Antonio Gramsci (Routledge Revivals)

Conservative Schooling for Radical Politics

Harold Entwistle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415557634
• eBook ISBN: 9781135195458
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Antonio Gramsci is one of the few Marxist theoreticians to have considered the role and nature of education, yet paradoxically his revolutionary, political and social theory seems at odds with his conservative approach to the content and processes of schooling. This book, originally published in 1979, examines his educational, political and cultural writings in an effort to resolve this apparent discrepancy.

Gramsci's relevance lies in his treatment, in the context of his radical political theory, of themes which currently exercise modern radical educationists. Among the subjects he discusses are the sociology of the curriculum, the apparent discontinuity between the culture of school and that of daily life, problems of literacy and language in education, the role of the state in the provision of education, the cultivation of elites and the role of intellectuals, the relative functions of authority and spontaneity in education and the ambiguious relationship of these to differing political ideologies, particularly Fascism.

Part one
The schooling of children

Introduction

An ambiguity attaches to the word ‘school’ following from different usage in Europe and North America. In North America, school tends to refer to the total complex of institutions of formal education, including colleges and universities. When young adults speak of ‘being in school’ or of ‘going back to school’, it is higher education to which they are referring. But in Europe school usually refers to the institution devoted to the education of the child and the young adolescent: school covers the period of compulsory education and upper secondary schooling, and it is in this sense that Gramsci habitually uses the Italian equivalent, scuola. As will become evident, it is of importance to understanding Gramsci’s concept of education as hegemonic that this distinction be drawn between school as concerned with the education of children and school as referring to formal education at any level, including institutions for the education of adults.

The curriculum of the school

A striking feature of Gramsci’s writing is its positive valuation of traditional, mainstream, humanistic culture. Throughout his own work his debt to this is immense; his erudition, especially in the fields of history and literature (including foreign literature), is impressive. There is no dismissal of this mainstream culture, its source in Graeco-Roman civilisation, as ‘bourgeois’ in any pejorative sense. McInnes has remarked upon ‘that substantial part of Gramsci’s work that consists in the defence and illustration of formal logic, classic culture, liberal education and disinterested enquiry’ (1971, p.15; cf. also Quaderni, III, pp.2346–7). In a letter dated March, 1918, Gramsci explained the objectives of his club for young adolescents (La Club di Vita Morale) as ‘the disinterested discussion of ethical and moral problems, the formation of a habit of research, of disciplined and methodical reading, of the simple and clear expression of one’s convictions’ (quoted Manacorda, 1976, pp.24–5). Similarly, when calling upon the Italian Socialist Party to create ‘cultural associations’ aimed at educating the working class, he urged that these should develop in the Italian people those qualities which he felt they lacked, ‘the love of free discussion, the desire to search for truth rationally and intelligently’ (Formazione, p.95): ‘to the proletariat is necessary a disinterested school, a humanistic school, in short, as was intended by the ancients and more recently by the men of the Renaissance’ (Scritti Giovanile, p.57). One Italian Gramscian scholar concludes with reference especially to his early writings, that ‘it does not seem possible to deny, above all in examining the content of education, that Gramsci shows himself for the most part to be anchored to the model of the traditional bourgeois school’ (Broccoli, 1972, p.35). Moreover, when he insisted that Marxism ‘maintains a dynamic contact with the masses and aims continually to raise new strata of the masses to a higher cultural life’ (Notebooks, p.397), he did, indeed, see the higher cultural life as a product of the dialectical engagement of popular culture with high culture: ‘the philosophy of praxis (i.e., Marxism) was born on the terrain of the highest development of culture in the first half of the nineteenth century’ (Notebooks, p.399). For Gramsci there is no so-called proletarian or working-class culture to be idealised, absolutely discontinuous with the historical cultural mainstream. In this respect he is at one with the traditional Marxist-Leninist postion (see below, pp.43–6). He was, of course, aware of the anachronism of a humanistic culture which remained dominated by the classical languages (Notebooks, pp.37–40). Intrinsically valuable as he believed these to be as instruments of personal discipline, he recognised the need for schools to teach a ‘new humanism’ focused upon those modern forms of knowledge which were intrinsic to an industrial civilisation.

In the educational essays there is no attempt to outline, systematically, a programme of subjects for the curriculum. What Gramsci does, again paradoxically, is to praise the traditional Italian elementary school, which he believed to have been the object of mistaken reform by the fascist government in 1923. This positive evaluation of the existing elementary school has proved puzzling to some Gramscian scholars. The editors of the Notebooks feel it necessary to warn their readers that many references in the Notebooks and the Letters had to be euphemistic in order to circumvent censorship by the prison authorities (Notebooks, p.xiii). In their view, the eulogy of traditional educational institutions is ‘a device which allowed Gramsci to circumvent the prison censor, by disguising the future (ideal system) as the past in order to criticise the present’ (ibid., p.24). Hoare and Smith’s point is taken with reference to Marxist concepts and to the founding fathers of Marxism. But when education is under discussion it is not clear that Gramsci’s defence of historical institutions was a disguise for advocacy of new, radical educational content and practices which he preferred in substance, but thought it prudent not to describe. We shall see that his prescriptions for the upbringing of children are, indeed, conservative and it would be odd if the entire thrust and substance of his discussion of educational principles had been completely misleading and unreliable hints of his own preferences. In the event, when he took the initiative in organising a school for his fellow political prisoners on the island of Ustica, this was modelled on the pattern of the traditional elementary school (Manacorda, 1976, p.70; Lawner, Letters, no. 2). Though some references to his own schooling are disparaging, this seems less a disenchantment with schools, as such, than a criticism of the shortcomings of a small backward country school in Sardinia where half of his fellow-pupils could only speak Italian haltingly, and of his small gymnasium where three overworked ‘self-styled professors’ relied ‘more on brazen cheek than competence’ (Lettere, no. 6, 387; 295; Edinburgh Letters, no. CLXXX; cf. also Davidson, 1977, p.37). These criticisms cannot be read as criticism of the principles underlying the traditional school: ‘It was right to struggle against the old school, but reforming it was not so simple as it seemed. The problem was not one of model curricula but of men, and not just the men who are actually teachers themselves but of the entire social complex which they express’ (Notebooks, p.36). Earlier in the same note he had also distinguished the educational principles embodied in the old school law (the Casati Act of 1859), of which he approved, (see Manacorda, 1976, p.325) from their actual implementation, about which he remained agnostic. After outlining its aims, he concluded: That was the real basis of the elementary school. Whether it yielded all its fruits, and whether the actual teachers were aware of the nature and philosophical content of their task, is another question’ (Notebooks, p.35). In this connection it is interesting that a modern English historian of the Labour Movement, E.P.Thompson (1968b), has concluded that elementary education, especially, has ‘resisted and thrown back…the meaner manifestations of cultural domination and social control’ which were characteristic of much nineteenth-century educational and cultural priggishness with reference to the working class.

Gramsci’s positive evaluation of the elementary school as it existed under the old school law referred especially to its contribution towards the conquest of ignorance and superstition. Though he recognised in everyone the capacity to be a ‘philosopher’, ‘artist’, ‘man of taste’, participating in ‘a particular conception of the world’ (Notebooks, p.9), it is also evident that he believed that philosophy, artistry, taste and conceptions of the world could be mistaken or cognitively and aesthetically barren (ibid., p.323):

It must first be shown that all men are ‘philosophers’, by defining the limits and characteristics of the ‘spontaneous philosophy’ which is proper to everybody. This philosophy is contained in: 1. language itself which is a totality of determined notions and concepts and not just words grammatically devoid of content; 2. ‘common sense’ and ‘good sense’; 3. popular religion and, therefore, also in the entire system of beliefs, superstitions, opinion, ways of seeing things and acting which are collectively bundled together under the name of folklore.

Put in the language of Piagetian psychology, this amounts to saying that the untutored intelligence frequently manifests itself in conceptions which are pre-operational with reference to natural scientific and social modes of thought. ‘Common sense’ is a blend of ‘good sense’ and folkloristic superstition, and Gramsci saw education as an enterprise for enlarging the component of good sense within common sense (see below, pp.33–5. for elaboration of this distinction between common sense and good sense). The merit of the traditional Italian school had been in its pursuit of this objective:

The School combatted folklore, indeed every residue of traditional conceptions of the world. It taught a more modern outlook based essentially on an awareness of the simple and fundamental fact that there exist objective intractible natural laws to which man must adapt himself if he is to master them in his turn—and that there exist social and state laws which are the product of human activity, which are established by men and can be altered by men in the interests of their collective development. (Notebooks, p.34; cf. also Manacorda, 1976, p.226–7)

A contemporary of Gramsci confirms that the Italian elementary school before the 1923 reforms had become involved in combating folklore, though the critical tone in which this confirmation is offered suggests that he (Codignola) did not approve of this development (1930, p.390):

Little by little, teachers became convinced that they should devote themselves to a sort of secular priesthood, that it was their function to liberate minds from family, social and religious idols by means of an initiation to rational examination and unprejudiced observation of facts, and that it was for them to liberate the thought of children from the fables of the mother and priest, the national language from dialect, reason from sentiment, and even consciousness of humanity from the narrowness of love of country.

This characterisation of the old Italian elementary school by an observer who was not unsympathetic to the Fascist government’s school reform provides further support for the view that Gramsci’s belief in the radical potential of the old elementary school was well founded. As we shall presently see, his view of examinations and of the importance of teaching facts, his own proposals for the teaching of language and his insistence that the local culture of family and neighbourhood must be superseded through transmission, by the school, of a universal humanistic culture, are in line with Codignola’s description of the aims of elementary school teachers before 1923.

The distinction which Gramsci drew between natural laws which are intractable and social laws which are normative, given only by men, recalls Popper’s (1966) conception of ‘critical dualism’. Based on this distinction a curriculum aimed at replacing folklore with a more modern outlook would necessarily include the teaching of natural science and social studies. According to Gramsci, that aspect of the latter which is concerned with ‘rights and duties’ had been neglected in the past, and teaching of these civic values must be added to the ‘first, “instrumental” notions of schooling—reading, writing, science, geography, history’ (Notebooks, p.30). It is in his insistence upon rigorous, formal study of these intellectual instruments, especially language, that Gramsci reinforces the claims of the elementary tradition.

From the Letters and Notebooks there is no warrant for inferring that anything less than a rigorous standard of literacy will serve the working class. A reading of these offers no support to those modern educationists who question the value of a print culture and, hence, of literacy for the working class (see e.g., Young; Postman). From this point of view, Gramsci’s work is of special interest in the context of the current debate about differential, class-based language codes and the question of ‘bilinguality’ in relation to restricted language codes (working-class speech, or Black English) and the so-called elaborated code of the middle class and the school (Labov; B.Bernstein). It is true that Gramsci made two points which might appear authoritative for anyone wishing to encourage ‘lower-class’ speech or dialect in schools. In a letter to his sister he advised her to let his nephew speak Sardinian ‘dialect’ if he wished (Lettere, no. 23):

I hope you’ll let him speak Sardinian and not pester him about this. It was a mistake it seems to me not to let Edmea (his niece) speak Sardinian freely when she was small. This was detrimental to her intellectual development and put her imagination in a straitjacket…I entreat you not to make the same mistake, and to let your children pick up all the ‘sardisms’ they wish and to develop spontaneously in the natural surroundings where they were born.

But it is clear that Gramsci regarded the acquisition of ‘sardisms’ only as part of a ‘romance’ stage in the development of language skill. Manacorda reminds us that this advice was given to the mother of a two-year-old (1976, p.80), and Gramsci himself had in mind that the local Italian was itself a poor and deficient slang (Lettere, no. 23). His considered conclusion in the Notebooks was an assertion of the need to master the standard form of a language (p.325):

If it is true that every language contains the elements of a conception of the world and of a culture, it could also be true that from anyone’s language one can assess the greater or lesser complexity of his conception of the world. Someone who only speaks dialect, or understands the standard language incompletely, necessarily has an intuition of the world which is more or less limited and provincial, which is fossilised and anachronistic in relation to the major currents of thought which dominate world history. His interests will be limited, not universal…it is at least necessary to learn the national language properly. A great culture can be translated into the language of another great culture, that is to say a great national language with historic richness and complexity, and it can translate any other great culture and can be a world-wide means of expression. But a dialect cannot do this.

Indeed, part of Gramsci’s reason for entreating his sister to allow the children to speak Sardinian was that this is itself a language, not a dialect, despite its having no great literature (Lettere, no. 23).

It is evident that so far as Gramsci does offer insight into the current debate about education and social class, he gives no underpinning for those who see in Black English or ‘lower-class’ English a vehicle for rational thought as cogent as (and, indeed, with advantages over) Standard English. In a passage in the Notebooks he writes of the importance of teachers understanding peasant speech (Notebooks, pp.35–6). But he is also clear that the object of schooling is the complete mastery of the standard form of the language and a high standard of literacy. The current questioning of the value of literacy follows from the assumption that the teaching of reading is itself a means of social control and, hence, is necessary for maintenance of the existing socio-cultural hegemony (Postman). Gramsci seemed committed to the opposite view of the politics of literacy.¹ Without mastery of the common, standard version of a national language, one is inevitably destined to function only at the periphery of national life and, especially, outside its political mainstream. Teaching of the standard written and spoken forms of a language is, therefore, a democratic necessity. And if he did not explicitly commend literacy as a tool of the revolution, Gramsci did recognise that absolute mastery of written communication was necessary for anyone engaged in the communication of ideas. Describing how the specialised editors on Ordine Nuovo worked with him in committee to improve their individual and collective performances, he wrote (Notebooks, p.29):

Such activity requires an unyielding struggle against habits of dilettantism, of improvisation, of ‘rhetorical’ solutions or those proposed for effect. The work has to be done particularly in written form, just as it is in written form that criticisms have to be made—in the form of terse succinct notes…the writing down of notes and criticisms is a didactic principle rendered necessary by the need to combat the habits formed in public speaking—prolixity, demagogy and paralogism.

And he concluded by underlining the importance of the discipline of writing, especially for the working class intellectual attempting to educate himself: ‘This type of intellectual work is necessary to impart to autodidacts the discipline in study which an orthodox scholastic career provides in order to Taylorise intellectual work’ (ibid., p.29; and cf. Fiori, 1970, p.151; Quaderni, I, pp.135–6 and Manacorda, 1976, pp.59–60; see Notebooks, pp.302 ff. for significance of the reference to Taylorism). Pozzolini refers to Gramsci’s disinclination to make concessions to those who argued that his language was too difficult for most of his readers on the grounds ‘that to impoverish his language would often have meant to impoverish the debate’ (1970, pp.108–9). And, as Broccoli reminds us, since Gramsci was concerned with the problem of bringing the ‘popular classes’ into their heritage of the national culture, it is not surprising that he was unable to conceive of this achievement without mastery of the national language (1972, p.196).

Gramsci’s assessment of the educational possibilities latent in the cultural environment of the child’s own family and neighbourhood was much the same as his judgment about the limitations of dialect. He recognised that local culture is often starkly at odds with the culture which the schools attempt to transmit:

the individual consciousness of the overwhelming majority of children reflects social and cultural relations which are different from and antagonistic to those which are represented in the school curricula…There is no unity between school and life, and so there is no automatic unity between instruction and education.

From this conclusion, however, Gramsci did not dismiss school as irrelevant to life. To the contrary, he saw it as the teacher’s function:

to be aware of the contrast between the type of culture and society which he represents and the type of culture and society represented by his pupils, and conscious of his obligation to accelerate and regulate the child’s conformity with the former and in conflict with the latter (Notebooks, pp.35–6).

In discussing the dangers involved in popularising scientific knowledge (which he took to be a necessary function of intellectuals—see below, pp.144–7) he wrote critically of situations in which ‘the rough and uneducated environment has dominated the educator, the vulgar common sense has imposed itself upon science and not vice versa’ (Quaderni, II, p.877).

It is clear that Gramsci subscribed to the notion of the child as (in modern educational jargon) ‘a deficit system’, and a critique of deficit theory (as, for example, in Esland, 1971, p.89) would be tantamount to a dismissal of Gramsci’s position on curriculum, pedagogy and examinations. Again, he can be no authority for those sociologists of education who dismiss cultural deprivation as a myth whilst asserting the adequacy of all sub-cultures as valid ways of life (see, eg., Keddie, 1973). Far from being adequate or valid, he concluded, the ‘popular average’ level of culture was ‘very low’ (Notebooks, p.392). He did not fall into the conservative trap with reference to popular culture which the cultural adequacy thesis leads to.² One difficulty with this position is that, logically, it offers no possibility of the kind of creative, progressive outcomes (especially the fusing of theory and practice) which Gramsci believed could follow from a dialectical engagement of different conceptions of the world, i.e. of different sub-cultures (see pp.119–21 and pp.160–5 below).

However, Gramsci acknowledged the fact that life in different sub-cultures would evoke differing perceptions of school and academic learning (Notebooks, pp.42–3):

Undoubtedly the child of a traditional intellectual family acquires this psychophysical adaptation (i.e., to the work of the schools) more easily. Before he ever enters the classroom he has numerous advantages over his comrades, and is already in possession of attitudes learnt from his family environment…. This is why people think that the difficulty of study conceals some ‘trick’ which handicaps them—that is, when they do not simply believe that they are stupid by nature.

But Gramsci’s solution to the problem of the difficulties in schooling encountered by children of the ‘lower’ or ‘subaltern’ classes was not to convince them that they are victims of an academic confidence trick. They are not encouraged to find ‘adequacy’ in their own cultures, nor to search for alternatives to the content and pedagogy of the traditional school. The only ‘trick’ lies in hard work, ‘tears and blood’: ‘If our aim is to produce a new stratum of intellectuals, including those capable of the highest degree of specialisation, fro...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The schooling of children
• 2 The education of adults
• 3 Theory and practice in education
• Conclusion
• Notes
• A note on sources
• Bibliography