The Evolution of Educational Thought

Lectures on the formation and development of secondary education in France

Emile Durkheim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136622861
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

First Published in 2005. Emile Durkheim's writing on education is well-known and widely recognized to be of great significance. In these lectures - given for the first time in 1902 to meet an urgent contemporary need - Durkheim presents a 'vast and bold fresco' of educational development in Europe. He covers nearly eight hundred years of history. The book culminates in two long chapters of positive recommendations for modern curriculum, which should be of special interest and value to those concerned with education policy, in whatever capacity.

part one

chapter 1

The history of secondary education in France

This year we are going to study a subject which has long intrigued me. Even at a time when I was not as I am today, exclusively concerned with teaching educational theory, I was already attracted by the idea of researching into how our secondary school education emerged and developed, because this study seemed to me to be one of very great general interest. And if this project was never realised it was both because I was deflected by other concerns and because I was aware of the great difficulties of the subject. If today I have decided to embark upon this venture it is not only because I now feel better prepared for it, but also, and more importantly, because circumstances seem to demand it of me since it meets, I believe, an urgent contemporary need.

It has been announced that a great reform of secondary education is at hand. After having spent the last twenty-odd years moulding and remoulding, in every possible direction, our secondary school curricula, it has finally been realised that, however valuable and interesting the innovations which have been successively introduced might be from other points of view, there is one consideration which is far more important than all the others and which ought by rights to have preceded them, for it constitutes the condition on which alone the others can succeed. It has been realised that if it is necessary to show discrimination in prescribing the different subjects to be taught, to transmit them in prudent dosages and to apportion them with care, it is even more essential to communicate to the teachers, who will be called upon to carry out this teaching, the spirit which is supposed to animate them in their task. It has been realised that the value of a programme is wholly dependent on the way in which it is carried out; for if it is carried out with reluctance or a passive resignation either it will defeat its object or it will remain a dead letter. It is essential that the teachers entrusted with the task of transforming the programme into a reality approve of it and take an interest in it. Only if they themselves live it, will they be able to bring it to life. Thus it is not enough to prescribe to them in precise detail what they will have to do; they must be in a position to assess and appreciate these prescriptions, to see the point of them and the needs which they meet. In brief, they must be familiar with the problems for which these prescriptions provide provisional solutions. This means that it is essential to initiate them into the great problems involved in the education for which they will be responsible, no less than into the methods whereby it is proposed to solve them, so that they may be able to make up their own minds with a knowledge of the issues involved. Such an initiation can only come from a study of educational theory which, if it is to be of value, must be given at the appropriate time: namely, when the intending teacher is still a university student. This is how the idea emerged that we need to organise through our various faculties the study of education, by means of which the future secondary school teacher can prepare for his functions.

A simple enough idea, I admit, indeed one which is to all appearances a mere truism; but nevertheless one which is still going to meet with a great deal of resistance from a variety of quarters. First of all, there is an old French prejudice which looks with a kind of contempt on the whole business of educational theory. It seems to be a very inferior form of study. By some strange illogical process, whereas political systems interest us and we argue passionately about them, educational systems inspire indifference in us, or even a kind of instinctive aversion. This is a quirk in our national temperament, which I shall not take it upon myself to explain. I am content simply to note it; I shall not waste more time showing the extent to which this kind of indifference and contempt is unjustified. There are some truths which one cannot go on harping back to indefinitely. Educational theory is nothing more than reflection applied as methodically as possible to educat ional matters. How then can there be any form of human activity which can do without reflection? There is today no field of action in which science, theory, that is to say reflection, does not increasingly explore and illuminate practice. Why should the activity of education be an exception? No doubt one can attack the scandalous use to which more than one educational theorist has put his reasoning powers; one may think that the systems are often very abstract, making little contact with the world of reality; one can say that, given the present state of the human sciences, speculations about education cannot proceed too cautiously. But simply from the fact that it has been distorted by the way in which it has been understood, it does not follow that the activity is impossible; from the fact that it has been deliberately modest and circumspect one cannot conclude that it is pointless. What, after all, is more futile than telling men that they should lead their lives as if they weren’t endowed with reason and reflection? Reflection has been stimulated; it cannot help but apply itself to those educational problems which have arisen in its path. The question is not whether it is to be used, but whether it is to be used haphazardly or methodically. Now, to use reflection methodically is to do educational theory.

But there are some who, while willing to admit that educational theory has some sort of general use, deny that it can be of any use as far as secondary education is concerned. It is currently said that a theoretical preparation is necessary for the primary school teacher but that, thanks to some special providence, the secondary school teacher has no need of it. On the one hand he has seen, in the example of his teachers, how one teaches and, on the other, the wide cultural grounding which he gets at university enables him intelligently to exercise this technique which he has observed in operation throughout his school days, so that he needs no further initiation. One may well ask, however, how it is that simply because the young student can explicate ancient texts, understand the subtleties of languages whether living or dead, is an erudite historian — how, in consequence of this alone, he should know what procedures are necessary in order to transmit to children the education which he himself has received. We have here two quite different types of activity which cannot be learned by the same processes. Acquiring knowledge does not entail acquiring the art of communicating it to others. It does not even entail acquiring the fundamental principles on which this art is grounded. But surely, it is said, the young teacher will organise his teaching on the basis of what he remembers of his school and student days. But is it not clear that this is to decree the eternal perpetuation of existing practices, for it follows that tomorrow’s teacher can do nothing but repeat the practices of his own teacher of yesterday, just as he too was merely imitating his own teacher; and it is consequently impossible to see how, in this endless series of self-reproducing models, there can be any innovation at all. The scourge and enemy of routine is reflection. This alone can prevent habits from becoming immutable, rigid and sacrosanct. This alone can keep them vital and sustain them in such a condition of flexibility and malleability that they will be able to change, evolve and adapt themselves to variations in circumstance and situation. In as far as one restricts the role of reflection in education, one condemns it to stagnation; and perhaps here is to be found at least a partial explanation of the surprising fact, which we shall have cause to notice later; namely, the strange neophobia which has characterised our secondary education for centuries. We shall see in fact how in France, whereas everything has changed, whereas the political, economic and ethical system has been revolutionised, there has nevertheless been something which has remained palpably immutable until quite recent times: this is the educational presuppositions and procedures of what has come to be called a classical education.

But there is more. Not only is there no reason why secondary education should enjoy the sort of privilege which allows it to do without any knowledge of educational theory, but in my view there is nowhere where it is more essential. It is precisely in those school situations where it is most lacking, that there is the greatest need of it.

In the first place, secondary education is a more complex organism than primary education. Now, the more complex an organism is, the more it needs reflection in order to adapt itself to its environment. In the elementary school, at least in theory, every class is in the hands of one and only one teacher; consequently his teaching tends to have a quite natural unity which is very straightforward and therefore does not need to be intellectually planned: it is indeed the unity of the person teaching. The same is not true of secondary schools, where the same pupil is generally taught by a variety of teachers. Here there is a genuine division of pedagogic labour. There is one teacher for literature, another for languages, another for history, another for mathematics and so on. How, short of a miracle, can unity emerge from this diversity, unless it is contrived? How can all these different teachers adapt to one another and complement each other so that they create a unified whole, if the teachers themselves have no notion of what the whole is? It is not a question, especially in secondary schools, of producing mathematicians and men of letters, physicists and naturalists, but of developing the mind through the medium of literature, history, mathematics and the natural sciences. But how can each teacher fulfil his function, as regards his own specialised part in the total enterprise, if he does not know what this enterprise is and how his various colleagues are supposed to collaborate with him in it, in such a way that all his teaching is related to it? People often argue as if all this went without saying, as if everybody knew instinctively what is involved in developing a mind.

But there is no problem more complicated. It is not enough to be a literary sophisticate, a good historian or an ingenious mathematician in order to understand the diverse elements out of which an intelligence is formed, the basic conceptions which constitute it and how they can be called forth in the various educational disciplines. Add to this the fact that the word ‘education’ changes its meaning depending whether the child we are talking about is of one age rather than another, is at primary or secondary school, is destined for one sort of activity in life as opposed to another. Now, if it is important to explain the goals which all education should serve and the routes by which the goals can be reached, then we need the study of educational theory; and it is for lack of this that so many teachers in our secondary schools are working in a situation where their efforts are dissipated, and they find themselves paralysed by their isolation from one another. They shut themselves up in their specialism and expound the subject of their choice as if it existed alone, as if it was an end in itself, when it is really only a means to an end which it should constantly have in view and to which it should always be subordinated. Indeed, how should it be otherwise as long as, while they are at university, each group of students are taught their chosen subject separately from the rest and there is nothing to encourage these colleagues of tomorrow to meet and to reflect together on the common task which awaits them.

But that is not all. Secondary education has for more than half a century been undergoing a serious crisis which has by no means reached its conclusion. Everybody feels that it cannot remain as it is, without having any clear idea about what it needs to become. Hence all these reforms which follow one another with almost cyclical regularity, which are carried out and revised and sometimes even contradict one another. They bear witness both to the difficulty and to the urgency of the problem. Moreover the question is not peculiar to France; there is no major European state in which it has not arisen in almost identical terms. Everywhere educationalists and statesmen are aware that the changes which have occurred in the structure of contemporary societies, in their domestic economies as in their foreign affairs, require parallel transformations, no less profound, in the special area of the school system. Why is it that the crisis is most acute in the case of secondary education? This is a fact that for the moment I am content to note without trying to explain. We shall understand it better in what follows. Whatever it may be, in order to emerge from this period of turmoil and uncertainty, we cannot rely on the sole effectiveness of decrees and regulations. As I argued at the beginning, decrees and regulations can only connect with reality if they are supported by conviction. I would go further and claim that they cannot have any real authority unless they have been proposed, planned, publicised and in some way pleaded for by informed opinion, unless they express it in a thoughtful, clear and co-ordinated way, instead of trying to create and control it through the medium of officialdom. For as long as the spirit of doubt reigns in the minds of men, there is no mere administrative decision, however wise, which can cure it. It is essential that this great task of reconstruction and reorganisation be the work of the same body of people as that which is being called upon to be the subject of the reorganisation and reconstruction. Ideals cannot be legislated into existence; they must be understood, loved and striven for by those whose duty it is to realise them. Thus there is no task more urgent than that of helping future secondary school teachers to reach a consensus as to what is to become of the education for which they will be responsible, what goals it might pursue, what method it should use. Now, there is no way of achieving this other than by confronting future teachers with the questions which arise and with the reasons why they arise, by equipping them with all the pieces of factual knowledge which might help them in reaching solutions to the problems, and by guiding their reflections with liberal teaching methods. Moreover, this constitutes a necessary condition for revitalising, without any kind of artificiality, the somewhat ailing condition of our secondary education. For it is no use trying to conceal the fact that secondary education finds itself intellectually disorientated between a past which is dying and a future which is still undecided, and as a consequence lacks the vigour and vitality which it once possessed. To say this is not to imply that anyone is to blame but rather to take note of something which is a product of the nature of things. The old faith in the perennial virtue of the classics has been definitively shaken. Even those who by inclination look most naturally towards the past have a strong sense that something has changed, that needs have arisen which will have to be satisfied. As against this, however, no new faith has yet appeared to replace the one which is disappearing. The task of educational theory is precisely to help in the development of this new faith and, consequently, of a new life. For an educational faith is the very soul which animates a teaching body.

Thus the necessity for study of educational theory turns out to be far more pressing in the case of the secondary school teacher than in that of the primary. It’s not a question of simply instructing our future teachers in how to apply a number of sound recipes. They must be confronted with the problems of secondary school culture in its entirety. This is precisely what the course of study we are going to begin this year seeks to achieve.

I know that both those who over-generalise and those who are meticulously scholarly (for in this instance diametrically opposed types of mind find themselves in agreement) will claim that nothing of practical utility can be learned from history. What on earth, they ask, can the colleges of the Middle Ages tell us about secondary schools today? In what way can the scholasticism of the trivium and the quadrivium help us to discover what, here and now, we ought to be teaching to our children and how we ought to be teaching it? It is sometimes even additionally suggested that these retrospective studies can only have disadvantageous consequences; since it is the future for which we have to prepare, it is the future to which we should be looking and on which we should be concentrating our attention; excessive contemplation of the past can only hold us back. I believe, by contrast, that it is only by carefully studying the past that we can come to anticipate the future and to understand the present; consequently a history of education provides the soundest basis for the study of educational theory.

Indeed is it not already highly instructive to survey the various sorts of education which have followed one another in the course of our history. Of course — as is too often the case — the successive variations are attributed to the feebleness of the human intellect which has failed to grasp the one-and-for-all-time ideal system, if they are regarded simply as a series of mistakes painfully and imperfectly correcting themselves one after the other, then this whole history can only be of marginal interest. At most it could put us on our guard against repeating old mistakes; but then again, since the realm of errors knows no bounds, error itself can appear in an infinite variety of forms; a knowledge of the mistakes made in the past will enable us neither to foresee nor to avert those which may be made in the future. We shall see, however, that there was nothing arbitrary about any of these theories and these systems, which have undergone the test of experience and been incarnated in reality. If one of them has not survived, this was not because it was merely the product of human aberration but rather that it was the result of specific and mutually interacting social forces. If it has changed, this is because society itself has changed. Thus one comes to realise on the basis of first-hand experience that there is no immutable form of education, that yesterday’s cannot be that of tomorrow, that while on the one hand, the systems are in a state of perpetual flux, these continual changes (at least when they are normal) connect at any given moment in time with a single fixed and determining reference-point: namely, the condition of society at the relevant moment. In this way we can get away from the prejudices, both of neophobia and of neophilia: and this is the beginning of wisdom. For while, on the one hand, one acquires immunity from that superstitious respect which traditional educational practices so easily inspire, one comes to feel at the same time that the necessary innovations cannot be worked out a priori simply by our imagination which longs for things to get better, but rather that they must be, at every stage of development, rigorously related to a totality of conditions which can be objectively specified.

The history of education, however, does not consist merely in a kind of introduction to educational theory, excellent in itself but of only very general relevance. We can and should expect it to furnish us with certain essential requirements which nothing else can provide.

In the first place, isn’t it obvious that in order to play his part in that organism which is the school, the teacher needs to know what the organism is, what are the component parts out of which it is constituted and how they are interrelated so as to form a unity? Since this is the environment in which he will have to live it is critically important that he be familiar with it; but now the question arises, how are we to set about giving him this familiarity? Are we to restrict ourselves to explaining to him the legal rules and regulations which determine both the material and moral aspects of the way our academic institutions are organised, by pointing out to him the various cog-wheels and showing how they interlock? Certainly a course of this sort wouldn’t be a waste of time; indeed it might justly be thought surprising that we allow our young teachers to enter the academic world without any knowledge of the laws which govern it. But this sort of knowledge would not really be knowledge, for these teaching institutions did not come into existence on the same day that the legislation defining them was drafted. They have a past which is the soil which nourished them and gave them their present meaning, and apart from which they cannot be examined without a great deal of impoverishment and distortion. If we are to know what they are really like and how consequently we shall behave towards them, it is not enough to be apprised of the letter of the laws which stipulate the relevant form they are to take and lay down (in theory) how they are to be organised. What we need to know is, as it were, the inner life of the institutions, how they are motivated and what goals they seek to achieve. For they have acquired a momentum of their own, which drives them in some particular direction and it is this which we need to know about more than anything else. Now just as we need more than one point in order to specify any particular line (especially a relatively tortuous one), so the geometrical point which is constituted by the present moment is by itself quite useless if what we wish to do is to plot the trajectory of a particular institution. What tends to make it move in one direction rather than another are forces which are internal to it, which give it life, but which do not reveal themselves clearly on the surface. In order to understand them we need to see them at work in the course of history, for only in history do they manifest themselves through the accumulation of their effects. This is why no educational subject can be truly understood except by placing it in the context of the institutional development, the evolutionary process of which i...