Gramsci on Liberal Education

Antonio Gramsci is surprisingly defensive of traditional, liberal education in his Prison Notebooks. In his day, as in our own, there was growing pressure to reject classical education, and to focus instead on practical, vocational training. That tendency, Gramsci notes, comes from the demand for ever greater professional specialization (and therefore specialized training) to meet the needs of the modern, industrial economy. 

What Gramsci proposes is basically what we have today--a system of universal public education that encompasses humanistic/liberal arts subjects before specialization and vocational training. Such an education regime aims "to create the fundamental values of 'humanism,' the intellectual self-discipline and moral independence which are necessary for subsequent specialization" (32).

Gramsci offers two arguments. First, he defends traditional liberal education from the charge that it is too airy or abstract or irrelevant. He takes up the defense of Greek and Latin, perhaps the most obvious candidates for removal in a progressive reform of education:

In the old school the grammatical study of Latin and Greek, together with the study of their respective literatures and political histories, was an educational principle--for the humanistic ideal, symbolised by Athens and Rome, was diffused throughout society, and was an essential element of national life and culture. Even the mechanical character of the study of grammar was enlivened by this cultural perspective. Individual facts were not learnt for an immediate practical or professional end. The end seem disinterested, because the real interest was the interior development of personality, the formation of character by means of the absorption and assimilation of the whole cultural past of modern European civilisation. Pupils did not learn Latin and Greek in order to speak them, to become waiters, interpreters or commercial letter-writers. They learnt them in order to know at first hand the civilisation of Greece and of Rome--a civilisation that was a necessary precondition of our modern civilisation: in other words, they learnt them in order to be themselves and know themselves consciously (37).

That's a familiar, conservative defense of the study of Western Civilization. This is our heritage, and by studying it we learn who we are and where we came from. Blah blah. Very familiar. 

He goes on to defend the rigidity required of traditional ("mechanical") modes of education. The goal is not primarily to instill creativity in the pupil (though elsewhere Gramsci does favorably cite that aim), but instead to produce habits of diligence and discipline:

In education one is dealing with children in whom one has to inculcate certain habits of diligence, precision, poise (even physical poise), ability to concentrate on specific subjects, which cannot be acquired without the mechanical repetition of disciplined and methodical acts. Would a scholar at the age of forty be able to sit for sixteen hours on end at his work-table if he had not, as a child, compulsorily, through mechanical coercion, acquired the appropriate psycho-physical habits? If one wishes to produce great scholars, one still has to start at this point and apply pressure throughout the educational system in order to succeed in creating those thousands or hundreds or even only dozens of scholars of the highest quality which are necessary to every civilisation (37).

(I don't know many scholars today who work for sixteen hours straight. Probably because they didn't learn Greek and Latin at age 6).

He then turns to defend specifically Latin and Greek grammar instruction. It is an advantage that these are dead language. That means they are learned by careful parsing and by swinging between minute grammatic detail and grand cultural myths:

Latin is learnt (or rather studied) by analysing it down to its smallest parts ... The language is dead, it is analysed as an inert object, as a corpse on the dissecting table, but it continually comes to life again in examples and in stories. Could one study Italian in the same way? Impossible. No living language could be studied like Latin: it would be and would seem absurd. ... [Latin] has been studied in order to accustom children to studying in a specific manner, and to analysing an historical body which can be treated as a corpse which returns continually to life; in order to accustom them to reason, to think abstractly and schematically while remaining able to plunge back from abstraction into real and immediate life, to see in each fact or datum what is general and what is particular, to distinguish the concept from the specific instance (38).

This education, Gramsci continues, is especially important for Marxists. It is an education in historicism, it forces students to consider historical ruptures and to appreciate the contingency of human nature. The key insight of Marx's "philosophy of praxis," Gramsci says, is that "there is no abstract 'human nature', fixed and immutable ... but that human nature is the totality of historically determined social relations, hence an historical fact which can, within certain limits, be ascertained with the methods of philology and criticism" (133).

Studying the canon allows the student to experience the transformation of human consciousness through time. That historicizing instinct is critical to acquire the capacity to imagine just how different the future might be. There is no better way to undermine a tendency to reify/naturalize the present than to understand the past.

[the student] has plunged into history and acquired a historicising understanding of the world and of life, which becomes a second--nearly spontaneous--nature, since it is not inculcated pedantically with an openly educational intention. ... Above all a profound 'synthetic', philosophical experience was gained, of an actual historical development (39).

For that reason, Gramsci suggests, the study of Latin and Greek would need to be replaced by some subject that could similarly (1) demand diligent study to form good work habits, (2) teach students to both master specific details while building abstract conceptual understanding, and (3) form a historicizing mindset that could allow students to see beyond their present moment.

That's Gramsci's first argument--a defense of traditional humanistic education. He then makes his second argument: a critique of vocational instruction. 

The paradox Gramsci observes is that even though self-described progressives favor vocational education, such an education would produce an enormously hierarchical society:

The most paradoxical aspect of it all is that this new type of school appears and is advocated as being democratic, while in fact it is destined not merely to crystallise them in Chinese complexities (40).

To upset that hierarchy:

 one needs, instead of multiplying and grading different types of vocational school, to create a single type of formative school (primary-secondary) which would take the child up to the threshold of his choice of job, forming him during this time as a person capable of thinking, studying, and ruling--or controlling those who rule. The multiplication of types of vocational school thus tends to perpetuate traditional social differences; but since, within these differences, it tends to encourage internal diversification, it gives the impression of being democratic in tendency. The labourer can become a skilled worker, for instance, the peasant a surveyor or a petty agronomist. But democracy, by definition, cannot mean merely that an unskilled worker can become skilled. It must mean that every 'citizen' can 'govern' and that society places him, even if only abstractly, in a general condition to achieve this" (40).

Vocational education appears to be democratic in its rejection of traditional, aristocratic, liberal education. But it in fact tends to produce "juridically fixed and crystallised estates rather than moving towards the transcendence of class divisions" (41).

So universal liberal education is the true democratic education, vocational training a means of ensuring social hierarchy. (Someone like Simone Weil would probably disagree. She'd argue that it is possible, perhaps only possible, to genuinely respect human equality if we learn to respect persons' equal dignity across social ranks. But her view has some difficulties too. This is an old problem for people worried about equality and meritocracy and equal opportunity etc.)

Tied to all this is Gramsci's fear that professional specialization (spurred on by educational specialization) undermines traditional forms of political leadership. The working class, if it is to take the lead in shaping a future culture and politics, needs that kind of leadership, and therefore it needs holistic, liberal education. 

Here's Gramsci on the conflict between genuine leadership and technocratic specialization:

The question is thus raised of modifying the training of technical-political personnel, completing their culture in accordance with new necessities, and of creating specialised functionaries of a new kind, who as a body will complement deliberative activity. The traditional type of political 'leader', prepared only for formal-juridical activities, is becoming anachronistic and represents a danger for the life of the [technocratic] state: the leader must have that minimum of general technical culture which will permit him, if not to 'create' autonomously the correct solution, at least to know how to adjudicate between the solutions put forward by the experts, and hence to choose the correct one from the 'synthetic' viewpoint of political technique" (28).