World Yearbook of Education 1965

The Education Explosion

George Z. F. Bereday, Joseph A. Lauwerys

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136238529
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Published almost every year since its beginnings four decades ago, The World Yearbook of Education has become one of the most established and respected international publications in education. Each edition focuses on a particular key issue and includes contributions from leading scholars. Now reprinted for 2006, all these classic references have become available to buy again. Editions now available include: 1965: The Education Explosion
1966: Church and State in Education
1967: Educational Planning
1968: Education within Industry
1969: Examinations
1970: Education in Cities
1971/2: Higher Education in a Changing World
1972/3: Universities Facing the Future
1974: Education and Rural Development
1979: Recurrent Education and Lifelong Learning
1980: The Professional Development of Teachers
1981: Education of Minorities
1982/3: Computers and Education
1984: Women and Education
1985: Research, Policy and Practice
1986: The Management of Schools
1987: Vocational Education
1988: Education for the New Technologies
1989: Health Education
1990: Assessment and Evaluation
1991: International Schools and International Education
1992: Urban Education
1993: Special Needs Education
1994: The Gender Gap

SECTION I COMPARATIVE AND THEORETICAL

CHAPTER ONE

The demand for education as a human right

ON December 10, 1948, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Although none of the reputedly sovereign and independent states represented voted against adoption, the vote was not unanimous. The Soviet Union and its satellites, South Africa, and Saudi Arabia abstained. The Declaration consists of a Preamble and thirty articles, most beginning with the phrase “Everyone has the right to…”

The thirty articles are introduced by a statement to the effect that the General Assembly “proclaims this Universal Declaration of Human Rights” as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping the Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of member states themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction

Having voted and proclaimed the Declaration, the Assembly next called upon member states—on the record, vainly—to make it fully known among their peoples and “to cause it to be disseminated, displayed, read and expounded principally in schools and other educational institutions without distinction based on political status of countries or territories”.

Of the thirty articles listing and defining human rights and liberties one, the twenty-sixth, deals with education, viz:

(1) Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.

(2) Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.

(3) Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.

Education as a Religious Obligation

The education designated in this Declaration would seem to be formal and institutional, a function of schooling rather than of living. It is, however, postulated on a conception of human relations that recurs intermittently in the history of mankind’s cultures, West and East, but becomes a more or less continuing fighting faith with the Democratic Revolution in the West. Its spread owes something to the invention of printing, which made literacy a practical attainment for the multitudes. It owes much to the Protestant Reformation’s insistence that everyone should have free access to the Sacred Scriptures and decide for himself the meaning of the word of his God. The step from this “right of private judgment” regarding divine intentions to the right of private judgment regarding secular rulers and their rules was a step toward the conscious recognition of an always experienced and recurrently challenged fact. This is the fact that mankind is made up of multitudes of individuals, with all their likenesses vitally different each from the others, and each joined together with some others in various agreements on creed and culture, work and play, war and worship, and other relationships which bind aggregations into societies; and all struggling together for a life and a living on the same earth.

The Democratic Revolution idealizes this most obvious of human facts into a common faith for all mankind. The faith contravenes other, less widely distributed, facts of power-organization. The faith affirms that each unit of aggregate humanity, whether a single person or a society of persons is, according to “the laws of nature and of nature’s God”. the equal of the others in unalienable rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”; that these diverse equals institute government “ in order to secure these rights ”; that governments, be they sacerdotal or secular, may not abrogate these rights but must in every way maintain and advance them.¹ The thirty articles of the Universal Declaration repeat and diversify these rights and freedoms, and for the first time explicitly specify education, however conceived, as an undeniable claim which everyone has upon society and which society must concede and satisfy.

This is a new and unprecedented world-wide appreciation of the function of education in human relations.

Although education is always and everywhere a transaction between teacher and learner, tradition tends to keep it a word for the what and how of teaching rather than the process of learning. That long seems to have been taken for granted. Teaching transfers something which the teacher already knows to the pupil who doesn’t yet know it; the teacher’s past thus providing form and content for the pupil’s future. In schooling this future is the present concern of both, and to no small degree it is shaped as repetition of others’ past. To effect this repetition is a duty which the older generation owes to itself and to the younger, however the younger may take it. For the Israelites it was an obligation laid upon the elders by divine commandment. Thus Deuteronomy (xi. 18–21) reports Moses’ admonitions: “You shall therefore lay up these words of mine in your heart and in your soul; and you shall bind them as a sign upon your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. And you shall teach them to your children, talking of them when you are sitting in your house, and when you are walking by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. And you shall write them upon the doorposts of your house and upon your gates, that your days and the days of your children may be multiplied in the land which the Lord swore to your fathers to give them, as long as the heavens are above the earth.”

God’s commandment to teach descendants diversifies into a mission to teach everyone. The Roman Catholic sacerdotal establishment claims it for a mandate exclusively its own, and demands that secular and worldly instruction shall conform to their priestly, Otherworldly doctrines. But all Pentateuch-occasioned doctrines—the Christian and the Moslem obviously—are missionary doctrines. The priestly teachers of them purport to offer those they teach not so much assurance of multiplied days of life in Thisworld, as assurance of lasting after-life in an Otherworld. And they make survival, alive or dead, depend on education.² Missionary religions like Buddhism, whose goal, per contra, is not survival but release from the struggle to survive, also take education for the high road to their release, and set up rules of instruction in the way that becomes sanctified conditions of This worldly survival.

Education as a Political Obligation

Nor was survival less the paramount task of education for the polities of classical antiquity. The object of concern for the world of Plato and Aristotle and the rhetoricians was to train political and military ‘guardians’ of a state ever struggling to preserve itself from factions within and foes without. In their state’s total population such ‘guardians’ would make up a relatively small caste of free men shaping the fortunes of an economy sustained by the labours of multitudes of men and women with knowledge and skills they learned in no school; men and women whose political role was to be subjects, not citizens. They could be aptly defined as tools with life in them. Training might improve their serviceability to their masters; but as learners, their true teacher was precedent and experience. Guardians and rulers, on the other hand, required the doctrines and disciplines of formal education. They could learn the political and military generalship necessary to the ongoing survival and expansion of the state only via a schooling from which the multitude were excluded. As Aristotle observed in the Politics: “Of all things that I have mentioned, that which contributed most to the permanence of constitutions is the adaptation of education to the form of government.”

The education of its characteristic élite has a similar relation to the power structure of every cultural economy. Polymorphous India, Confucian China, Christian Europe before the Democratic Revolution had each a ruling élite whose education was necessary for the state’s survival, and a non-educated multitude who serve the élite as a means to this survival, and to whom the rulers’ ends were a matter of indifference. Or if the people were to be educated, it was for the sake of those ends. “For the universe,” declares an analect in the Confucian Yi Ching (“The Book Changes”, The Great Appendix), “for the universe the most essential is life. For the sage, the most precious is the state. That which maintains the state is man. That which maintains the people is wealth. The administration of wealth, the education of the people and the prohibition of wrongdoing is his [the sage’s] righteousness.” Even the humanists of the European Renaissance, who transvalued education from a caste obligation into a personal privilege fitting them the better to exercise their own powers and perfect their own personalities, exploited the distinction between classes subject to education and masses subject to classes. Schooling, formal education, was not conceived as a right for everyone until after the Protestant Reformation. Man’s mind is convinced that it was made for liberty, declared Moravian Bishop Comenius in his Via Lucis; the conviction is insuperable, and it cannot be satisfied short of a league of nations promoting “ universal books, universal schools, a universal college, and a universal language”.

Education as a Natural Right

Nowadays the world is disposed to take such schooling as a right for granted, as it takes breathing and eating for granted as a right. Its equation of direct education to air and food comes with the philosophical transposition of human nature from an immortal soul betonging in a supernatural Other-world into a child of This-world’s nature endowed by its parent with the rights that identify it, that constitute its haecceitas. The transposition became manifest late in the sixteenth century and has been making irregular progress ever since. Baruch Spinoza envisioned God as Nature. His redefinition of Nature and man in terms of the new science of his time—especially Galileo’s—was supported by the mathematics of Newton and became an item in the changing commonsense of later generations. In his Theologico-Political Tractate, Spinoza wrote (ed. Elwes, Vol. II, Ch. 16): “The power of nature is the power of God, which has a sovereign right over all things; and inasmuch as the power of nature is simply the aggregrate power of all her individual components, it follows that every individual has the sovereign right to do all he can: in other words, the rights of the individual extend to the utmost limits of his power as it has been conditioned. Now it is the sovereign law and right of nature that each individual should endeavour to preserve itself as it is, without regard to anything but itself; therefore this sovereign law and right belong to every individual…. Whatsoever an individual does by the laws of its own nature it has a sovereign right to do, inasmuch as it acts as it was conditioned by nature and cannot do otherwise.” Thence learning, if not teaching, is a sovereign right, an expression of Nature’s ‘first law’ of self-preservation.

All such expressions are activities of the individual’s struggle for survival. They are not behaviours due to obedience of a divine or any other commandment, nor are they endurance of a penalty or cultivation of a privilege; they are the exercise of natural man’s natural rights, all ultimately formations of his struggle for “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” realized at last as his struggle for survival, and as at once the going and the goal of his existence. Among these survival-values learning is primary, and this makes education as natural a right as eating or drinking or breathing. It is an animal as well as a human activity, since animals do, in greater or less degree, educate their young. But in its human mode, education compensates genus humanum for its lack of teeth, claws, horns, quills, venom, and other animal organs of defence and attack. Achieving the compensation is a function, first, of the biological prolongation of human infancy, and second of its social prolongation. Without the desire to know and the power to learn, prolonged infancy would be the same as very short life. So, as Aristotle observed in an early chapter of his Metaphysics, “all men by nature desire to know”. And, as various later thinkers noted, all are naturally free to satisfy the desire by exercising the power. In consequence, the natural right to learn becomes a function of the social power to teach; and as the what of the teaching multiplies and diversifies in content and increases in amount with the progress of civilization, a social prolongation of the tutelage of the learner supervenes upon the biological one. Some sacerdotal sovereignties make this a ground of their claim that as the divinely appointed teaching church, it is by the same mandate the ruling power over all things of the believing church. Thus, in 1954, Pope Pius XII, addressing some nine hundred prelates and theologians, advised them that “the power of the church is not bound to matters strictly religious that it has been entrusted with “the keeping of the natural law by God’s appointment”; that those Roman Catholics are wickedly out of line who “think that the leadership and vigilance of the church are not to be suffered by one who is grown up.”³ This, in sum, is tantamount to the lifelong prolongation of religious infancy which the principle of the right of private judgment repudiates. It assumes a divine mission to teach, and a duty to be taught which is not the same as the right to learn.

Nuclear in this claim is the division of the what and how of education into an infallible truth via a supernatural revelation to which natural reason is but a foreordained handmaiden, and an empirical body of knowledge which men build up by discovery as they struggle on, and which their future experience confirms as reliable. The multitudes are taught the supernatural truth by indoctrination; they learn what knowledge is reliable as they are led themselves to observe, to examine, and to test for consequences. But what they learn thus is appraised as but “the wisdom of this world, and foolishness with God”; while what is indoctrinated is a “wisdom not of this world” an eternal wisdom hidden and unknown but revealed through the spirit, a wisdom rejected by “the natural man, for they are foolishness unto him.”⁴

When Francis Bacon argued that knowledge is power, he had in mind St. Paul’s “foolishness with God “, that wisdom of the world which is power over nature. It was his purpose to better the seeking of this knowledge which men seek “for the benefit and use of life.” He knew well enough that the other wisdom, which is foolishness with men, was also power, but the power of men over other men helpless and afraid before nature; men who, hoping for freedom from fear and want, accept supernatural creeds and codes, magical rites and rotes as a means thereto. By and large, most of mankind have continued in the condition, regardless of the ever-growing, ever-diversifying body of the knowledge which is power. In the West, the sacerdotal monopoly of the interpretation of Revelation has been to some extent diminished by the Protestant right of private judgment and by its application thereto of the sciences of man. In man’s struggle for survival, the teachings of the sciences and their implementation “for the benefit and use of “fe”. Among the peoples of the East and of Africa there is now in formation a similar rivalry, Some three hundred years after Bacon, Rabindranath Tagore, poet and sage of British India, and avatar of two cultures, drew the moral: “It must be admitted on all hands,” he wrote in a discussion entitled The Unity of Education, that the world belongs to-day to the Europeans. It is their milk cow, and it fills their pails to overflowing.” And why? Precisely because of this deplorable “wisdom of the world which is foolishness with God”; because the Europeans have created “a science of life” that is the most important bran...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• The World Year Book of Education 1965
• Contents
• Editors’ Introduction
• General Introduction
• SECTION 1. Comparative and Theoretical
• SECTION 2. Reports from Countries
• list of contributors
• Index