Abstract
This paper presents a comparative analysis between the school perspectives of two European authors from the first half of the 20th century: Antonio Gramsci (1881–1937) and Célestin Freinet (1896–1966). Through bibliographical research, comparisons are made between them, taking as reference the theoretical and methodological foundations of each one and what is most fundamental when one is dealing with school: concepts of the human being, principles, purposes, content, method, and school structure. In the final notes, guidelines for educational policies inspired by both authors are presented. The conclusion is that if it is indeed possible to establish proximity between them, since they shared the same conception of the Marxist world, it also possible to view the distance between their methods, such as the role of the teacher in the school, and its syllabus, such as value of the classics.
Introduction
This article presents a comparative analysis between the formulations on the school of two European authors working in the first half of the 20th century: Antonio Gramsci (1881–1937) and Célestin Freinet (1896–1966). Both were influenced by Marxist thought, which led them to consider an education and a schooling different from established systems. As a legacy, they express the need to elevate the school to a place of emancipatory education, that is critical and available as a right to all.
Though they worked in the past, these authors analyzed what would turn out to be a conjunctural moment of the contemporary world. They still can contribute to rethinking education and schooling, because their position that education is not a commodity to be produced and made available in the market game is still a profound challenge to the contemporary neoliberal mindset. This can be better understood in the neoliberal description given by Giroux (2018): Central to its philosophy is the assumption the market drives not just the economy but all of social life. It construes profit-making as the essence of democracy and consuming as the only operable form of agency. It redefines identities, desires and values through a market logic that favors self-interest, a survival-of-the-fittest ethos and unchecked individualism. Under neoliberalism, life-draining and unending competition is a central concept for defining human freedom (Giroux, 2018a: 3).
In order to identify proximities and/or distances between the authors’ ideas and ideals, a bibliographical search was carried out between Gramsci and Freinet, taking as reference the theoretical and methodological foundations of each one. As elements of analysis, we employed what is most fundamental when we are dealing with school: concepts of the human being, principles, purposes, content, method, and school structure.
Thus, the article is presented in three sections. The first section deals with Gramsci's unitary school proposal, which aims to foster the students as integral subjects capable of knowing and doing, “thinking, studying, directing or controlling who directs” (Gramsci, 2000a: 49). Furthermore, when dealing with Freinet’s modern school techniques, the hope is to show how radical ideas applied on the school floor allowed a new schooling based on a perspective of transforming the bourgeois school and the student and teacher roles, as well as promoting a critical understanding of social life. In the last section, comparisons are presented in which the concepts of the school in Gramsci and Freinet are confronted. Correlations are made, including in the final notes, that outline some similarities among these authors in relation to educational policies. In the end, it is expected that the relations established here, in company with further studies on these authors, can support modifications in education and schooling.
Gramsci unitary school
Gramsci was born in 1881 in Sardinia (Alés), a region of southern Italy less economically privileged than the north, and impoverished by the land proprietorship and the ethical-political and cultural predominance of the Catholic Church and the intellectuals linked to it (see Martins, 2011). He did not finish his degree, but he is recognized as a philosopher, educator, journalist, literary critic, member of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), creator of the Italian Communist Party, and articulator of the Red Biennial (1919–1920) 1 . With the failure of this movement, he continued to fight for a “new civilization” until he was arrested on November 8 1926, despite having parliamentary immunity. In jail for more than 10 years, then released so that fascism would not have a martyr on its hands, he produced reflections on various themes and recorded them in the Prison Notebooks and letters, which were published after his death (April 27 1937) and were influential in the updating of Marxism.
Gramsci’s concept of the “unitary school” is a formulation of his maturity: the prison period. As a Marxist educational proposition, it was founded on the concept of class. It meets three basic criteria for identifying proposals with this profile: it understands education as a phenomenon immanent to the process of production of what is needed for existence, adopts work as an educational principle, and commits itself to overcoming capitalism as a mode of production of the social human being (Martins, 2016).
It is impossible to understand the “unitary school” in isolation from other concepts of the Gramscian legacy. In fact, “as a theoretician of superstructures, Gramsci reviews the Marxist concept of state” (Saviani, 2013: 69) and creatively formulates others; hence the need to understand the “integral state” (“civil society + political society, that is, hegemony clothed with coercion”, Gramsci, 2000b: 244). Hegemony is understood as a group's ability to control and dominate the totality: social, organic intellectual, hierarchical; the fields of moral and intellectual reform; philosophy as a conception of the world embodied in the products and social processes, guiding the praxis; ideology as a conception of the world that incorporates the subjects as “will”; objective and operative force in history (see Liguori, 2007), and the historical block.
Within this totality of civil society (see Semeraro, 1999), the unitary school is “linked to life” (Gramsci, 2000a: 45) and “aims at […] creating the fundamental values of ‘humanism’, intellectual self-discipline and moral autonomy […].” It “demands […] the duty […] of the State to ‘conform’ the new generations” (Gramsci, 2000a: 39). As it can be seen, the unitary school has “a relevant role […] in human-social development” (Saviani, 2013: 79) and thus is based on two presuppositions: the Marxist concept of a human being and a political conception of the educational processes that form it.
Human for Gramsci means a being of relations: a praxical and historical, not metaphysical, being (Gramsci, 1999: 245). There is no other subject to intervene in reality except the human being, although some posit God, the social or linguistic structure, or even reason (as Hegel affirmed) as a backdrop to human action. The human being, by praxis, produces the concrete totality: hence Gramscian humanism (Gramsci, 1999: 411). By transforming the natural and social world through work, the human being produces his own human nature (essence), because “each one transforms himself, […] insofar as he transforms and modifies all set of relations of which he is the central point” (Gramsci, 1999: 413).
However, the individual was not born and does not act in a world completely created by him, because he inherits the reality produced by others, with limits and possibilities. The present is a meeting between the past (legacy of past praxis) and future (orientation to praxis, possibilities of being), which develop in the concrete totality (Gramsci, 1999: 422). Whether or not the future is affected by praxis within the limits of the present situation is determined by creating the dialectical relationship between “circumstances and education […] the circumstances have to be transformed by men and the educator himself has to be educated” (Marx and Engels, 1984: 108).
Gramsci captured this relationship dialectically, and as a historical and dialectical materialist he criticized prominent Italian subjectivist intellectuals, such as Croce and Gentile, as well as exponents of the determinism and mechanics of the Second International, such as Bukharin. In short, for Gramsci, the human being works with a “historical block of purely subjective and individual elements and elements of mass and objective or material, with which the individual is in active relationship. To transform the external world, the general relations, means […] to develop oneself” (Gramsci, 1999: 406).
This conception implies an understanding of the human as being unfinished: a becoming product of praxis in reality also unfinished: developing in history. The delineation of the process of “finishing,” of self-formation of the human being, is given by the term education. Hence Saviani's precise definition of education as “mediation within global social practice” (Saviani, 2011: 120), and educational work as “the act of producing, directly and intentionally, in each individual person, the humanity that is produced historically and collectively by all men” (Saviani, 2011: 7).
In this way, Gramsci understands education as politics and politics as having an educative dimension: “The whole relation of hegemony is necessarily a pedagogical relation” (Gramsci, 1999: 399). Thus, the school becomes a strategic space for the socialist struggle for the construction of a “new civilization,” assuming it is a “unitary school.”
The starting point of Gramsci's school formulation is the critique of the schools of his time: the bourgeois school, which strives to be universal and is “interested,” especially in the formation of labor, yet embodies positive aspects such as rationalization and the principle of the activity between educator and student (active school); the traditional school, which is for the few, is authoritarian, and distant from social problematics, but is humanist and defends the transmission of the historical-cultural patrimony of humanity to future generations; and the Gentile fascist scholastic reform of 1922–1923, which provided for professional and religious instruction to workers, to forge ethical-political passivity in them.
Based on these critiques and the fact that culture was a privilege of a few selected by the unjust official examinations, Gramsci defended in his youth the “disinterested” school of labor: humanistic, propedeutic to general culture, and not prematurely professionalizing, as opposed to governmental initiatives in 1916 to merge workshops and schools. With broad training that interests all and without lowering the level of education in the schools of the people—because Gramsci believed that if underlings had adequate conditions, they could learn what the dominant class learns—the disinterested school intended to prepare students for positions in the future socialist state.
This marked Gramsci's actions in 1917 with the creation of the Association of Popular Socialist Culture, as well as the intervention in the “Grido del Popolo” (People’s Clamor), newspaper that was the most important cultural and political expression of the PSI, whose direction Gramsci took over this same year. In 1919, Gramsci, Tasca, Togliatti, and Terracini, supporters of the same political chain, founded the “Ordine Nuovo” weekly magazine aimed at integrating the productive (interested) world into the world of culture (disinterested) and educating subordinates for revolution, and for basis work with the factory councils. Subsequently, with the rise of fascism and the end of political freedom in Italy, the school was created by correspondence, to form nuclei of revolutionary militants throughout the country. In these experiments Gramsci matured the concept that it is necessary to form with an interest, but at the same time, in the direction of a disinterested, anti-sectarian, historicist, and humanist culture, a way to form ethically and politically capable subjects to exercise hegemony. Even in the prison of the Island of Ustica, he experienced the creation of a school that maintains this same principle (see Jesus, 2005). In prison, Gramsci reflected on the socialist scholarly proposals of omnilateral formation whose example lay in the “single school of work”, which was forged after the revolution, led by the Russian pedagogues Krupskaia and Pistrak, and translated in terms of polytechnics (see Saviani, 1987).
Thus came the unitary school, which took on assumptions of Marxian theory, but updated them to the reality of Western societies (see Nosella, 2007). The educational proposal of Marx and Engels is of the 19th century, in the context of the “restricted state,” and advocated the “technological” formation, articulated to “mental” and “corporal” education. The unitary school was born in the 20th century, in the dynamics of the “enlargement of the State,” and committed itself to the production of a new culture for the subaltern classes, which demanded a reorder of the inner self according to the socialist orientation. It should be emphasized that the term unitary indicates both a single school for all and the articulation of “knowing” and “doing” in the teaching–learning process.
Gramsci, in Americanismo and Fordismo (2001), understood the context of modern work, which rearranged individual and collective behavior and formed the human being according to production, as something both negative (separation between “knowing” and “doing”) and positive (rationalization and discipline). He assumed it as a principle to promote in the subaltern classes the necessary education to overcome the realm of need for freedom, stimulating activity and creativity, but with discipline and intervention, with technical and professional training, since it was articulated to the humanistic formation linked to concrete reality.
Working with dialectical pairs, as is characteristic of his philosophy of praxis (between idealism and vulgar materialism), Gramsci presented the method of unitary school and that of non-school education founded on modern work from early childhood and respecting the psychic development of the educated, directing it with civilizing habits toward the exercise of autonomy as an adult (discipline and amorousness; freedom and necessity). He discarded belief in natural gifts (such as professional inclinations in childhood) and stimulated learning based on the contradictions of concrete reality, but with discipline and rationalization, to forge a non-subaltern human nature (discipline and autonomy). Gramsci's method is non-spontaneous, like that of Rousseau and new pedagogy (which Gramsci distrusts, but he acknowledges criticisms of traditional pedagogy), because at his pleasure the student will be formed as a chaotic being, assembled from the casual influences of environmental stimuli. The student requires the intervention of the educator in the formation process: starting from common sense, the aim is to achieve the philosophical conception (rationalization) necessary for creative, active promotion of ethical-political autonomy—conditions to overcome subalternity. Thus, Gramsci offered to Marxism a theory of personality that understands the human being “as a historical block” (Ragazzini, 2005: 146).
In the unitary school, the contents are valued and articulated from the professionalization-humanistic-training pairs, since the learner needs to appropriate the historically produced knowledge, particularly of the classics (Saviani, 2011: 124), because they contain syntheses of maximum development of the human spirit. Linked to this, the domain of the scientific foundations of modern work must also be contained; hence it is essential to restructure the school environment (“buildings, scientific material, teachers etc.” Gramsci, 2000a: 36) for the learner to dominate the processes of production of the social being. This basic school aims to train intellectuals of various profiles and should be secular, fully funded by the state, full-time, with teachers close to the students and whose authority lies in good formation (coercion and affection).
The objective of the unitary school is to make the members of the subaltern classes, through a “cathartic” process (Cardoso and Martins, 2014), acquire a higher conception of the world (philosophical) beyond religion, informed by common sense and “folklore,” becoming autonomous, able to act as subjects of history itself: from “class-in-itself to the condition of class-for-self” (Saviani, 2013: 82). With the desired knowledge and mastery of the structural and super-structural scope of social life, they would be stimulated to acquire a “second nature” (Gramsci, 2000a: 48) and to break with ethical-political passivity and become “capable of thinking, studying, directing and controlling who directs” (Gramsci, 2000a: 49); they will be integral beings, as Leonardo da Vinci was: a synthesis between science and humanistic culture.
Free expression and work in Freinet’s modern school
Célestin Freinet was born in Gars, Southeastern France, in the year 1896. He was the son of shepherds and spent his childhood tending herds, an experience that served him well for many reflections on school education 2 . In addition to herding, the call to fight in World War I was fundamental in guiding all his work in education that sought to make it different from the traditional, bourgeois school, which focused not on critical education regarding social life but on maintenance of its status quo. However, as a teenager, Célestin Freinet had chosen teaching for his profession, says his wife, Élise Freinet (1979, 1978), and the war only postponed the beginning of a trajectory marked by the struggle for a school that could transform the people and the inequalities they lived under.
He was 23 years old when he was appointed on the first day of January 1920 to teach at the primary school in Bar-sur-Loup, Alpes-Maritimes. Countering the orders of doctors who treated him for pulmonary insufficiency after he was seriously injured by toxic gas, he decided to test himself by assuming a class of boys in the community to which he had been assigned. “For a stubborn obstinacy in physical and moral effort,” said Elise Freinet (1979: 17), “the young teacher began his long and patient apprenticeship in the office of educator.” His youthful desire to be a teacher earned him 46 years of teaching on the school floor, working for an education that was not alienated from the people who should be educated. In his first months of acting as a teacher, he soon realized that he could not give in to the traditionalism of the school, which demanded the memorization of lessons that had nothing to do with the village surrounding his classroom.
From the beginning of his teaching career, Célestin Freinet resolved to innovate the traditionalist school. We could even say that it was his insistence on teaching with his lungs injured and unable to speak for a long time that helped him establish revolutionary techniques of teaching. One of his first inventions in school life was the technique known as “class-walk” (Freinet, 1975), in which they left the classroom to observe closely the borough in the village, including productive life. He began, therefore, what he called common sense, a method of teaching that leads from empiricism to theoretical study, reversing the logic of the authoritarian scholastic present in educational institutions (Fortunato, 2016a; Fortunato et al., 2016).
Elise Freinet (1979) noted that in the context of teaching, there was class education, maintaining the gap between the popular class and the one most favored economically, politically, and culturally. Although Célestin Freinet's battle with traditional school pedagogy prevailing at school was similar to the innovations brought by Decroly (centers of interest) and Montessori (self-education), his institutions served the bourgeoisie. Freinet, meanwhile, was with the people, seeing poverty impact negatively on the health, behavior, and learning of students. While teaching, Freinet always sought ways for the children to somehow express themselves about what they saw, felt, and were learning (Fortunato, 2016a; 2016b). Based on what he called free expression, it became clear that the children perceived the social contradiction between the many people who had little to eat and the few who accumulated goods. After he collected several free texts, in which his students reported starving and the anguish of their parents for not being able to feed them, he declared: Through them [the children] then come the most serious revelations about the social situation, about life about the sufferings of one of the most miserable classes of humanity; we penetrate the secrets of hard family life, the promiscuity of the slums in the exploitation of misery (Freinet E, 1979: 80). What we like, we know and see very well, would be that we continue to use the immoral and anti-pedagogical system that prepares, not men, but docile servants of a regime; would like to oblige us, proletarian educators, to serve unreservedly the school of the bourgeois class (Freinet E, 1979: 82, author’s highlights).
Elise Freinet (1979) made it clear that the idea of dialectical materialism had influenced Célestin Freinet’s thinking about culture and society. According to the author, Marxism had clarified the motives that triggered the war and its years lived in the trenches. Marxist ideas helped him to recognize the contradictions of any human system, spurring him to join the trade-union movement and the Communist Party in the early 1920s. When he had already been transferred from Bar-sur-Loup to the Saint-Paul school in Vence (still in the Alpes-Maritimes), his relation to dialectical materialism became more intense when he came into contact with the work of Georges Politzer (1998), published in 1928, in which it exposed the contradictions of psychology bound to scientific ideology. Freinet identified in the author's ideas how the passage from a knowledge of practical experience to a logical knowledge takes place, leading him to conceive a sensitive psychology and a pedagogy anchored on work. Obviously, the work of the school is not that of the capitalist labor market, but of the Marxist conception of the transformation of nature. This is very evident in the words of Elias (2001): Influenced by Marxist philosophy, the school intended and thought is the school of work, perfectly integrated in the general process of life: the child becomes a subject and the teacher is one who guides, stimulates and facilitates learning. Work allows men to structure and educate while transforming nature […] Through work, man fully and affectively develops his potentialities […] Free and creative labor is the way of being human ascending (Elias, 2001: 46–47).
Contemporary to distinguished academics of education, such as the already mentioned Decrole and Montessori, in addition to John Dewey, Claparède, and others, Freinet (1975) never devoted his studies to creating a school of arid traditionalism. However, his work supplies virtually a laboratory of knowledge that can be used in the university and its experimental schools. Therefore, he never gave up on being in school with the children he educated and exploring with them human nature and different ways to discover the world. In this regard, Élise Freinet (1979) proclaims: There is never, in the writings of the most illustrious pedagogues of that time, the concern with the joy of living, this universal notion of sensibility, experience of pleasure and suffering so important in the life of the child. The search for intellectual knowledge is always the determining factor of all methods of pedagogues, certainly concerned with associating interest and pleasure with these methods, but still concerned with accumulating knowledge, where a certain confusion between instruction and education (Freinet E, 1979: 89).
It was in Vence that, under the movement of the Laic Teaching Cooperative, the couple Elise and Célestin Freinet were able to establish the first school of the people, built in cooperation by the proletariat itself and inaugurated in 1935. In his school, Freinet (1975) could advance the techniques of the class-walk and the school newspaper, which were already part of their teaching repertoire, to work with school correspondence, with his teaching ateliers, with the book of life, and the self-assessment forms. Freinet's inspiration, says Sampaio (1989: 65–66), “made everyone interested in the true education of their children, showing them their rights and duties, and drawing attention to the importance of the fact that they were parents of little beings who needed to be educated for life.” In this school, his techniques, inspired by the free method and at work, constituted a place for the construction of knowledge through experience and technique, for the recognition of social life and its contradictions, made concrete by the school press. With World War II, Sampaio (1989) explains Célestin Freinet was taken as “a dangerous leader who built clandestine pamphlets.” He was imprisoned in a concentration camp, and his school was looted and plundered.
Even his weakened health and imprisonment did not stop the educator. In Sampaio's (1989) reports, we saw that Freinet helped prison colleagues with literacy, organized study groups, and managed to create conditions for them to develop artistic works and even a handmade newspaper. There, they produced reports of life in which the evils of the concentration camp were expressed, but in letters registered to families, opportunities for life were discerned. Incarcerated, he could, through education, inspire texts, illustrations, theatre. In the prison he produced two fundamental books to explain his perception about human beings and education: Sensitive Psychology Essay (Freinet C, 1998a) and Work Education (Freinet C, 1998b). He was released in 1941, weakened but eager to rebuild his school. “Freinet’s life was his job, wherever he went,” noted Sampaio (1989: 71).
The school, for Freinet (2001), should be the place of preparation for life, not for domestication aimed at inclusion in an industrial, capitalist labor market, the result of which involved two world wars. He was looking for a child-centered school, not as a preparation for the adult world as it was already established. “The child will fulfill his destiny,” postulated Célestin Freinet (1975: 8) “elevating himself to the dignity and potential of man, who is thus prepared to work effectively, when he becomes adult, self-interested lies, for the realization of a harmonious and balanced society.” Thus, he affirmed that “education is not a school formula, but a work of life” (Freinet C, 2004: 13).
He died as a teacher in 1966. His legacy is a life of struggles for a popular education, an extensive repertoire of teaching techniques that enable the individual development of each student, a vast bibliographic production built on the school floor and in the jail of the concentration camp, and a still vital international movement that fights for a schooling by work and cooperation. Still, Freinet expressed three manifestos that, if put into practice, could transform school education: down with the class system, down with textbooks, and 25 students per class.
Proximities and distances between Gramsci and Freinet
Considering that the conception of the world affects the totality of the human being, the fact that Gramsci and Freinet were Marxists produced in them some common positions regarding education and school, although with localized differences.
The first and most evident closeness between them refers to the concept of the human as a being of praxis: self-producing himself throughout history. If this is the case, whoever wishes to build a new civilization, which surpasses class society, finds it indispensable to forge it in the day-to-day of the capitalist way of life. In this sense, public schools are configured as privileged spaces for this to occur.
But, it happens that, in the context of Gramsci and Freinet, an authoritarian school system was instituted in the interests of the dominant classes. Both understood traditional schools as class-based schools, serving the dominant class. Conceiving clearly the political dimensions of schooling, they formulated alternative proposals to the model that prevailed, with aims directed to the interests of the subaltern classes. To put school at the service of popular needs is the common objective of both the Gramscian and Freinetian school proposals.
In order to make this educational goal viable, the authors adopted, in the educational proposals they produced, work as an educational principle and work according to the Marxist meaning of the term. In this way, both the unitary school of Gramsci and the popular modern school of Freinet commit themselves to life, bringing it into the teaching–learning process to enliven the school. A living school transforms the individuals who pass through it, in order to enable them to transform social relations.
In addition to these commonalities, there is the fact that Gramsci and Freinet shared the experience of being arrested and charged with subversive activities because of their Marxist militancy. Each not only had educational experiences in prison but also used writing as a way to mitigate their existence in the tragic environment of the prison, producing works of great value for the understanding of human nature and its intimate relationship with the social fabric, as well as for education.
Nevertheless, there are some differences between Gramsci and Freinet. The first of these is that Freinet effectively articulated the educational proposal on the school floor and the innovations he produced came from this space, whereas Gramsci could only work as an educator in non-school educational spaces, such as party-training environments and the trade-union movement.
The weight of the new school on Freinet is much greater than on Gramsci. This, interestingly, is skeptical of modern pedagogies centered on the interest of the child, while it accepts as the attribution of the unitary school the goal of forging active, creative, and autonomous individuals. Freinet, in turn, is part of a school renovation movement that critiques the traditional school, even as he is characterized as a school reformer committed to popular interests.
If Freinet seems to discard completely the traditional school, particularly what he calls intellectualism present in it, Gramsci understands that it’s important for the subaltern classes to appropriate the knowledge historically produced by humanity and synthesized in science, philosophy, and the arts. He even defends, in the unitary school, the study of Latin and Greek, as a way for Italians to appropriate their own culture, something necessary for the production of a new civilization.
If so, the role of the teacher for both becomes different as well. While in the modern popular school the teacher is an organizer of the teaching–learning processes, attentive to the interests of the students and the reality lived in the school community, in the unitary school he needs to have greater initiative to intervene in the educational process.
Finally, Gramsci and Freinet, each in his own way, scrupulously translated the Marxist ethical-political commitment to schooling, expressing the need for it to turn to popular interests and breaking with the historical commitment schooling has with the ruling classes, expressed both in traditional and technical pedagogy. In other words, they left an essential legacy for those who want to rethink education and school in times of neoliberalism and the rebirth of fascism.
Final notes
Searching and debating Gramsci’s and Freinet’s legacy in the present context may seem anachronistic. “However, despite the appearance of ‘business as usual’ in shaping policy, it is often the smallest cracks in the system that make it possible for particular challenges/challengers to open frontiers to new changes, ontologies and epistemologies” (Tesar, 2016b: 312). Indeed, both authors, in the proximity and distance they keep in their ideas and educational praxis, can inspire the construction of feasible alternatives to present and future educational policies.
Gramsci and Freinet started from a Marxist ideal to transform the bourgeois school, which was oriented only to the intellectual formation and maintenance of a social status quo, in which the different social classes must be maintained. Both envisioned a school geared to social transformation, allowing everyone to access and appropriate the knowledge to notice and critically understand society itself. To this end, their school outlooks were anchored in the Marxist conception of work. They saw, in the schools, the pupil as protagonist of the educational process, becoming responsible for his own formative course and historical destiny.
Both educators had experiences in jail for the same reason: party militancy of the communist stamp, based on the teachings of Marx. While imprisoned, they used writing and education to mitigate the time of confinement. There, they produced books that not only express the direction of their ideas about school and education for the people, but also about culture and society—and about being human.
Despite many similarities, it was found that in school practice, the pair had different thoughts. Gramsci was convinced of the importance of the more active role of the teacher as the one to initiate the process of inquiry, as well as of a curriculum in which classical studies were present as a way of developing autonomy in the students' thinking. Freinet, on the other hand, understood the traditional school as supported by a very authoritarian scholasticism, with methods directed to a kind of domestication of the pupil; so he built a school based on each student's interests, giving them the freedom to choose what and how to learn.
In developing this study, it was possible to identify the Marxist basis in two educators who were bold enough to confront the traditional class-based school system. Their ideas are based on concepts of a livelier education, organized by work and directed towards the building of a more equitable society. If, as perceived by Tesar (2016c: 594), an equal, fair, and just society is currently “not paramount in the mind of many policymakers, who often use normalising and boundary-making measurements about what the ethics of particular policies are,” then looking back at Gramsci’s and Freinet’s educational ideas might be a way to build a different, yet more flourishing society.
Looking at their work in this way, it is possible to identify commonalities between them when contemplating educational policies with different goals and means than the neoliberal agenda that has taken hold in systems throughout the world. Although Gramsci and Freinet didn’t write about educational policies and didn’t put them into systemic practice, the notes they recorded and the educational praxis they developed indicate that both agree that the State should provide schooling that is public, free, secular, and of socially referenced quality, with the following commonalities.
The principle of the educational process: work, in the Marxist sense of the term, must be assumed as an educational principle The method: the educational processes of the different levels must be carried out with reference to the physical, intellectual and moral development of the students, and mediated by active relations between student and educator The content: students should be encouraged to learn by integrating the problematics of concrete life into the school dynamics, directed to the socialization of knowledge historically produced by humanity School environment: it must be reformulated, to allow time and space for unusual activities in traditional schools, such as seminars, talking circles, research laboratories, various workshops, and mutual education, among others Purpose: school education should place students, not as objects to be molded, but as subjects who can understand themselves and the world around them, exercise moral and intellectual autonomy, participate actively as protagonists in the construction of democratic social life—that is, in the production of a new civilization and new civility.
Obviously, educators will find these guidelines for rethinking educational policies, stemming from Gramsci's and Freinet's legacy, difficult to execute in the context of neoliberal hegemony and the rise of fascism. But they can become a “weapon of struggle” (Giroux, 2018b) for those who oppose the status quo.
It is to be hoped that, in resuming these trajectories, with their encounters and divergences, new research will come, always with the intention of locating in Gramsci’s and/or Freinet's thought, foundations to continue the search for a public education that allows society to overcome its many social inequities.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Canadian writer and democratic educator Deb O'Rourke for the valuable comments and for proofreading the manuscript.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.