One cannot talk about the future of education without talking about the future of work. There are immediate questions of unemployment, the dwindling number of industrial workers, automation and robotization, even the massive redefinition of jobs. These all have a strong impact on the nature and scope of education, but a more fundamental question arises in relation to the very nature of the work process itself. The social nature of work goes a long way toward determining the structures and content of education.
Years ago, in Labor and Monopoly Capital, Harry Braverman called our attention to the natural unity of the conception and execution of the work process, and pointed to the dissolution of that unity in modern capitalist societies. This dissolution has given rise to two types of education: education for those who conceptualize and education for those who carry out the tasks of work. Braverman argued that over the past 200 years, capitalism had accentuated the division which affects the “cultural-biological” unity of thought and action.[1] This unity remains broken in the social structure of virtually every country, and affects most of humanity.
Taken together, increasing technological productivity and the ongoing cheapening of labor power constitutes a worldwide process, one that is closely tied to the divide between those who conceive of the tasks of work and those who carry them out. The variations in this combined process have a close connection not only to work but also to education, and are linked to the struggle for power—political, social, military and ideological as well as informational. In linking work and education, then, it is necessary to think not only of work itself, but of the social struggles over work and employment.
Education, work and accumulation form part of a whole in which we find the struggle to make use of resources on a world scale. The future of education and work will thus depend upon the socio-economic and political-military characteristics of the post-Cold War period, and particularly on the conflicts between the center and periphery of the global order.
The dominant neoliberal order has created a powerful contradiction which fundamentally shapes these conflicts, and which threatens the very stability of the system. The neoliberal model has not been able to generate enough aggregate demand to counter the effects of technological unemployment and the exponential growth of the poor population, a population without purchasing power. If effective demand for goods and services continues to come predominantly from the wealthy minority, the system will not only have to replace any concept of “triumphant democracy” with one of “limited democracy”—limited in that democracy is extended to electoral politics but social relations and state structures remain embedded in authoritarianism. Eventually it will even have to replace the emergent “limited democracies” with what we might call “limited and exclusionary wars.”[2] Democracies, wars and dictatorshps—all devised to exclude the needs and desires of the majorities—will end up establishing employment and education policies for minorities and the elites of an unsustainable world.
This growing exclusion is now a reality in the world, and it is not necessary to call to account the numerous statistics on poverty and extreme poverty, or violence and extreme violence, in the South and periphery of the world to recognize that structurally, the “new world order” resembles a universal Apartheid. This is the case not only because of the discrimination and growing impoverishment of the great majority of humanity, but also because of the ever-growing transfer of immense quantities of wealth, flowing from the periphery to the center, from wage labor to capital.
The struggle for power today corresponds directly or indirectly to the struggle for democracy as a universal project. In this struggle, elite projects of “limited democracy” are being challenged by a project of “democracy for all”—or democracy from below—which must include the democratization of social organizations as well as the democratization of state power. It implies challenging the mechanisms by which wealth is transferred away from poor and extremely poor populations. The problem of the future of education and work is closely linked to this global struggle, and to the ongoing development both of triumphant capitalism and alternative social movements.
This way of looking at the problem leads us to reject the thesis which currently dominates discussions of education: that the market alone should determine the qualitative and quantitative requirements of education. That is, what to teach, how to teach and to whom?
While the social division between those who conceptualize and those who carry out production grows throughout the world, the so-called “second industrial revolution” of computer-based production has given rise to new ways of thinking and new forms of organization.[3] Given the dominance of the market, these new structures and forms are demanded only of a relatively small nucleus of firms and populations in certain parts of the world. That nucleus may be consistently growing, but it is not replacing the social structures which divide thinking and acting. Rather, it is complementing, building upon and combining with them. The global system is promoting a focused and localized development of computer-based technology which is arising in small niches of prosperity surrounded by poverty. These nuclei of high technology occupy a small part of the system and are far from diffusing or extending themselves. The unequal laws of the market fiercely oppose such extension.
The new mental and organizational structures which tend to unite knowledge and action, which combine conception and execution, and which bring the mind and the hands together, are being implanted only in the most advanced circles of postindustrial development. If in earlier stages of development the union between thinking and doing was limited to the owner, the manager and the professionals directly associated with them, now it extends to a much wider group of manual and intellectual workers. In the most developed countries, the union between knowledge and action among workers has been converted into practice in the famous scientific and technical revolution in which “all doing is knowing and all knowing is doing.”[4] This revolution seems to point to a coming together of the new forms of thinking-doing on technological as well as political, social and cultural terrain, but this coming together is only taking place among the dominant, postindustrial forces, among those privileged enough to work in the core firms and industries.
These developments are important because we cannot think of an advanced project of democratic education without joining thought and action. A national democratic policy which aims to create a less inequitable, less oppressive society cannot separate thought from action in a network of educational structures. Any democratic movement will have to propose an educational system that links thinking and doing on all terrains: political and moral, scientific and technical, critical and creative thought. The struggle for this new union will constitute one of the most important acts of culture, education and employment in the immediate future. This objective will confront immense obstacles in the structures of inequality of work. Sooner or later, it will contribute to the forging of less inequitable structures.
Any proposed transformation of work and education must take into account the recent politics of neoliberalism and the dismantling of the interventionist state in all its manifestations—from social democratic and populist to Marxist-Leninist. This politics, which coincides with the privatization of the public sector, the gutting or outright abandonment of free public services and the elimination of social subsidies, coincides with the growth of profits and concessions to transnational companies and with the loss of direct and indirect income by the salaried population. Its repercussions on education are obvious.
With the administrations of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan leading the way, the neoliberals succeeded in imposing free-market neoclassical thought as undebatable scientific truth. Only recently has this worldview begun to be widely questioned, mostly in reference to what has come to be called “the social question.” The current crisis of neoliberalism, nonetheless, has not given rise to alternative paradigms in social and educational policy. In the immediate future, the most we can hope for is a brake on the privatization of companies and public services, and on the privatization of scientific and technical knowledge, as well as primary, intermediate and higher education.
But the political environment remains inhospitable to thoughts of a comprehensive social transformation in the immediate future. Precisely for this reason, it is crucial to devise proposals for employment and educational policies that, without returning to the state structures of the populist past or to a “really nonexistent socialism,” can create alternatives to the return to colonialism, racism and fascism that has accompanied the rise of neoliberalism.
Democratizing the educational system today requires universalizing the knowledge of both the information revolution and the democratic revolution. It also presupposes the redistribution of systems of decision making and production in politics, research and development, and industry. Basic or general education is as important as specialized, technical or scientific education for the production of goods and the provision of services. It is as important as is ethical and political education for democracy.
Transforming the educational system also consists of educating the immense majority of future citizens to know how to reflect upon and make decisions about political, social, cultural and economic problems, and to know how to act, plan, become informed and organize. But apart from these fundamental goals of general culture, which it is important to carry to a higher level, any challenge to neoliberalism must be a broad struggle of the majority, by the majority and for the majority. It requires a struggle for education and employment, and a struggle for the production of wage goods—the goods consumed by ordinary people.
If a return to the provision of public social services is seen as essential, the investment and public spending that generates jobs for the production of wage goods will have to be combined with the creation of a social and state economy that drives a self-sustaining economic development which can grow in a non-inflationary way. The creation of new jobs and technologies for those who have been unemployed—”downsized”—by capital and private firms, as well as education for them and for their children, will depend on this development and on the social actors who support it. The fact that the policies of production for the majority are blocked by the current dominant web of interests does not mean that we should not immediately begin to struggle for this alternate model of production, employment and education.
The need for education in the culture of thinking-doing demands that we pose the problem of the general culture as well as specialized instruction. We must not only transmit the cognitive material of science and technology, but combine it with a culture which is humanistic and scientific in the classical tradition.
Knowing both how to think and how to do at the beginning of the twenty-first century not only requires knowledge of various specialized disciplines and the mastery of information and computer technologies, it also requires a new understanding of essential classical thought. Our classics at the turn of the twenty-first century—modern and ancient philosophy, history, science and the arts—all must be edited anew into a basic anthology which expresses that fundamental core of classical humanism: that nothing human is alien to us.
To the teaching of the traditional trades, and to humanistic culture in general, we must add a complete culture of “do it yourself,” which will not only support individual work, but collective work as well. In the field of language, a culture of dialogue—as opposed to monologue—must occupy a prominent place, and bilingualism should have predominance over monolingualism. In the field of morals, the teaching of ethics as politics and politics as the ethics of social relations must replace the forms which separate acts from words and which have hidden the great moral failures of our times.
At the same time, the critical and experimental spirit, the spirit that lights the way against dogmas and prejudices must confront those conservative versions of postmodernism which hold that all interpretation is valid; that a “majority” does not exist, nor is it possible to construct one; and that there is no social subject, nor is it possible to construct one in an alternative, self-organized society. Our job is precisely to participate in the creation, transmission and investigation of a new democratic culture—a culture of the majority.
As for the techniques of transmission of knowledge and the arts, of thought and deeds, it is more necessary than ever to propose models in which schools are combined with open systems of teaching that uphold the highest intellectual, technical and practical standards. The new systems must embody the aspirations of excellence. This is the greatest pedagogical challenge.
The establishment of a universal system of education is not simply a technical problem. It is a struggle for knowledge, and is intimately linked to the struggle for employment and for a nonexclusionary democracy. If yesterday we viewed free education as a secondary goal, today we must see it as a top priority. We can make a school out of the nation, out of the workplace, and out of our communities. This is not a simple rhetorical appeal. We are speaking of the necessity and practical possibility of creating a world in which the society of information, reflection and action prevails in all social organizations.
Face-to-face teaching combined with electronic teaching, classroom teaching with workplace teaching, the transmission of pure knowledge combined with the arts and trades, all represent the face of a democratic education. The best method of transforming the educational system in the new era consists, in the world’s great universities, of founding centers of production of didactic material for open systems of the highest quality. With schools, churches, trade unions and political parties, these centers will serve to prepare citizens, manual and intellectual workers, managers and creators for a nonexclusionary democracy.
The need to organize and strengthen the educational imagination is necessary for the creation of a new democratic world, and what is needed is precisely a democratic educational project. There is no doubt that an authentic democracy requires the extension of the benefits of higher education to all its citizens, and that any policy to the contrary is antidemocratic. In that context, the market of our time presents the greatest obstacles to democracy and education. Rather than basing our project on the market, we must create a society which can redirect and control it. We must confront the logic of its exclusionary minorities. The elitist arguments against the expansion of higher education are the self-serving arguments of privilege.
In a nonexclusionary system of higher education, “the only requisite of cognition [will be] that action is effective.”[5] And the only requisite of political action will be that people learn in the course of struggle, that they correct their forms of teaching, learning, thinking and acting. Only a community engaged in teaching and learning to think and act can—in the spirit of liberty and pluralism—teach and learn to construct a new type of democracy, “a state which can be controlled by society.”[6] Either we educate to think and act or we will not be constructing an education for democracy, nor will we be building democracy for all.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Pablo González Casanova is Professor of Sociology and former Rector of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Translated from the Spanish by NACLA.
NOTES
1. Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degredation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974).
2. For an enthusiastic discussion of the “third wave” of
“triumphant democracies,” see Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).
3. See Ervin Laszlo, La Cohérence du Réel: Evolution, coeur du Savoir (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1989).
4. Humberto Maturana R. and Francisco Varela G., El Arbol del conocimiento: Las bases biológicas del entendimiento humano (Santiago, Chile: Editorial Universitaria, 1984).
5. Francisco J. Varela, Conocer las acciones cognitivas: Tendencias y perspectivas (Barcelona: Gedisa, 1990), p. 109.
6. Rui Falcao, “O aprendizado na luta,” in Falcao, ed., Estratégia: una saida para a crise (São Paulo: Cajamar, 1991), p. 163.
