The Revolt of the Outer Party.

Meanwhile, Everyman can get stuffed.

I’m pleased to say that I’ve been contacted about translations of these essays into Portuguese, and the first has now appeared.

A reminder that these essays will always be free, but you can support my work by liking and commenting, and most of all by passing the essays on to others, and passing the links to other sites that you frequent. I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here.☕️

And thanks again to those who continue to provide translations. Versions in Spanish are available here, and some Italian versions of my essays are available here. Marco Zeloni is also posting some Italian translations, and has set up a dedicated website for them here.

Right, then.

I’ve been reading Emmanuel Todd’s new book La Défaite de l’occident (“The Defeat of the West”)  over the last few weeks. I’ve taken a bit of time over it because, whilst it’s not a particularly long book, it is quite dense and packed with data, charts and tables.

If you read French and can get hold of a copy you should: Todd is one of those polyvalent figures French intellectual life occasionally throws up (or used to), and he works at the intersection of anthropology, demography, sociology and economics, with a good dash of politics thrown in. He’s best known for having predicted the fall of the Soviet Union fifteen years before it happened, based entirely on official demographic data. Now, nearly fifty years later, he takes a look at the West, and especially the United States, and doesn’t like what he sees. Needless to say, the book has been greeted with screams of rage in France, not least because it is explicitly written in the context of the Ukraine War, and provides data-based explanations for western failures, as well as for the remarkable staying power of the Russians, and for that matter the disunity of the West itself.

Much of the book is taken up with sociological and anthropological enquiry into family structures, urbanisation and types of religious observance. (Todd sees the inevitable destruction of the US flowing from the fact that the last vestiges of the Protestant seriousness about work and education have now gone, leaving the country in the hands of a rich, nihilist oligarchy with no collective ideology at all.) These are things outside my field of competence, but I just want to pick up a couple of the points he makes about education, in the context of a wider and more general discussion. I have become convinced that a large part of the West’s problems at the moment stem from the fact that we have forgotten what education is about, and what it is for, and that we no longer value it for itself, but only as something to be purchased to provide an income stream later. This has a number of serious social and political consequences. I’ll refer back to Todd’s book from time to time, and also to one or two other authors, all of whom seem to me to be arguing in a similar direction. As someone who’s spent virtually his entire life associated with the education system in one way or another in several countries, as a student, researcher, parent, tank thinker, lecturer and teacher on various subjects in different parts of the world, and with contacts in the school and university systems of different countries today, I may perhaps be excused for offering a few thoughts.

We never bother with the question “why educate people?” today. The need is tacitly taken for granted, and if a justification were ever needed it would be that a complex society like ours would collapse if people were not educated to help run it. That’s true as far as it goes, but it doesn’t explain why education was necessary in the first place. To call it a “human right” is meaningless, since anything can be called a human right if enough powerful actors are able to force its acceptance as such. You can also argue that education is necessary for economic growth, but, as Ha-Joon Chang points out, that relationship is not a simple one: more education does not necessarily mean higher economic growth.

In some situations, education is actually a risk. In static societies where things are seen as ordained by the gods or by nature and ideally not subject to change, education is at best unnecessary outside the restricted area of the operation of the state in its present form, and at worst dangerous, since it might give the people unsafe and dangerous ideas. Aristocratic and theocratic societies have frequently tried to obstruct or control education, or even the printing and distribution of books, and this has created problems when the same societies want to embrace technology and modernise (thus some of the problems with university graduates in Iran today.)

This suggests that we should look for the fundamental explanation of the need for education in the desire for political change, and perhaps the loss of enthusiasm for education among political elites more recently as a sign that political change and development no longer matter to them. More widely, we should also expect that the desire for control of education reflects the desire to control, accelerate or slow down the pace of political change: something today’s elites have quite forgotten.

It all depends how far back you want to go, I suppose, but we should probably at least acknowledge that in the ancient world “education” meant essentially teaching young people what they needed to know to take their place in society. In farming communities, there was an enormous burden of knowledge to be passed on just about crops and husbandry, never mind healthcare, pregnancy, child-rearing, hunting, military skills and perhaps much else. As Joseph Henrich points out, successful seal-fishing in the Arctic required a whole set of technologies that had to be carefully worked out and practised, and then taught to successor generations if the tribe was not to perish from hunger. In Greece, education was originally partly physical, and partly musical and poetical. In Athens, this was later expanded to the study of mathematics, rhetoric and similar subjects, which influenced university courses until Shakespeare’s time. But these subjects were not chosen at random, but to fill an identified need: healthy minds in healthy bodies, in effect.

In the West, arguably the first “need” for education after the Classical era was in the Church, where texts were required and had to be hand-copied, where accounts had to be kept, and theological works and administrative documents written. Yet medieval literature (much of which was written by lay people) as well as historical records, show that literacy was also a need widespread among the men and women of the upper and middle classes: perhaps ten per cent of English society could read by 1400, though that didn’t’t necessarily imply skill in Latin, for example. (Indeed, control of Latin teaching, insofar as the Church could manage it, was also control of political power.) But of course even humbler members of society, especially merchants, needed to be able to read and write, to sign contracts and to keep accounts. In most countries, it seems that there were secular schools in at least the major towns and cities, and of course instruction would also take place in the family.

The link between the rise of Protestantism, the rise of printing and the spread of literacy is a subject far too vast to go into here. It’s enough to say that the spread of Protestantism through printed vernacular Bibles, religious pamphlets and the commentaries and sermons of such theologians as Luther, Zwingli and Calvin, both created the conditions for extensive social and political change, and gave governments a powerful weapon to promote and perpetuate it. An educated, or at least literate, population was essential for the maintenance of Protestant rulers in power, and in turn the demand for vernacular religiouus literature in Protestant countries was enormous. It’s a frighteningly long time now since I had to read my way through some religious controversies of the sixteenth century, but I do recall being impressed by the sheer volume of vernacular religious literature of the time, how popular and widely disseminated it was, and how frequently reprinted.

In turn, of course, a literate middle class gained political power, started to look for jobs with the aristocracy and the Court, and even, in a small way, began to constitute its own power bases. Todd suggests—and he’s not the first—that the greater degree of urbanisation and thus complexity in Protestant countries, as well as the encouragement of literacy to enable Bible-reading, had a measurable impact on economic growth, and on internal power relations. Certainly, the aspiration to making the working-class literate to enable them to read the Bible and thus lead lead better lives lasted a long time in Protestant countries, still leaving faint traces in the Methodist Sunday Schools of my early youth.

Of course, it wasn’t only Protestant countries that experienced growth in the complexity of their societies and their economies, but, without being too schematic, it’s fair to say that in Catholic countries the Church maintained an effective monopoly of education for a long time and that, even with the rise of mass education in the nineteenth century, it continued to try to exercise as much power as it could over what was allowed to be taught. I’ll have more to say about that in a moment, but for the time being let’s just note how hopelessly naive, in this context, is the modern concept of education found in, and practised by, the Professional and Managerial Caste (PMC) and how it completely ignores questions of power and ideology (except as clever intellectual exercises) in favour of a depoliticised conception of education as about gaining certificates as an investment to increase earnings.

The “need” for education was most famously demonstrated with the Industrial Revolution and its requirements for a skilled workforce, as well as the further complexity that economic development brought with it. Yet the purely utilitarian explanation of the growth of education is inadequate by itself: for many countries, it was an instrument of state policy, to create a coherent society and a “school for the nation.” Primary education (ie up to age 10/11) became compulsory in Prussia early in the eighteenth century, and—perhaps surprisingly—in Austria fifty years later. The idea spread rapidly through Europe, although the British, perhaps unsurprisingly, were among the last to adopt it, in 1880. In that case, the initiative was very closely related to enlarging the franchise of those allowed to vote: “we must educate our future masters” as the British Prime Minister Disraeli said.

What should be obvious by now is the fundamental seriousness with which education was taken then, and how closely it was related to the political and economic struggles of the time. Nowhere is this truer than in France, which is important not just in itself, but because its example inspired many other European countries at the time of the Revolution and afterwards, and because the bitter battles between secular and religious attempts to control education are still continuing today, in a somewhat different guise.

Education before the Revolution was entirely in the hands of the Church, and had been theoretically compulsory since the time of Louis XIV. Ordinary children (predominantly boys) were educated through a network of schools managed by local Bishops, but because the families had to pay fees, attendance was at best irregular. In the major cities, religious orders such as the Jesuits created free Colleges, predominantly for the middle classes. Some of these, such as the Lycée Louis Le Grand in Paris still exist today, and attract a wealthy and often conservative clientèle.

From the beginning, popular education was one of the priorities of the Revolution and the Republic. Citizens, unlike subjects, needed to be educated to play their parts. Various laws took control of education away from the Church and gave it to the State, but during and after the time of Napoleon, the Church managed to reclaim a lot of its power. Importantly, and quite early in the Revolution, Universities, with their curriculum still based on Classical ideas, were swept away and replaced by professional training institutions, to turn out the engineers, doctors, lawyers and others that the new Republic would need: this was an initiative widely copied throughout Europe.

In spite of the return of the Monarchy, and subsequently the Empire of Louis Napoleon, the commitment to universal education as a national priority remained, even if the actual work of educating young children was done by the Church. By the time of the installation of the Third Republic in 1871, there was already a strong political current that wanted free, compulsory education, under the the control of the State, not the Church, and based on Republican principles. It goes without saying that this agenda was deeply political: the Church was a ferocious opponent of every facet of modern society and democracy, and an uncritical supporter of the Monarchy; the more absolute the better. So long as children were being educated according to such ideas, building a modern, republican France was impossible.

Modern, secular education was slowly enforced in France towards the end of the nineteenth century, free until the age of thirteen, and against violent opposition from the Church and traditionalists generally. Its shock-troops (the “Cavalry of the Republic”) were a new generation of professionally trained teachers, often from working class backgrounds, trying to teach civic education and the principles of the Republic rather than religious dogma, and so finding themselves in permanent conflict with local priests who told their parishioners that secular education was a sin against God. When the irrevocable separation of Church and State took place in 1905, Clemenceau, then Prime Minister, sent the Police and the Army into the schools to evict the priests and nuns who refused to leave. (Unsurprisingly, they returned under the Vichy regime between 1940 and 1944.)

The battle to finally free education from religious influence lasted into the 1960s, when the Church was still opposing education of boys and girls in the same schools (something ironically now being put in question by another religion entirely.) And in the countryside, the influence of the local Church over education lasted into the 1970s, especially to the detriment of girls, which explains why the Left in France (and notably M. Mélenchon’s Islamo-Wokist hybrid party) has lost a lot of support among women who grew up in the era, and have no wish to see anything like it return.

Now I hope that this breathless little tour illustrates just how serious, controversial and politically important a subject education used to be. Before we get onto the downgrading of the importance of education in recent decades in favour of “education!!!” or “we don’t need no edukayshun” let’s just reflect for an instant on what these early pioneers actually accomplished, with blackboard and chalk and a few books, because it, much more than Universities in some ways, is an index of what can be done, and what has been destroyed.

The average participant in the First World War, a front-line soldier or a woman in a munitions factory, and whose grandparents were very probably illiterate, left school at thirteen. Yet the studies that have been done in various countries show a very high level of literacy in the letters exchanged with families, as well as indicating the type of books that were read at the time. (Books of poetry seem to have been especially popular.) The average front-line soldier of 1914 had been taught to write clear, grammatical, well-constructed prose in a readable hand, and the average factory-worker was skilled enough to do mental arithmetic calculations and to calibrate machinery in days long before even the first analogue calculating devices. Shop assistants could and did perform complex arithmetical calculations in their head.

In some cases, this can be precisely quantified. In France, because of national control of education syllabuses and testing materials, scholastic standards can be arithmetically compared over the generations. In general, the thirteen-year old school-leaver of 1914, let alone 1934, had a reading-age at least equal to, and probably higher than, the sixteen year-old school-leaver today. (Around ten per cent of such children are functionally illiterate anyway.)  Reprints of mathematics textbooks aimed at 12-13 year olds in the 1930s are widely available, and most adults will admit that they have difficulties with them without a calculator. But in many cases, actually, the West had it easy. Letters sent home by Japanese soldiers in Manchuria in the 1930s show that children brought up in the countryside had mastered and could use a written language where you need about 3,500 characters to read a newspaper.

Which brings us to popular culture. One of Paul Fussell’s conclusions in his masterpiece The Great War and Modern Memory is that we have quite forgotten how literate were the working classes who went off to war in 1914. Books of poetry were everywhere, letters home featured Biblical citations and quotations from great literary works from memory. Education was regarded, not as a form of imprisonment or repression, but precisely as a means of betterment and escape. In Britain, the Workers’ Educational Association had been set up in 1903 to provide free education for ordinary people, often in the form of lectures by experts, and was very popular. In Europe, parties of the Left had their own educational branches.

And people wanted to be educated. In Britain, Everyman’s Library was launched in 1906 by JM Dent, to provide even the poorest people with access to the classic literature of the world, in pocket format, at the price of one shilling. The books (including a multi-volume encyclopaedia) were a roaring success, and are still in print.  The title of the series is taken from a speech by Knowledge in the medieval play of the same name, who says:

I will go with thee,

and be thy guide,

In thy most need

to go by thy side.

(I can’t think of a better encapsulation of what education is all about. How many of us, growing up in cultural deserts after the Second World War owe our sanity and even our survival to the local public library and the few books our parents could afford to buy?) Public and private lending libraries flourished, and Allen Lane launched Penguin Books in 1935, to general scepticism that ordinary people would pay 6d for good quality literature and non-fiction. We know what happened next. And in 1946 a Classics teacher, EV Rieu, brought Lane an English translation of Homer’s Odyssey. Somewhat doubtful that ordinary people actually wanted to read Homer, Lane nevertheless published it as the first Penguin Classic, and it sold three million copies within a few years. It was followed by hundreds of other reprints and translations which had previously only been intended, and priced, for educated elites. Don’t tell us we don’t need no education, was the popular verdict.

All of this, let it be repeated, was by and for ordinary people. Most of Rieu’s readers had left school at fifteen or earlier. (For that matter, the English-language classics among those they were reading had  been purchased on their first appearance, by millions of ordinary people like themselves, often in monthly instalment form.) But, like their peers elsewhere, they had absorbed a level of general education and culture in advance of anything we have today. Yet this was not because they were somehow better or cleverer than us, labouring as they did under the pressures of poverty and war, but because governments and society put commitment and resources into the education of ordinary people, which is no longer done, and ordinary people had a thirst for education, which has since been bred out of them. Even today, as experts puzzle over statistics, trying to understand what technical differences in education methods account for varying results in different countries, they forget that what really makes the difference is not clever techniques, or computers, or even more money, but fundamental commitment. It’s sobering indeed to watch schoolchildren in Africa walking miles to school in the morning, often barefoot,  just to learn. And it’s difficult, or impossible, to go back in time, when you make mistakes. One of Todd’s arguments is that the US WASP elite with its puritan heritage, which did prize education at all levels, is now gone. The non-cultural money- and success-driven elite which has replaced it is too heterogeneous to constitute a ruling class capable of providing an example, and doesn’t seem interested in the education of ordinary people anyway. “Asians” in the widest sense are doing very well in the US, according to statistics, but that doesn’t seem to be having any emulative impact outside their own community. Meanwhile, of course, and unlike the US, cultures such as Russia, China and India retain widespread support for education at all levels.

Now, notice that I have scarcely used the word “university.” The modern government and economic structures and the democratic political systems of countries such as France, Germany, Britain and even Japan, were built on the mass education of ordinary people. Indeed the pressure for democracy, and the achievement and exploitation of it through mass political parties, were inseparable from it. Education beyond the age of sixteen was for the few, education beyond the age of eighteen was for a tiny proportion, usually the wealthy.

This is hardly to say, of course, the universities were unnecessary. But earlier, I mentioned their transformation during the French Revolution into primarily technical elite training institutions, many of which still exist today. Universities in the modern sense began essentially as a parallel movement, as institutions where middle-class young people intending careers in the Law, the Church, Medicine and the new and exciting subjects of Engineering and Science would come to study, alongside such traditional pursuits as Classics, Mathematics and Philosophy. Mass education produced its own demand for teachers of such subjects as History, Geography, Literature and Languages, and of course a cadre of experts had to be created to educate the educators. Finally, the growth in the size and importance of government created a need for an intellectually-trained and mature group of young people to staff it, sometimes with normal degrees, others with high-level specialist training. Now notice that, once more, all these developments were driven by need, and involved significant government investment and encouragement.

A generation after World War 2, this had created an effectively tripartite society in most countries. There was a working-class and industrial base, educated to a reasonable standard, often technically trained and largely keeping its own traditions and culture. Every now and then, someone would escape from this base, and “do well” for themselves. There was an intermediate layer of people from modest backgrounds, most of whom left school at eighteen and went into middle-level technical or administrative jobs: again, some of them would crash into the next level. That level went to university and went on to professional careers and the higher administrative positions. It was, of course, a class-bound and hierarchic society, but in most western countries it was sufficiently open and flexible that talent of various kinds could find its own way, and the general move in the 1960s and 1970s to expand university places, reflecting the increased need for graduates, enabled people like me to have a university education. The Open University, founded in Britain in 1969, astonished its critics with the discovery that ordinary people were prepared to get up at five in the morning to watch lectures on TV before going to work. For all their faults and injustices, such systems (where university was free to attend and many countries paid you to go there) seems to belong to a mythical past, now.

Several things combined to destroy these relatively open systems. Unemployment, a word that children born after World War 2 first heard in history lessons, returned with a vengeance after the combined inflationary and deflationary effects of the Oil Price crisis of 1973-4. Just as this was being mastered, a number of malevolent governments emerged in western countries, determined to overturn the postwar consensus, and break the power of trades unions. (Unemployment doubled in the first year of the Thatcher regime in 1979-80 for example.) For the first time, unemployment began to hit the well-qualified, including recent graduates. And for the first time also, governments realised that one way of massaging unemployment figures downwards was to keep people in education, no matter how pointless or trivial their studies were. From the 1980s, governments began to cram more students into existing institutions, and reduce the entrance requirements. In some countries, this was easy: in France, where the baccalaureate school-leaving certificate entitles you to attend university, it was just a question of making the examination progressively easier, and expanding the number of subjects you could study. A bac in building construction entitled you to register for a philosophy degree.

At the same time, “education” moved from being something the country as well as individuals needed, to a magic bullet somehow capable of reducing unemployment and compensating for the jobs and skills lost by de-industrialisation, offshoring of the economy and the destruction of the public sector, which had employed large numbers of graduates. It was not a policy but a slogan, as though supply would create its own demand. University was marketed as a commercial investment for young people and their parents, with the implied threat that if you didn’t go to university you stood little chance of finding a job. Employers soon realised that demanding degrees for jobs that didn’t need them was a good way of narrowing down the range of potential applicants.

The effect was to create a new caste in society: the Credentialed, who had degrees (sometimes several) but very varying standards of actual education. They tended to marry, to socialise, and to work together, and constituted the basis of what became known as the Professional and Managerial Caste (PMC.) Whereas fifty years before, they would have mixed professionally, and even socially with other classes, now they seldom did so. The casualisation and externalisation of menial services meant that previous, albeit limited, contact between the classes no longer existed. The local butcher and baker gave way to the supermarket, the bank staff to a computer helpline, the ticket offices to machines. By contrast, middle-class non-jobs exploded in number, as people with degrees in nothing very much moved into “management” and “human resources” where they could do the most damage

And after a while, this class, whose political expression I have called the Party, began to develop a consciousness, and some fairly hard-headed views. What, after all, was the point of educating the ordinary person now? Skilled jobs had pretty much disappeared; secretaries, junior managers and administrators had been replaced by computers; specialists in computing or medicine or engineering could be sourced from abroad, and anyway this new Internet thingie was going to make much teaching redundant anyway, wasn’t it? Without the elite consensus about education which had existed since the nineteenth century, it no longer claimed the same importance except insofar as it touched the lives of the PMC itself. Thus, more private schools, personal tutors and a life for the children of the PMC more demanding and rigorous than the Jesuits of the eighteenth century would have thought reasonable. As for the rest of the population, the two-thirds to three quarters outside the PMC, their votes were no longer needed, and the mass parties of the past were wound up. The Party, in its different manifestations, had realised that if only half the people voted, and if the PMC completely dominated politics, the NGOs and the media, often moving smoothly between them, there was no need for mass parties, and no need, indeed, to target more than about 20% of the voting population any more.

As a result, education became a kind of playground and battleground for the PMC. At school, they could try out all these clever educational theories they remembered from their youth, when the idea was that no-one should be forced to learn, or do, anything they didn’t want to. If standards of reading and writing fell catastrophically, that was just too bad: in the end it was the politics that counted, and their own children were protected. Of course, once governments give up trying to define the school curriculum, other forces will try to take over. In France and several other European countries, it’s the Islamists, trying to make more and more inroads into the secular education system that was built with such determination and against such violent opposition. These days, teachers routinely receive death threats if they teach anything that strict Muslim parents disapprove of: not even the Catholic Church went that far. But hey, these aren’t our children, our children are protected from all that. And then universities, their syllabuses, teaching and administration, became a field of combat between different PMC social and political lobbies, seeking to control what they could, and destroy what they could not, liked bored feuding courtiers at the court of an absolutist monarch.

Because actually, all was not well with the PMC. There just aren’t the number of jobs now to successfully employ all the graduates, and those that exist are often insecure and temporary. When I was at school, a couple of teachers (since they often married each other) could have a decent house and a car and holidays, and a relatively enviable standard of living. That’s long gone: a representative couple today would be working themselves to the bone, disappearing under a mountain of useless paperwork, being forced to dance steps choreographed by educationalists who had never been inside a classroom, and wearily looking forward to retirement in a house they hope to be able to buy some day. (A couple of young lawyers or doctors living in a major city might find themselves similarly placed.) And it’s not much better at University level: in many countries much of the expansion in teaching posts has been in temporary positions, or in “Institutes” and “Centres” funded by soft money, often from dilettante donors who follow the prevailing winds of fashion. Even thirty years ago, during one of my periodic escapes from government into academia, I remember a colleague saying that she spent a good half of her time, not researching and writing, but finding opportunities and writing proposals for the next three-year soft grant. It’s got worse since.

I’m not sure this can go on much longer. Here, of course, we approach Peter Turchin’s theory of elite over-production. I think Turchin’s theory is basically right, but I suspect the problem is even more general: at any level, in any society, if the educational and intellectual qualifications of its members exceed the capacity of that society to absorb them usefully, there’s going to be trouble. That’s why, for example, colonial rebellions were almost always led by western-educated elites who were frustrated with what they could achieve under colonialism, and wanted the power for themselves, and why rebel groups in Africa today are often led by young students unable to find satisfactory employment. Could the same thing happen in the West?

Not in quite the same way, obviously. But there are signs of a split emerging between the Inner and the Outer Party of the PMC, and it’s getting worse. In many ways, the current dispensation amounts to an explicit repudiation by the Inner Party of the post-war settlement, based as it was on universal education, and the recruitment of ordinary people into the Outer, and even the Inner Party of the day if they had the necessary abilities. (Ironically, this was also how the Communist Party system worked.) But now, the whole idea of the Inner Party is to monopolise power and wealth for itself, progressively reducing the chances of Outer Party members to join it. AI is likely to be just the latest of a series of initiatives designed to undercut and pauperise the Outer Party, as many jobs in education, law and management fall victim to it.

The model of a society in which the Inner Party owns all the wealth, and everyone else, from the food delivery cyclist to the middle-ranking lawyer, exists in a state of permanent insecurity and servility is not sustainable, and it’s doubtful if it will ever be reached in that form. But the hyper-concentration of wealth and power now developing will bring home to the Outer Party that their interests are not just different to those of the Inner Party, but actually opposed to them. It’s at that point that revolutions classically become possible. But revolutions require two things: an ideology, and political forces to bring about change. The PMC as a whole, like Orwell’s Party, has no ideology as such. Likewise, is only interested in power, and its ultra-liberalism makes any kind of effective alliances impossible. It therefore spends much of its time in vicious competition for power in institutions it controls, especially educational ones. Such a posture necessarily rules out any kind of alliance with the majority of the population, whom it anyway despises and is desperate to differentiate itself from. And that population now no longer routinely produces the kind of leader who used to emerge from the working class and the lower-middle class in the past, as a result of an enlightened education policy.

The last couple of generations have seen a fundamental transformation of the questions surrounding education from: what are the needs of the country and society? to: how can we make money educating the gardener’s children? Of all the short-sighted pieces of stupidity perpetrated by the Party over the last couple of generations, that may be the dumbest, and ultimately the most socially destructive. Maybe they need some education.