Graham R (Ed.) - Anarchism - A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas Volume One - From Anarchy to Anarchism (300 CE to 1939)

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Anarcliy And Education
64. Bakunin: Integral Education (1869)
From the time of Godwin, anarchists have recognized the importance of education as a
means of social liberation, on the one hand, and as an authoritarian means of social control,
011 the ot/ler. While Proudhon had advocated general vocational training as a means of lessenil1g
the negative effects of the divisioll of labour (Selection 12), it was Bakullin who developed
the concept of "integral education," which was meant to Ilelp overcome the division
between intellectual and manual labour, an idea Kropotkin expanded upon in Fields, Factories
and Workshops (Selection 34). The following extracts are taken from BakU/lin's essay,
"L'Instruction integrale, " originally published as a series of articles in the Swiss
Internationalist paper, L'Egalite, in 1869. The translation is taken from Robert Cutler's The
Basic Bakunin (New York: J)rometheus, 1992), and is reprinted with his kind permission. For
collsislency, I have changed the references to "all-round education" back to "integral education,
" as that is how the concept is referred to in the otller selections.
THE fiRST QUESTION WE MUST NOW consider is whether the working masses can be
fu lly emancipated so long as the education that they receive is inferior to that given
to the members of the bourgeoisie, or, in general, so long as any class of any size enjoys,
because of its birth, the privileges of a better upbringing and a fuller education.
Doesn't this question answer itself Isn't it obvious that of two persons endowed
with nearly equal natural intelligence, the one who knows more, who is broaderminded
thanks to scientific learning, who grasps more easily and fully the nature of
his surroundings because he better understands those facts which are called the laws
of nature and society and which interconnect natural and social events-that that
person will feel freer in nature and society, and that he will also in fact be the cleverer
and stronger of the two The one who knows more will naturally rule over the one
who knows less; and if between two classes just this one difference in education and
upbringing existed, it would be enough to produce all the others in short order, and