* £-c£t/c#/rdrzjl
WíV
Educational transformations are always the result and the symptom of the social transformations in terms of which they arc to be explained, ľor a people to feel at any given moment the need to change its educational system, it is necessary that new ideas and needs have emerged for which the old system is no longer adequate. But these needs and ideas do not arise spontaneously; if they suddenly come to the forefront of human consciousness after liaving been ignored for centuries, it is necessarily the case that in the intervening period there has been a change and that it is this change of which they are an expression. Thus, in order to understand the educational achievement of the sixteenth century, we need as a preliminary to know in a general way what constituted the great social movement that historians call the Renaissance and of which a new educational theory was but one manifestation.
The essence of the Renaissance lias often been identified witli a return to the spirit of classical times; and indeed this is precisely the meaning of the word normally used to designate this period of European history. The sixteenth century is supposed to have been a period when man, abandoning the gloomy ideals of the Middle Ages, reverted to the gayer and more self-confident view of life which prevailed in the ancient pagan world. As to the cause of this change of direction, it allegedly consisted in the rediscovery of classical literature, the principal masterpieces of which were rescued during this period from the oblivion in which they had languished for centuries. On this view it was the discovery of the great works of classical literature that brought about this new change of outlook in the western European mind. But to speak of the Renaisssance in  this way is only to point in the most
On Education and Society
ÉMILE DURKHEIM
superficial way to its facade. If it were indeed true that the sixteenth century simply took up the classical tradition at the point it had reached when the Dark Ages arrived and temporarily blotted it out, the Renaissance would emerge as a movement of moral and intellectual reaction that would be hard tu account for. We would have to assume thai humanity had strayed from its natural path for fifteen centuries, since it had to retrace its steps back over a period of such length in order to embark upon a whole new stage in its career. Certainly progress docs not proceed in a straight line; it makes turnings and detours; advances are followed by recessions; but that such an aberration should be prolonged over a period of fifteen hundred years is historically incredible. It is true that this view of the Renaissance accords wilh the way in which the eighteenth-century writers spoke of it. But just because they fell a kind of admiration for the simple life of primitive societies, are we to say that theii social philosophy was an attempt to restore prehistoric civilization? Because the men of the Revolution thought that they were imitating the actions of the ancient Romans, are we to view the society that resulted from the Revolution as an imitation of the ancient city? People involved in action are the least well placed to see the causes that underlie their actions, and the way in which they represent to themselves the social movemcnl of which they are a part should always be regarded as suspect and should by no nicam be thought of as having any special claim to credibility.
Besides, it is simply not true that classical literature was unknown during the centuries we have just been considering, that it was only discovered towards the beginning of the sixteenth century, and that it was this rcvcla-
Excerpted from I.'evolution pédagogique en France (Paris: Presses Universitäres de France, 1969), pp. 194-197, 198-201, 236-239, 266-269, 286-288, and 296-303. This translation was undertaken b) Peter Collins. A translation of the full volume (under the title The Evolution of educational Thought) ii forthcoming from Roullcdge and Kegan Paul, Ltd.
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lion that suddenly expanded the intellectual horizons of Europe. The fact is that there was not a single period during the whole of I he Middle Ages when these literary masterpieces were not known; in every generation we find a few people sufficiently intelligent and sensitive to be able to appreciate their worth. Abclard, the hero of dialectic, was at the same  time a literary scholar; Virgil, Seneca, Cicero, and Ovid were just as familiar to him as were Boethius and Augustine. During  the   twelfth   century   there   was  a famous school at Chartres which, inspired by ils founder, Bernard dc Chartres, offered a classical education  similar  to what would later be offered by the Jesuits. One could multiply examples of this type. It is true ihat these attempts  to  introduce classical literature into education remained isolated cases; they never succeeded in capturing the imagination   of  the   Scholastics, who cast ihem  hack   into  obscurity.   Bui   they arc nonetheless real, and they are sufficient lo prove that if classical literature was not appreciated in the Middle Ages, if it played no part  in  education,   this  was  not because people did  not know of its existence. In short, the Middle Ages knew about all the main aspects of classical civilization, but it only retained what it regarded as important, »hat answered to its own needs. Its entire jliention   was  caught  by   logic,  and   this eclipsed everything else. Thus, if everything changed  in  the sixteenth  century, if suddenly Greek and Roman art and literature »ere recognized as being of incomparable educational value, this clearly must have been because at  that  moment  in  history, as aj consequence of a change that had taken place In the public  mind, logic  lost  its former I prestige—wliile by contrast an urgent need \ was felt for the first time for a kind of culture i that would be more refined, more elegant or ' tierary. People did not acquire this taste because they had just discovered classical iniiqiiity; rather, they demanded from the uiiiquity they already knew the means of satisfying the new taste they had just acquired. What we must seek, therefore, is an
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account of this change of direction in the intellectual and moral outlook of the European peoples, if we wish to understand the nature of the Renaissance insofar as it affected educational thought no less than scientific and literary thought. A people only modifies ils mental outlook to such an enormous extent when very fundamental^ features of social life have themselves been modified. We can therefore be certain in advance that the Renaissance derives, not, I repeat, from the fortuitous fact that certain classical works were exhumed at this time, but rather from profound changes in the organization of European societies. 1 cannot, -of course, attempt here to paint a complete and detailed picture of these transformations, but 1 should like at least to point out the most important of them so as to be able to relate the educational movement we shall be exploring to its social roots.
In the first place, there was a group of interrelated changes in the economic sphere. People had finally got away from the paltry life-style of the Middle Ages, when the general insecurity of relations paralyzed the spirit of enterprise, when the limited number of markets stifled great ambition, when only the extreme simplicity of their tastes and needs enabled men to live in harmony with their environment. Gradually order had been established; better government and more efficient administration had rallied people's confidence. Towns had proliferated and become more populous. Most important of all, the discovery of America and the I rade route via the Indies had galvanized economic activity by opening up new worlds in which it could operate. Consequently, the general welfare hadsbecn increased; vast fortunes had been amassed; and the acquisition of wealth stimulated and developed a taste for the easy, elegant life of luxury. . . .
However, if this transformation had been limited to the world of the aristocracy, it probably would not have had such extensive social consequences. But one of the effects \ of accrued wealth was to produce at the   ) same time a narrowing of the gaps between  /
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social classes. Up till then the bourgeoisie had not even dared raise its eyes to look at the aristocracy across what it felt to be a great fixed gulf. And it found it natural to lead  quite  a different existence. But now that the bourgeoisie tiad become richer and consequently more powerful, it also became more ambitious and sought to narrow the gap. Its expectations had increased with its resources, making the life it had led up till then appear intolerable.  It was no longer afraid to cast its gaze upwards and it wanted    , as well  to live  the life of the nobles, to   | imitate   their   style,   their   manners,   their luxury. As one writer puts it: "Pride was reaching ever higher peaks in every section of the community. The bourgeoisie in the towns have started wanting to dress in the same   way   as   the   aristocracy ... and   the people from the villages in the same way as the bourgeoisie in the towns." According to another author,  the bourgeois ladies grew bored with their life of obscurity; they now wanted to copy the great ladies. "One can scarcely distinguish  any longer between a noble   lady   and   a   plebeian . . . one   sees women who are worse than plebeian dressing in flowing robes embroidered in gold and silver. . . their    fingers    are    loaded    with emeralds  and  other  precious stones ... in the old days the practice of kissing a lady's hand in greeting was restricted to aristocrats, and noble ladies did not offer their hand to the first comer, let alone to anyone at all. Today men smelling of leather rush to kiss the hand of a woman whose escutcheon is exclusively    aristocratic.    Patrician    ladies marry plebeian men, plebeian women marry patrician men; thus we are breeding hybrid creatures." It is easy to guess that so considerable a change in the way life was understood would inevitably be accompanied by a change in  the  way education  was understood, and that instruction designed to produce a good bachelor of arts, versed in all the   secrets   of  syllogism   and   argument, would be quite unsuited to the enterprise of producing an elegant and fluent nobleman
able to hold his own in a salon and possessing all the social graces.
However, in addition to this transformation, there was another one, no less important, which took place in the world of ideas.
liy the sixteenth century, the great nation states of Europe had been in large measure established.  Whereas  in   the  Middle   Ages there had been but one Europe, one Christendom,   which   was   united   and   homogeneous, there now existed great individual collectivities with their own intellectual and amoral characters. England found its identity and its unity with the Tudors, Spain with Ferdinand   of  Castile  and   his  successors. Germany with the Hapsburgs (albeit more vaguely), and France did so before any of the   others  under  the Capctians. The old unity of Christendom had thus been definitively shattered. However much people continued   to   profess   respect  for  the  fundamental doctrines, which still appeared highly abstract, each of the groups which had thus been formed had its own special mode of thought and feeling, its own national temperament whose particular emphasis tended to affect the systems of belief that had been accepted until that time by the vast majority of the faithful. And since the great moral figures that had arisen could only develop their individual natures, since they could not organize their thoughts and beliefs according to their own lights unless they were granted the right to deviate from accepted beliefs, they claimed this right and in claiming ii they   proclaimed   it;   that   is   to  say they claimed  the  rights  of schism and of free inquiry—albeit only to a limited extent, and not as absolute rights, since such a tiling would have been inconceivable at the time. It is here that we find the root cause of the Reformation, that other aspect of the Renaissance that was the natural result of llit movement towards individualization and differentiation taking place at that time withit the homogeneous mass of Europe. In out sense, of course, Scholasticism had paved tin
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way for it. Scholasticism had taught reason lo be more self-confident by confronting it with monumental questions and equipping it with a rigorous logical training so that it might make fresh conquests. However, between the audacities of Scholasticism, especially at the end of the fifteenth century, which were always relatively moderate-between the more or less bold claims made by a few thinkers whose voices were scarcely heard outside the schools, and the sudden explosion that was the Reformation and that shook the whole of Europe, there is clearly a radical break, which bears witness to the fact that new forces had come into play.
Here we have a new causal factor, which was to bring about a change in the theory and practice of education. The Christian faith had played too large a part in medieval education for the educational system not to be affected by the upheavals that faith was undergoing. Moreover, there were other ways in which the economic factor exercised a parallel influence. It is clear, in fact, that the aesthetic ideal of the Middle Ages was quite unsuited for pupils who had acquired a taste for luxury and the life of leisure. And since this aesthetic ideal was the ideal of Christianity, Christianity itself was affected by the same phenomenon. For it was not possible that the aversion felt henceforth for the old view of life should not be extended lo the whole system of beliefs upon which [hat view of life was grounded. If, as we have argued, Christianity was accepted so readily by the barbarians, this was precisely because of its starkness, its indifference towards the products of civilization, its disdain for the joys of existence. But the same reasons that accounted for its triumph then were now to diminish its authority over people's minds. Societies that had learned to savor the joy of living could no longer put up with a doctrine ihat rendered sacrifice, self-denial, abstinence, and suffering in general the supreme objects of desire.
Individuals, sensing that this system ran counter to  their deepest  feelings and op-
posed the satisfaction of needs they regarded as quite natural, could only be disposed to cast doubt upon it, or at least to cast doubt upon the way it had been interpreted up to that time; for it is impossible to accept uncritically, unreservedly, and without sufficient reason a doctrine that in certain respects seems to go against nature. Without renouncing it completely, people came lo feel the need to revise it, to interpret it afresh, in such a way that it would harmonize with the aspirations of the age. Now, any such revision and reintcrpretation presuppose the right to revise, to inspect, and to interpret, in some sense the right to examine, which, however one looks at it, implies a diminution of faith. . ..
Now, it is clear that there is nothing in Scholasticism that could have satisfied these new tastes: on the contrary, it was bound to be hostile lo them. Since it attached no importance to form, it did not hesitate to twist language savagely in order to satisfy all the needs of thought, without regard lo considerations of purity or harmony. As a result of the very great place it accorded to debate, it developed a taste not for ideas that were delicate, subtle, measured, but rather for opinions that were dogmatic and clear-cut and whose features stood out in such a way that conflicting opinions could be clearly contrasted. Moreover, the violent arguments that were born of these contrasts could only encourage a coarseness in manners comparable to what had been upheld for so long by the noble knights in their tourneys and similar practices. The student of (he Middle Ages was primarily concerned with crushing his opponent beneath the weight of his arguments and did not care in the least whether his presentation was attractive. His unkempt appearance and his rustic deportment and manners were expressions of this same state of mind.
Here we have the explanation of why the men of the new generation were quite literally horrified by Scholasticism and its methods.   The   extreme  virulence  of their
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polemics seems at first sight to be out of place in a purely educational quarrel. But the fact is that the issue was really more wide-ranging. The sixteenth century did not accuse Scholasticism simply of having engaged in certain debatable or regrettable academic practices but rather of having constituted a school of barbarousness and coarseness. Hence the frequency with which the words barbarus, stoliditas, rusticitas recur in the writings of Erasmus. To these refined minds a Scholastic is quite literally a barbarian (remember the title of Erasmus's book Antibarbaros), who speaks a language scarcely human, crude-sounding, formally inelegant; who delights only in arguments, in deafening yells, in verbal and other battles; who is ignorant, in sum, of all the benefits of civilization, of everything that contributes to the charm of life. We can readily conceive of the feeling such an educational system would be capable of arousing in men whose ,ajm was to render humanity more tender,
j (more elegant, more cultivated.
;|    The only way to succeed in ridding the
i Jiuman intellect of its coarseness, to polish and refine it, was to introduce it to and piake it intimate with an elegant and refined (civilization, so that it might become imbued with its spirit. Now, the only civilization ■that could satisfy this condition at that time (was that of the classical peoples as it had I been expressed and preserved in the works
'of their great writers, poets, and orators. It was thus quite natural that these should be seen as providing the schoolteachers needed by ihc young. "What then," says Erasmus, "what then could have guided these coarse men of the Stone Age towards a more human life, towards being more gentle of character and more civilized in morals? Was it not literature? It is literature that molds the mind, that mollifies passions, that checks the untamed outbursts of natural temperament." For this purpose there existed no other established and developed literatures apart from those of Rome and Greece. With this in view, the moral milieu in which the child was to be molded had to be
DURKHEIM
made up of all the extant elements of these literatures.  Hence  the enormous attention accorded by the public at this time to the masterpieces of Greco-Roman civilization. If people esteemed and admired them, if they sought to imitate them, this is not because they were exhumed at this moment in history and, by being discovered, suddenly inculcated   in   people a  taste  for  literature. Quite the reverse: it was because a taste fur literature, a taste for a new kind of civilization, had just been acquired that they suddenly    became    objects    of   enthusiaslic veneration;  for  they appeared, and quite rightly so, as the only means available of satisfying this new need. If this vast body of literature had hitherto been neglected, this was not because nothing was known of it (we / have already seen that the major works were v^  known);  rather,  its  virtues  were  not ap-) prcciatcd  because  they did not meet any '  contemporary  need.  If, by contrast, they - were  then regarded in  the eyes of public opinion, or at least of a certain section of it, as being of incomparable  value, this was !     because a new attitude of mind was in the '    process of developing and  could  only be \, fully realized in the school of the classics. And   one   may even wonder whether the greater frequency of the finds and exhumations that occurred at this period was nota result of the fact that since, henceforth, the value   of these   discoveries  was   fully appreciated   people   devoted   more   of their ingenuity   to making them. To  find, one must  seek, and one only seeks in earnest when one attaches importance to what one hopes to find.
Thus the educational ideas of the humanists were not the result of simple accidents. They derived, rather, from a fact whose influence on the moral history of our country it is difficult to exaggerate; I refer to the '• establishment of polite society. If France dij indeed become from the sixteenth century onwards a center of literary life and intellectual activity, this was because, at this same period, there had developed among us a select society, a society of intellectually
ON EDUCATION AND SOCIETY
cultivated people to whom our writers addressed themselves. It was the ideas and the \ tastes of this society that they communicated; it was for this society that they wrote and for it that they thought. It was here in this particular environment that the driving force of our civilization from the sixteenth century to the middle of the eighteenth century arose. And the object of education as Erasmus conceived of it was to I, prepare man for this special and restricted society.
Here too we can see the essential character and at the same time the radical flaw |   of this educational theory. It is the fact that / it is essentially aristocratic in nature. The t-> kind of society that it seeks to fashion is.-' always  centered   around   a  court, and  its members arc always drawn from the ranks of the aristocracy or at least from the leisured classes. And  it  was indeed here and here alone that that fine flowering of elegance and culture could take place, the nurturing and development of which were regarded as more important than anything else. Neither |   lirasmus nor Vivěs had any awareness that beyond this small world, which for all its brilliance was very limited, there were vast masses who should not have been neglected and for whom education could have brought |  about  higher intellectual  and  moral  standards and an improved material condition. When such a thought did occur to them it disappeared again very quickly without their j   thinking it necessary to examine it at length. I  Since he realizes that this expensive education is not suitable for everyone, Erasmus wonders what the poor will do; his answer to this objection is utterly simple. "You ask," he says, "what the poor will be able to do. How will those who can scarcely feed their children be able to give them over a sustained period of time the right kind of education? To this I can only reply by quoting |   the words of the comic writer: 'You can't |  ask that what we arc capable of achieving I should be as great as what we would like to achieve.' We arc expounding the best way of |  bringing up a child, we cannot produce the
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means of realizing this ideal." He restricts himself to expressing the wish that the rich will come to the help of those who are well-endowed intellectually but who would be prevented by poverty from developing their aptitudes. But he seems not to realize that even if this education were made available to everybody the difficulty would not he resolved, for this generalized education would not meet the needs of the majority. Iftdeed, for the majority the supreme need is survival, and what is needed in order to survive is not the art of subtle speech, it is the art of sound thinking, so that one knows how to act. In order to struggle effectively in the world of persons and the world of things more substantial weapons arc needed than those glittering decorations with which the humanist educationalists were concerned to adorn the mind to the exclusion of anything else.
Think now how much Scholasticism, for all its abstractness, was imbued with a more practical, more realistic, and more social spirit. The fact is that dialectic answered real needs. Intellectual conflict, competition between ideas, constitutes a genuinely important part of life. Moreover, the strength and virility of thought which were acquired as a result of such arduous mental gymnastics could be used in the service of socially useful ends. Thus we must beware of thinking that the medieval schools served only to produce dreamers, seekers after quintessences, and useless pettifogging quibblers. The truth is quite the opposite. It was there that the statesmen, the ecclesiastical dignitaries, and the administrators of the day were brought up. This training, which has been so denigrated, created men of action. It was the education recommended by Erasmus that forms a totally inadequate preparation for life. In it rhetoric supplants dialectic. Now, if rhetoric had good reason for featuring in the education of the classical world, where the practice of eloquence constituted not only a career but the most important career, this was by no means the case in the sixteenth century, when it played
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only a very small part in the serious business of life. A theory of education that made rhetoric the principal academic discipline could thus only develop qualities related to the luxuries of existence and not at all to its necessities. . ..
In order to know what became of the educational theories of the Renaissance when they were translated into practice, it would thus seem that we have only to investigate how the University understood them and applied them. But what makes such a procedure impossible, what makes the whole question more complicated, is the great change that took place at this very moment in our academic organization. Up till that time the University had a complete monopoly on and sole responsibility for education, and consequently the future of any educational reforms was dependent upon the University and upon the University alone. However, towards the middle of the sixteenth century, over and against the University corporation there was established a new teaching corporation, which was to break the University's monopoly and which was even to achieve with quite remarkable rapidity a kind of hegemony in academic life. This was the corporation of the Jesuits.
The Jesuit order arose from the need felt by the Catholic Church to check the increasingly threatening progress of Protestantism. With extraordinary speed the doctrines of Luther and Calvin had won over England, almost the whole of Germany, Switzerland, the Low Countries, Sweden, and a considerable part of France. In spite of all the rigorous measures taken, the Church felt itself impotent and began to fear that its dominion in the world would collapse completely. It was then that Ignatius Loyola had the idea of raising a wholly new kind of religious militia the better to combat, and if possible to crush, heresy. He realized that the days were over when people's souls could be governed from the depths of a cloister. Now that people, carried by their own momentum, were tending to elude the Church,  it  was essential  that  the  Church
DURKHtIM
move closer to them so as to be able to influence them. Now that particular personalities were beginning to stand out from the homogeneous moral and intellectual mass that had been the rule in preceding centuries, it was essential for the Church to be close to individuals, to accommodate its influence over them to intellectual anil temperamental diversities. In short, the vast monastic masses familiar to the Middle Ages, which, stationary at their post, had restricted themselves to repulsing such attach as occurred, without, however, knowing how to take the offensive themselves, had to be replaced. An army of light troops would be established that would be in constant contact with the enemy and consequently well-informed about all his movements, but at the same time sufficiently alert and mobile to be able to go at the slightest signal wherever there was danger, and yet sufficiently flexible to be able to vary its tactics in accordance with the diversity of people and circumstances; its troops would do all this while always and everywhere pursuing the same goal and cooperating in the same grand design. This army was the Company of Jesus.
What was distinctive about it was that it was able to contain within itself two characteristics, which the Middle Ages had adjudged irreconcilable and contradictory. On the one hand, the Jesuits belong to a religious order in the same way as the Dominicans or the Franciscans; they have a head, they are all subject to one and the same rule, to a communal discipline; indeed passive obedience and unity of thought and action have never been carried to such an extreme degree in any militia whether secular « religious. The Jesuit is thus a regular priest. But, on the other hand, he simultaneously possesses all the characteristics of the secuht priest; he wears his habit; he fulfills his functions, he preaches, he hears confessions, lie catechizes; he does not live in the shadow of a monastery, he rather mingles in the life of the world. For him duty consists not in (lie mortification of the flesh, in fasting, in ab-
ON EDUCATION AND SOCIETY
stinence, but in action, in the realization of the goal of the Society. "Let us leave the religious orders," Ignatius Loyola used to say, "to outdo us in fasts, in watches, in the austerity of the regime and habit that, out of piety, they impose upon themselves." "1 believe that it is more valuable, for the glory of Our Lord, to preserve and to fortify the stomach and the other natural faculties lather than enfeebling them . . . you should not assault your own physical nature, be-; cause if you exhaust it your intellectual ' nature will no longer be able to act with the same energy."
Not only must the Jesuit mingle with thet world, he must also open himself up to the ;    ideas   that   arc   dominant   within   it.   The better to guide his age he must speak its! '■    language,   he   must   assimilate   its   spirjlJ j    Ignatius   Loyola   sensed   that   a   profound 1    change had taken place in manners and that there was no going back on Ihis; that a taste for well-being, for a less harsh, easier, sunnier existence had been acquired that could not conceivably  be  stifled or fobbed off; :    lliat man had developed a greater degree of pity for his own sufferings and for those of his fellowmen, that he was more sparing of pain, and consequently that the old ideal of absolute renunciation was finished. To prevent the faithful from drifting away from religion the Jesuits devoted their ingenuity I    to divesting religion of its former austerity; they made it pleasant and devised all kinds of accommodating arrangements to make it easy to observe. It is true that in order to lcmain faithful to the mission they had as-..   signed themselves, to avoid seeming to encourage the innovators against whom they i   were struggling by their own example, they had at the same time to stick to the letter of immutable  dogma.  It  is  well known how ihcy extricated themselves from this difficulty and were able to reconcile these conflicting demands thanks to their casuistry, I   whose   excessive   flexibility   and   over-ingenious refinements  have  frequently  been pointed   out.   While   maintaining  in   their sacred form the traditional prescriptions of
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Roman Catholicism, they were still able to place these within the scope not only of human weakness in general—there is no religion that has ever managed to escape this necessity—but of the elegant frivolousncss of the leisured classes of the sixteenth century in   particular; it   was  these  leisured  classes lhal it was so important (o keep free from heresy and to preserve in the faith. And this i^ how, while they became essentially men of the past, defenders of the Catholic tradition, the Jesuits were able to exhibit towards the ideas, the tastes, and even the defects of the time an  attitude  of indulgence for which they have often, and not without reason, been reproached. They thus had a dual identity as conservatives, even as reactionaries, on   the  one  hand,  and  as liberals on the other: a complex policy the nature and origins of which we needed to show here, for we shall encounter it again in the foundations of their educational theory.
13ul  they very quickly came to realize that in order to achieve their end it was not enough  to  preach,  to  hear confession, to catechize: the really important instrument in~\ the struggle for mastery of the human soul    ) was the education of the young. Thus they-resolved  to seize hold  of it. One fact in particular made them acutely aware of the urgent need for this; one would have had to be blind to all the evidence not to sec that the new methods taking root in the schools could only have the effect of opening up the road to heresy. Indeed, the greatest minds of the time, the most illustrious of the humanists, had openly been converted lo the new religion; this was the ease with Dolet, with Ramus,   with   Mathurin  Cordier, with  the majority of the teachers in (he College de France,  recently   founded   by   Francois  I. Thus  humanism   by  its  very  nature  constituted a threat to the faith. And indeed it is clear that an inordinate taste for paganism =" was bound to cause people's minds to dwell in   a   moral  environment   with   absolutely nothing Christian about it. Accordingly, if the evil was to be attacked at its source, it would be necessary, instead of abandoning
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the humanist movement to its own devices, to gain control of it and to direct it. . . .
The aim of the Jesuits thus had nothing to do with getting the pupil acquainted with and able to understand classical civilizations; it was exclusively concerned with teaching them to speak and write in Greek and Latin. This explains the importance attributed to written assignments and the nature of these assignments. This is why in the grammar classes prose composition prevailed and was far more important than translation from Latin, which was scarcely practiced at all. This is why stylistic exercises were so numerous and so varied. Tliis attitude even influenced the way the expositions were carried out. Father Jouvency has left us model expositions of Latin authors; one has only to read them to see that their main aim is to get the pupils to appreciate the author's Latin and his literary style, and to encourage them to imitate these same qualities.
Far  from seeking to get their pupils to think again the thoughts of antiquity, far from wishing to steep them in the spirit of classical times, the Jesuits had precisely the opposite aim. Indeed, this was because they could see no other way of extricating themselves  from  the contradictory situation in which  they  had  quite  deliberately  placed themselves.   Because   the   fashion   was   for humanism, because classical letters were the object of a veritable cult, the Jesuits, always sensitive to the spirit of their age, professed, as we have just seen, a form of humanism-even quite an  uncompromising one, since Greek and Latin alone were permitted entry into their colleges. But from another point of view, as we have said, they realized full ' well  that  humanism  constituted  a  threat, that there was a real danger in wishing to fashion  Christian  souls   in   the  school  of paganism.   How  could   these   two  contradictory needs be reconciled? How could the faith be defended and safeguarded as was required by the self-imposed mission of the Jesuits,   while   they   simultaneously   made themselves  the apologists  and exegctes of pagan literature?
There was only one way of resolving this antinomy: this was, in the very words used by Father Jouvency, to expound the classical authors in such a way "that they became, ! although pagan and profane, the eulogists of I the faith." To make paganism serve the glori-• llcation and the propagation of the Christian ethic was a daring undertaking and, it would appear, remarkably difficult; and yet, the Jesuits had enough confidence in their ability to attempt it and to succeed in it. But in order to do this they had deliberately to denature the ancient world; they had to show the authors of antiquity, the men they were and the men they portray for us, in such a way as to leave in the shadows everything that was genuinely pagan about them, everything that makes them men of a particular city at a particular time, in order to highlight only those respects in which they arc simply men, men as they arc at all times and in all places. All the legends, all the traditions, all the religious ideas of Rome and Greece were interpreted in this spirit so as to give them a meaning any good Christian could accept.
Thus the Greco-Roman environment in which they made their pupils live was emptied of everything specifically Greek or Roman, so that it became a kind of unreal, idealized environment peopled by personalities who had no doubt historically existed but who were presented in such a way thai they had, so to speak, nothing historical about them. They were now simply figures betokening certain virtues and vices and all the great passions of humanity. Achilles is courage; Ulysses is wily prudence; Nunia is the archetype of the pious king; Caesar, the man of ambition; Augustus, the powerful monarch and lover of learning; etc. Such general and unspecific types could easily be used to exemplify the precepts of Christian morality.
Such disinheriting of antiquity was made easier for the Jesuits by the fact that, at lcasi for a long time, all teaching of history was almost completely absent from their colleges. Ľvcn literary history was unknown. A
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ON EDUCATION AND SOCIETY
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writer's works were expounded without anyone's bothering to notice the physiognomy of the author, his manner, the way he related it to his age, to his environment, to his predecessors. His historical personality mattered so little that it was normal to study not an author, not even a work, but selected passages and extracts. How was it possible to form a picture of a specific man out of such sparse and disjointed fragments, among which his individuality was dispersed and dissolved? Each of these pieces could scarcely appear to be anything other than an isolated model of literary style, a sort of fair copy of exceptional authoritativeness.
We can  now  understand better how it came about that the Jesuits, and perhaps to a lesser extent  so  many  other educators, (ended to attribute to the past and especially lu  the  distant   past  an  educational  value greater than that which they attributed to the present. This was because the past, at least at a time when the historical sciences have not advanced sufficiently to render it almost as precise and specific as the pres-ent-the past, because we see it from afary* naturally appears to us in vague, fluid, unstable forms, which are consequently all the easier to mold according to our will. It constitutes a more malleable and plastic substance that we can transform and present according to our fancy. It is thus easier to liend   it   for  educational   purposes.  These people, these things from former times, we embellish without realizing we are deceiving ourselves in order to turn them into models for youth to imitate. The present, because it is before our very eyes, forces itself upon our attention and docs not lend itself to this kind of reworking; it is virtually impossible for us to sec it other than as it is with its ugliness, its mediocrity, its vices, and its failings; and   this is why  it  seems  to  us í JI— jdapted to serve our educational ends. It was in lliis way that antiquity in the hands of the Jesuits   could   become   an   instrument   for Christian education, whereas they would not have been able to utilize literature of their own age in the same way, imbued as it was
with the spirit of rebellion against the church. In their desire to attain their goal, they had a powerful vested interest in fleeing from the moderns and taking refuge in antiquity.. . .
But so far we have only studied the Jesuits' teachiiTg. We must now consider their disciplinary structures. It is perilaps in this area that they showed the most art and . originality and it is their superiority in this respect that best explains their success.
Their entire discipline was founded upon two principles. I        The first was that there can be no good education   without   contact   at   once  con- '. tinuous and personal between the pupil and   i the  educator—and   this  principle  served  a/' dual purpose. First, it ensured that the pupil was never left  to his own devices. To be properly molded he had to be subjected to pressure that never let up or (lagged; for the spirit of evil is constantly watchful. This is why the Jesuits' pupil was never alone. "A supervisor would follow him everywhere, to church,  to class,  to  the  refectory, to his recreation; in the living quarters and sleeping V   quarters   he   was  always   there  examining |   everything."  But  this  supervision was not /    intended only to prevent misconduct. It was also to enable the Jesuit to study at his ease "character   and   habits   so   that   he   might manage    to    discover    the   most   suitable method of directing each individual child." In other words, this direct and constant intercourse was supposed not only to render the educational process more sustained in its      ( effect but also to make it more personal and      / better   suited   to   I lie   personality   of each , ' pupil.  Father Jouvency never stops recommending that a teacher not limit himself to exerting a general and impersonal influsnce on   the  anonymous  crowd   of pupils  but rather graduate his influence and vary it according to age, intelligence, and situation. If he is conversing with a child in private, "let him examine the child's character so (hat he can mold what he says in accordance with it and, as they say, 'hook' his interlocutor with the appropriate bait." And the better to get
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DURKHEIM
the pupils to open their minds to him, he will need to make them open their hearts by endearing himself. Indeed there can be no doubt lhal in the course of the relationships thus cemented between teachers and pupils bonds of friendship were frequently formed that survived school life. Thus Descartes remained very sincerely attached to his former teachers at La ľlechc.
One can  readily  imagine how effective this system of continuous immersion must have been. The child's moral environment followed liim wherever he went; all around him he heard the same ideas and the same sentiments being expressed with the same authority. He could never lose sight of them. He knew of no others. And in addition to the fact that this influence never ceased to make  itself felt, it was also all the more powerful because it knew how best to adapt to the diversity of individual personalities, because it was most familiar with the openings through which  it  could  slip  and  insinuate   itself   in    the   pupil's   heart.   By comparison with the style of discipline that had been practiced in the Middle Ages this represented  a major revolution. The medieval teacher addressed himself to large and impersonal   audiences,  among  which  each individual, that is to say each student, was lost, drowned, and consequently abandoned to his own devices. Now, education is essentially an individual matter, and as long as the medieval teacher was dealing with vast masses he could obtain only very crude results. Hence the rowdy indiscipline of the students of the Middle Ages, which the establishment of the fully residential colleges was an  attempt-never fully successful—to counter. For the colleges did not have at their disposal a staff of teachers and supervisors sufficiently numerous or perhaps sufficiently committed to the task of supervision to be able to exercise the necessary control and influence over each individual.
But in order to train pupils in intensive formal work, which was moreover pretty lacking in substance, it was not enough to surround  them, to envelop them at close
quarters with solicitude and vigilance; it was not enough to be constantly concerned to contain and sustain them; it was also necessary to stimulate them. The goad which the ({'Jesuits employed consisted exclusively of competition. Not only were they the first to organize the competitive system in the colleges, they also developed it to a greater intensity than it has ever subsequently known.
Although  today  in  our classrooms this system  still   has  considerable   importance, nevertheless it no longer functions without interruption. It is fair to say that with the Jesuits it was never suspended for a single moment. The entire class was organized to promote this end. The pupils were divided into two camps, the Romans on the one hand  and the Carthaginians on the other, who lived, so to speak, on the brink of war, each striving to outstrip  the  other.  Each camp had its own dignitaries. At the head of the   camp   there   was  an   imperátor,  also known as dictator or consul, then came a praetor, a tribune, and some senators. These honors, which were naturally coveted and contested, were distributed as the outcome of a competition, which was held monthly. From another point of view, each camp was divided into groups consisting of ten pupils each ("decuries"), commanded by a captain (called  the "decurion") who was selected from among the worthies we have just mentioned. These groups were not recruited at random. There was a hierarchy among them: the first groups were composed of the best pupils, the last groups of the weakest and least industrious of the scholars. Thus just as the camp as a whole was in competition with the opposite camp, so in each camp each group had its own immediate rival in the other camp at the equivalent level. Finally, individuals   themselves  were   matched and each soldier  in  a group  had his opposite number in the opposing group. Thus academic work involved  a kind of perpetual hand-to-hand    combat.   Camp   challenged camp; group  struggled with  group; pupils supervised  one another, corrected one an-
ON EDUCATION AND SOCIETY
103
other, and took one another to task. On some occasions the teacher was not supposed to be afraid of pitting together two pupils of unequal ability. For example, an able pupil would have his work corrected by a less able pupil, says Father Jouvency, "so that those who have made mistakes may be the more ashamed and the more mortified by them." Il was even possible for any pupil to do battle with a pupil from a higher group % and, if victorious, to take his place.
It is interesting to note that these various ennoblements carried with them not only honorific titles but also active functions; and indeed it was these that constituted the prize. The captain enjoyed extensive powers. Seated opposite his group he was responsible for maintaining silence and attentiveness among his ten scholars, noting down absences, making the scholars recite their lessons, ensuring that assignments had been done with care and completed. The consuls exercised the same authority over the captains in their camp that these did over their own group members. Everyone was thus kept constantly in suspense. Never has the idea that the classroom is a small organized J society been realized so systematically. It J was a city-state where every pupil was "a functionary. Moreover, it was thanks to this division of labor between the teacher and the pupils that one teacherXvas able without too much difficulty to run classes that sometimes numbered as many as two or three hundred pupils.
In addition to such regularly recurring competitions there were intermittent competitions too numerous to list. From time to time the best pieces of work were affixed to the classroom doors; the most noteworthy were read publicly in either the refectory or the I lall of Acts. Aside from the annual prize-giving, which took place solemnly to the sound of trumpets, prizes were given out spasmodically in the course of the year for a good piece of declamation, for a meritorious literary work, for a well executed dance, etc. from the second form onwards there was in each grade an Academy to which only the
best pupils belonged. Then there were all kinds of public meetings in which the most brilliant pupils appeared and to which the families came to hear and applaud them. Thus an infinite wealth of devices maintained the self-esteem of the pupils in a constant state of extreme excitation.
Here again the Jesuits were effecting a revolution  compared  with  what had gone before. We have seen that in the University"-and  the colleges of the Middle Ages the system of competition was completely unknown; there  were  no rewards to recompense merit and induce effort, and exams were organized in such a way that for conscientious pupils they were little more than a formality.   And  here  we  have,  quite suddenly, a totally different system, which not only establishes itself but which instantaneously develops to the point of superabundance. It is easier to understand now .haw the training given by the Jesuits managed lo acquire   the  intensive  character which  we were recently remarking upon. Their entire system of discipline was organized towards this goal. The state of constant competition in which the pupils lived incited them to strain all the resources of their intelligence and will-power and indeed rendered this essential. At the same time the careful supervision to which they were subjected diminished   the possibility of lapses. They  felt themselves   guided,  sustained,  encouraged. Thus   everything   induced   them   to  exert themselves. As a result, within the colleges there   was   genuinely   intense   activity,   no doubt flawed by being expended on the superficial rather than on the profound, but whose existence was incontestable.
However, now that we have noted the transformations that the Jesuits initiated in the realm of school discipline, we must seek their causes. Where did these two new principles come from? Did they derive exclusively from the particular aim the Jesuits were pursuing, from the very nature of their institution, from the mission they had assigned themselves, or were they not, by contrast, rather  the effect  of more  general causes,
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were they not a response to sonic change that had occurred in public thought and ethics?
What must immediately rule out the first hypothesis is the fact that if the Jesuits were the first to realize these principles in academic practice, they had nevertheless been recognized and proclaimed already by the educational thinkers of the Renaissance. We remember Montaigne's protests against teachers unintelligent enough to wish to regiment the minds of all individuals in identical fashion. He too wants teachers to study the temperament of the pupil, to test him in order to understand him better, to make him, as he says, "run in front of himself" in order to be able to guide him in an enlightened way. And from another point of view, we have seen that the love of glory, the thirst for praise, and the sentiment of honor were for Rabelais and for Erasmus, as for the major thinkers of the sixteenth century, the essential motives for all intellectual activity and consequently for all academic activity. The Jesuits were thus on these two points, at least in principle, in agreement with their time. It is interesting to note that we know of at least one college where, before the time of the Jesuits, the competitive system was organized and practiced, moreover, in a form that in more than one respect resembled the one we have just described. This is the college at Guycnne, where Montaigne spent several years. The pupils in any one class were divided according to ability into sections that bore considerable resemblance to the Jesuits' groups of ten. Ľxaniinations took place frequently in which the pupils of one class were questioned by the pupils from a higher class or section. And here again we encounter competitions in public speaking, which took place before the assembly of all the classes.
It was the fact that a great change had , taken place in the moral constitution of society that made this double change in the system of academic discipline necessary. In the seventeenth century the individual played a much greater part in social life than
that which had hitherto been accorded to him. If, in the Middle Ages, teaching was impersonal, if it could be addressed diffusely to the indistinct crowd of pupils without any disadvantage, this was because at that time the notion of individual personality was still relatively undeveloped. The movements that occurred in the Middle Ages were mass movements carrying along large groups of human beings in the same direction, in the midst of which individuals became lost. It was Europe in its entirety that rose up at the time of the Crusades; it was the whole of cultivated European society that soon afterwards, under the influence of a veritable collective urge, flooded towards Paris to receive instiuction. The didactic style of the time was thus in accord with the moral condition of society.
' With the Renaissance, by contrast, the individual began to acquire self-consciousness; he was no longer, at least in enlightened circles, merely an undifferentiated fraction of the whole; in a sense, he was himself already a whole, he was a person with his own physiognomy who had and who experienced at least the need to fashion for himself his own way of thinking and feeling. We know that at this period there occurred, as it were, a sudden blossoming of i'great personalities. Now, it is quite clear that J in proportion as people's consciousness bc-|. conies individualized, education itself must become individualized. From the moment it is required to exert its influence on distinct and heterogeneous individuals it cannot continue to develop in blanket fashion, homogeneously and uniformly. Thus education had to be diversified, and this was only possible if the educator, instead of remaining distant from the pupil, came close to him to get to know him better and to be able to vary his actions according to his individual nature.
But from another point of view, it is equally clear that an individual possessed of self-awareness, with his own set of beliefs and interests, cannot be motivated or trained to act by the methods applicable to an amor-
THE SECOND TRANSFORMATION OF AMERICAN SECONDARY EDUCATION
105
phous crowd. For the latter methods mighty shakings of the foundations are needed, powerful collective impressions of a rather vague and general kind, like those that sent tremors through the multitudes gathered around Abclard on the Montagnc Sainte-Gcneviévc. By contrast, in proportion as each individual has his own particular moral life he must be moved by considerations specifically appropriate to him. Thus one must indeed appeal to self-esteem, to the sense of personal dignity, to what the Germans call Selbstgefühl. It is no accident that competition becomes more lively and plays a more substantial role in society as the movement towards individualization becomes more advanced. And so, since the moral organization of the school must reflect that of civil society, since the methods that are applied to the child cannot differ in essence from those that later on will be applied to the man, it is clear that the processes of the medieval disciplinary system could not survive; it is clear that discipline had to become more personal, to take greater account of individual feelings, and consequently to allow for a degree of competitiveness.
There    was   thus   nothing   intrinsically arbitrary   about  the   two   innovations   the
riic past few years have seen a very large amount of public controversy over education in America. The controversy has touched on every aspect and level of education, from nursery school to graduate education, and the spokesmen have represented many different interests and points of view. But the focus of the controversy has
y       Jesuits   introduced   into   the   disciplinary
i,       system:  the  principle underlying them, at
;r       least, was well-grounded  in the nature of
it       things, that is to say in the condition of
d       society in the sixteenth century. But if the
:-       principle was right, if it was to be retained, if
is       it deserved to survive, the Jesuits applied it
il       in the spirit of extremism that is one feature
s       of  their academic  policy  and, simply bv
c       dying this, they denatured it. It was good 10
e       keep close to the child in order to be able to
e       guide him confidently; the Jesuits came so
t       close to him that they inhibited all his free-
J       dom  of movement.  And  in  this way the
s '■     method worked against the end it was meant
:- ,     to serve. It was wise to get to know the child
e       well in order to be able to help in the dcvcl-
:-       opment   of  his   nascent  personality.   The
s .     Jesuits, however, studied him in order to
i  |    stifle more effectively his sense of self—and
;■}    this was a potential source of schism. At least, once they had recognized the value of
i       rivalry and competitiveness, they made such
:       immoderate use of them that the pupils were
:       virtually at war with one another. Mow can
1       we fail to consider immoral an academic organization that appealed only to egotistical sentiments? Was there then no means .
i       of keeping the pupils active other than by
:       tempting them with such paltry bait?
been the public high school, its organization and curriculum, and the philosophy of education that governs it. On one side, with many individual exceptions and variations in views, stand the professional educators and their organizations. As the creators and administrators of the existing system, American educators not surprisingly by and large
3. The Second Transformation of American
Secondary Education
MARTIN TROW
dom International journal of Comparative Sociology 2 ( 196 1): 1 44-165. Reprinted by permission.
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