Public instruction according to Jovellanos

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Andreu Navarra

Exiled in Mallorca in 1802, Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, the most influential writer and reformist of our Enlightenment, wrote a memorandum on public education that remains astonishingly relevant: “Instruction that disrupts the most certain principles, that disregards all sacred truths, that promotes and spreads the most harmful errors—that is what bewilders, misleads, and corrupts society. But I would not call that instruction; rather, it is delusion. Solid instruction is its antidote; it alone can resist its contagion and stem its ravages; it alone must repair what the other destroys, and it alone is the only resource capable of saving communities infected by it from death and desolation. Ignorance will make them its victim, but solid instruction will save them sooner or later; for the reign of error cannot be stable nor lasting, whereas the dominion of truth will be eternal, like truth itself”. We see it clearly: a dissolving, deceptive education can destroy a nation, and only the antidote of rational solidity and sustained collective effort can rebuild it.

A common theme in the rhetoric supporting competency-based or LOMLOE-styled education devalues formal education in favour of “life’s education” or spontaneous learning, which supposedly takes place beyond the classroom walls. This is among the most worrying post-truths in contemporary pedagogism, for it closes the door to theoretical thought for any students who lack intellectual resources at home. Jovellanos wrote in 1802: “Instruction acquired through this casual means of communication is merely practical. No one, by such means, can reach those theoretical truths that constitute real knowledge; by such means, no one has become a geometer, a mechanic, or an astronomer. Now then, with only such instruction, to how many errors would the general, the magistrate, the navigator, the engineer, and the architect not be exposed?” Are our educational authorities clear on this? Or will they persist in submerging those students who most need structured knowledge into the lowest tiers of a neo-feudal, technocratic caste system?

In 1956, historian Miguel Artola observed that one of the defining characteristics of Jovellanos’s thought, and indeed of all Enlightenment philosophy, was the extension of legal universality. In the society of the Ancien Régime, one of the traits of “estate-based society” was the possession of a particular legal status, implying inequality before the law and legal pluralism. This is why the LOMLOE is so aberrant, so anti-Enlightenment, because it seeks to deliberately prevent non-privileged students from surpassing superficial, utilitarian knowledge, while reserving intellectual exclusivity for a narrow economic elite: access to advanced culture and science, exemption via segregating fees or enrolment in foreign-owned institutions where the elite access oratory, philosophy, literature, and economics, relegating the majority to consuming low-quality, contentless digital substitutes. The poor are expected to educate their emotions, ’empowering’ themselves as if school were a self-help book, while true civic emancipation will be accessible only to the children of a scant minority.

In 1956, Artola wrote: “The entire educational programme, the full cultural effort, and the political influence of the Enlightened thinkers were directed towards achieving a reform that, in modern terms, is described as the transition from estate-based to class society.” In the techno-feudal society, there is nothing left to reform. Everything has already been solved by five imperial corporations that have saved Humanity and elevated it to an optimal state of happiness. Utopias are already fulfilled or nearly so; to doubt or resist integration is an act of reactionary obscurantism or suicidal Luddism.

“Class-based” education (the “meritocracy” so detested by the ill-informed pseudo-left) may have been problematic, but is estate-based education any better? What can absolute conformity, the religious nature of Homo economicus, and the mere dream of leading a life of idle wealth offer to the citizens of tomorrow? The system periodically picks a random nobody and showers them with millions of euros or dollars: thus, the masses are led to believe that without study, effort, or even discernible action, anyone could access a golden utopia, the paradise of endless visibility. Competency jargon, like Scholasticism circa 1750, is a new carceral labyrinth, a neo-language of control that feeds off an absolutist realism. Yet, reality undermines and unmasks these social utopias.

In 1802, Jovellanos wrote: “The sources of social prosperity are many; but all stem from a single origin, and this origin is public instruction… It is the womb, the prime source that nourishes these springs… With instruction, all things are improved and flourish; without it, all things decay and fall to ruin in a State.” With astonishing ease, we have been convinced that the only source of wealth is the wealth of and for another, the manna that we expect to reap if we integrate ourselves into digital mechanisms—machineries of capital and revenue concentration, purely extractive mechanisms serving a transnational, dematerialized empire. Yet their “mining” is not ours. Their privileges are closely tied to our destitution, to the cracks in the walls of our schools.

Through the revolutions of competency-based learning, we have voluntarily placed ourselves into a new Ancien Régime, hierarchically ordered by estates. The nightmares typical of a society unable to organize, nurture, and create will not be long in coming to stay and escalate levels of discontent. This has happened in France, and it has happened in the United States. Yet, there came a time when even absolutists could no longer believe that without a liberal programme, they could sustain social coherence or progress. When it was possible to consolidate democratic and supportive values through a social contract, the elites chose to short-circuit the engine of public instruction to regress into degeneration. What is remarkable is that, with the real data on the catastrophic outcomes of this neoliberal revolution in hand, anyone continues to believe in the stultifying utopias espoused by our politicians.

Source: educational EVIDENCE

Rights: Creative Commons