Schooling as a rational rite of passage

Abstract

Starting from Illich’s identification of the compulsory schooling process with the rational initiation rite to the modern, free-market, society, the paper aims to detach the philosophical premises this expensive and unequal ritual is grounded in. After having referred to Van Gennep’s conception of the rites of passage, we shall show that the schooling rite corresponds to basic myths of the modern age, that is, progress, tolerance, freedom, and equality. In the second part of the paper, the genealogy of the modern schooling system shall be traced back to the first fully modern political theory, the one Thomas Hobbes had elaborated. According to Hobbes there are two ways out of state of nature and imperfect socialization: the universal possession of the new science of nature and of human nature grounded in mechanism; and the simultaneous renunciation to natural freedom which gives birth to the irresistible power of the sovereign. Hobbes accorded preference to the first one. The constitution of the rational political body represents a shortcut towards the perfect socialization which derives from equal and universal possession of science. The schooling thus represents a way out of pre-modern forms of political dissociation marked by inequality, servitude, and unhappiness, that is, a rational rite of passage from feudal society to the modern one. From this perspective, the modern economic and political system makes a whole with universal and compulsory schooling.

Introduction

In Deschooling Society (1970a) and in a few essays written in the 1960s and gathered in Celebration of Awareness: A Call for Institutional Revolution (1970b), Ivan Illich pointed to the fact that the contemporary social order is, on one hand, based upon compulsory schooling and, on the other hand, that the schooling system appears incapable of providing the members of the society with equal opportunities, even though that remains one of its main objectives. In order that social immobility characterizing the feudal epoch be overcome, modern pedagogues and politicians resorted to the schooling system, by means of which they attempted to unbind the social status from the birth and to relate it to achievements in education. ¹ According to Illich, in consequence of that one hierarchy was merely replaced by another, being true that the poor, who usually grow up surrounded by poorly educated people, have less chances to obtain significant scholastic results. If the scholastic performance ranking sets in motion, at least to some extent, the social mobility, it still conditions it heavily. The promised freedom of choice education allegedly offers to all members of the social body collapses into social inequality. The failure is due to the contradictions intrinsic to the education system, which remains heavily conditioned by the economic and social status, birth, and tacit knowledge one acquires in the family. The school qualifies and, therefore, disqualifies.

I shall argue that the theoretical premises of compulsory schooling can be derived from the thought of the first fully modern political philosopher, Thomas Hobbes. According to Hobbes, the first thinker who has grounded the political and moral reflections in the new science of nature, the mechanism, men become men only within the society, namely in virtue of socialization (Taubes, 1983). It goes without saying that Hobbes did not theorize the necessity of the compulsory schooling. Yet, if we start reasoning from the very same scientific premises, we shall make a convincing argument for its necessity. The compulsory schooling, indeed, is a way out of the state of nature characterized by the mutual fear and bellum omnium contra omnes, or rather a way out of the imperfect forms of socialization characterized by war, fear, inequality, lack of freedom and progress, misery and unhappiness, prejudice and ignorance of the laws of nature. There is no truly stable society without schools and without the coercive power of the sovereign, and these two institutions refer to each other and cooperate in establishing peaceful order (Robin, 2004: 8). Undeniably, it is the sovereign’s irresistible force that compels to schooling. But such coercion is conforming to reason, as it is proved by the fact that it does not generate feudal servants but free citizens bestowed with equal political rights, and men who truly understand the mechanism of human nature cannot but want to be forced to it.

Hobbes’ political and moral theory is grounded in a mechanical explanation of natural motion. In this essay, some very important logical deductions, having their starting point in mechanism and arriving at anthropology, will be omitted. A complete study of Hobbes’ mechanical anthropology is not the objective of this investigation, which is concerned with individuating a theoretical nexus between compulsory schooling and the building of peaceful social order, and aims to cast a light on the connection between schooling, anthropology of the ritual, and the mechanical paradigm according to which all natural motion can be explained in terms of laws of motion and, consequently, the collision of natural bodies may be prevented thanks to the exact knowledge about those laws.

The genealogy of the modern schooling system

When aiming to explain the ineffectiveness and the injustice of the education system, Illich made use both of economic and sociological data and of the language pertaining to the anthropology of religion. The schooling is grounded in a new myth, a myth of social salvation through learning (Illich, 1970a: 101). It operates as a ritual reproducing the most important myths of modern societies (national state, industry, market, and progress). Indeed, as Italian ethnographer Ernesto De Martino claimed just a few years before Illich’s works had been written, every myth corresponds with a rite (De Martino, 2002: 240). The myth to which corresponds the schooling rite can be summed up as follows: faith in science and progress stemming from the practical realization of purely rational truth. The school is the Church of the schooling era, which succeeded the feudal epoch. Because of its capacity to rescue the poor by providing them with the opportunity to partake in the economic race and by integrating them within the social order, its power is similar to the one the medieval Church exerted, which declared itself able to save souls from hell (Illich, 1970b: 93). Illich thus “suggests ritual brings about social unity through its mystificatory power – that of perpetuating social life in such a way that it is perceived as natural”, that is to say, as immutable, spontaneously flourishing from our very nature. “This mystificatory power can be understood as a process in which rituals, as cultural forms, are objectified into a symbolic medium which supports an existing social order” (McLaren, 1986: 26).

Illich claims that school attendance constitutes a rite of passage exhibiting deep parallelism with baptism (Illich, 1970b: 54). In the feudal age, the unbaptized person was not allowed to partake in the social life of the community of fidelity and peace characterizing the medieval social order and was therefore treated as an enemy (Brunner, 1992). To put it in different words, those who have not partaken in the education liturgy cannot be admitted to the modern society and to its institutions, for they did not learn the salvific rules regulating them. For this reason, schooling as a rite of initiation has to be compulsory and universal. No part of the social body can live in dissociation. “The university has become the final stage of the most all-encompassing initiation rite the world has ever known. No society in history has been able to survive without ritual or myth, but ours is the first which has needed such a dull, protracted, destructive, and expensive initiation into its myth. The contemporary world civilization is also the first one which has found it necessary to rationalize its fundamental initiation ritual in the name of education” (Illich, 1970b: 19). Moreover, as many other studies have proved, the whole of the school life itself is framed within several rituals (Lancy, 1976; Meyer, 1977; Moore, 1976) and can be interpreted as a series of ritual games of graded promotions (Illich, 1970b: 20), a sequence of liturgies that are considered constitutively measurable by means of rationally elaborated scales.

In The Rites of Passage (2004), the great French anthropologist and ethnographer Arnold Van Gennep classified the baptism among the rites of initiation. Just like other initiation rites, its function consists in integrating the novice into the new community. Van Gennep subdivided the rites of passage in three broad phases: separation; liminality; and re-aggregation. If we apply this distinction to the baptism, we observe that the potential new member of the ecclesia had to be firstly disjointed both from the effective members of the Church and from the external world through pre-liminal rites of separation, such as an exorcist formula. During the liminal phase, namely after he had obtained the catechumen status, he could attend to the religious rituals, but was denied the permission to partake in the holy Mass. The liminality thus implies the progressive separation from the non-Christian community that the catechumen originally belonged to. Such separation coincides with learning the Christian Logos. Finally, through the baptism ritual, which is both the arche and the telos of all these complex series of rites, he was incorporated within the new community, becoming himself a new person, a regenerated man (Van Gennep, 2004: 66–115).

If we now turn back to schooling as a rite of passage aiming to produce an active and conscious member of the society, we can observe that the kindergarten period can be considered as the separation phase during which the new member leaves behind his original environment. This phase is incomplete because the separation is not total, radical, just as the catechumen, after having attended to the service and learned the new truth, used to go back home where he kept living together with his pagan family. The compulsory education process represents the liminal period, during which the school catechumen is forbidden from participating in several social activities – working and voting – and is surrounded by many taboos concerning, for instance, violence and sexuality. Finally, after having graduated from high school (the graduation rite is a rite of re-aggregation), the catechumen becomes the full society member, a new man, a useful social agent, and his political and economic freedom of choice is given him back, since what characterizes our society is personal freedom. Every man is born free, but gains all of his freedom, the civil freedom, only after having completed the compulsory schooling rite. The freedom is the result of coercion. The compulsion to exercise the right to education liberates man by making him become a member of civil society and, as such, a potential founder of a new natural society – a new family. All these rites both reflect and articulate the rational social structure contemporary society tends to generate and can be justified and explained by referring to rational thinking alone (Delattre, 1979). Schooling function is the socialization and as a rite it “transforms the style and values of everyday action, thereby becoming the new ground of action itself” (Grimes, 1982: 61).

Schooling rite

Even if the schooling rite presents many parallels with other rites, it cannot be fully comprehended only by means of a comparative ritualistic analysis. Its rationality, remarked by Illich, together with its universality and compulsoriness (baptism is essentially neither universal nor compulsory, even if it historically tended to become such) presupposes a different conception of human nature and society. Every new culture rests on a new conception of nature and the modern one makes no exception: the idea of nature we imply derives from mechanical interpretation of natural processes (Leclerc, 1972: 147). The nature surrounding the modern man is supposed to be deprived of proper, inner vitality. The universe we inhabit is composed of dead matter (Rosenstock-Huessy, 1993: 741–745).

Therefore, a set of questions has to be put: Why all men have to go through the schooling rite? Why the new Church does not admit the existence of other alternative “religions”? Why our society is supposed to function only if all its members are trained in the scientific truth? Why any other form of knowledge is deprived of the right to exist and the only admitted knowledge is the one the schooling system approves of? And, finally, how is the compulsory schooling related to the modern conception of nature and human nature, which was firstly elaborated in the 17th century?

The meaning of the compulsory schooling is not reducible to pure coercion, dominion, capitalistic or collectivistic economy – to mystification, as Illich states. Illich criticized the schooling on the basis of its ineffectiveness and of the social injustice it generates by reducing the education to the outcomes of the schooling process. All knowledge that is not scholastic, that is not sealed by the ministers of the new universal Church, the teachers, is deprived of the legal and, thus, economic value. My aim is not to criticize the schooling after the style of Illich, but rather to explain why the schooling as a rational, universal, and compulsory rite of passage from pre-social, “natural,” family life to the social life is theoretically necessary and which are the philosophical premises this necessity is grounded in. In other words, why there cannot be a deschooled modern society composed of free and equal citizens.

The modernity is the first and only epoch in which everyone is forced to attend schools; in which a right to learning is perverting into an unavoidable duty. It is the first epoch that makes progress, peace, tolerance, equality, critical thinking, freedom – values that constitute the presuppositions of the good life – dependent on the outcomes of schooling, that is, on equal transmission of scientifically corroborated notions. Only within the peaceful social order (the unequal distribution of wealth, knowledge, tolerance, civil rights, and so on, brings about social crisis) can everyone devote themselves to the pursuit of their personal aims, to the pursuit of happiness.

Hobbes starts his search for the “immortal peace” by referring to the human condition in the state of nature. In the state of nature and in pre-modern, irrational, forms of association men are unable to perform their potential humanity, their natural freedom, which collapses and turns into the war of everyone against all the others. When left to spontaneous development, natural freedom turns into its self-negation. In the 17th century, when the idea of the state of nature was fully elaborated, it had three basic meanings: a political; an ethnographic; and a theological. In the first sense, the state of nature is opposed to the political State, in the second one to the civility, culture, and society, and in the third one to the state of grace. In this last meaning the nature coincides with the state of original sin that only the baptism can remove (Landucci, 2004: 262). These three meanings are interwoven and, according to Hobbes, political State, society, and grace represent the overcoming of the state of nature. There is no society without political State and, as Hobbes claimed, only Christians, who obey the evangelic precept to respect each other, can give birth to the Commonwealth.

According to the mechanical interpretation of nature, man is a body in motion composed of the sum of his natural powers, as sense, imagination, and reason. By nature, man is gifted with all he needs to obtain happiness, that is, he is self-sufficient. Yet, so as to gain happiness and to preserve his life, his being in movement, man needs more and more power. By nature, there is no law forbidding him to seek for power and to accomplish whatever he supposes is useful to preserve his life. “I put for a general inclination of all mankind a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death. And the cause of this is not always that a man hopes for a more intensive delight than he has already attained to, or that he cannot be content with a moderate power, but because he cannot assure the power and means to live well, which he hath present, without the acquisition of more” (Hobbes, 1998: 66).

In order to increase their power men perpetually tend to subjugate the others, thereby depriving them of natural independence. This is how historical societies came into being. The other is a great source of power, even if he remains the most dangerous one. For this reason, men run into the others as enemies and consider every other man as bad, even if all men just act according to the mechanisms of their nature. Our very nature precipitates us into mutual war, fear, and distrust, so that none of our goals can be achieved. When confiding only in nature, men are unable to actualize their potentialities and they give life to forms of political dissociation. Such life is the most miserable of all lives. The nature has to be corrected in accordance with the truth.

The cause of the human unhappiness is to be found in the ignorance of mechanisms governing human nature: “in those things which every man ought to meditate for the steerage of his life, it necessarily happens, that not onely from errours, but even from ignorance it selfe, there arise offences, contentions, nay even slaughter it selfe” (Hobbes, 1983: 30). The others are not enemies because of their immorality, but because human nature, universally identical in every individual, pushes them to act as such and pushes everyone to consider all the others as such. If all men knew that, if they all learned natural laws regulating human behaviour, they would stop subjugating the others and depriving them of occasions of happiness. Everyone would start acting according to justice and would consequently avoid to impose on the others their personal idea of good. Nobody would do to the others what he would not accept to be done to him. Only by tolerating the others’ beliefs and opinions do men become able to cooperate with them and to identify them as potential partners rather than enemies. This tolerance, stemming from the true knowledge about nature, would generate peace, that is, perfect socialization. The universal possession of science, which proves the rationality of the evangelic precept of mutual respect, would lead men out of the state of nature characterized by state of war, and in order to overcome it they would not need to rely on the artificial power of the sovereignty:

For if we could suppose a great multitude of men to consent in the observation of justice, and other laws of nature, without a common power to keep them all in awe, we might as well suppose all mankind to do the same; and then there neither would be, nor need to be, any civil government or Commonwealth at all, because there would be peace without subjection (Hobbes, 1998: 112).

All men strive for the good. It is the ignorance of how to achieve it in conformity with our nature that makes us believe that the domination over the others represents the appropriate way of increasing the power. It is quite the contrary: by ruling the others men merely enlarge their unhappiness, and accordingly spread fear, distrust, and enmity and, finally, turn their natural power into powerlessness. There is an exact identification between unhappiness, ignorance, and powerlessness that Hobbes’ political theory, grounded in the science of nature, implies.

And what would happen if only few men were acquainted with the real causes of the human behaviour? Hobbes did not omit to answer the question. The men of science would still be compelled to act as wolves, incapable of turning the possession of science into visible behaviour. They could observe the justice only in the conscience. In the meanwhile, their actions would keep obeying the inadequate desire of power. Their inner morality and their outward deeds would not be consistent with each other and their knowledge would result as unusable. Indeed, when surrounded by wolves, they could not – in force of the mechanical necessity commanding men to do whatever it takes to save the bare life – act for peace, for that would bring them to servitude, and thereby to unhappiness. For this reason, it is not sufficient that just few men knew, as it is not sufficient that just few of them transfer the whole of their natural power to the sovereign. They all either have to know, or to seal the pact simultaneously. ²

Moreover, since different men identify the good with different forms of power – be it wealth, science, health, political offices – not everyone believes that the acquisition of the true science of nature represents the appropriate way to increase their happiness. Here is the reason why everyone has to attend schools, even if they are all born free, that is, without a given duty to be carried out. Since the true peace stems from the social realization of the rational knowledge, that is, from the practical actualization of the scientific interpretation of nature and of human nature (meanwhile the peace we have experienced derives from the fear of the sovereign power – this is the primary reason why most men obey the laws), all parts of the social body have to be compelled to schooling. In order that everyone be forced to gain the true knowledge, we need to rely upon, once again, the irresistible power of the sovereign, just as we need to discredit all other forms of knowledge (metaphysics and magic) and of its transmission. Only the true science of nature teaches us that the others are not enemies and that in order to avoid conflicts we should just let them do whatever they please until they start putting obstacles on our path to achieving our goals – the sovereign will hinder them from doing so and will punish them for doing so, and the punishment is the outermost form of education. The rational knowledge is the remedial to the imperfectness of nature and the sovereign power is just the surrogate for the power of the knowledge.

Discussion and conclusion

The exercise of sovereign power is still an imperfect modality of transposing men into the civil society, an artifice corresponding to the defective level of their knowledge and incomplete and unequal diffusion of the truth. The perfect way would rather consist in the simultaneous possession of the science of human nature grounded in mechanistic anthropology. When men possess it, they know how to act in order not to damage the others and, consequently, in order not to be damaged by them. For this reason, one of the most important duties of the sovereign concerns the universal and compulsory education to critical thinking, to the useful freedom, thanks to which men acquire the capacity to leave the natural state of minority behind and to be admitted to the society. Baptism, for Hobbes, is indeed a sign of admission. So, schooling is a secularized rite of initiation to a secular truth: we are compelled to the remission of the sin of ignorance of nature by which we are admitted to the social life.

Other rituals humanity had elaborated were all based upon beliefs. The schooling as a rite of passage from the state of nature to civil society, from imperfect humanity (when man is both man and wolf) to the fulfilment of natural capacities, is grounded in the true science of human nature, whose movements can be explained without resorting to metaphysical principles. The science is believed to be not a belief. Since human nature is identical in every single man, schooling is by necessity universal and obligatory. Its goal is to bring men peace, that is, socialization based upon rational knowledge, which in turn represents the premises starting from which any other goal can be pursued.

All rites of passage produce a transformation of intersubjective relations, and schooling makes no exception. Yet, while other rites seek to transform the man, whose nature is the soul (as Aristotle claimed), the school works only upon the transformation of man’s knowledge of the nature, since man – whose nature is the sum of physiology, biology, and genetics – cannot change his nature. The nature is non-available to man. After having been baptized, man used to become a member of the community of fidelity and peace, that is, a friend of the others. The baptism involved an inner transformation of the subject. According to all pre-modern political thought true peace can occur only between friends. Compulsory schooling does not aim to make us become friends, it just teaches us – and this is perfectly according to reason – that acting as wolves is counter-productive, both for us and for the social order. Moreover, within the schooling process the friendship is an obstacle, since friends tend to help each other and, by doing so, they distort the perfect rationality of the learning process. Everyone has to learn all by themselves the fundamental mechanism regulating natural movements and consequently become able to adapt their living to it and to recognize in the others potential partners. And yet, we all have school-mates – in spite of the rite of passage we are compelled to go through. This can mean only two things: either the scientific understating of nature is not conforming to nature; or we still have to adjust our educational system in order that everyone, absolutely everyone, be compelled to understand what is truly good and appropriate for man.

From this perspective, even important changes and accomplishments towards teaching and the learning process that have happened along time, do not invalidate the basic structure and orientation of the coercive schooling process: everyone has to possess a certified diploma, that is, everyone has to gain a knowledge whose content is decided on by the political power and scientific institutions and not by autonomous choices of individuals and communities. As Illich claimed, all possible change can only come from within man and not in virtue of the next institutional imposition (Illich, 2005).

By having detached the nexus between anthropology of ritual and mechanical interpretation of natural motion, upon which the compulsory schooling – one of the distinctive features of modern societies – is grounded in, I am aware to have merely repeated a commonplace that modern society involves the dialectic process of scientific and critical thinking and axiological Christian heritage. By arguing that Hobbes was the first thinker to demonstrate the rationality of tolerance – rooted in the Christian idea according to which no one ought to do to their fellowmen what one does not want to be done to him – with respect to the erection, preservation, and development of peaceful social order, I hope to have individuated the starting theoretical point of convergence between scientific thought and Christian values from which the logical necessity of compulsory schooling can be inferred. Indeed, according to Illich, modern institutions stem from the corruption of Christianity by which the commandment to take care of each other had been turned into political obligation to take care of each other by means of rationally organized institutions (schools, hospitals, and welfare agencies).