The Reform of Education

by Giovanni Gentile

Man has been called a political or a social animal. He might therefore be considered also as an educating animal. For we do not merely educate the young ones, our young ones. Education being spiritual action bearing on the spirit, we really educate all those that are in any way and by any relations whatsoever connected with us, whether or not they belong to our family or to our school, as long as they concur with us in constituting a complete social entity. And we not only train those of minor age, who are as yet under tutelage, and still frequent the schools and are busily intent upon developing and improving their skill, their character, their culture. We also educate the adults, the grown-up men and women, the aged; for there is no man alive who does not daily add to his intellectual equipment, who does not derive some advantage from his human associations, who could not appropriately repeat the statement of the Roman emperor—nulla dies sine linea. Man always educates.

But here, as in every other manifestation of his spiritual activity, man does not behave in sole conformity 34 with instinct; he does not teach by abandoning himself, so to speak, to the force of natural determinism. He is fully aware of his own doings. He keeps his eyes open on his own function, so that he may attain the end by the shortest course, that he may without wasting his energies derive from them the best possible results. For man reflects.

It is evident then that education is not a scheme which permits pedagogues and pedants to interfere with their theories and lucubrations in this sacred task of love, which binds the parents to the children, brings old and young together, and keeps mankind united in its never ceasing ascent. Before the word came into being, the thing, as is usually the case, already existed. Before there was a science and an incumbent for the chair, there existed something that was the life of this science and therefore the justification of the chair. There was the intent reflectiveness of man, who in compliance with the divine saying, “Know thyself,” was becoming conscious of his own work, and therefore, unwilling to abandon his actions to external impulses, began to question everything. What the lower animal does naturally and unerringly through its infallible instinct, man achieves by the restless scrutiny of his mind. Ever thoughtful, always yearning for the better, he searches and explores, often stumbling in error, but ever rising out of it to a higher station of learning and of art. Our education is human, because 35 it is an action and not a fact; because it is a problem that we always solve and have to keep solving for ever.

This intuitive truth is demonstrated experimentally to us by the very lives we live as educators. As long as the freshness of our vocation lasts, as long as we can remain free from mechanical routine and from the impositions of fixed habits; as long as we are able to consider every new pupil with renewed interest, discover in him a different soul, unlike that of any other that we have previously come in contact with, and differing within itself from day to day; as long as it is still possible for us to enter the class-room thrilled and throbbing in the anticipation of new truths to reveal, of novel experiments to perform, of unexpected difficulties to overcome, in the full consciousness of the rapid motion of a life ever renewed in us and around us by the incoming generations, that flow to us and ebb away unceasingly towards life and death; so long shall we really live and love the teacher’s life, so long shall we demonstrate to ourselves and to others the truth I have already affirmed.

We teachers should be constantly on our guard against the dangers of routine, against the belief that we have but to repeat the same old story in the same class-room, to the same kind of distant, blank faces, staring at us in dreary uniformity from the same benches. We shall continue to be educators only as 36 long as we are able to feel that every instant of our life’s work is a new instant, and that education therefore is a problem that insistently stimulates our ingenuity to an ever renewed solution.

Now the most important of all tasks, ancient and modern, in the field of education is this,—the task of the teacher to represent the Universal to his pupils, the Universal, of course, as historically determined. Scientific thought, customs, laws, religious beliefs are brought before the pupil’s mind, not as the science, the laws, the religion of the teacher, but as those of humanity, of his country, of his period. And the pupil is the particular individual who, having entered upon the process of education, and being submitted, so to speak, to the yoke of the school, ceases to enjoy his former liberty in the pursuit of a spiritual endowment and in the formation of his character, and, in consequence of this educational pressure, bends compliantly before the common law. Hence the world-old opposition to the coercive power of the school, and the outcry raised from time to time against the privilege demanded by the educator, who on the strength of the assumedly higher quality of his beliefs, his learning, his taste, or his moral conscience, claims to interfere with the spontaneous development of a personality in quest of itself.

On one side education undoubtedly assumes the task of developing freedom, for the aim of education is to 37 produce men; and man is worthy of this name only when he is a master of himself, capable of initiating his own acts, responsible for his deeds, able to discern and assimilate the ideas which he accepts and professes, affirms and propagates, so that whatever he says, thinks, or does, really comes from him. Our children are said to be properly raised when they give evidence of being able to take care of themselves without the help of our guidance and advice. And we trust that we have accomplished our task as educators when our pupils have made our language their own and are able to tell us new things originally thought out by them. Freedom then must be the result of education.

But on the other hand, teaching implies an action exercised on another mind, and education cannot therefore result in the relinquishment and abandonment of the pupil. The educator must awaken interests that without him would for ever lie dormant. He must direct the learner towards an end which he would be unable to estimate properly if left alone, and must help him to overcome the otherwise unsurmountable obstacles that beset his progress. He must, in short, transfuse into the pupil something of himself, and out of his own spiritual substance create elements of the pupil’s character, mind, and will. But the acts which the pupil performs in consequence of his training will, in a certain measure, be those of his teacher; and education will therefore have proved destructive 38 of that very liberty with which the pupil was originally endowed. Is it not true that people constantly attribute to early family influences and to environment—that is, to education—the good and the bad in the deeds of the mature man?

This is the form in which the problem usually presents itself. The mind of the educator is therefore torn by two conflicting forces: the desire zealously to watch and control the pupil’s growth and direct his evolution along the course that seems quickest and surest for his complete development; and, on the other hand, the fear that he may kill fertile seeds, stifle with presumptuous interference the spontaneous life of the spirit in its personal impulses, and clothe the individual with a garment that is not adapted for him,—crush him under the weight of a leaden cape.

The solution of this problem must be sought in the concrete conception of individual personality; and this will be the theme of the next chapter. But I must at the very outset utter an emphatic word of warning. My solution does not remove all difficulties; it cannot be used as a key to open all doors. For as I have repeatedly stated, the value of education consists in the persistence of the problems, ever solved and yet ever clamouring for a new solution, so that we may never feel released from the obligation of thinking.