Durkheim and Modern Education

W.S.F. Pickering, Geoffrey Walford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN:
  9780415181686
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134675883
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This volume explores Durkheim's place in modern educational thought at three different levels: * Durkheim's ideas on education are analyzed and placed in the context of modern society * current educational issues are explored using a Durkheimian framework * Durkheim's thought is related to that of modern educational theorists to reveal his enduring influence In discussing Durkheim's modern relevance, the contributors stress his desire to integrate the practical and theoretical aspects of education. They identify particular pertinence in his focus upon the moral base of education and his insistence upon the importance of the social and society.

1 Introduction¹

W. S. F. Pickering and Geoffrey Walford

DOI: 10.4324/9780203022054-1

The unpopularity of Durkheim's work on education

Of all the social areas that Durkheim examined, or the sub-disciplines that he developed, the least referred to has been that of education. This was the case amongst his own disciples who constituted the Année Sociologique group. And the same lack of interest continues amongst scholars today. The subjects of methodology, religion, morals, epistemology, suicide, the division of labour, law, and so on, have given rise to comment, criticism, praise and development. Not so the Cinderella of them all: education. Admittedly, Paul Fauconnet who followed Durkheim as professor in Paris made education his speciality but published nothing original on the subject. In more recent times a few books and some articles have appeared on the subject. But the fact remains that Durkheim's Rules of the Sociological Method (1895a) and Suicide (1897a) have been far more prominent among teachers and students than say, The Evolution of Educational Thought (1938a) – a book which in many respects approaches the magisterial – or even Moral Education (1925a). Why is it, then, that Durkheim's approach to education has been so marginalized? As a sociologist of education, should he not be written off? Before an attempt is made to answer such questions, and to suggest why he should be taken more seriously, attention ought to be focused on his deep concern for education. But lest there be any misunderstanding, it should be stated at the outset that this book and its introduction are concerned only with the education of young people up to about 18 years of age. University education lies outside its boundaries.

The educational world of France

Durkheim was born at a time when public education was seen to be of the utmost importance to the well-being of the French nation. In spite of the fact of radical Napoleonic reforms in education, the disastrous war of 1870 was held by some to be due to a failure of an entrenched educational system which, amongst other things, was not focused sharply enough on the sciences.

In France the training of teachers in primary and secondary schools was taken much more seriously from the beginning of the nineteenth century and was much more institutionalized than it was, for example, in Britain. One can point to the Ecoles Normales Primaires (teachers' training colleges) which were initiated by Napoleon and which were for primary school teachers and were found in every département. For those anticipating teaching at the secondary level, in lycées or universities, study at an Ecole Normale Supérieure was required, the most prestigious of which was the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. The best candidates often went from teaching in a lycée to lecturing in a university. Students unable to pass the exams necessary to enter the Ecole Normale Supérieure usually went straight into a university. The courses at the Ecole Normale in Paris were of an academic standard, usually held to be higher than that of the university itself. A person who successfully completed the course would at the end have received something equivalent to an honours degree as well as a qualification in pedagogy. In Britain, teachers' training colleges were never given such priority. The first voluntary college was opened in Battersea, London in 1834: by 1850 there were about thirty such colleges in England under the control of the national church or local civic authorities (Judge et al. 1994: 165). Such colleges were outside the compass of the universities and it was commonly reckoned in the mid-nineteenth century – and to some extent is still found – that a man (not a woman!) who read for a degree at Oxford or Cambridge could proceed to teach in a school without any further training. Education courses in universities proceeded slowly and Cambridge created a faculty of education only in 1968 (Searby 1982: 3).²

Another reason that made the training of teachers so important in the eyes of the French government in Durkheim's day was the policy that the ideals of the state should be implemented by teachers themselves. It was these instituteurs and institutrices of the Third Republic who, it was hoped, would supplant the curé as the moral leader, not only in towns, but in the thousands of villages of rural France. The policy was to replace a rigid ecclesiastical morality with a secular one. Through Jules Ferry, who was in the ministry of education during the Third Republic, all primary schooling was made free and compulsory in 1881.

Durkheim, man, sociologist and educator

Such, in a few words, was the educational world in which Durkheim found himself as a leading pedagogical figure. He was born in 1858 into a rabbinic family in Epinal in Lorraine, entered the Ecole Normale Supérieure in 1879 and received his aggrégation in 1882. He taught at three lycées for short periods and then went to lecture at the University of Bordeaux in 1887. In 1902 he became a lecturer at the Sorbonne and gave compulsory courses in education at the Ecole Normale. All his life he was deeply immersed in the teaching profession at various levels.

Unlike the situation in Britain and the United States, formal education in France was controlled by the French civil service based in Paris. It was centralized and much influenced by the government in power. Local authorities had little or no say in its administration. Realizing his potential for their purposes, not least in education, certain people in the government of the day selected Durkheim as someone important for the future. To enhance his career they sent him in 1886 to study in Germany for a year under leading psychologists and philosophers. All his university posts involved the subject of education. When he first went to Bordeaux he was appointed lecturer in social sciences and pedagogy. Later he became professor of social science. When he went to the Sorbonne it was as a lecturer in the science of education and when he was made professor in 1913 the title of the chair at his request was Science de l'Education et de la Sociologie. When he first went to Paris to teach he followed a professor of education, Ferdinand Buisson. Buisson before that had been Director of Primary Education and supported Ferry in the reforms – the Ferry Laws, just mentioned. Thus it is clear that education was always prominent in his appointments and might be said to be his life's work, irrespective of the many books and articles he wrote on sociological subjects in general. It is estimated that three-quarters of his teaching time was given to pedagogy. However, Durkheim referred to an uncomfortable tension in this respect. On the one hand he admitted the extreme importance of education to society and the fact that he had to spend so much time in lecturing on education. And he was unique among all sociologists until recent times in giving education such a large place in his thought. On the other hand, he saw his creative work – his mission – as that of developing the science of sociology, which he was convinced had so much to offer to the academic world and to society in general.

Sociology, as a totally secular science of social phenomena, could also be seen to have an ideological base which coincided with that of the anticlerical Third Republic. It provided it with a firm, ‘scientific’ foundation. Another type of sociology was known before that of Durkheim. It was that of Auguste Comte (1798–1857), who indeed had coined the word. But his sociology had been rejected by the academic world and was scientifically and philosophically unacceptable, not least because it reached its culmination in a secular Catholicism. Durkheim was a far more political creature than Comte. He was a devoted Frenchman and a strong supporter of the Third Republic. Though never a member of any political party, he was a socialist in spirit and many of his friends were socialists. He was critical of its manifestation in various parties claiming to be socialist. Such were the alleged political consequences of his sociology that in the 1930s it was attacked by more conservative politicians when it was planned to incorporate some of his thinking into educational syllabuses. The person responsible for such an inclusion was Félix Pécaut, a strong Durkheimian sympathiser. His policy forced him to resign from the government.

But in general Durkheim was successful. Sociology became a recognized academic subject and his disciples were able to teach it through university appointments, as a rule, within the discipline of philosophy. It made its way into Eastern Europe, to the United States and slowly into Britain where Durkheimian sociology gradually became popular through social anthropology.

During his lifetime, Durkheim's publications on education were meagre. They were mainly articles and reviews (see references). However, after his death, lectures and lecture courses appeared in the form of books – Education and Sociology (1922a), Moral Education (1925a), The Evolution of Educational Thought (1938a). All these, whose titles are given in English, were not translated into that language until after the Second World War. The fact that they were translated relatively late, compared with the English translations of other books by Durkheim, only emphasizes the fact that was raised at the beginning, why of all the social areas dealt with by Durkheim, was education the most neglected? To that question we now turn.

Criticisms expounded and answered

The purpose of education

Perhaps one reason for the unpopularity of Durkheim's work on education comes in his concept of the function, or if one prefers, the purpose of education. In an early book not usually referred to in connection with education, Suicide, he writes that education is ‘only the image and reflection of society. It imitates and reproduces the latter in abbreviated forms: it does not create it’ (1897a: 427/t.1951a: 372). There is no evidence to show that Durkheim ever deviated from this position. Two issues ensue. One, it assumes a form of determinism and rigidity within the processes of education. Two, it reduces the role of the teacher in society to that of a kind of civil servant.

By today’ s values, does Durkheim's assertion about the purpose of education damn him? At first sight it might appear so for it means that the teacher can teach only what is stipulated by the curriculum, that is, what the ‘authorities’ prescribe and is thus highly restricted. Boundaries are set: the content is imposed. Only in this way, it seems, can a society be sure that its children become socialized into its norms and ideals and receive practical knowledge held necessary for being adult members. The object of education is ‘to arouse and to develop in the child a certain number of physical, intellectual and moral states which are demanded of him by both the political society as a whole and the special milieu for which he is specifically destined’ (1922a: 4l/t.1956a: 71). Of course the extent to which the teacher is restricted will depend on the curriculum set by authorities. Some teachers who find it acceptable will be pleased with the task before them. But others might say it limits their powers and they thus become little more than ‘state administrators’. Their own predilections and ideals have to be repressed.

Durkheim never really considered in detail the issue of the syllabus. He probably did not think it was his task. It was a given within which the teacher could be creative. For Durkheim teaching was both a science and an art (Pickering 1979: 104–6). The teacher must never be an automaton. Durkheim emphasized the humanity of the relation between the teacher and the pupils and this is nowhere more evident than in his argument for the total prohibition of corporal punishment in schools (see chapter 5).

That the teacher cannot change society would appear to downgrade the role of teachers, for they must be subservient to higher authorities. The teacher is therefore very much ‘number two on the list’. Durkheim wrote ‘education can be reformed only if society itself is reformed’ (1897a/t.1951a: 373). One assumes the order is irreversible.

That the school must always reflect the community in which it is situated may seem to reflect Durkheim's authoritativeness and his sense of social order. And order is necessary for a society to function. But surely it is true that a primary school or even a secondary school has to follow in the wake of social ideals rather than be an agent for social change? One has to start with the tradition contained in and set by society. It is necessary to build on that so that lasting change can take place. A school's primary purpose is to transmit that tradition. Never can a school be a hotbed of revolution!

Is the individual or society the primary object of education?

At the heart of a society stand représentations collectives', which are ideas, ideals, morals, religious values created by society for society. It is these which have to be absorbed by the pupil. This, it might be argued, makes education social-centred rather than individual-centred. Durkheim, with his commitment to social realism (society is a reality sui generis), is open to criticism from educationalists on the grounds that the individual is crippled because what is social must always be prior. The individual is therefore dehumanized. This is a distorted reading of Durkheim. He stands for the autonomy and full development of the individual. The highest point in the process of evolution is the emergence of the individual. An individual must be free to be the person he or she believes they can become. Education encourages each individual to advance to the degree she or he is able. The point is that this cannot be achieved apart from the social. It is out of the social that the individual grows. Young children have a need for order and security before the individual can develop particular characteristics and abilities. Thus in general terms the relation between the social and the individual is a dialectical one, with neither of them being finally triumphant. The individual is partly derived from the social and partly from specifically individual traits. On this point Durkheim and Dewey are very close. Further, Durkheim held that the child's mind was not a tabula rasa but had given emotional characteristics. Psychology had a legitimate place in studying the individual development of children.

In preparing the individual for adult society, education beyond a certain age has to be tailored for society and its requirements at a particular period in history. Again, society dictates, or what are now called market forces dictate what is desirable or possible. Pupils are not to be given just a general education but a vocational one where the occupation students finally embrace is available to them. Earlier school education directly prepares them for vocational education. Such an educational policy has nothing which smells of dilettantism or learning for its own sake. Life is too earnest for that.

Durkheim asserted that the school can be viewed as a community which reflects the society in which it is situated. Obvious though such an assertion is, it has its limitations. The school is indeed a social institution but can never be an independent society, even a democratic one, because of its authoritarian structure and its economic dependence on the larger community.

In another direction one might say that Durkheim has been maligned, or cast to one side, because he held that all teaching had to be carried out in schools and that parents should have no say in it. It is interesting because he himself gives the impression of being a patriarchal figure who would have had a considerable say in the education of his own children.³ He offered no reasons for his position. But nevertheless certain social groups adopted Durkheim's position long before him, notably Anabaptists, who were pioneers in infant education and who have always stood for the autonomy of the school, where all discipline of children is carried out – never in the home. This is certainly a stronger position than Durkheim's.

The issue of morals

Of all Durkheim's books on education the most popular has been Moral Education (1925a). But although it covered many topics in education, including the class and school as social groups, discipline, punishment, psychology, the teaching of the sciences and so on, the subject which engaged most of his attention was the teaching of morals. The reasons for this are several. One might begin with a personal one. Durkheim himself was a very ‘moral’ person, indeed there was something of a Puritan in him. He had hoped his greatest book would have been on morality but alas he completed only the introduction in manuscript form before he died (see 19...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• The Durkheim family
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• Part One
• 2 Emile in a Pluralistic Society
• 3 Emile Durkheim, Citizenship and Modern Education
• 4 Kohlberg's Critique of Durkheim's Moral Education
• 5 The Administration of Punishment in Schools
• 6 Teaching Autonomy
• Part Two
• 7 Japanese Education A Durkheimian ideal type?
• 8 Educating for Social Cohesion in a Pluralist Society
• 9 Durkheim, Democracy and Diversity Some thoughts on recent changes in England and Wales
• 10 Durkheim, Dewey and Progressive Education The tensions between individualism and community
• 11 Emile Durkheim in the Context of the American Moral Education Paradigm
• 12 Classroom Management as Moral Education A Durkheimian perspective
• Part Three
• 13 Durkheim, Social Revitalization, Education and Religion
• Name index
• Subject index