Socialism saw Labour as the combination of ‘Hand, Heart and Brain’ for the ‘renewal of the earth’ whose bounty was to be shared in common by all humans including the future generations. Such a world was to be realised through the united struggle of all the working people.

Socialism drew from the Enlightenment tradition the ideas of the perfectibility of human beings and progress through accumulation of knowledge and wisdom. It also drew from the materialist doctrine the idea that human character was shaped by the environment and upbringing and hence the possibility of changing the upbringing to change human beings. It drew from the medieval communitarian ideals the notion of equality of all human beings, which meant equal sharing of labour, produce, knowledge and public responsibilities; an aversion to division / specialisation of labour; and opposition to exploitation and exercise of power over individuals. At the same time, it rejected individualism in favour of the idea of a ‘community of equals’. It saw in the factory system and capitalist laissez faire, the very opposite of its ideals and considered it essential to break this system to recast the future as per its ideals.

If most of these ideas were shared by all socialists, they were not unanimous about several other issues: the importance of a cooperative movement vs class struggle; on the possible role of industrial production and that of the state and many more such issues. These differences then led to the socialist ideas branching off into Anarchism, Communism, Democratic Socialism etc. These differences as we shall see had profound impact on the educational ideas of the socialists.

Education as mentioned above was central to the core of the emancipatory project of socialism. Human beings needed to be rational, well-informed and skilled and education was the means for this. Inequality in education was a major cause of social inequality, hence the need for establishing educational equality, equal access to education for all. Education was a key component in the struggle of the working people, as it would enable them to understand their rights and help them to strategise their struggles. It had an important role in dispelling misinformation and the false ideological frameworks thrust upon us. It was even more important in cultivating in the future human beings the new moral values of community life as equals. Education was also central to reclaiming our humanity and dignity which has been denied by division of labour and exploitation.

Marx’s third ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ (1845) spells out a dialectical solution to some of the key issues faced by the socialist movement as an educational project:

Education that remoulds human beings would gain its force and meaning from the revolutionary practice of changing the world and hence could not be an a priori process or remain static but had to be a dynamic and changing force, itself subject to change.

As the socialist engagement with education evolved it addressed some key issues like equality of access to education, exercise of freedom and control in the process of education, indoctrination vs critical thinking, promoting individual freedom vs the needs of the community, balancing the mental, dispositional and manual dimensions (‘Hand, Heart and Mind’) and the institutional frameworks for imparting education to all.

It should be remembered that education was central to all ‘modernist’ projects, and not just to socialism. It was an essential component of absolutist states, the nation states, colonialism, liberal democracy, ‘social reform’ and anti-colonial movements. The socialist education project thus had to constantly engage with these alternative educational projects and redefine itself.

Socialism and mass education in many ways evolved together in the context of the transition from absolutist states to nation states and colonial states. This was also accompanied on the one hand by the processes of transition to capitalism, proletarianization and industrialisation and on the other by intellectual movements like the Enlightenment and Liberal Democratic thought.

The Mass Education system emerged in Europe initially as an instrument of the absolutist state and subsequently of the emergent nation state. It had the dual purpose of disciplining the increasingly proletarianized population and preparing it for productive work in the factories. The higher education system was designed to produce competent staff for industry, army and bureaucracy with a grounding in the newly emerging sciences. The entire system was structured so as to reproduce rigid social hierarchies even while keeping some opening for the exceptionally meritorious.

This was to an extent challenged by liberal democratic tendencies, especially in the United States, which promoted common schooling under the control of local communities for creating a common citizenry of white male settlers.

Liberal democratic thinking as it emerged emphasised freedom of the atomised individual and imagined a state which protects the rights and liberty of these individuals with their consent. Certain forms of liberalism were rooted in laissez faire ideas of the state not interfering with market forces and this meant allowing market forces to control access to education too.

Socialist thought and movement emerged in this context of growing industrialisation, individualism, laissez faire and consolidation of nation states during the concluding phase of the struggle to end feudal privileges and absolutism. It also had strong roots in the actual movements of the working people, artisans, industrial workers, etc. The felt needs of these classes were articulated in the demands of the movements and theorised by intellectuals, some of whom also came from the ranks of the poorest. Socialism was a reaction to growing centralisation of power and resources in the hands of the state and industrialists and the destruction of the community and atomisation of the individual human being by the joint efforts of the state and the market. It sought to rebuild the community even while taking into account the emergence of the state and industrial production and to restore a degree of equality and dignity in society.

The idea of state provision for mass education emerged as a response to the anxiety created by the German Peasant Wars of the 16th century and the popularity of radical religious movements like Anabaptism. Anabaptists (a radical Christian sect which rejected institutionalised religion and the combination of religion and the state) sought to establish communes of equals without any privileges and based on common ownership and the principle of each person contributing according to his ability and receiving according to his needs. Anabaptism, as is well known, treated the period of childhood as a special phase of human life in which the individual cannot take conscious decisions, and needs to be cared for and nurtured by elders. The commune was to be held together by strong socialisation and indoctrination. Keen to build a community of equals the Anabaptists looked to a special kind of education as the key to this process. All children, boys and girls, once weaned away, were to be entrusted to a residential school with its school mother, master and other assistants. Children were to grow up there together as equals and as members of a common community and groomed into the beliefs and practices of the Anabaptists.

In fact, in the Anabaptist colonies, a mother entrusted the care of her baby to a nursery which had all the other babies and toddlers, visiting the baby only to breast feed. After 18 months the child was entrusted to another set of caregivers till it reached the age of five, when s/he was under the care of a school master, who besides other things taught the child to read, write, personal hygiene and the Christian faith. Schooling meant a lot more than this, it included grooming into the culture and ways of living and dispositions of the community as the child remained in the school collective. Parents could visit them and take them out for walks, but little else. At the age of twelve the male child was apprenticed to a trade within the colony while girls were trained separately to do cooking, sewing, and housekeeping. The Anabaptists believed that children were naturally prone to fall into evil ways and needed to be weaned away from them and develop humility, frugality, obedience, passivity, and brotherly love through education.¹  While great emphasis was placed on discipline, physical punishment and severity was discouraged. “It is necessary to exercise great discretion and discernment in disciplining children for often a child can be better trained and corrected and taught by kind words when harshness would be altogether in vain, while another can be overcome with gifts. A third however cannot be disciplined without severity... Therefore the exercise of discipline of children requires the fear of God.”²

While most of these communes and schools were small, short-lived, severely persecuted and often ridden with internal strife, their ideals had a profound impact on the imagination of those exploring alternatives to feudal and capitalist ways of life and education. Indeed, Pestalozzi, who was to be a torchbearer of democratic pedagogy, was greatly influenced by Anabaptist educational practices. The Anabaptist idea of a common residential school to inculcate a new value system found favour with early communist thinkers of the French Revolution. The Anabaptist emphasis on nurturing children led to a closer study of children, their dispositions and behaviour, and laid the foundations of childhood studies and pedagogy.

Around the same time as the Anabaptists, the princely states of Germany and the Lutherans³  and Pietists visualised mass education funded by the state as a means of indoctrinating and disciplining the population. As Andy Green points out, “The peasant wars in Germany convinced Luther of the urgent need for a widespread system of education which would act as a mechanism of social control and he argued that this should be financed and administered by the secular power. His proposals were readily taken up by German princes.”⁴  As a response to the Lutheran initiative the Jesuits too took up education as a major activity. This also coincided with the emergence of absolutist states of varying kinds which found state-controlled education an important instrument for both developing its bureaucracy and army as well as disciplining the masses. A large number of German states enacted ordinances instituting a public education system in the sixteenth century itself.

James Melton has argued that the radical changes occurring in the rural world of the following two centuries led the emergent absolutist states of Germany to look to mass education as a disciplining and indoctrinating force.⁵  As feudalism reconstituted itself through absentee landlordism and peasant families lost control over land and engaged with the market in diverse ways (including craft production under the putting out system) traditional forms of patriarchal control of family and feudal estates were weakened. In the towns too the traditional apprentice system was on the decline, resulting in the growth of the footloose urban poor. “The state saw an urgent need for new forms of labour discipline to make peasants and industrial workers more productive and for new forms of social control to compensate for the decline in traditional forms of authority.”⁶  The emerging absolutist state used the pedagogic approaches of the Pietist movement which emphasised popular literacy so that people could read the Bible and imbibe its values. This was a peculiar combination of agency and submission of the learner. It appealed to the absolutist rulers “because it stressed austerity and the work ethic, upheld the social hierarchy, and believed in authority in the classroom. With its stress on universality and social obligation, Pietist schooling was a useful instrument for regenerating social authority. It was also uniquely adapted, so the mid-century cameralists were to argue, for creating the kind of voluntary submission and self-discipline which was needed for the new industrial workers and the peasantry when they were granted more independence.”⁷  The intervention of the state in the 18th century (the main architects of the system being Johann Hecker (1707-1768) and king Frederick II (1712-1786)), usually took the form of inspection of schools, ordinances insisting on compulsory attendance of all children aged five to thirteen, till they achieved minimum literacy and numeracy skills. The laws also stipulated norms for teacher training, state approved text books and state funds to supplement school expenses.

Prussian absolutism evolved under the shadow of the French Revolution and the challenge it posed, which climaxed in the defeat of Prussia at the hands of the Napoleonic armies. The new Junker state was saddled with the responsibility of transforming Prussia into an industrial capitalist country and at the same time sustaining and consolidating the semi-feudal Junker landed interests. One method was whipping up German nationalism among the masses through school education. The idealist philosopher, JG Fichte (1762-1814), a spokesperson for this strategy, put it thus: “By means of education we want to mould Germany into a corporate body, which will be stimulated and animated in all individual members by the same interest.”⁸

The foundations of the public ‘national’ education system were laid by Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835), who combined a commitment to liberal ideals of education with intense nationalism. He was inspired by the idea of ensuring a general education for all which will shape all citizens. "There are undeniably certain kinds of knowledge that must be of a general nature and, more importantly, a certain cultivation of the mind and character that nobody can afford to be without. People obviously cannot be good craftworkers, merchants, soldiers or businessmen unless, regardless of their occupation, they are good, upstanding and – according to their condition – well-informed human beings and citizens. If this basis is laid through schooling, vocational skills are easily acquired later on, and a person is always free to move from one occupation to another, as so often happens in life.” Humboldt restructured the education system instituting the Volksschule, establishing provincial and district school boards, an examination system and of course the university system which combined knowledge generation and propagation. Ironically, he was a liberal at heart who advocated education for individual freedom and as such was opposed to state control over education. He also was greatly impressed with the pedagogy of Pestalozzi (of whom more later). He nevertheless used the opportunity to briefly head the education department under the King, to institute an integrated state-controlled education system, hoping that academic freedom would eventually prevail. He was responsible for the three-tier education system (primary, secondary and tertiary). The universal elementary education was to promote literacy, numeracy and a smattering of geography and natural science. In shifting curricular emphasis from religious and classical education to language, mathematics, and natural sciences, he was following the Enlightenment project. He established teacher training institutions inspired by Pestalozzi so as to promote “a teaching method that is not concerned with what has been learnt so much as with the way in which the learning process may be used to exercise the memory, sharpen the understanding, develop critical faculties and cultivate refined moral feelings.” Education indeed was to go beyond mere literacy and numeracy: “not that the children should simply be taught reading, writing, arithmetic, etc., but that all the principal faculties of their body and mind should be developed and exercised as harmoniously as possible, so that the other skills followed as a matter of course.” His conceptualization of secondary and tertiary education betrays a conservative bent of mind. Secondary school was for ‘learning to learn’ and skill and knowledge acquisition essential for any professional development, which however emphasised the study of Greek and Latin classics. Tertiary education in the university aimed at greater abstraction and knowledge creation and ‘realisation of one’s full creative potential’. Entry into the tertiary level was to be closely guarded through a strict and high standard examination system. These then would man the echelons of power and authority in the bureaucracy and army. Of course, access to secondary and tertiary levels depended greatly upon the ability of the family to afford such education.

The subsequent development of the Prussian-German schooling system catered to the development of both absolutism and industrialisation even as elementary schooling was effectively universalised, with great emphasis on classroom discipline (often implying heavy corporal punishments and memorising information). Germany took the lead in setting up ‘trade schools’ and polytechnical education at the secondary level to train person power for the emerging industry. German secondary schooling was clearly organised to sustain social hierarchy, with the gymnasiums which gave access to university education and eventually positions of power for the Junker elite and the Oberrealschulen, trade schools, etc. for the less privileged middle class. The three-tier education system which ensured universal literacy and numeracy and socialisation into nationalist ideologies at the primary level, placed great emphasis on training in classical languages and literature at the secondary level as a stepping stone to tertiary education. At the secondary stage girls went to different schools and were taught different subjects, which would enable them to be better housewives. They were legally denied entry into the tertiary institutions. This effectively kept higher education and hence positions of power and authority accessible to only those men who could find the time, resource and discipline to indulge in such studies. Subsequently most modern countries were to follow this structure to protect social hierarchy and also to ensure a social elite with a particularly conservative ‘quality’ education.

French absolutism in comparison was less interested in primary education which it left to the Jesuits and the churches, and instead focussed on education at the ‘tertiary’ level to foster naval and military might. The state, steeped in mercantilist ideology, was keen on establishing a colonial empire across the seas. Mercantilism also meant some emphasis on improving the quality of domestic manufacture. French absolutism thus focussed upon technical and military education at the higher levels.

It is the French Revolution between 1789 and 1794, especially its Jacobin phase that threw up both democratic educational thought and the radical precursors of the socialist ideas and formulated the demands of the lowest strata of the French society with regards to education.

As the 18th century drew to a close and the end of the Ancien Regime was in sight, several radical and democratic thinkers sought to conceptualise a new education system, especially for France. Philosophes like La Chalotais and Diderot wrote on the subject. They were clearly opposed to clerical control over education, especially the Jesuit control over higher education in France. They wanted a secular national education under the control of the state representing national interests. The entire edifice of education was to be controlled by a central institution, a Universite based in Paris. Education would emphasise rationalism and merit and merit implied selection by competition. ‘Competitive examinations’ were to be used to fill all positions, replacing feudal criteria of birth and kinship. But the philosophes were clearly opposed to the idea egalitarian education. Indeed, they were open to allowing the Church to educate the masses. They advocated secular rational education for the middle class who would then rise up to positions based on merit on the one hand, and clerical education for the masses to keep them in their places. To quote La Chalotais, “The goal of society, requires that the knowledge of the people should not go beyond their occupations. Any man who looks beyond his dismal trade will never practice it with courage and patience.” Rousseau and Voltaire concurred. Rousseau’s Emile was after all an aristocratic child.

Rousseau is usually credited with formulating a child friendly and democratic notion of education in his Emile published 1762. Emile advocated a utopian upbringing education which would enable a man to end the alienation and deformation which the Hobbesian bourgeois world imposed. Thus would be recovered the ‘natural man’ (who was not born of sin as the Bible advocated) who would change the world. Essentially this was Rousseau’s attempt at theoretically recovering the ‘natural’ man who could be in harmony with the world around instead of living in conflict and competition. It was not a blueprint for a democratic or mass education but a philosophical ‘thought experiment’.

If a vision for a democratic mass education was yet to develop in the Ancien Regime, a vision of democratic pedagogy was on the anvil in the educational ventures of Johann Pestalozzi (1746-1827). Pestalozzi was greatly influenced by Rousseau’s Emile but was also deeply concerned with the education of the poor and destitute. He looked upon education as a means for emancipation of the poor, especially the rural poor, then being driven to take to craft production under the putting out system to supplement their incomes. Education should both help them become free thinking individuals and also enable them to profitably engage in productive work.

Pestalozzi began with a school which combined productive work with education for the rural poor in Neuhoff (Switzerland) in the 1770s. The products made by children were to be sold in the market to pay for both their education and their upbringing. Predictably this naïve project was a disaster and seemed to bear out a point made by Rousseau in his Emile that the education of the individual (who must be free) and that of the citizen (who must be of use) could not be combined in a single project. The idealistic faith in the ‘natural freedom of the children of God and in the virtues of an education that merely seconded natural tendencies’ crashed against the hard reality of the struggle for survival of the poor. The educator was declared insolvent and the school closed down in 1780.

Pestalozzi was as much concerned by the poverty of the peasants around him as he was with educational philosophy and methods. Indeed, his educational novels so movingly described poverty and squalor that his educational ideas were lost sight of by his readers. He looked to education as the means of addressing social injustice and poverty. “I believed that I could neutralize the most oppressive consequences of the evils of the feudal system and of the factory system through renewed effort for the education of the people to increased productivity in home in farm and to a greater degree of self-respect.” (Pestalozzi, Views and Experiences, 1804) However such education could not be the traditional kind based on rote learning of scriptures or texts selected by the teachers. “The central point stressed by Pestalozzi in How Gertrude Teaches is that all truly human activity must be self-generated; therefore, the old educational methods of purely mechanical drill are psychologically unsound.” But then, he had no prescriptions or fully worked out philosophy to serve. He kept exploring and making mistakes and trying to learn from them. If anything, constant striving to learn to educate to ensure the larger goal of freedom and autonomy of individual human beings animated his work. Attending to the individuality of each child and assisting in the development of the child’s individuality was essential to the assertion of the poor buried under the burden of ‘social’ needs as defined by the rulers. This meant that the teacher had to abandon given prescriptions of what the child needed to learn and instead try to study each child, analyse his/her mental processes, and address his or her learning requirements.

Soon, the world was agog with the French Revolution and Pestalozzi was made an honorary citizen of the Republic in 1792. He moved away from the earlier idealistic leanings towards an idea of education to promote ‘individual autonomy’, not as an end to be achieved but as a process. “Pestalozzi thus refuses education for reproduction of an ideal or real world: he perceives it as a form of action which allows each person to recognize his own individuality and make a 'creative work of himself.” (Michel Soetard in UNESCO review) Individual freedom had to be fortified by autonomy or acquisition of competence which included, besides literacy and numeracy, some knowledge of a craft. After nearly two decades of reflection and short-lived experiments, Pestalozzi set up an institution at Yverdon in 1805 in which he put into practice his famous ‘Method’. The Method did not consist in any specific set of materials or processes or practices. Instead, it required a close study of children. “The Method is certainly a necessary instrument. It is important to observe the nature of children, to deduce the laws governing their development, to create an environment conducive to that development, to take expressly into account the social dimension of the educational relationship and to make a child's capacity for action effective...” (ibid) This knowledge was to be used to create an emancipatory educational programme which would further the freedom and autonomy of the child, without falling into the trap of slavish adoption of a particular educational practice or technique.

The slogan inscribed on the banner of the socialist workers above carries the words, “Hand, Heart and Brain” and Pestalozzi’s educational ideas were devoted to cultivating these very components in children.

“Pestalozzi uses the word 'head' to designate man's ability to detach himself through reflection from the world and his confused impressions thereof by developing concepts and ideas. However, as an individual, man remains situated or even completely immersed in a world that through the experience he undergoes makes constant demands on his sensitivity and brings him closer to his fellow men in the struggle to control nature through work: this is the domain of the heart. Acted upon, therefore, by what exists and challenged by what ought to be, man has no alternative but to use this continuous conflict which he faces fair and square in order to fashion his own being: that is the work of the hand. These three elements thus act together to bring out the drive for autonomous existence in each of the persons concerned...”

To Pestalozzi, the role of the educator was to mediate between the child and the social and physical world, and create learning environments that attended to all three dimensions of a human being. “It is not sufficient in an educational establishment to divide up the subjects harmoniously between intellectual, artistic and technical activities. Each teacher should also strive to bring into play in every educational activity all three elements involved in developing the child's capacity to act for himself: the physical-education instructor will pay attention to the child's intellectual grasp of the exercises he performs and to their impact on his senses; the mathematics teacher will take care not to lose sight of his subject's relevance to the children's everyday experience but to provide an opportunity for them to apply mathematics on their own account at some stage in the educational process, etc. Pestalozzi never tired of stressing that this balance is never definitively established and may be disturbed at any moment to give undue advantage to one of the three 'animalities': head, heart or hand.” (All quotations are from (Michel Soetard’s Profile of Pestalozzi in Prospects, Vol XIII, No. 3 1983, UNESCO Review)

Pestalozzi was a great sensation and success in his own time even though his school had to be shut down due to both internal dissensions and paucity of funds. All kinds of governments sent their teacher educators to him to be trained and people claiming to understand his methods spread all over Europe and America propagating some element or the other of his ideas, though often misrepresenting them. Ironically both absolutist and democratic educators drew from him.

As mentioned above Pestalozzi was an ardent enthusiast of the French Revolution. It was in the heady years of the French Revolution (1789-1795) that a democratic vision of education and mass education emerged. The separation of state from church and the suppression of Catholic monasteries and sale of church properties meant an undermining of the Church’s control over elementary and higher education in France. Since the revolutionary government was slow in building alternative educational structures due to its pressing political activities, education suffered much during the period. Yet it threw up some foundational ideas of mass education for the future.

The Constituent Assembly dominated by the middle classes incorporated into the 1792 Constitution a commitment to ‘public education for all citizens, which should be free in respect of that teaching which is indispensable for all’. In other words, committing to a minimum free education for all, leaving open the question of higher education. The most radical liberal view of mass education was articulated by Nicolas de Condorcet who presented the ‘General Organisation of Public Instruction’ in the Assembly in April 1792. He was an ardent republican, advocate of women’s suffrage and equal rights of all races and abolition of slavery, besides being a mathematician. Condorcet considered education as a means for the enlightenment of each individual and a right of all. Condorcet considered ‘Inequality of instruction is one of the main sources of tyranny’, and the purpose of education is to ‘bring [classes] closer together by instruction’.⁹ He considered it an essential requirement of a citizen who would be able to exercise his or her civic rights without being influenced. He was opposed to state control over education. Education, Condorcet proclaimed, should assure for everyone the opportunity of perfecting their skills and rendering themselves capable of the social duties to which they had a right to be called; to develop to the utmost the talents with which nature has endowed them, and in so doing to establish among all citizens a true equality and thus to make political equality realised by the law.

During the early phase of the French Revolution Marquis Condorcet presented a report on public education to the Constituent Assembly in 1792 a proposal for building a secular, public funded comprehensive public education. Besides proposing the nitty gritty of the proposed system, it also presented the ideological premises of such a system. “Our hopes in the future condition of the human species may be summed up in these three important points: the destruction of inequality among nations; the progress of equality within a single people; and lastly the genuine improvement of the human person.”¹⁰  Condorcet argued that equality was possible only when all individuals were autonomous and could take decisions without being dependent upon the wisdom of another person. When it came to entrusting public duties to someone, a citizen needed to be armed with reasoned and informed judgement, which was possible only through a basic education. Education, while thus being a civic necessity, also was the key to the full attainment of one’s potentials.

“To offer all individuals of the human race the means to provide for their needs, to ensure their well-being, to know and exercise their rights, to understand and fulfil their duties, to ensure for each one the faculty of perfecting his industry, to render himself capable of the social functions to which he has the right to be called, to develop the whole range of talents with which nature has endowed him, and by this means to establish between all citizens an equality of fact and to realize the political equality recognized by the law—this must be the first goal of a national educational system.”¹¹

Condorcet, like the liberal revolutionaries of his time, defined equality as equality of rights and equality before law and equality in public life. Inequality which was the product of property rights and differential talents and market status, was not a subject of intervention.

Civic equality mandated equal education for all at least upto the level which empowered them to form a reasoned judgement (which included basic literacy, numeracy, science, history and public morality). This was to be publicly funded, in public institutions administered by elected bodies, but autonomous and controlled by professionals.

It was a five-tiered system, with universal and compulsory four-year primary schooling with schools in every habitation, a less accessible and voluntary secondary education which continued the basic elements of the primary education, a tertiary education which introduced specialisation. Then came the fourth level of Lycées, which would be equivalent to a university education and a final level of research and knowledge production. This was a pyramidal structure, one secondary school for every 15 primary schools, one tertiary institution for every 19 secondary school, one Lycée per 21 tertiary institutions. Quite obviously fewer and fewer students would climb up the levels and only a select few talented individuals would reach the highest levels.

This was to be free at all levels but not compulsory after the primary level, as it would encroach upon the freedom of the parents, who retained the freedom to engage their children in labour etc. Condorcet was aware that many parents would not be able to spare their children from labour, especially for higher education. Another limiting factor which determined entry into higher education was the talent and interest of the student, which could be lacking. This would explain the pyramidal nature of the school system. Condorcet did provide for scholarships to enable talented but indigent students to pursue higher education, but their number would be limited. Condorcet allowed for the inequality in education in the post-primary stage and argued as follows:

“Education, however egalitarian, is bound to increase the superiority of those who by nature are better organized. But equality of rights will be preserved if this superiority does not entail any real dependence and if each individual is sufficiently educated to exercise, of her or his own accord and without having to submit blindly to another’s judgement, the rights guaranteed to her or him by law. The superiority of a few, far from being a bad thing for those who have not been so well-favored, will thus contribute to the good of everyone, and human skills and knowledge will become the common heritage of society.”¹²

A major concern of Condorcet was the indoctrination of children, a concern which made him reject state or clerical control over education. He differentiated between ‘instruction’ which armed children with the tools of reason and civic morality and ‘education’ which meant some kind of conditioning which included matters of faith.¹³  While the former was to be given in the public schools, the latter was left to the homes, churches, synagogues etc. The public school would not inculcate even the Constitution and the Rights of Man as a doctrine, but as something which had been achieved and could be bettered. Condorcet very deliberately removed matters relating to religion, art, poetry and aesthetics etc from school curriculum and instead emphasised subjects which promoted reason and productive skills (like science, math, agriculture crafts).

Condorcet was for equal access of women and men to education so that women too could enjoy the freedom guaranteed by the Constitution. It may be recalled that he was also a supporter of women’s suffrage.

Condorcet’s proposals were never debated or voted upon or implemented but marked the high point of the liberal democratic conception of public education. It came under increasing attack as the Sans-Culottes, the poorest urban artisans and workers asserted themselves politically during the Jacobin phase of the Revolution. To begin with, the Revolutionary government had not set into motion the setting up of the promised public education system. Secondly, Condorcet’s proposals were found to be not egalitarian enough, given their primary concern with equality of opportunity and civic equality without social or economic equality.

His criticism of the Constitution of 1793 led to his condemnation and arrest and eventual death in prison.

The Sans-Culottes saw in education a means of ameliorating their lot, to rise in society and to destroy the empire of wealth, since education, if the community failed to guarantee it for all, was the most valuable privilege of the wealthy classes. The Sans-Culottes also anticipated a strengthening of the Republic from educational progress; the future, they considered, would be secure only if the younger generation was nourished on their ideals.

The groundswell of demand for instituting a national system of education to build the unity of the nation and inculcate the spirit of revolution grew and took the form of setting up of schools by the communes, like the one in Luxembourg which announced the proposal thus: "Education will be based on explaining to children their duties and obligations toward their country and their parents, to inculcate the manners and attitudes which they must aim for in order to be useful members of society; we will nurture their natural goodness, teach them pity, respect for the aged... We shall show them by suitable simple examples the purpose of every society, and the various forms of government which might be adopted; above all, we shall teach them about government based on freedom and equality. We shall explain to them natural laws, political laws and civil laws. To this will be added the definition of sovereignty, of the will of the people, of freedom, of equality, of the Republic; and we shall tell them about the horrors attached to all tyrannical government and about the happiness which naturally emanates from republican government."¹⁴  Public education was seen as a bulwark against clerical and feudal reaction, an instrument of ‘public safety’. The poor had their own vision of meaningful education: besides inculcating the republican spirit, they wanted a practical education which, being professionally organized, would prepare the young for specific activities. "not one of those metaphysical educations which weaken republican manners and virtues, but an education suitable for perfecting the arts and the trades, in order to provide a great boost to natural industry, to our factories, to our commerce, and to destroy tyranny forever."¹⁵  Another group put it differently, “the artisan, the soul of commerce, will find in it a means of perfecting his skill, the worker his talent, and that you will banish anything which might allow the rebirth or the perpetration of superstitious ideas."

This was a far cry from the liberal education advocated by Condorcet which would promote reasoning and eschew indoctrination.

Robespierre, while presenting the Lepelletier’s plan for public education to the Convention in July 1793 posed the question poignantly:

“But what about the poor, what will they do? To this poor child, you offer instruction; but before that, he needs bread. His labouring father deprives himself of his morsel to give it to him; but the child needs to earn something. His time is tied to work, because work is tied to subsistence. …In vain you would establish a coercive law against the father; but he wouldn’t be able, daily, to do without the work of a child who at eight, nine and ten years, already earns something. A few hours a week, that is all he can sacrifice.”

He had two major proposals in this regard.

“I ask you to decree that, from the age of five until twelve years for boys and until eleven for girls, all children, without distinction and without exception, will be taught in common, at the expense of the Republic: and that all, in the holy name of equality, will receive the same clothes, food, education and care.”¹⁶

This called for free and compulsory elementary education in common state boarding schools, to be known as Maisons d’Egalites. The schools would teach the three Rs, practical skills and republican principles, thus combining a notion of practical service to the Revolution with Robespierre’s idea of creating a ‘new type’ of republican man. In response to objections Lepelletier’s brother argued that, since there would not be an abolition of private property to wipe out the rich as a class, the only way to make them accept equality was through ‘education commune’. “You will establish by mandatory common education, a fraternity among citizens and an equality that can only be entered into in the age of innocence within youth institutions…”

Robespierre proposed to raise funds for this by taxing the rich. “In the following way I propose to share out the cost of these schools, almost all will fall on the rich; the tax will hardly be noticed by the poor. Thus, you will attain the advantages of a progressive tax which you wish to establish; also without violence or injustice, you will wipe out the enormous disparities of fortune whose existence is a public calamity.”

The adoption of the proposals took some months and the masses were in no mood to wait. ''Why is it that the National Convention has failed to adopt this wise measure in its entirety, why does it fear forcing parents to submit to this new level of equality in sending their children, regardless of their background, to the same educational institutions?" Communes and districts clamoured for setting up schools but had little resources to do so.

The popular pressure for instituting a national education system on a footing different from the one suggested by the liberal democratic Condorcet, was accompanied by the articulation of early ‘socialist or communist’ views by Gracchus Babeuf (1760-1797) and his collaborators, and indeed the larger body of anti-rich Sans-Culottes who sought to establish ‘common happiness’ or bring about equality of joy. Recognising the fundamental fact of the division of society into a minority of rich and a majority of poor labouring classes, he unequivocally took the side of the poor and the oppressed. To him a society based on inequality and monopoly was unnatural and impermanent. Even though Babeuf recognised the unequal division of property like land to be a cause of social inequality, he argued that the equal division of land was no solution as it would immediately give birth to inequality. Instead, he favoured a system of communal labour on communally owned land and communal distribution of the product equally or according to needs. Society, for Babeuf, was a large family, and within that large family each member would contribute what he could according to his abilities and each would be assured all that he needed.

Babeuf followed the Sans-Culottes and the Jacobins in declaring that the aim of society was 'the common happiness' and that the Revolution was to ensure egalite des jouissances. But since private property necessarily entailed inequality, and since the equal division of property, could 'last but one day', the only way of attaining practical equality, he maintained, was to establish a common administration; to suppress individual property; to attach each man to the employment or occupation with which he is acquainted; to oblige him to place the fruits of his labour in kind into a common store; and to establish a simple administration for food supplies, which will take note of all individuals and all provisions, and will have the latter divided up according to the most scrupulous equality. Each man would be attached to the employment or occupation with which he is acquainted... All productive and manufacturing agents will work for a common storehouse, to which each will send in kind the fruits of his labour, and distribution agents – no longer working solely for their own interests, but rather for those of the great family –  will allot to each citizen his equal and varied portion of the whole mass of the product of the entire association. This is essentially, as Georges Lefebvre has emphasized, a communism of distribution.¹⁷

Babeuf ardently supported the Sans-Culottes’ demand for public assistance to the poor and public provision of education. He recognised education as a cause of social inequality. A third of his "Preliminary Address" was given over to education and there is no doubt that it was in his eyes just as necessary a possession as any economic possession. "Education has become with us a kind of property to which each one has the right to lay claim". It was a tool, and depending upon its distribution, it was as critical to a hierarchical society as it was to an egalitarian, democratic one. The loss of equal education had created the terms of oppression and inequality; the reestablishment of equality of education would establish the terms of democracy and social equality. “Education is a monstrosity when it is unequal, when it is the exclusive patrimony of one class of the society; because education then becomes the controlling hand of this class, a mass of mechanisms, a provision of weapons of all kinds, by which the ruling class combats the other class, which is disarmed.”¹⁸

At this time, Babeuf was almost alone in seeing education in such tangible, economic terms, rather than the political, cultural, or patriotic terms of most educational reforms on the eve of the Revolution. Condorcet who too was concerned with issues of equality and liberty and was for universal access to primary education so that the equality of rights and liberty could be ensured. At the same time, he was convinced of the need for unequal education so that some may labour and some may engage in developing and imparting knowledge, even when such persons were more likely to be from the leisured classes. In recognising education as a kind of property, Babeuf was able to reject the hierarchy created by unequal distribution of knowledge and the social and economic inequality it fostered. His solution, which has certain kinship with the schools of the Anabaptists, may not have been as impracticable as it appears at first sight. It was the solution which Robespierre had endorsed, that of sending all children to one common boarding school. The writings of Babeuf available to us do not tell us about what he thought about the curriculum and pedagogy in such common schools. However, the Jacobins and the Sans-Culottes were clear on their rejection of the ‘metaphysical’ curriculum of Condorcet which eschewed ‘indoctrination’. They wanted the younger generation to imbibe the lessons and values of the Revolution lest they be forgotten and lost, loosening their vigil against the scheming of the nobility and propertied classes. Thus the purpose of education was not merely the personal development of the individual in defence of his or her rights, but the creation of a community of social, intellectual, economic and political equals.

The defeat of the Jacobins and the suppression of Babeuf paved the way for Napoleon’s rise. Napoleon did institute a national education system, which sharply differentiated between mass education, which was left to the Church and higher education which focussed on technical education and the preparation of generals and bureaucrats.

The experience of the French Revolution and its aftermath was the ground on which early socialist thought emerged trying to make sense of emerging industrial society. Understandably we can see several streams, some wanting to build upon industrialisation and others rejecting it, some looking at the Jacobins with favour and others critical of them.¹⁹

The early ‘Utopian’ socialists like Saint-Simon (1760-1825) and his followers, firmly believed in Progress – advance of Science (Natural Science, Moral Science and Arts). They held that social structure changes in conformity with the progress of science. The medieval age was dominated by warriors and the modern age should be under the ‘industrious class’ (those engaged in production – bankers, entrepreneurs and workers). They sought to build a society led by these ‘industrious’ and the learned and the creative people, for the common good of all humanity. Saint-Simon advocated a social order in which productive resources were under state control and the state under the control of the industrious classes committed to maximising production based on science for the common good. The state would generate work for all and it was the duty of all to work for society.

Saint-Simon’s great contribution to Socialist theory lay in his insistence on the duty of society, through a transformed State controlled by les producteurs, to plan and organise the uses of the means of production so as to keep continually abreast of scientific discovery. Production was to be organised based on science and mechanisation. Each person would be rewarded in accordance with his contribution to the common human welfare. Even though this meant differential remuneration, there would be no inheritance and hence no permanent property.

Universal elementary education was essential for both nurturing a population committed to the ideals of the society but also to cultivate and propagate science and the arts. At the same time Saint-Simon was wary of the ‘ignorant masses’ who wrought havoc during the Jacobin period. Thus education would serve both the purpose of building the new society based on science and knowledge and also contain the destructive potential of the masses.²⁰  In the words of Cole, “The industrialists were to control finance, and were to have the last word in deciding what should be done; but they were to be advised by the savants and the artists, who were to collaborate in giving society a clear direction in the realm of ends. Saint-Simon, in this connection, laid the greatest stress on education, which under his scheme was to be exclusively controlled by les savants and was to rest on a foundation of universal primary schooling designed to indoctrinate the whole people with a true system of social values, corresponding to the progress of les lumieres. He was convinced that society needed for its right functioning a common basis of values, which it was the business of moral science to formulate into a code of education and of social conduct.”²¹  Educational indoctrination was to be extended also to the colonies where lived ‘uncivilised’ people. Of course, Saint-Simon had more followers among the emerging industrial middle class, but few workers were attracted. In his last days he drifted towards building a reformed Christianity as the basis for the future world.

Charles Fourier (1772-1837), a younger contemporary of Saint-Simon, had a diametrically opposed notion of the future community of equals. As Engels pointed out, Fourier had an acute understanding of the contradictions of capitalism which he termed ‘civilisation’. Engels was also appreciative of Fourier’s treatment of the women’s issue and the importance he gave it.

Unlike Saint-Simon, Fourier rejected the idea that character could be moulded by environment and education. In fact, he was convinced that human nature was kind of unchanging and the problem lay in social institutions that were not in alignment with it. He was in favour of free development of human inclinations instead of suppressing or controlling them and hence was opposed to a division of labour that imposed one kind of labour on a person. His notion of education then was to eschew repression and allow free growth of the inclinations of children. “Fourier’s conception of education was of a piece with this. He wanted the children to follow their natural bents, and to learn a variety of trades by attaching themselves freely to their elders in a sort of manifold apprenticeship. ... He held that the best way to learn was to do, and that the way to make children want to learn was to give them the chance of doing. Given free choice, he said, they would pick up easily enough the kinds of knowledge towards which they had a natural attraction, children, he said, have a natural taste both for making things and for imitating the doings of their elders; and these tastes provide the natural foundation for a right education in the arts of life.”

“Fourier emphasised the importance of educating children in good social habits and attitudes; but he put his main reliance, not on getting them to believe what it was in the general interest they should believe, but on guiding them to do, spontaneously and with pleasure in the doing, what their own desires, as well as the good of society, commanded.”²²  In line with his thinking on freedom of children Fourier was opposed to compulsory schooling.

He advocated setting up of communes voluntarily to practice such ideas. Though this didn’t happen in his own lifetime, some immigrant followers tried them out in the United States.

We thus have two broad strands of socialist thinking on children’s education, one which advocated indoctrination of children and another which allowed children greater freedom in pursuing their natural inclinations while being schooled into new moral values. William Godwin (1756-1836), the influential English precursor of anarchist/socialist thought belonged to the latter school. “But in the matter of education his hostility to coercion and his strong individualism led him to oppose all those reformers who wanted a public educational system as a means of developing the reasoning powers of the rising generation. No child, and no adult, he insisted, should ever be taught anything they did not want to learn: coercive education was as bad as coercive government, and would inevitably have like effects. It would degenerate into indoctrination, either with false notions or, even if with true notions, in such a way as to undermine the self-reliance of the taught on their own powers of arriving at the truth. Accordingly, the kind of education Godwin wanted rested on the spontaneous teaching and learning of individuals within the local community groups. Of this voluntary, natural education he wanted a great deal: indeed, he relied on it to keep his communities continually advancing along the paths of knowledge and rational common sense.”²³

He admitted congenital inequalities, but made light of them, and considered that every human being was born with a like propensity towards reasonable conduct, and that this propensity would come swiftly into its own if men were enabled to live under un-demoralising conditions of simplicity. This emphasis on the influence of environment in the formation of character was to be taken over from Godwinism by Robert Owen. However, he was suspicious of all institution building and preferred seamless and spontaneous community-based education.

This year (2024) marks the second centenary of the winding up of Robert Owen’s utopian New Lanark Community. As it has been said it was a failure of a giant, a failure that has left us many lessons.

According to GDH Cole the term ‘Socialist’ was first used in 1827 by the followers of Robert Owen in their journal to describe his views and subsequently by the followers of Saint-Simon.²⁴  None of the socialist thinkers discussed earlier were educationists or tried to set up schools to promote their ideas. It was Robert Owen (1771-1858) who was first among the so called ‘Utopian Socialists’ to build workers’ cooperatives and set up schools as their central institutions. Owen, as Engels pointed out, was developing his ideas in times which saw the maturing of the Industrial Revolution in England and it was also the time when mass schooling for working class children was emerging in England. These schools were largely run by churches or by religiously minded philanthropists keen on weaning children away from crime. Scotland, where Owen began his experiments, had a system of Church controlled parish schools which in the early phase of industrialisation had been greatly disrupted. Some enlightened manufacturers like Owen’s father-in-law, Dale, had set up schools as part of their industrial establishments to train young children as skilled workers.²⁵  Convinced as he was of the possibility of harmony between capitalist manufacturers and workers, Owen looked to education as the means of combining the Enlightenment vision of human perfectibility with the technical needs of industrial production.

Owen came from the middle class and was close to several entrepreneurs and capitalists and was a fairly successful businessman himself. He had to constantly convince his fellow investors of the eventual profitability of taking care of the education and welfare of the workers. In this he was inspired not so much by religion as by the Enlightenment ideas. He was a man of action, deeply concerned with the plight of workers and their exploitation, especially child labour. Owen tried various ideas and constantly evolved, moving over decades from paternalism to Socialism. He experimented with setting up Utopian communities in Britain and the US, inspired setting up of cooperatives by workers and eventually moved on to support all efforts of workers for self-organisation and assertion of their rights. Owen’s political and educational ideas evolved over time though we can find seeds of most of his ideas even in his early writings, which were more paternalist in nature, trying to balance the interests of labour and capital.²⁶

In his mature phase Owen rejected distinctions of class and station as being artificial. He also rejected a permanent division of labour and hierarchy based on the type of work performed, and advocated the principle of reciprocity. ‘No man has the right to require another man to do for him what he would not do for that man. There will be no occupation requisite to be performed by one which will not be performed by all.’ The natural and rational classification of human beings is then the classification of age, each division based on a stage of life having the occupation to perform for which it is the best adapted by nature. He argued that the best way to divide the society was to create eight ‘classes’ based on age: the first class being from birth to the fifth year and the eighth class being from 40 years to 60.²⁷  Each was to enjoy the privileges needed by that ‘class’ and contribute to society in accordance with their natural capacities. Each was to have a varying proportion of education, pleasure, productive work, management, and participation in social affairs, suited to that age group. For example, while education and recreation were to be the lot of the first two groups (till 10 years), the next two age groups (10-20 years) were to receive training in productive skills and also teaching younger ones. Material production was to be the prime responsibility of the fifth age class (between 20 and 25 years). Management of materials, their preservation and distribution, was to be done by the sixth group and social management was entrusted to the seventh age group (30-40 years). Overall direction and interaction with external agencies were to be done by the next, eighth group (40-60 years). Each was to have its share of education and recreation and provision of care and comforts needed by that age group.²⁸  Thus the functions and privileges assigned in unequal societies permanently and hereditarily to certain groups of people were to be assigned to each individual as he or she progressed in age. Each group except the first one was to be engaged in both learning and teaching younger ones.

The upbringing of children was to be socialised (i.e. done by the larger society) and the role of the family to be reduced –food, clothing and education of children was to be publicly managed. The educational space was redefined to include the playground, the school, the lecture theatre and the church – to build character and reasoning of all age groups, not just the children. The educational facilities were to be provided for from the profit earned by the factories and shops of the community. Many of these ideas were tried out in his experimental cooperatives.

Owen considered the pursuit of pleasure (‘innocent recreation’) as a natural and legitimate endeavour as opposed to the clerical notions of sin. But it required a collective effort to produce the objects of pleasure and a responsible enjoyment. “The great business of human life is first to produce abundance of the most valuable wealth for the use and enjoyment of all; and secondly to educate all to use well and properly enjoy their wealth after it has been produced.”²⁹  Production itself was to be organised on scientific principles and industrial technology. Education thus had an important role in the building of his ideal society. In other words, Owen emphasised three principles; pursuit of pleasure, production of abundance (which incidentally required industrialisation) and education to ‘properly enjoy’.

Educational experience was the key to instil some core moral values necessary for ‘proper enjoyment’: “clear and inseparable connection which exists between the interest and happiness of each individual and the interest and happiness of every other individual”.³⁰  This was the basis of the cooperative society he wished to build. As his sons were to recall later, a child “is never to injure his playfellows, but on the contrary he is to contribute all in his power to make them happy.” At the same time he advocated pursuit of pleasure by each without harming fellow humans.³¹

Owen was steeped in the materialist doctrine as Engels pointed out: “Robert Owen had adopted the teaching of the materialist philosophers of the Enlightenment: that man’s character is the product of his inherited constitution on the one hand, and of his environment during his lifetime, especially during his period of growth, on the other.”³²  Even though Owen is usually thought to be an advocate of the view that only external inputs shape the character of the child, he did emphasise the interplay of nature and nurture which created diversity; natural inclinations and faculties were formed in the womb; hence diversity of interests; but environment and education shaped their reasoning, character, skill, moral dispositions and social attitudes. Hence the need to respect diversity and nurture skills, reason and morals.³³  One of the purposes of nurturing was inculcating the idea of ultimate congruence between personal and community welfare.

Robert Owen shaped the initial socialist discourse on education in the first half of the 19th century when mass education was yet to evolve in Britain. Like the Anabaptists, he visualised socialisation³⁴  of childcare and upbringing so that individual families were freed from such responsibilities. This meant the setting up public education as a cornerstone of his utopian communities. He also campaigned for setting up a national public funded universal education system with schools and teacher education institutions managed by a public department of education. Owen conceived of an elementary education which respected the freedom and choice of children and gave important space to music and dance. Owen shared with many of his contemporaries a fear of the anarchic and unruly and undisciplined mind-set of the working class but unlike them was against using fear and religion to discipline. The Sunday schools run by philanthropists for working class children mainly focussed on the three Rs and the Bible to be taught by rote to instil a sense of discipline in children. Instead, Owen believed that all humans are inherently rational and perfectible and did not need the fear of divine reprisal to be good.

Owen advocated setting up of communities of workers based on principles of equality. He was more aligned towards the views of Saint-Simon in that he favoured the use of science and technology and the factory system of production as the basis of such a community. Owen tried to put into practice his ideas when he was entrusted with the running of a mill in Lanark, Scotland. It had been set up by his father-in-law, David Dale, who had visualised it as a model community with factories, residences for workers and a school for their children. It employed child labour on a large scale. Owen took over the management of the estate sometime in 1800 and continued there till about 1812 when he fell out with his partners and had to reconstitute the partnership with more enlightened persons like Jeremy Bentham and some wealthy Quakers. It is around this time that he began to write and lecture about his vision of society and education. The experiment was wound up by 1824 as the partners fell out and Owen shifted to the US to try out his ideas there.

At Lanark, to begin with, Owen stopped employing children under ten and restricted the working hours of the older children so that they could attend school. He also fixed the working hours of adults to 12 hours and converted the community school into an adult school in the evening. The factory commune provided decent accommodation, wages, and opportunities for the use of leisure. School was a central institution of the community – children from 18 months were admitted to it and it also conducted adult education through public lectures and provided recreation through music and dance programmes. Working children apparently went directly to the school from the factories, still in their working clothes.

Education was central to the creation of the new communities. The most prominent building of the community at Lanark was the School and the ‘Institute for Formation of Character’ a two storied building set amidst vast open grounds built around 1818. It had large halls to accommodate nearly 600 persons of the community and also over 400 children. The ground floor was for the infants and the upper floor rooms were used for older children and adult education. While the younger children paid no fees, the older ones had to pay a modest fee. The expenses of the school and the Institute was largely paid for from the profits of manufacturing and the shops.

The educational environment shaped the nature of a child and for this reason Owen called for close attention to be given to the education of children. In developing a rational human being, he argued, memory and rote learning had no place. Even arithmetic operations were to be explained in terms of why they work instead of being taught as formulas. It was considered that rote learning would destroy the natural intellectual faculties of children. “Thus the child whose natural faculty of comparing ideas, or whose rational powers, shall be the soonest destroyed, if at the same time, he possess a memory to retain incongruities without connection, will become what is termed the first scholar in the class; and three-fourths of the time which ought to be devoted to the acquirement of useful instruction will be really occupied in destroying the mental power of the children.”³⁵

Owen appears to be influenced by Pestalozzi as he was strongly against punishment and reward as methods of disciplining children.³⁶  In fact he argued that such methods deformed children and eventually made criminals out of them. “How much longer shall we allow generation after generation to be taught crime from their infancy, and, when so taught, hunt them like beasts in the forest, until they are tangled beyond escape in the toils and nets of the law?” Instead, he insisted on understanding children and why they behaved the way they did. Some of the principles of his pedagogy can be gleaned from the following observations by Peter Gordon: “The qualities that Owen looked for (in selecting his teachers) were a love of children and willingness to follow his own instructions. No corporal punishment was to be administered, no harsh words were to be uttered by the teachers and the children were not to be ‘annoyed with books’. The young were encouraged to ask questions when their curiosity was aroused and, above all, they were to be happy. There were no prizes or punishments.”³⁷ Owen was convinced that “children are governed by kindness and not severity; excited by wish to learn rather than by distinction”.

The choice of the topic of study based on the interest of the students and the methods of teaching was to be ‘pleasant and agreeable’. Significantly, Owen insisted that if the interest of the students faltered, the teacher was to reflect and change rather than blame the children.

Education was to take place outside the class rooms amidst nature or the community. Conversation between the teacher and the students was to replace bookish learning³⁸  and children were to learn by direct interaction with the material world. Despite his initial fascination for the Lancastrian monitorial method Owen soon abandoned it as he found it contrary to his principles. The Owenian schools used what was termed the ‘objects method’ which used concrete objects as the starting point of studies rather than text books.³⁹  This came from “Owenite insistence that knowledge of the natural world was one of the means by which the mind could be freed from the preconceptions of existing society. Objects were fragments of the world of nature, and children's appreciation of them came through the senses, whereas books and teachers were a source of preconceptions. Hence the insistence of Owenite educationalists on placing 'facts' before children, on letting children make up their own minds, and hence also the distrust of textbooks and the importance placed on the interrogative method of teaching, based on knowledge gained by individual inquiry.”⁴⁰

Interacting with objects and reasoning was to be done not just within the confines of the class rooms but mostly outside of it. He wrote, “Where are these rational practices to be taught and acquired? Not within the four walls of a bare building in which formality predominates. But in the nursery, playground, fields, gardens, workshops, manufactures, museums and classrooms”.⁴¹  Class rooms would be used in inclement weather, but they too were to be equipped with pictures, large maps, globes, rock samples, etc. (This incidentally included a globe nineteen feet in circumference, prepared by the school. Typically, this was not labelled and figuring out the continents, oceans and islands was one of the activities to be done with the globe.) Another ‘teaching aid’ displayed was ‘rivers of time’. Each ‘nation’ was allotted one stream and the stream was marked by intervals of centuries. Major events of the nation during that century were marked in the time segment; some kind of chronological table of different countries.⁴²  To Owen teaching about life in other places and times would open up the minds of the students to diverse possibilities and understand their own situation better. The curriculum included a fair measure of ‘natural history’, history and geography, in an age in which science was yet to find entry in the school curriculum. Science in fact was to be taught right from the ‘infant’ stage in manner agreeable to the children.⁴³

The Owenian school curriculum had a graduated structure based on his notion of age based social classes. The eighth class (those aged 40 to 60 years) was entrusted with the education of the younger ‘classes.’ Owen described his vision of the education of the different classes in a talk to the workers of Manchester. The following extract relates to the very first class (from birth to the end of the fifth year) of his conception:

The second class consisted of 5 to 10 years old children.

While we can see the emergent emphasis on ‘operations of business life’ and ‘domestic arrangements’, Owen subordinated these skills to what he called ‘dispositions’. Reading, writing and arithmetic were to be introduced at this stage. Owen was opposed to excessive emphasis on literacy. Owen wanted to inverse the order of teaching literacy. He would have preferred to first inculcate ‘love of learning’ by observing, handling and talking about things before teaching to read as the way to acquire further knowledge. He could not always persuade his teachers to do so. He argued that children learnt better from the physical examination of things and conversation with teachers and should themselves develop a felt need to read, before being taught to read and write. Even then emphasis was to be on understanding rather than mere decoding, and writing was to be introduced only when the children had the urge to communicate thus. When it came to mathematics Owen was opposed to making children memorise tables and algorithms instead of understanding the operations. Quite clearly Owen differed from the Lancastrian pedagogy which focussed on rote learning of alphabets, numbers and tables and algorithms. Owen’s own emphasis was on promoting understanding and reasoning as an aid to developing rational thinking human beings.

One of Owen’s early concerns related to the divorce between mental and physical labour. He wrote, ‘The natural standard of value is in principle human labour, on the combined manual and mental power of men called into action’. He advocated and tried to put into practice the principle of active learning through interaction with objects of diverse kinds and also productive activity in fields and workshops. Children were encouraged to assist in domestic arrangements and in work in the gardens for a few hours a day according to their strength. It was expected that when they completed their primary education at the age of ten “they will be well trained rational beings; superior in mind, manner dispositions feelings and conduct to any who have yet lived ...”

The ‘Third Class’, consisting of children from 10 to 15 years old was to be engaged both in education and manufacturing. In the following years (12 to 15 years) the children “will be engaged in acquiring a knowledge of the principles and practices of the more advanced useful arts of life; a knowledge by which they will be enabled to assist in producing the greatest amount of the most valuable wealth, in the shortest time with the most pleasure to themselves and advantage to society.” However, Owen surprisingly had little to say about vocational or technical education. It is not clear if productive work was actually a part of the school curriculum or if it was left to children’s engagement in the manufactories. One may presume that children over ten years were employed at least for a few hours every day in the manufactories, gardens, kitchens etc. and taught the relevant skills. It may be added that Owen accepted the gender division of labour and preferred to assign girls to work in the communal kitchen and boys to factories of the commune.

Even as the older children were trained in productive work, Owen repeatedly stipulated that it should not harm their physical and mental health, and encouraged them to understand the scientific principles involved in the work. For working children / adults Owenian schools also taught natural science, history and geography as important components of curriculum in an age in which science was not a part of the curriculum even of elite schools, which focussed on teaching classics. Such a combination would endow the working class with “giant powers”. Further, “There would be an end of all mere animal machines. … Instead of the unhealthy pointer of the pin (an alienated worker) there would spring a working class full of activity and useful knowledge…”⁴⁶  It is probably this which led Marx to associate Owen with polytechnic education.

Music, dance, sewing, physical exercises, walks, drill were an essential part of the curriculum (pursuit of pleasure without harming others) for all age groups. This was a major attraction for visitors to the schools in a time when Lancastrian factory methods were becoming a norm.

“I found there a music school. Half a dozen or more little fellows had each a flute, and were piping away in notes that did not preserve the strictest tunefulness. . .From this we went into a large room above stairs where there were fifty or sixty young people, both boys and girls, attending to the lessons of a dancing-master.” (Prof J Griscom 1819 – American, a Quaker and Professor of Chemistry & Natural Philosophy in the New York Institute)

Church was an essential part of the Owenian community. To begin with he tried to ensure that religious education avoided superstition, bigotry, hypocrisy, hatred, revenge, wars, etc and created an open-minded approach to religion. However, Owen wanted to do away with religious instruction – a subject of conflict and the cause of his eventual exit from Lanark.

To him the object of education was to develop people who would be oriented to living in a productive and self-administering community of equals. Owenite cooperative schools also experimented with democratisation of school administration by giving students of senior classes a vote on all matters of management and giving all other classes a right to formally petition for any change they wanted.

Quite expectedly, Owenian experiments at building cooperative communes of equals producing in factories for the market did not work and often broke down, taking the form of personal squabbles or disagreements or a financial crunch. It also appears that the workers were not too enthusiastic about ideas of communal living, common kitchen, and the upbringing of children. Nor were they enthusiastic about attending the ‘educational’ adult classes and instead preferred the music and dance sessions after a long and tiresome work day. It was not easy to find teachers oriented in the new ideas and there appear to have been frequent changes of staff. Even so people from all over the country flocked to see the experiment and wrote enthusiastically about them, quite like an earlier generation had done with Pestalozzi’s schools.

The radicals of the working-class movement who were emerging from the Chartist movement were sharply critical of Owen’s faith in collaboration between the capitalists and the working class and in his faith in the role of the existing state to introduce favourable laws and national education. Owen in turn argued with working class leaders to give up class hatred and antagonism and work towards building cooperatives which did not deny a share of produce to the capitalists (interest on capital). While the mainstream factory workers were less enthused by Owen’s ideas, a large number of artisanal workers took to Owenism and set up cooperatives with varied success.

While Owenian experiments at commune building failed and gave place to the radical political working-class movements of the Chartists, many elements of his educational ideas continued to inspire democratic educationists. Publicly funded education for all children (including working children) which simultaneously developed autonomy of the individual and served the needs of an egalitarian community; activity based education that formed a continuum with real life, integration of mental and physical labour, child-centred pedagogy that encouraged the initiative of the children… the Owenian conception of mass education was not necessarily proletarian or socialist but drew from broad democratic educational traditions of Europe and America.

The early socialists discussed above were deeply sensitive to the plight of the working class and strongly argued for reducing working hours and increasing their wages and improving working conditions. Yet they did not yet visualise any irreconcilable conflict between the employers and the workers and hoped that reason would prevail and that capitalists would realise the long-term benefit of an educated, healthy and well-paid working class. The emerging working-class movement, rather than the capitalists, developed an interest in these ideas and in fact many of Owen’s ideas were sought to be put into practice by groups of workers who set out to build producers’ cooperatives. Even those who were not were increasingly convinced of the need for education, especially an education that was based on science and reason rather than religion and moralising. Several radical writers like Carlyle, Thompson etc, strongly advocated the teaching of science, geography, astronomy and promoting ‘understanding rather than memorising of opinions’. This would be meaningful to both the children of the rich and the poor and help to create an enterprising and knowledgeable generation. As the working class began to organise itself into trade unions to fight for its rights, the importance of education was seen as twofold -- to enable the workers to articulate their demands and critique the theorists, especially economists who were mystifying science to defend exploitation; secondly to enrich the lives of workers by imbibing the recent advances in sciences and arts. This took the form of a debate within the working-class movement about the nature of education which the workers needed – either to prepare for class struggle or prepare skilled workers who would be more successful in finding gainful employment.

I am grateful Prof Kumkum Roy for careful copy editing of the entire article. CN Subramaniam.

Endnotes:

1.  For a brief discussion of the early Anabaptist educational experiments, see Knill, William Douglas, "Hutterian education: A descriptive study based on the Hutterian colonies within Warner county no. 5 Alberta Canada" (1958). Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers. 5555. https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd/5555

2  Harold S Bender, “A Hutterite School Discipline of 1578 and Peter Scherer’s Address of 1568 to the school masters” The Mennonite Quarterly Review, 5:241 October, 1931.

3.  Luther advocated state controlled rather than church controlled education. He wrote two important tracts on the issue of education: ‘Letter to the Burgomasters and Councillors of all towns in German lands, urging the establishment and maintenance of Christian schools’ (1524) and ‘Discourse on the Duty of sending Children to School’

4.  Andy Green, Education and State Formation: The Rise of Education Systems in England, France and the USA. Palgrave Macmillan UK (1990), p. 112

5.  Melton, I. Van Horn, Absolutism and the Eighteenth-Century Origins of Compulsory Schooling in Prussia and Austria, 1988.

6.  Andy Green, op. cit., p. 117

7.  Ibid p. 11

8.  I. Bowen, A History of Western Education, vol. 111, pp. 258-9.

9.  Cited in Andy Green, op. cit., p. 142.

10.  Bernard Jolibert, ‘Condorcet’ in Prospects: the quarterly review of comparative education (Paris, UNESCO: International Bureau of Education), vol. XXIII, no. 1/2, 1993, pp. 197-209.

11.  Ibid.

12.  Ibid.

13. He probably had the ‘Anabaptist’ view of education in mind.

14.  Albert Soboul, The Sans-Culottes, Princeton University Press, 1981, p. 86.

15.  Ibid. p. 88.

16.  Andy Green, op cit. pp. 143-144.

17.  Albert Soboul, ….

18.  Cited in James Harkins, ‘The Socialism of Gracchus Babeuf on the Eve of the French Revolution’ Science & Society, Vol. 54, No. 4 (Winter, 1990/1991), pp. 427-441.

19.  For a historical background to the emergence of diverse socialist ideas see, F Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific.

20.  G. D. H. Cole, A History of Socialist Thought Volume I The Forerunners 1789-1850. Macmillan and Co. (1953) p.44.

21.  Cole. Vol 1, p. 44.

22.  G. D. H. Cole, A History of Socialist Thought Volume I (1953) See his chapter on Fourier and Fourierism.

23.  Ibid. pp. 29-30.

24.  Cole, op cit. pp. 1-2.

25.  For a useful study of Dale’s pioneering efforts and the evolution of Owen’s educational ideas and experiments, see Robert Davis & Frank O’Hagan, Robert Owen, An Intellectual Biography, in Continuum Library of educational thought, 2010.

26.  For example, his “A statement regarding the New Lanark Establishment” (1812), Gregory Claeys, Selected Writings of Robert Owen, Vol I, Routledge, 2016, p. 11-22

27. 6 Lectures delivered in Manchester – ‘Natural and rational classification of society’ (5th lecture – 1937) in Harold Silver, Robert Owen on Education Selections edited with an introduction and notes CUP, 1969 pp. 203-…

28.  Ibid pp. 205-215.

29. Ibid.

30.  Ibid. p. 111.

31. Robert Dale Owen, An Outline of the System of Education at New Lanark, Glasgow, 1824.

32.  F Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, Chapter 1

33.  In the opening section of his Book of the New Moral World, (1836) Owen laid down the principles thus:

“4th. That the organization of no two human beings is ever precisely similar at birth; nor can art subsequently form any two individuals, from infancy to maturity, to be precisely similar.

“5th. That, nevertheless, the constitution of every infant, except in case of organic disease, is capable of being formed into a very inferior, or a very superior, being, according to the qualities of the external circumstances allowed to influence that constitution from birth.” Gregory Claeys, Selected Writings of Robert Owen, Vol 3, Routledge, 2016, p. 23 in the subsequent section he elaborated upon the interplay of genetic diversity and education and training. Owen appears to argue that humans cannot be held responsible for their actions, as they have no control over either their genetic make-up or the kind of upbringing they are subjected to.

34.  The term ‘socialisation’ is used here in the Marxist sense of “the process of transforming the act of producing and distributing goods and services from a solitary to a social relationship and collective endeavour.”

35. R. Owen, A new view of society, or essays on the principle of the human character and the application of the principle of practice. London, 1814. Cited in Peter Gordon, Robert Owen, UNESCO, 1999.

36.  This was also emphasised by his son Robert Dale Owen, op cit., pp. 9-13.

37.  Ibid

38.  Robert Davis & Frank O’Hagan, Robert Owen, An Intellectual Biography, pp. 87-88.

39.  Pestalozzi is usually credited with introducing this method.

40.  W. A. C. Stewart, Progressives and Radicals in English Education 1750–1970, Palgrave Macmillan UK, 1972 pp. 47-8.

41.  Gregory Claeys, Selected Writings of Robert Owen, Vol 3, Routledge, 2016, p. 165.

42. Robert Dale Owen’s “Outline of the System of Education at New Lanark”, 1824

43.  Ibid pp. 44-45.

44. Harold Silver, Robert Owen on Education Selections edited with an introduction and notes CUP, 1969 pp. 205-6.

45. Ibid.

46.  Cited by Davis and O’Hagan, p. 135

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