This letter to Spanish libertarian educationist Francisco Ferrer, founder of the new review, L’École Rénovée, appeared in Freedom in June 1908. It summarises Kropotkin’s views on libertarian education and reflects his ideas of how education would work in a free society.
Dear comrade and friend,
I am very glad to note that you are about to issue L’École Rénovée [the Reformed School], regretting but one thing: that I am unable to give it all the assistance I would.
Everything has to be begun over again in the schools of the present day. Above all, education in the true sense of the word: that is to say, the formation of the moral being, the active individual, full of initiative, enterprise, courage, freed from that timidity of thought which is the distinctive feature of the educated man of our period—and at the same time sociable, communistic by instinct, equal with and capable of feeling his equality with every man throughout the universe; starting emancipated from the religious, narrowly individualistic, authoritarian, etc., principles which the school inculcates.
As regards all this, we must evidently, step by step, create a new exposition of all the sciences: concrete, in place of the present metaphysical expositions; social—“associated,” if I may employ the term—in place of individualistic; and “popular” expositions, from the point of view of the people, instead of that of the leisured classes, which at present dominates all science, and especially our books of instruction.
For history, social economy evidently, no one doubts it. But the same holds good for every science: biology, the physiology of living creatures in general psychology, and even for the exposition of physics and mathematics. Take, for example, astronomy. What a difference when it was taught from the geocentric point of view to what it became when conceived and taught from the heliocentric standpoint, or to what it will be when taught from the point of view of the infinitely small, travelling through space and producing, through incessant collision, celestial harmonies. Or take mathematics when taught as simple logical deductions of signs which have lost their original meanings, and remaining signs only, are treated as entities, to when they will be taught as simplified expressions of facts which are life, infinite and infinitely varied even in Nature. I shall never forget the way in which our great mathematician, Tchebycheff, taught us the integral calculus in the St. Petersburg University. When he would say, writing the given signs of his integrals: “If, gentlemen, within certain limits, we take the total of all the infinitesimal variations that can occur in the three dimensions of such a physical body, under the influence of such forces…”—when he spoke thus his integrals became the living emblems of living things in Nature; whereas with other professors, these identical signs were but dead matter, metaphysics without any real meaning.
Now, the teaching of all the sciences, from the most abstract to those of sociology, the economic, and the physiological psychology of the individual and the crowds, requires reconstruction in order to reach the level of the science of the day. Science has progressed immensely during the past half-century, but the teaching of science has not followed a similar development. It must be brought up to date. First, in order that instruction, as already mentioned, should no longer be an obstacle in the development of the individual, and next, because the cycle of instruction now necessary has become so much enlarged that the effort of all must be to elaborate methods which will combine an economy of energy and time whereby to reach the desired end. Formerly, it was he who was destined for the career of priest, scholar, or administrator, who studied. He thought little of devoting ten or fifteen years to study. Today the whole world wishes to study, to know, and the producer of wealth, the worker, is the first to demand it for himself.
There should not be a single human being to whom knowledge—not superficial semi-knowledge, but true knowledge—should be refused on account of time.
Today, thanks to the extraordinary progress of the nineteenth century, we can produce everything that is necessary to assure well-being to all. And we can at the same time give to all the joy of true knowledge. But in order to do it we must reform the methods of instruction.
In our present schools, formed to make an aristocracy of knowledge, and up to now directed by this aristocracy under the supervision of priests, the waste of time is colossal, absurd. In English secondary schools, two years of the time reserved for the instruction of mathematics are given up to exercises on the transformation of yards, perches, poles, miles, bushels, and other English measures!
Everywhere history in schools is time absolutely wasted on the memorising of names, of laws incomprehensible to children, wars, admitted falsehoods, etc. And in each branch the waste of time reaches outrageous proportions.
Well, it is easy to foresee that we shall be compelled to adopt integral instruction—i.e., teaching which, by the practice of the hand on wood, stone, metal, will speak to the brain and help to develop it. We shall arrive at teaching every one the basis of every trade as well as of every machine, by labouring (according to certain already elaborated systems) at the work-bench, with the vice, in shaping raw material, in oneself making the fundamental parts of everything, as well of simple machines as of apparatus for the transmission of power, to which all machines are reduced.
We must come to the merging of manual with mental labour, as preached by Fourier and the International, and which is already to be found in a few schools, notably in the United States, and we shall then see the immense economy of time that will be realised by the young brain developed at once by the work of hand and mind. Then, as soon as the matter is seriously studied, we shall find means to economise time in every branch of teaching. The field for cultivation as regards instruction is so immense, so vast, that the union of every spirit freed from the mists of the past and turned towards the future is necessary; all will find therein an immense work to accomplish.
My best wishes for the success of L’École Rénovée.
With fraternal greetings,
P. Kropotkin