Bakunn on Education II
[deals with natural ability etc, good for the 
old lib-caps]

We have shown how, as long as there are two or 
more degrees of instruction for the various 
strata of society, there must, of necessity, be 
classes, that is, economic and political 
privilege for a small number of the contented 
and slavery and misery for the lot of the 
generality of men.

As members of the International Working Men's 
Association (IWMA/AIT), we seek equality and, 
because we seek it, we must also seek integral 
education, the same education for everyone.

But if everyone is schooled who will want to 
work? we hear someone ask.  Our answer to that 
is a simple one: everyone must work and 
everyone must receive education.  To this, it 
is very often objected that this mixing of 
industrial with intellectual labour cannot be, 
except one or the other suffer by it.  The 
manual workers will make poor scholars, and the 
scholars will never be more than quite pathetic 
workers.  True, in the society of today where 
manual labour and intellectual labour are 
equally distorted by the quite artificial 
isolation in which both are kept.  But we are 
quite persuaded that in the rounded human 
being, each of these pursuits, the muscular and 
the nervous, must be developed in equal measure 
and that far from being inimical each must lean 
upon, enhance and reinforce the other.  The 
science of the sage will become more fruitful, 
more useful and more expansive when the sage is 
no longer a stranger to manual labour, and the 
labours of the workmen, when he is educated, 
will be more intelligent and thus more 
productive than those of an ignorant workman.  
From which it follows that, for work's sake as 
much as for the sake of science, there must no 
longer be this division into workers and 
scholars and henceforth there must be only men.

The result of this is that those men who are 
today, on account of their superior intellects, 
caught up in the ivory towers of science and 
who, once they have established themselves in 
this world, yield to the need for a thoroughly 
bourgeois position and bend their every 
invention to the exclusive use of the 
privileged class to which they themselves 
belong.  These men, I say, once they become 
truly the fellows of everyone, fellows not just 
in their imagination nor just in their speech 
but in fact, in their work, will just as 
necessarily convert their inventions and 
applications of their learning to the benefit 
of all, and especially apply themselves to the 
task of making work (the basis, the only real 
and rightful basis of human society) lighter 
and more dignified.

It is quite possible and, indeed, likely that 
during the period of fairly lengthy transition 
which will, naturally, succeed the great crisis 
of society, the loftiest sciences will fall 
considerably below their current levels.  
Equally, it is not to be doubted that luxury 
and everything constituting the refinements of 
life will have to disappear from the social 
scene for quite a long time and will not be 
able to reappear as the exclusive amusements of 
a few, but will have to return as ways of 
dignifying life for everybody, and then only 
once society has conquered need in all of us.  
But would this temporary eclipse of the lofty 
sciences be such a misfortune? Whatever science 
may lose in terms of sublime elevation, will it 
not win through the extension of its base? 
Doubtless there will be fewer illustrious 
sages, but at the same time there will be fewer 
ignoramuses too.  There will be no more of 
these men who can touch the skies, but, on the 
other hand, millions of men who may be degraded 
and crushed today will be able to tread the 
earth as human beings: no demigods, but no 
slaves either.  Both the slave and the demigods 
will achieve human-ness, the one by rising a 
lot, the other by stooping a little.  Thus no 
longer will there be a place for deification, 
nor for contumely.  Everyone will shake hands 
with his neighbour and, once reunited, we shall 
all march with a new spring in our steps, 
onwards to new conquests, in the realm of 
science as in the realm of life itself.

So, far from having any misgivings about that 
eclipse of science - which will be in any case 
only a fleeting one we ought to call for it 
with all our powers since its effect will be to 
humanise both scholar and manual labourer and 
to reconcile science and life.  And we are 
convinced that, once we have achieved this new 
foundation, the progress of mankind, in the 
realm of science as elsewhere in life, will 
very quickly outstrip everything that we have 
seen and everything we might conjure up in our 
imaginations today.  But here another question 
crops up: will every individual have an equal 
capacity for absorbing education to the same 
degree? Let us imagine a society organised 
along the most egalitarian lines, a society in 
which children will, from birth onwards, start 
out with the same circumstances economically, 
socially and politically, which is to say the 
same upkeep, the same education, the same 
instruction: among these thousands of tiny 
individuals will there not be an infinite 
variety of enthusiasms, natural inclinations 
and aptitudes?

Such is the big argument advanced by our 
adversaries, the bourgeois pure and simple, and 
the bourgeois socialists as well.  They imagine 
it to be unanswerable.  So let us try to prove 
the opposite.  Well, to begin with, by what 
right do they make their stand for the 
principle of individual capabilities? Is there 
room for the development of capabilities in 
society as at present constituted? Can there be 
room for that development in a society which 
continues to have the right of inheritance as 
its foundation? Self-evidently not; for, from 
the moment that the right of inheritance 
applies, the career of children will never be 
determined by their individual gifts and 
application: it will be determined primarily by 
their economic circumstances, by the wealth or 
poverty of their families.  Wealthy but empty-
headed heirs will receive a superior education; 
the most intelligent children of the 
proletariat will receive ignorance as their 
inheritance, just as happens at present.  So, 
is it not hypocritical, when speaking not only 
of society as it is today but even of a 
reformed society which would still have as its 
fundaments private property ownership and the 
right of inheritance - Is it not sordid 
sophistry to talk about individual rights based 
on individual capabilities? There is such a lot 
of talk today of individual liberty, yet what 
prevails is not the individual person, nor the 
individual in general, but the individual upon 
whom privilege is conferred by his social 
position.  Thus what counts is position and 
class.  Just let one intelligent individual 
from the ranks of the bourgeoisie dare to take 
a stand against the economic privileges of that 
respectable class and you will see how much 
these good bourgeois, forever prattling about 
individual liberty today, respect his liberty 
as an individual Don't talk to us about 
individual abilities! Is it not an everyday 
thing for us to see the greatest abilities of 
working men and bourgeois forced to give way 
and even to kowtow before the crass stupidity 
of the heirs to the golden calf? Individual 
liberty - not privileged liberty but human 
liberty, and the real potential of individuals 
- will only be able to enjoy full expansion in 
a regime of complete equality.  When there 
exists an equality of origins for all men on 
this earth then, and only then (with 
safeguards, of course, for the superior calls 
of fellowship or solidarity, which is and ever 
shall remain the greatest producer of all 
social phenomena, from human intelligence to 
material wealth) only then will one be able to 
say, with more reason than one can today, that 
every individual is a self-made man.  Hence our 
conclusion is that, if individual talents are 
to prosper and no longer be thwarted in 
bringing forth their full fruits, the first 
precondition is that all individual privileges, 
economic as well as political, must disappear, 
which is to say that all class distinctions 
must be abolished.  That requires that private 
property rights and the rights of inheritance 
must go, and equality must triumph 
economically, politically and socially.

But once equality has triumphed and is well 
established, will there be no lonaer any 
difference in the talents and degree of 
application of the various individuals? There 
will be a difference, not so many as exist 
today, perhaps, but there will always be 
differences.  Of that there can be no doubt.  
This is a proverbial truth which will probably 
never cease to be true - that no tree ever 
brings forth two leaves that are exactly 
identical.  How much more will this be true of 
men, men being much more complicated creatures 
than leaves.  But such diversity, far from 
constituting an affliction is, as the German 
philosopher Feuerbach has forcefully noted, one 
of the assets of mankind.  Thanks to it, the 
human race is a collective whole wherein each 
human being complements the rest and has need 
of them; so that this infinite variation in 
human beings is the very cause and chief basis 
of their solidarity - an important argument in 
favour of equality.

Basically, even in todays society, if one 
excepts two categories of men - men of genius 
and idiots - and provided one abstracts 
conjured up artificially through the influence 
of a thousand social factors such as education, 
instruction, economic and political status 
which create differences not merely within each 
social stratum, but in almost every family 
unit, one will concede that from the point of 
view of intellectual gifts and moral energy the 
vast majority of men are very much alike or, at 
least, are worth about the same - weakness in 
one regard being almost always counterbalanced 
by an equivalent strength in another, so that 
it becomes impossible to say whether one man 
chosen from this mass is much the superior or 
the inferior of his neighbour.  The vast 
majority of men are not identical but 
equivalent and thus equal.  

Which means that the line of argument pursued 
by our adversaries is left with nothing but the 
geniuses and the idiots.

As we know, idiocy is a psychological and 
social affliction.  Thus, it should be treated 
not in the schools but in the hospitals and one 
is entitled to expect that a more rational 
system of social hygiene - above all, one that 
cares more for the physical and moral well-
being of the individual than the current system 
- will some day be introduced and that together 
with a new society organised along egalitarian 
lines it will eventually eradicate from the 
surface of the earth this affliction of idiocy, 
such a humiliation to the human race.  As for 
the men of genius, one should note first of all 
that, happily or unhappily, according to one's 
main point of view, such men have not featured 
in the history of mankind except as the 
extremely rare exceptions to all of the rules 
known to us and one cannot organise to cater 
for exceptions.  Even so, it is our hope that 
the society of the future will be able to 
discover, through a truly practical popular 
organisation of its collective assets the means 
by which to render such geniuses less 
necessary, less intimidating and more truly the 
benefactors of us all.  For we must never lose 
sight of Voltaire's great dictum: 'There is 
someone with more wit than the greatest 
geniuses, and that is everyone'.  So it is 
merely a question of organising this everyone 
for the sake of the fullest liberty rooted in 
the most complete economic, political and 
social equality, and one need no longer fear 
the dictatorial ambitions and despotic 
inclinations of the men of genius.

As for turning out such men of genius through 
education, one ought to banish the thought from 
one's mind.  Moreover, of all the men of genius 
we have known thus far, none or almost none 
ever displayed their genius while yet in their 
childhood, nor in their adolescence nor yet in 
their early youth.  Only in their mature years 
did they ever reveal themselves geniuses and 
several were not recognised as such until after 
their death whereas many supposedly great men 
having had their praises sung while youths by 
better men have finished their careers in the 
most absolute obscurity.  So it is never in the 
childhood years, nor even in the adolescent 
years that one can discern and determine the 
comparative excellencies and shortcomings of 
men, nor the extent of their talents, nor their 
inborn aptitudes.  All of these things only 
become obvious and are governed by the 
development of the individual person and, just 
as there are some natures precocious and some 
very slow - although the latter are by no means 
inferior and, indeed, are often superior - so 
no schoolmaster will ever be in a position to 
specify in advance the career or nature of the 
occupations which his charges will choose once 
they attain the age when they have the freedom 
to choose.

>From which it follows that society, 
disregarding any real or imagined differences 
in aptitudes or abilities and possessed of no 
means of determining these in any event and of 
no right to allot the future career of children 
owes them all, without a single exception, an 
absolutely equal education and instruction.

[Egalite, 14 August 1869]

