Antonio Gramsci, "The Organisation of Education and Culture," from The Modern Prince and Other Writings (1959)

Our note: Part of Gramsci’s meditations on the modern system of schooling and call for a "unitary school" in answer to its failings, these excerpts are an interesting example of the way in which standards and merit-based advancement have been taken to be self-evident. Note that Gramsci goes no further than to say that entrance into the school and career placement from it would be determined by "repeated tests for professional aptitude" and "competition."

In modern civilisation all practical activities have, generally speaking, become so complex and learning so interwoven with life that every kind of practical activity tends to create a school for its own leaders and specialists, and hence to create a group of specialised intellectuals of a higher level to teach in these schools. Thus, alongside the older, traditional type of school which we may call "humanistic," and which was directed towards developing an as yet undifferentiated general culture in each human individual (the fundamental ability to think and guide oneself in life), there has been growing up a whole system of separate schools at various levels for whole professional branches or for already specialised and precisely differentiated professions. Moreover, today’s widespread educational crisis can be precisely linked to the fact that this process of differentiation and specialisation has taken place chaotically, without clear and precise principles, without a well thought out and consciously fixed plan. The crisis in educational programmes and organisation, that is, of the general direction of a policy for developing modern intellectual cadres, is to a large extent an aspect and a complication of a more comprehensive and general organic crisis.

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Today the tendency is to abolish every kind of "disinterested" (not immediately interested) and "formative" school and to leave only a reduced number of them for a tiny elite of ladies and gentlemen who do not have to think of preparing themselves for a professional future, and to spread every more widely the specialised professional schools in which the destiny of the pupil and his future activity are predetermined. The crisis will find a solution which rationally should follow these lines: a single humanistic, formative primary school of general culture which will correctly balance the development of ability for manual (technical, industrial) work with the development of ability for intellectual work. From this type of single school, following repeated tests for professional aptitude, the pupil will pass either into one of the specialised schools or into productive work.

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The unitary school requires that the State should take over he expenses of maintaining the scholars which today fall on the family. It transforms the budget of the education department from top to bottom, extending and elaborating it in unparalleled ways. The whole task of educating and forming the younger generation becomes public instead of private, since only in this way can it involve the whole generation without distinctions of group or caste. But this transformation of scholastic activity requires an unparalleled enlarging of the practical organisation of the schools, i.e. of the buildings, scientific equipment, teaching staff, etc. The teaching staff especially must be increased, because the efficiency of the school is the greater the closer the relationship between teacher and pupil – a fact which raises other problems which cannot be solved easily or quickly. The question of school buildings is also not a simple one, because this type of school ought to be a school-college (boarding school), with dormitories, dining-rooms, specialised libraries, rooms suited for seminar work, etc. Therefore, to begin with, the new type of school must and can only be open to restricted groups of young people selected by competition or nominated by suitable institutions.

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Carl Gutierrez-Jones
Department of English
University of California Santa Barbara, CA 93106
E-mail: carlgj@humanitas.ucsb.edu