PART SIX: Leading the Revolution
CHAPTER XIX

METAMORPHOSIS OF EDUCATORS

Robert Maynard Hutchins quotes ancient Comenius approvingly, as do we:

He gave no bad definition who said that man was a "teachable animal." And indeed it is only by a proper education that he can become a man... The education I propose in includes all that is proper for a man, and is one in which all men who are born into this world should share...

Our first wish is that all men should be educated fully to full humanity; not any one individual, nor a few nor even many, but all men together and singly, young and old, rich and poor, of high and lowly birth, men and women- in a word all whose fate it is to be born human beings; so that at last the whole of the human race may become educate, men of all ages, all conditions, both sexes and all nations.1

And Hutchins adds, as would we,"all educational systems of the past and present are seen to be to some extent inhuman, nonhuman, and antihuman.2 Or, as we would say, anti-kalotic.

There is "an inexorable and almost overpowering rise in demand for more education, of every sort and at every level, covering almost every village and hamlet." Resources to handle this demand are increasingly insufficient. The dystrocratic countries, especially, have almost no new conventional resources (money, schoolrooms, teachers) to apply to the need. The students now coming out are, at all levels, unsuited to the needs of national development, whether in dustrocracies, plutocracies or taxocracies. The school systems everywhere are bureaucratic, apathetic to change, and abysmally uniformed.3

The country whose people go without a disciplined education can never achieve kalos; nor can a country whose educational system, however elaborate, is dystrocratic. The United States spends $20 billions or about $100 per capita annually on higher education; it will probably spend $40 billions annually by 1975.4 Meanwhile, three pennies ($0.03) per capita is given over to higher education in dystrocracies.5 Total educational expenditures in the U.S.A. at all levels will rise to $76 billions by 1977, about $350 per capita.6 Most of this expenditure is dominated by pre-modern influences, by the demands of material consumption, by pervasive military forces, and by bureaucracy. In the language of Kalos, it is dystrocratic, plutocratic, stratocratic, and taxocratic. The doubling of its effort can they only result in standing still amidst the same and worse field of forces. The Soviet Union, spending less, is nevertheless in the same position. It can scarcely make headway in the solution of its problems. Only a true revolution of ideals can blast a way to an acceptable universal education.

Life is a kind of education and education is a kind of life. The tendency of formal schooling is to compartmentalize the two. Modern bureaucracy follows ancient aristocracy in segregating pupils, but for different reasons. It is done as part of the specializing of work, of residence, and of education. It is also part of the specializing of work, of residence, and of education. It is also part of the socialization process. It leads readily to incarceration, to militarization, to discrimination against age and social groups. If educators know and act in the light of these facts, they are capable of controlling education kalotically. If not, they are capable of gross collective injustices in an aura of morality and beneficence.

The more complicated and rapidly changing are the functions of society, the greater is the need for rapid formal education and the greater the impulse to subject education to bureaucracy. Thus what is the worst response becomes the preferred public policy. Kalotic policy has to resist this tendency forcefully and reinvolve education with the personal life process.

The school, then, properly understood, should be the continuous extrusion of personality into socially specialized groups led by teachers. Everyone is being educated from birth to death. The Kalotic society is a learning society. The best education can happen at any time from birth to death, and cannot logically be timed with any moment of segregation. Segregation of students is to occur merely as occasional diversions of the flow of lives around sundry rocks of ignorance, whereupon the flow resumes its course until death.

Gentlemen Scholars and Apprentices

Institutional education is the interruption of life, but possibly a pleasant and productive interruption, provided its form is matched with its content and goal. The enormous resources given over to schooling by modern plutocracies and taxocracies blinds everyone to its origins. The modern school has been first and foremost a disciplinary institution. Unlike the apprenticeship system, it has always had an abstract, regimenting purpose -not to make a thing, but to twist the young en masse into the frame of state, religion, or factory.

In the Middle Ages in Europe, going to school was called "sub virga magistri degere."7 Among the rich, the school hardly existed; it was a familial institution, tutorial in character for the wealthy and noble. As populations grew large and occupations become modern, schools become more necessary for rich and poor alike. The rich and high-born built schools to perpetuate their social advantages; they did not seek to regiment themselves but to segregate themselves; esoteric knowledge, all thing but to segregate themselves; esoteric knowledge, all things being equal, was preferred to knowledge available to all. The newer equal, was preferred to knowledge available to all. The newer schools of the working class maintained their original disciplaniary and corrective character.

However, there came about a meeting of the two; expansion of the privileges of the rich to the less rich, and of the appetite of the three institutional hierarchies for regimented creatures shaped the organization of education. Education everywhere and on all levels has still strong class biases. In the U.S.A., 7% of all college students in 1968 came from families of the bottom quarter of the income scale.8 Furthermore, education everywhere has still the vulgarity of military drill. What was done for the lower schools in democracies crept upwards into the colleges and finally into the universities, depriving them of the authentic voluntary form they had in the Middle Ages, when professors and students came and went, listening to whoever appealed to their mind.

It is this educational organization that has been foisted upon the non-European and non-American world. There is no more reason for them to be happy with it than for the millions of pupils who in the space of the last century have had to undergo its tortures because of the concurrence of five ideologies: the democratic that sought equality, the state that sought secular discipline and political unity, the military that wanted obedience and drill, the religious that wished to instill ritual devotion, and the industrial that needed trained routine workers.

The educated man of the new age is only dimly perceived in the dust clouds kicked up by the false fight between the "cultivated man" and the "expert". The "cultivated man" is the descendent of the tutored rich boy; the "expert" is the descendent of the apprentice. The ideal of the "cultivated man" lives in the inculcation of a smattering of information and a knowledge of curiosities into students whose life path is already laid and smoothed for them through their social origins. The apprentice system is found in the proliferation of specialized education that eats into the gentleman's curriculum everywhere.

The battle wages in elementary schools between those who wish to lecture children on grammar and those who prefer to teach woodworking, for instance, or, on the highest level, between requiring the study of dead languages or the study of the routines of an administrative body. Both concepts, united in the educational system that are spreading like wildfire around the world today, are invalid for kalotic communities.

First the costs of education are too high. Half of the huge cost of modern education is organizational, a quarter anti kalotic, and a mere quarter, if that is of direct or indirect help to the Revolution and its innumerable ramifications.9 This waste of resources results from the unholy marriage of the doctrines of gentleman snobbery and bourgeois-worker equality. American educators often lament that their factories are deprived of the money that is spent on armaments, cigarettes, gambling, and other less worthy enterprises. Few have asked themselves whether the waste in American education might not quickly eradicate illiteracy in the world.10 They wonder, then, why they are not taken too seriously.

The larger part of all curricula to be found in the several thousand colleges and hundred of thousands of lower schools in the world teaches non-kalotic subjects in an anti-kalotic manner and perpetuates the conditions that the world is thrashing to throw off. Secular and religious catechisms take their toll. The universities of Africa and other dystrocracies teach confused students abstract physics and European Classics, subjects that have no root in the dystrocratic culture, or even the kalotic culture to came."Two hundred and thirty-four students," wrote Jose Rizal nearly a hundred years ago in the Philippines, "left the room as ignorant as they entered it... Each of them had lost one more hour of his life and with it a measure of his dignity and self-respect."11

Several hypotheticals can help organize one's thought on the content and problem of education. Let all formal education be divided into four parts, as below. Then assign likely proportions to each part under present conditions, and under kalotic conditions, and contemplate the results. (Obviously, no census will produce the urgently needed data.)

In Formal Compulsory Universal In Schooling Kalotics

1. What the student does not want to know but must know, concerning character development and technique (taken as 50-50) 10% 20%

2. What the student does not want to know and does not need to know 75% 10% (a margin of error)

3. What the student wants to know and must know 5% 15%

4. What the student wants to know and does not need to know 10% 15% (a margin of error)

------- ----------

Total 100% 60% To be eliminated 40% ----------- New Total 100%

A. Institutional education throughout the world today is 75% waste.

B. A kalotic standard needs to be applied to education according to this logical framework.

C. Education for all given life processes (i.e., all education) should be as close to the process as possible. (corollary:if education is for those elements of existence that constitute the whole of one's life, they should be available applied throughout life.)

D. The chart does not deal with depreciation. What is not intrinsically wasteful nevertheless has a high rare of depreciation, because it is badly timed for use. So most of it,whether defensible or not on other grounds, is wasted by time and change.

Some recent studies have projected technological and social trends to about the Year 2000 and published hundreds of probable and possible developments in social affairs and technology, ranging from the extensive use of robots to the biological manipulation of man.12 It is fair to say that present-day teachers and their teaching systems in America, the Soviet Union, and other countries of the world are unequipped and therefore powerless to teach about most of such matters. They lack primarily the pedagogical method and then the means of keeping abreast of developments;even if they possessed both of these abilities, the present educational system would block their use at every turn. While the student in this pre-kalotic age typically regresses to the society of his teacher's youth, the world leaps forward by a generation; there is but a "generation gap," but a "three generation gap" built into education taxocracy.

The horror of alienation of man from his work, the stupefaction that came from narrow specialization, and routine machine labor, inspired the original communists, liberal,and anarchist critics of capitalism; they voiced positively at first a demand for the broad education of all people. The communists have outdone capitalism - they are the quintessence of capitalism in their lust for special training. The mockery of their original faith is a scandal to humanity.13

Today in the United States, 25% of the students of the tenth to twelfth years "drop out," despite all the compulsory features of the system and the furious propaganda on behalf of higher education.14 A third of the students admitted, after being examined, scrutinized, weighed, and found to be of highest quality for the mills of the finest colleges in the world, drop out or are released before the end of their four-year term. Then, because they lack the "credentials" that are needlessly required in millions of governmental and non-governmental positions, they are joined to the poor who also lack "credentials" and both are blocked from careers in taxocratized society.15

The Gist of Education

The educational systems of the world, without exception, cannot handle yet the concept of instrumental and scientific education, even in schools of medicine, physics, or biology. So profound is the regard for "fact,"so catechistic are educational authorities everywhere, that they cannot easily realize, first, that education is for a whole lifetime plus the generation to be taught by the pupils of today, and second, that in every subject, the important lessons " or learning occurs as the transfer of intellectual doing-abilities.

All knowledge can be looked upon as either pure or applied. There is no god-given superiority of one iota of knowledge over another; ergo, there has to be a kalotic set of priorities. The educational system all the way up is as much a place for pure as for applied science, since science is pure when it states reality, applied when it manipulates real situations, kalotically applied when it uses kalotic principles to supply subjects of pure study with goals for the manipulation of reality.

One needs to be suspicious of the term "pure" because it is a refuge of the merely curious, the "cultivated gentleman," cultural blindness, and partisan of many kinds. The natural sciences, social sciences, and humanistic sciences, when taught as "pure" subject, remain loaded with affect (and defect). The perceptions of significance, importance, shapes, forms, authorities, and other domains of approaches to the subjects are special to a time, a place, and a way of looking at the world.

What is "pure"has then to be redefined periodically to readjust perception to changing social realities. What is perceived is what is taught and what is taught is what is practiced and what is practiced is what is perceived:this is the ideological circle that has to be broken regularly to maintain clearheadedness. The danger of a "pure" attitude to science defeating these periodic checks is considerable.

Redefining the `pure' and `applied' in kalotic terms means redefinitions of perception and curriculum, both of them being tasks of such order of universality and difficulty as to require subjecting educational systems even more forcibly than other social institutions to revolutionary change. If the educators and scientists of the world do not revolutionize their own systems, and then lead the movement for the general social revolution, they will be in the doubly responsible and potentially shameful position of having given birth to the present technological revolution whose advances are being heavily expended. It is probable, in that case, that the world would have nothing kalotic to show for the technological revolution. Bureaucracies and waste would see to it that man rests unchanged, buried as usual in the complications of his efforts to extricate himself.

Students in Revolt

In 1960 a well-respected management consultant, John Corson, working under impeccable auspices, published a book on a long-neglected subject, The Governance of Colleges and Universities.16 The term "student" is not carried in its Index. Nor is the student considered except as something to be administered. He is a "captive consumer". The president "delegates responsibility for governance of student affairs to the dean of students with the knowledge that the faculty continuously oversees this officer's actions. His own participation in this area of decision making, except in times of emergency, is precluded by other demands on his time."17 A section calls "communication" the "blood stream of human enterprise" but, since students are not mentioned, they are presumably not in the bloodstream.18 A passage briefly mentions the "honors systems" that play a part in student discipline and elsewhere administrative controls over the quality of faculty are said to show effects of student gossip.

This was the state of affairs just before the student rebellions that erupted throughout the world. Now, no matter what the type of regime, its system of education has come under assault, and rightly so, by student groups. Uncomprehendingly, a committee reports in America on student activism during the year 1968:

De Gaulle was nearly overthrown, Italy's government fell, Mexico's ruling party was shaken. Assassination of Pakistan's president was attempted. West Germany, Thailand, South Africa, Egypt, Czechoslovakia, England, Japan, Spain, and the Soviet Union were among the disparate nations hit by student-led demonstrations.

Whereupon, with more hope than evidence, the group asserts:

The hope of democracies is that the violent and disruptive forms of confrontation will yield to the more rational and constructive. There is good reason to feel confident that this hope will be fulfilled. As 1968 ended, the usually silent majorities on campuses and in the universities were plainly turning away from their prophets of anarchy and destruction.19

It is not "the hope of democracies," that systems will not change, but rather their despair. "The more rational or constructive" forms do not exist. Nor do "silent majorities," nor any more "anarchy and destruction" that attend all collective actions, which are just as wasteful and self-injurious when they occur by "peaceful" attrition or very rapid silent chain-fission of souls from societies, dollars from the poor.20

Many educators of this pre-kalotic world believe that they deserve honors for philanthropy, justice, and achievement in the public interest merely for their existence as educators. And indeed they exchange such honors among themselves in front of planned, compulsory21 audiences. Now they are told by their own minions that they do not deserve their high places, and they are forced to consider trenchant issues for the first time. No wonder that the rulers of the University of California, Columbia University, and a thousand other halls of learning around the world feel hurt and incredulous.22 The faces of their demonstrators are not pretty to behold. The authorities are full of pomp and ceremony; but the disorderly ones say, "If they are authorities, let them rule rightly."

The authorities and the media that they influence and derive nourishment from should better admit with Edgar Jean Faure, in proposing the considerable reform of French higher education in July, 1968 that the "May Revolution" of that year, and similar disturbances, were explainable neither by the energy of a handful of instigators, nor by nihilism, nor by taste for violence.... The students feel a profound malaise with regard to the world. The Napoleonic concept of a centralized,authoritarian university is dead. The demand for evolution requires a democratization of education from the nursery to the university.

Practically every first-rate college in America has experienced student petitions, strong protests, demonstrations, "illegal" occupation of property, disobedience of educational and political authorities, strikes, boycotts, and other forms of stressed democracy in the five- year period that began in 1965. Some 292 major student protests took place on 232 campuses during the first six months of 1969.23 In America, too, the secondary schools have become agitated.24 Over 1,000 underground high school newspapers have appeared. Professor Alan Westin, who was systematically reporting the movement, estimated conservatively that 2,000 schools were disrupted between November 1968 and May 1969.25 (There are 20.000 public school districts with 45 million students in the nation.) The unrest emerged in every section of the country, in rural, urban, and suburban areas.

That teachers themselves were in an uneasy and truculent state is evidence by a poll conducted quietly by the National Education Association among its million members; 70% of the rank and file wanted the NEA to pursue more aggressive policies such as strikes and demonstrations.26 In institutions of higher learning the younger faculty and the undergraduate college professors were in the forefront of protest.

Until the past few years, the faculties were the fiefs of a dozen universities such as Columbia, Harvard, and the University of Chicago, which granted most of the higher degrees. In recent years, the "tintyping" of higher education imprinted a second batch of universities, raising the number to about 100. These now dominated the 1900 colleges and universities, stressing graduate education and reducing the prestige of lower college teaching, while perpetuating the old disciplines, the old curricula, the old vaguely liberal forms of thought -- in short, the establishment.

A nationwide survey of 55 college campuses27 reported on May 24, 1969, that 28% of the students claimed to have "participated in a demonstration of some kind." Other studies showed that most students sympathized in general with the demonstrations. "At the heart of the discontent...," claimed George Gallup, Jr., and John O. Davies III, the Poll's editors, "is the feeling that society as a whole is seriously ill and that changes are imperative."

Other reasons of a secondary nature might be added. The bungling of Vietnamese policies outraged many. The growing impersonality of the ever larger schools caused widespread anomie. The crowding into small dormitories and the disintegration of housing conditions around schools made peaceful community life difficult. Other reasons of a secondary nature might be added. The bungling of Vietnamese policies outraged many. The growing impersonality of the ever larger schools caused widespread anomie. The crowding into small dormitories and the disintegration of housing conditions around schools made peaceful community life difficult.

The arrogance and presumption of faculties and admissions offices of the colleges in frightening, browbeating, and examining them meticulously before admitting them, deeply offended not only the students who were denied admission to other schools but also those who were admitted. After suffering psychological warfare for years before admitting them, deeply offended not only the students who were denied admission to other schools but also those who were admitted. After suffering psychological warfare for years before admission in the name of "high standards," the students found the standards often repetitious of what they had already achieved, frequently meretricious, and often irrelevant to their goals. Often their parents were equally annoyed though the system of fierce competition was so thoroughly foisted upon the high schools that neither the students not their parents understood how they were being victimized.

The snobbish faculty, the rabid scientists, the record-straining administrators deserved to have their own creatures turn upon them. Nor could they be as ignorant as the press and politicians who,on the whole, condemned the insurrections of the students as blind unprovoked assaults led by a tiny minority Professor Joseph Katz, who spent some years in the intensive study of students passing through Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley described the active students in these words:

Whom are the activists? A fairly large number of researchers, including this writer, have examined the background and interests of activists, and the results have shown a high degree of similarity. Researchers have found that activists are academically more able than the rest of the students, achieve a higher grade point average, and are psychologically more mature. Activists tend to come from homes in which parents are better educated, have higher incomes, and are more affectionate than is the case in the homes of their non-activist peers. The activists are people encouraged by their parents, their background, and their endowments to ask for more meaningful and richer lives for themselves.29

These "promising" students were often united with the "least promising" -- the blacks -- which fact served further to disconcert the academic and public observers. This appeared to them as a logical contradiction: the better students and the least qualified might be expected to be mutually antagonistic. There is, however, an explanation. The same system of education that cheats the "superior" student cheats that "inferior" student who barely qualifies. Christopher Jencks and David Riesman have shown once again that the American college system, like all others in the world, is class-biased. The great increase in college enrollments since World War II does not come from the families of lower occupational and educational levels, but from middle-class families who are "affluent but academically inept."29 Poverty bars the poor still.

But more than that, low motivation and lower-level educational facilities, which are ground into the population, exclude any considerable representation of the poor in colleges unless a revolution should occur. A poor black or white who comes of college age is told that he should apply for admission, but is told simultaneously that he cannot really qualify, and he should have prepared himself better for college, although it is cheerfully recognized that he could not have done so. If this is not the same as "catch 22 ,"* it us at least "Catch-23."

Thus both the exceedingly well qualified and the unqualified candidates for higher education in America find themselves victims of an inhuman, antikalotic system, masquerading as sweet mother, alma mater. The disaffection and conflict will continue in both secondary schools and colleges. A wider range of tactics will be employed (they already number in the dozens). The students will move off the campuses and challenge the society in other institutional settings. Swiss engineering students of the Federal Institute of technology both invented a tactic and scored a success in an arena outside of the university when they proposed and won a referendum of the people of Switzerland annulling an act of the Parliament which was ambiguous in granting them rights of "representation" and "autonomy" in the governance of the university.30

Despite the fact that the educational systems of the most technically advanced countries of the world must continue to supply the greatest number of Tutors to the general Kalotic Revolution,the same systems must be concurrently overturned. To do both is not impossible. What is required is that the kalotic concept of the world be kept firmly in mind amidst the anguish of the conflict-passing science, society, government, law, and life all together through the medium of education.31

New Schools for All

While action is precipitated everywhere, it can be projected sharply in a series of kalotic colleges founded wherever in the world the political situation will permit. The constitutions of such colleges can be simply declared. They can be formed of 50 or more students and faculty. They would do well to center upon every city in the world of over half a million inhabitants. Their organization is the basic organization of kalotic toparchy - representative, autonomous, and directed at kalos and cosmarchy.

The fields of study within kalotic colleges should be formed around every social issue; they should be fields without fences, reformable whenever the issue is resolved. Every issue can be approached by the analytic trilogy: Emos, pneumos, dikeos. Each field should contain its philosophers and philosophy of kalotic science -- pragmatic and continuous with the life of mankind. All ages and all persons should be admitted, leaving the natural division of talents and preparation to form the divisions of study and labor. Their "academic calenders" should be flexible; their entrances and exits into life should be always open. They should avoid dormitories, but provide hostels, so that the students can come for symposia, sleep in, and leave for their life-pursuits, and while "in residence" for a weekend a week, or a month, exchange information and research with the faculty. Wherever ten or more students may congregate, in neighborhoods or villages, they may form store-front fraternities, there to carry on discussions and activities in a spirit of Kalos and camaraderie.32

The kalotic colleges should establish and maintain liaison with each other by the fullest and latest techniques of mechanical informational exchange, storage, and retrieval. They should have libraries that live by being at a peak of availability. Each should report to all others on their discoveries and activities. Once a student, always a student; hence the line between the highly involved and the less involved should be only lightly demarcated by degrees, certificates, and privileges. If necessary, a student at a kalotic college can be matriculated at an ordinary colleges to remake their institutions.

This cosmarchic group of kalotic colleges is a principal force in the achievement of the programs for Kalotic Year One and Kalotic Year 50. As such, it supplements the myth of Kalos: Indigenously constructed and established to reflect the individuality of their settings, operating with the humility of men and women who ask the minimum in the material and mental luxuries afforded by the educational establishment until the day of its reform, functioning freely, with enthusing goals in mind, and drawing upon the best of every society in history, art, ideas, and humanity,they will present a most attractive sight to a world that is confused and distraught over the meaning that science and education hold for man's fate.