are solved. Finally, Dewey wanted to see a move away from the model of a passive student receiving information from the teacher to that of an active learner solving problems, as will be explained in Chapter 16.
It should be stressed that Dewey was not alone in criticising the accepted teaching methods of his time: there were plenty of 'reformers', but what Dewey did was to provide a theoretical, philosophical framework for the reforms. It is no accident that before Dewey became a professional philosopher, he had been a schoolteacher and had personal experience as well as theories to draw upon. He also saw the contradiction of the authoritarian nature of traditional schools and teachers in a society which claimed to be dedicated to democracy.
What was Dewey's alternative theoretical framework? Dewey saw education as an essentially practical question of helping the young to understand their environment, broadly defined, and to be able to function effectively within a world that was continuously evolving. A fundamental concept for Dewey was 'growth', but growth in an open-ended sense. The essence of education was learning to cope with change and uncertainty in creative ways. This did not mean that social heritage, including history, was unimportant, but Dewey wanted such knowledge to be acquired not as dead information to be memorised but as living problems to be experienced and solved. Student involvement and activity were essential and could be related to understanding and experiencing the continuity of past and present. The school should be a laboratory not a museum, and it should be democratic.
Dewey saw this view of education as scientific, and proposed a scientific method of approaching thinking and problem-solving. There were five stages: first, we begin to think when presented with a problem; second, we gather data; third, we think of steps to a solution and construct a hypothesis; fourth, we test the hypothesis; and finally, the problem is solved or we return to the data to create another hypothesis. Dewey also rejected some of the concepts of traditional educational theory such as mind, intelligence, interest, attention, motivation and, above all, discipline. These were distractions from the real task of involving young people in experiences that led to growth. Dewey assumed that if teachers used better methods and relied on scientific enquiry, then problems of order and coercion would disappear.
Among his enemies of education Dewey included two kinds of 'dualism': first, academic knowledge contrasted with vocational education; second, leisure and work. He also departed from the notion of 'liberal education'. Dewey also believed that morality should not be imposed from above but learned, experientially, in social contexts, including the context of the school. Schools, therefore, had to be moral institutions providing good models for practising moral behaviour. Children would learn to apply 'scientific' methods of problem-solving to social as well as technical issues.
Unfortunately, many of Dewey's ideas have been misunderstood and simplified. Later in life, Dewey found it necessary to dissociate himself from many 'progressive' practices and schools which simple allowed children to follow their own interests and learn whatever they wanted to by discovery. The debate continues: Sir Keith Joseph, as British education secretary (1981-86), criticised British educationists for even discussing Dewey's theories, and blamed him for preaching relativism; New Labour seems to have ignored the real theories of Dewey, preferring the traditional, back to basics approach which Dewey disapproved of. Dewey was, of course, well aware of the problems of trying to operate his methods, and discusses them in his books (for example, Democracy and Education5). However, he insists that many problems of schools were of their own making. Dewey may have underestimated the problems of modern education but his contribution to the discussion of education in a democracy was enormous.
We have already commented on the general tendency tor schools and education to fall behind other aspects of social development. This 'cultural lag' was evident in the first half of twentieth century England, partly as a result of a reluctance to spend money on education, but partly also because educational ideas tended to remain nineteenth century or predemocratic. One of the books which helped to change attitudes significantly was Education: Its Data and First Principles by Percy Nunn6 (1870-1944), an outstanding British educationist. It was reprinted several times and translated into many languages, and also influenced some of the official reports such as Hadow.7 Nunn was anxious to oppose what he regarded as the evil influence of German idealists, such as Hegel, whom he blamed for the growth of German nationalism and the idea of a superhuman State. Nunn's counter-attack took the form of praising the English version of moderate individualism. His book was regarded as progressive in the sense of being child-centred rather than dominated by State needs. In later editions of his book, he was conscious of the dangers of the Nazi State, but even in the first edition his individualism was clearly a response to what he saw as a dangerous continental trend:
From the idealism of Hegel more than from any other source, the Prussian mind derived its fanatical belief in the absolute value of the State, its deadly doctrine that the State can admit no moral authority greater than its own, and the corollary that the educational system, from the primary schools to the university, should be used as an instrument to engrain these notions into the soul of the whole people.8
Nunn's views were complemented by those of R.H. Tawney (1880-1962) who wrote from the point of view of a committed democrat and member of the Labour Party, As professor of Economic History at the London School of Economics from 1931 to 1949, he wrote a good deal about the development of education and other democratic trends, and as president of the Workers' Education Association he became increasingly aware of inequalities of educational opportunity. His major contributions were two-fold. First, his book Equality9 (1931) which argued convincingly against the class divisions that were impeding both educational and democratic developments. Second, his political activities within the Labour Party, in particular his draft of the Labour Party document Secondary Education for All10 (1922). Before this document, official policy had been content with the 'ladder of opportunity' approach to secondary education which meant only a small minority of pupils leaving elementary schools at the age of 11 with a scholarship to a grammar school. Tawney's writings helped to change the metaphor from the minimalist ladder to the much more democratic 'broad highway' approach of free and compulsory secondary education for all. There was a clear connection between the 1922 Labour Party document and the Hadow Report The Education of the Adolescent (1926). The message was the same: genuine democracy needs an educated population and also offers equality of opportunity to all.
When the Second World War broke out in 1939, the government found itself in the position of having to take responsibility for a wide range of activities which included not only the education of children but the evacuation of large numbers of pupils and supervision of their welfare in the safer areas. This pattern of rationing and controls set a precedent for planning the Welfare State in England after the war. One writer on education who justified the continuation of planning after the war was Karl Mannheim (1893-1947) a refugee from the Nazis who had settled in London and for a short time was professor of Education at the Institute of Education. One of his books was Diagnosis of Our Time11 which advocated planning for a free society. This was in direct conflict with the views of another refugee, Friedrich Hayek,12 at the London School of Economics, who advocated traditional liberal economic values of laissez faire. Hayek inspired Sir Keith Joseph and others in Margaret Thatcher's governments (1979-92) to want to rely on the market as a policy for education rather than planning. A theoretical justification for privatising education had been provided, but it was never completely accepted by the majority within the Conservative Party.
In the immediate post-war period, however, planning had majority support, and William Beveridge's Report (1943) provided a basis for a 'cradle to the grave' welfare service, including education. The 1944 Education Act was regarded as a major reform, not least for 'secondary education for all' as envisaged by Tawney in 1922. Much of the work of sociologists from the 1950s onwards, however, was to show that the policy of free access to education was by no means a solution to problems of unequal life chances. The work of A.H. Halsey, David Glass, Jean Floud and others showed that social class was still a powerful factor. In Basil Bernstein's words 'education cannot compensate for society'.13
Anti-Democratic Ideologies and Education
A.V. Kelly14 has pointed out that political theory over the centuries has been fundamentally anti-democratic for at least two reasons. First, pessimistic views of human nature such as those of Hobbes have suggested that the majority of human beings need to be controlled by a strong state of some kind. Second, a metaphysical view that a superhuman entity, such as the Roman Catholic Church or the Prussian State has to take priority over the wishes of individual human beings. Operating with such views of human nature, educational theorists have often tended to stress obedience and subjection of individual liberty to the greater good.
Education in Communist Russia
Before 1917, education in Russia was backward compared with Western Europe and the USA, Education had been one of the reforms following the abortive revolution of 1905, but only limited progress had been made by the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. After 1917, Lenin's wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya (1869-1939), became a leading member of the Education Commission. She worked with Anatoly Lunacharsky (1875-1933), who was the first Commissar for Education. In 1917 they outlined a revolutionary programme which included free and compulsory education up to the age of 17; pre-school education for all children; universities and professional training to be open to all; and a form of adult education especially designed to promote communist thinking. It was difficult to give priority to all these 'reforms' but Lenin supported them because he wanted to improve literacy and saw better education as a prerequisite for a communist, industrial society.
For a while schools were left to their own devices, to experiment with curricula and pedagogy. Encouraged by Lunacharsky, some schools attempted experiments based on Dewey; others simply carried on with traditional curricula and formal methods of instruction. The elimination of illiteracy was an early priority, not only for schools but for the Young Communist League and for trade unions. The policy continued into the first Five Year Plan in 1929. Dewey had visited Russia in 1928 and his books remained popular for some years. S.T. Shatsky, a progressive educator, had translated passages from Democracy and Education and for a while the project method of teaching remained popular in some schools. The Five Year Plan, however, insisted on greater uniformity, and Dewey's influence declined.
Krupskaya continued to be an influential member of the Education Commission and many reforms were introduced as part of the Five Year Plan, including an 'integrated curriculum' for the first four years of the common or Labour School. By the end of the fourth year pupils were expected to be able to take part in meetings and play the role of chairman or secretary; they were also expected to be active in their own education and to organise various kinds of social activity; they also prepared articles for the 'Wall Newspaper'. All of this was different from the traditional passive role of pupils who had been simply expected to listen and obey.
Another important innovation was 'polytechmcal education': part of the curriculum was devoted, not to preparation for work in the traditional sense, but to understanding mechanised agriculture and industry so that when they left school they would be ready for any role that was allocated to them. Krupskaya was a leading exponent of polytechnic theory and she was backed by Lenin until his death in 1924. However, in 1931 a significant change came when the Central Committee of the Communist Party declared that all experiments should cease. Polytechnic education continued but in a less flexible form. 'Progressive' forms of pedagogy (called pedology) were looked upon with suspicion and in 1936 pedology was abolished as a practice and a theory. Other theoretical work continued, however, including that of L.S. Vygotsky.15 He died of tubercolosis at the early age of 38 but his work on language and thought was continued by A. R. Luria16 and others.
In 1929 Lunacharsky had been dismissed as Education Commissar: it was thought that education was not improving quickly enough to provide the economy with the necessary manpower. He was replaced by A.S. Bubnov who remained in office until 1937. Bubnov had previously been Political Commissar for the Red Army and brought with him a concern for military efficiency: his task was to make education more useful for economic purposes; his method was to revert to tradition and discipline in schools. Krupskaya did not oppose these changes, but the Council for Education on which she had served since 1917 was abolished. Further centralisation and uniformity was introduced, and patriotism was stressed, especially in history books which were consequently rewritten. In some cases vocational education, which was particularly favoured by Stalin, replaced polytechnic education. Factory schools for young workers were developed. An even more important priority came with the drive for 'education for leadership': young people were selected for special training in Party Schools and youth organisations (the Komsomol). Although general education for all continued, there was a shift in priority towards leadership and training for leadership.
On the other hand, one of the heroes of communist education who was celebrated throughout his life was Anton Makarenko (1888-1939) who worked at the other end of the social scale. Makarenko developed a system for dealing humanely with the destitute orphans who existed in large numbers, organising collectives for these young people which were admired by many visitors from the West. As we have seen, until very recently, education theory was usually derived from other disciplines and then applied to educational issues. Makarenko was a theorist as well as a successful practitioner, and would have none of this. In one of his published lectures 'Methods of Upbringing' (1938, published 1965) he said:
I am convinced that educational methods cannot be evolved from what is suggested by adjacent sciences, no matter how far developed such sciences as psychology and biology...may be. I am convinced that deriving an educational means directly from these sciences' findings is something we have not the right to do.17
Only in recent writings in the West has this principle been accepted.
A second educational idea derived from Makarenko was the emphasis he placed on the social context of learning. In the West, the principle of individual liberty had sometimes led to methods which involved individual instruction and the search for individual learning styles. Makarenko's emphasis on the social is a healthy reminder of another point of view even if Makarenko took the principle of the superiority of the collective too far for many Western educationists.
After Stalin's death in 1953, attempts were made to apply the idea of polytechnic education to all schools as had originally been intended, but it was not seen as a success. With the collapse of communism in Russia any pretence of the continuation of a unique Russian system disappeared.
Education in Fascist Italy 1919-45
It would have been possible to have written about several variants of right-wing totalitarian systems in Europe such as Franco's Spain or Salazar's Portugal. We have limited ourselves to just two examples - Italy and Germany - but similar ideas (including education ideas) spread much further, for example, to South Africa, and to Argentina under Peron.
Fascist ideology in its Italian form is associated with Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) who first used the word 'fascist' in 1919 (derived from the Roman symbol of a bundle of rods plus an axe, fasces). In the social and economic chaos of Italy following the First World War, it was not surprising that many people were looking for an alternative form of government to that of democracy which appeared to be failing. The Enlightenment, liberalism and democracy emphasised the importance of individual freedom and equality. Fascism, by contrast, gave priority to the State and the need for individuals to subordinate their wishes to the corporate needs of the nation as a whole. In some ways, fascism represented an extreme twentieth-century version of the nationalism that had developed during the nineteenth century, but it was more than that. The Italian fascist slogan of 'believe, obey, fight' was an alternative to the 'liberty, equality, fraternity' of the French Revolution and its democratic aftermath, but it would be an exaggeration to talk of 'fascist philosophy', although one of Mussolini's followers, Giovanni Gentile (1875-1944), attempted to justify Mussolini's actions in philosophical terms.
At first, Mussolini was a socialist looking forward to a revolution of the kind that Marx had predicted. He eventually came to the conclusion that what was needed to change society was a great man: he wrote La dottrina del facismo (Doctrine of Fascism), which stated simply that he had wished to govern Italy and had taken power for the sake of a better nation. It was not until later that he found the more sophisticated philosophy of Gentile. The essential tenet of this ideology was by no means original: the State was the metaphysical source of all morality, guiding ideas and power. In this respect Gentile was following the ideas of Hegel and Fichte in Germany; he also for a while co-operated with Benedetto Croce (1866-1952) who later became a critic of Mussolini's fascism and Gentile's writing.
From 1922 to 1924, Gentile was minister of education and attempted a series of education reforms: the key factor here was to see education as an integral part of the corporate state. Gentile was also head of a Commission on Education (1926-28). Gentile's philosophy was a version of Idealism in which individual minds were - if they existed at all, subordinate to the collective, corporate state. This version of Idealism denied distinctions such as theory and practice, or past and present. Education was seen as the process of 'self-consciousness' or clarification of thought. His views on education were criticised by the Marxist writer Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), who saw Gentile's reforms in practice as being extremely reactionary and denying opportunities to working-class children. Gramsci was imprisoned by the fascists for his views and died in captivity in 1937.
A more generous view of Gentile's philosophy might see his version of neo-Hegelian idealism as a reaction against Positivism, which in Italy had rejected anything spiritual or metaphysical, including the Church. In a strange way, Gentile's Idealism allowed for both, but it is difficult to reconcile Gentile's philosophy with Mussolini's ruthless totalitarian police state. Mussolini was never handicapped by any philosophy: he was the all-powerful leader, il Duce, embodying the state and it was the duty of all Italians to obey him; radio, press and education became instruments to ensure obedience. His concordat with the Roman Catholic Church (the Lateran Treaty of 1929) allowed some religious teaching in schools. His control over education was, however, never as total or as effective as Hitler's.
It is only possible to understand fascism in the light of the pessimism of post-war Europe where traditional values and modes of government seemed to have broken down. Education policy in Italy was subordinated to nationalistic and ultimately irrational ways of thinking. Perhaps the real lesson for the history of educational ideas was that the anti-Enlightenment view of human beings was so readily accepted. The fact that Mussolini was, for a time, supported by many outside Italy ranging from the American poet Ezra Pound to politicians such as Winston Churchill, was not due to his education policy.
Education in Nazi Germany
Nazism should be seen not only as a reaction against German democracy but also in the context of other historical events. Noakes and Pridham,18 two specialists in this period, have stated: 'Nazism was as a political movement essentially a product of the First World War, of defeat and of the revolutionary upheaval which followed. Its ideological roots, however, go back to pre-war Germany. They lay, first, in the new wave of anti-Semitism which began with the 'great depression' of 1873-96; and second, in the emergence of a new radical form of right-wing movement which began in the 1890s and found expression in the imperialist pressure groups and anti-democratic organisations such as the Pan-German League. Both of these developments were, in turn, responses to the social dislocation produced by the rapid and uneven industrialisation and urbanisation which followed national unification.19
The story of Hitler's rise to power is well known and will not be summarised here. After many years operating as an extremist right-wing minority party, the Nazis were eventually reluctantly accepted by President Hindenburg, and Hitler became Chancellor. Through a mixture of terror and persuasion the Nazis were soon in control of the capitalist State, although sharing power with other right-wing parties. The Nazis were openly contemptuous of democracy and saw 'education' and propaganda as means of ensuring 'followership' as well as patriotism and anti-Semitism. Control of education involved close supervision of radio and other media. In March 1933 Joseph Goebbels, in overall charge of education and propaganda, spoke to the controllers of German radio stations in no uncertain terms:
We make no bones about the fact that the radio belongs to us and to no-one else. And we will place the radio in the service of our ideology and no other ideology will find expression here ... The radio must subordinate itself to the goals which the Government of the national revolution has set itself.20
Noakes and Pridham go on to describe how the Nazis ensured that they would have a sizeable audience: they arranged with industrialists to produce cheap radios. One-and-a-half million were produced in 1933 alone; by 1939, 70 per cent of German homes had a radio - the highest percentage in the world. The cheap radios could not receive foreign broadcasts.21 Measures were also taken to control the press and the arts. In May 1933 the infamous 'burning of the books' ceremony took place, organised, perhaps significantly, by the students themselves, or at least by the official student body; the burning was immediately followed by the issuing of a list of forbidden books to public libraries. This kind of activity was justified in terms of protecting young Germans from 'a decadent culture'. The leader of the Nazi Teachers League, Hans Schemm, said: 'Those who have youth on their side control the future', a theme which Hitler took up in his own speeches in 1935 and 1938 in which he stressed the total claim of Nazism on young Germans.22 Great pressure was accordingly put on young Germans to join the Hitler Youth which controlled access to work and sport.
The only alternative ideology that continued to exist openly was that of the Churches. Hitler did his best to silence any religious opposition and secured an agreement with the Roman Catholic Church. The opposition from the churches was - with some notable exceptions - feeble and ineffective. The Nazi equivalent of Mussolini's Gentile was Ernst Krieck (1882-1947), who was less of a philosopher than a Gentile - apologist for Hitler might be a better description. According to Krieck, the Nazi state was essentially total, and education was an inextricable part of the totality, not limited to schools and universities but permeating the whole of life. The Nazi philosophy saw 'educational' potential in all aspects of social life, hence the importance of symbols and rituals, such as the 'Heil Hitler' greeting and the rallies at Nuremberg. Education was part of the political framework designed to produce disciplined Germans who would, under the Fiihrer, rule the world. Health education and sport were just as important as traditional academic subjects. Education was for all, but education for leadership was a priority. Krieck wrote approvingly about Schools for the Elite:
The elite to be trained should be a carefully selected political-military group rigorously disciplined and bound together by a common national idea devoted to a life of honour, valour, loyalty, and preparedness for service and sacrifice ... and committed to the values of national, military and political life.23
In 1933, a number of boarding schools for boys aged between 12 and 18 were established for future leaders who were carefully selected and tested from time to time to ensure that 'moral' and physical standards were maintained. Those failing the tests were excluded, but successful students proceeded to further leadership training in 'castles' within the Hitler Youth structure. Hitler described the programme in this way:
Weakness has to be hammered out of them. In my castle of the Teutonic Order a youth will grow up before whom the world will crumble. I want a violent, domineering, undaunted, cruel youth. Youth must be all that. They must bear pain. There must be nothing weak and gentle about them ... I will have no intellectual training. Knowledge is ruin to my young men. I would have them learn only what takes their fancy. But one thing they must learn - self-command! They shall learn to overcome the fear of death under the severest tests. That is the intrepid and heroic stage of youth.24
In 1934 Bernhard Rust became the national minister of education, the semi-autonomous individual states having been abolished. He was a fanatical Nazi and took the opportunity to centralise and control the work of all schools. Teachers were required to read Mein Kampf and to study Nazi ideology. Surprisingly, a large number of teachers were already sympathetic to the Nazi cause: there was little resistance to the new education either in schools or in universities. Richard Evans, for example, said that most German historians 'collaborated willingly in the Nazi seizure of power and the Nazification of university education'.25
Conclusion: Back to Democracy?
By 1945 both Germany and Italy returned to democracy and democratic education. The communist regime continued in Russia but eventually collapsed, and although this might appear to be an account of the triumph of democracy and democratic forms of education, that would be misleading. Perhaps the real lesson to be learned from this chapter is the fact that modern societies can so easily turn into totalitarian states. It may be salutary to think about the warnings of the sociologists reviewed in Chapter 12, who emphasised the dangers facing modern societies.
One distinguished writer on this question, Erich Fromm26 (1900-80), brought to bear psychology and sociology as well as politics and direct experience of Nazi Germany. The first chapter of his book, written during the Second World War, is devoted to 'Freedom - a Psychological Problem' in which he argued that it would be unwise to try to account for the Nazi regime using only economic and political explanations. Fromm put forward psychological reasons based on a neo-Freudian perspective for the failure of democracy in Germany, arguing that there were general lessons to be learned in all societies that had moved from medieval social solidarity via the Reformation to the modern urban industrial world of individual freedom. He quoted Dewey:
The serious threat to our democracy is not the existence of foreign totalitarian states. It is the existence within our own personal attitudes and within our own institutions of conditions which have given a victory to external authority, discipline, uniformity and dependence upon The Leader in foreign countries. The battlefield is also accordingly here - within ourselves and our institutions.27
Fromm predicted difficulties later in the century for the USA and Western Europe, connected with the problem of individualism, which we have commented on from an educational point of view in earlier chapters. It is no coincidence, for example, that the Tawney we quoted on educational planning in this chapter is the same Tawney we referred to in our chapter on the Reformation: the contrast between traditional (medieval) society and the modern (urban-industrial) world has been a recurring theme in this book. In Chapter 12 we mentioned the fears of some sociologists; Fromm adds a psychological perspective to explain the emergence of authoritarianism in the 1920s and 1930s, and to warn of future dangers.
Much more recently concerns have been expressed about the future of democracy in England, for example, in the Demos publication Freedom's Children,28 the title of which is significant. The Demos study (and several others) focused particularly upon the low voting rates among young citizens, but saw the problem much more widely as political apathy connected with a fragmenting value system. A number of suggestions were made in this book about repairing the social damage; in 1997 the Education Secretary, David Blunkett, lent his support to a programme of citizenship education which was accepted by government and will be implemented early in the twenty-first century.29 It remains to be seen how successful this 'Aristotelian' addition to the curriculum will be. It soon became clear, however, that citizenship education would have to be placed in the much wider context of social and moral education.
References
1. B. Simon, History of Education 1780-1870 (Lawrence & Wishart, 1960); B. Simon, Education and the Labour Movement 1870-1920 (Lawrence & Wishart, 1965); B. Simon, The Politics of Educational Reform 1920-1940 (Lawrence & Wishart, 1974); B. Simon, Education and the Social Order 1940-1990 (Lawrence & Wishart, 1991).
2. R. Williams, The Long Revolution ( Penguin, 1961).
3. T.H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1950), p. 48.
4. Ibid., p. 85.
5. J. Dewey, Democracy and Education (Macmillan, New York, 1916).
6. P. Nunn, Education: Its Data and First Principles (Edward Arnold, 1920).
7. Hadow Report, The Education of the Adolescent (Board of Education, 1926).
8. P. Nunn, op. cit., p. 3.
9. R.H. Tawney, Equality (Allen & Unwin, 1931).
10. Labour Party, Secondary Education for All (Labour Party, 1922).
11. K. Mannheim, Diagnosis of Our Time (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1943).
12. F. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1946).
13. B. Bernstein, 'Open School, Open Society', New Society, 14 September 1967.
14. A.V. Kelly, Education and Democracy (Paul Chapman, 1995), p. 17.
15. L.S. Vygotsky, Thought and Language (MIT Press, 1962).
16. A.R. Luria and I. Yudovich, Speech and the Development of Mental Processes in the Child (Staples Press, 1959).
17. Quoted by J. Bowen and P.R. Hobson, Theories of Education (Wiley, Brisbane, 1974), p. 230.
18. J. Noakes and G. Pridham, Nazism 1919-45 (University of Exeter, Exeter, 1983-84), 2 vols.
19. Noakes, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 1.
20. Noakes, op. cit., vol. 2., p. 385.
21. Noakes, op. cit,, vol. 2, p. 386.
22. Noakes, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 416.
23. Quoted by W.F. Connell, A History of Education in the Twentieth Century World (Curriculum Development Centre, Canberra, 1980), p. 257.
24. Quoted by Connell, op. cit., p. 258.
25. R.J. Evans, In Defence of History' (Granta Books, 1997), p. 13.
26. E. Fromm, Fear of Freedom (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1942).
27. J. Dewey, Freedom and Culture (Allen & Unwin, 1940).
28. H. Wilkinson and G. Mulgan, Freedom's Children (Demos, 1995).
29. Department for Education and Employment, The Review of the National Curriculum in England: the Secretary of State's Proposals (Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, 1999).
Further Reading
Carr, W. and Hartnett, A., Education and the Struggle for Democracy (Open University Press, 1996).
Lawton, D„ Cairns, J. and Gardner, R., Education for Citizenship (Continuum, 2000).