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

Anarchy And Education /221
the human world would find itselfin its present state, divided anew into a large number
of slaves and a small number of rulers, the fo rmer working fo r the latter, as is the
case now.
Now you understand why bourgeois socialists call fo r only some education fo r
the people, a little more than they have now, and why we socialist-democrats call for
integral education for them, total education as full as the intellectual development of
the times allows, so that in the future no class can rule over the working masses, exploiting
them, superior to them because it knows more ...
But, they will say ...it is impossible for all humanity to devote itself to scientific
learning; it would die of hunger. While some study, accordingly, the others must
work to produce the vital necessities, first of all fo r themselves and then also for
those persons who have consecrated themselves exclusively to labours of the intellect.
For these latter work not just for themselves: don't their scientific discoveries,
through application to industry and agriculture as well as to political and social life
generally, both broaden human understanding and improve the situation of every
human being without exception Don't artistic creations ennoble everyone's life
No, not at all. And our greatest criticism of science and the arts is precisely that
they spread their good deeds and exercise their beneficial influence only over a very
small portion of society, to the exclusion of the vast majority and hence also to their
detriment .
... Someone will ask: If eveJYbody is educated, who will want to work Our answer
is simple: Everyone shall work and everyone shall be educated. A frequent objection to this reply
is that such a combination of industrial and intellectual labour can only hurt both,
that workers will be poor scholars and scholars will be poor workers. Yes, [this is true) in
present-day society, where both manual and mental labour are distorted by the wholly
artificial separation to which they have both been condemned. But we are convinced
that well-rounded living persons must develop muscular and mental activities equally
and that these activities, far from harming each other, not only will not impede each
other but instead wiII support, broaden, and reinforce each other; the scholar's science
wi\l become more fertile, more useful, and broader in scope when the scholar ceases being
a stranger to manual labour, and the educated worker wi\l work more intelligently
and therefore more productively than the unlearned worker.
From this it follows, in the interest of both labour and science, that there should
no longer be either workers or scholars but only human beings ...
But once equality has triumphed and is well established, will various individuals'
abilities and their levels of energy cease to differ Some will exist, perhaps not so many