The History of Homo Educandus

Opening Speech at the Plenum of the 5th World Congress of the World Council of Comparative Education Societies
Sorbonne, Paris, July 1984

Monsieur Debeauvais, thank you for the invitation to address this assembly. My lecture will take the form of a plea. I plead for research on the history of homo educandus. The object of such a history is the social construction of homo educandus and of the societal context within which his learning constitutes a process of personal enrichment with values that are assumed to be scarce. The organization of society in view of a human being in need of information and programming must be understood as a neglected aspect in the history of homo economicus.

I conceive of the social history of homo educandus as the opposite of the history of education. The history of homo educandus deals with the emergence of a social reality within which ‘education’ is perceived as a basic human need. Some of its elements take shape in Greek antiquity where the invention of the full alphabet first allowed the detachment of knowledge from the speaker. Without this alphabetic technique to fix a text and transmit an original, neither the literature nor the science with which education deals can be imagined. Other key elements that are presuppositions for education take shape between Alcuin and Albert the Great. Because only at the time of Alcuin are words first visually separated from each other, and the text becomes visible to the eye.

From then on it was possible to grasp the meaning of a text by looking at it, instead of pronouncing the words to make them understandable to the ear. Without this visualization of the text, there is no idea of ‘knowledge’ that is laid down and deposited in books, of knowledge that can be reproduced and communicated.

Sixty years ago Milman Parry introduced the distinction between orality and literacy into the study of epos and literature. His pupils have spelled out the importance of this detachment of language from the individual’s speech for the constitution of a new kind of truth. But their insights have not touched the core of educational theory, notwithstanding the great efforts made by Walter Ong and Jack Goody.

Even less has the importance of word division in the earlier Middle Ages been recognized in its importance to the ‘truth’ the educationalist presupposes. Only word division made it possible to copy texts by sight and, what is more important, to verify the textual identity of two books, thus conceiving the idea that an absolutely identical knowledge exists somewhere behind two individual copies. Even less than Milman Parry’s insights, has this touched education, except indirectly through the recuperation of Marshall McLuhan.

Without the historical evolution of this knowledge behind the text, John Amos Comenius (1592–1670) would have been unthinkable. It is this kind of truth which is needed by homo educandus whose history begins with him.

And so, at the time of Comenius the history of homo educandus begins, at least as a project and program: omnibus, omnia omnino docendi. With this intent to teach everybody everything thoroughly, the idea of homo educandus is defined. The new man is a being who ought to be taught whatever he should know or do.

The history of education stands in stark contrast to the history of homo educandus. The historian of education assumes the need for education as an a-historical given. The historian of education speaks as if, wherever there is human culture, there is also a knowledge stock that must be transmitted from generation to generation. He does not study the steps by which this need historically came into existence. He only studies how this need has been met by other societies in various times and in different ways.

The history of homo educandus must be distinguished from the history of education. But it must also not be reduced to the history of the interpretations that past societies have given to the pupil-teacher relationships which in their world were recognized as such. What meaning did Maimonides or Al Razi give to the teaching of young men? What meaning did musiké have for Greeks before and after writing became one of its subjects at the time when Plato was a child? What did shastra mean for Brahmins and artes for Hugh of Saint-Victor? These are questions that have been well studied by our colleagues from different disciplines: in the history of ideas, the histoire des mentalités, historical semantics and philosophy. But from all these the history of homo educandus must be distinguished: first, because its object bears no comparison with any social reality outside of Western tradition and, second, because its object is currently considered a historically non-problematic fact.

As a result, the history of homo educandus has been neglected. Our colleagues are unwilling to recognize that education is a concept sui generis, inconceivable in other societies and therefore inapplicable for a historical description of their past. Education, as the term is now used, means learning under the assumption that this learning is a prerequisite for all human activities while, at the same time, the opportunities for this learning are by their very nature in scarce supply. Thus understood, learning is an aspect of life which can be adequately distinguished from other aspects. Learning precedes, if not temporally at least logically, the competent execution of a socially expected task. Starting from this idea, which fits education, innumerable social features of other societies can be classified as occasions for ‘learning.’ Wherever the historian of education finds a poetry recital, a ritual, an apprenticeship, an organized game, he smells educational activity.

All textbooks on the history of education that I have consulted deal with their subject under the assumption that learning as a scare entity has always existed and only appeared in different guise and form. Through this assumption even Neanderthal man is subsumed into the sub-species of homo educandus, and his transition to neolithic culture ascribed to more competent teaching how to split flint. Pedagogues are so anxious to prove their own legitimate descent from Socrates, Varro or Buddha, that for them the history of homo educandus has become a taboo. Economists have been faced with a similar taboo, but unlike educational theorists, they have tried to deal with it. In the late eighteenth century, they defined their science as the study of values under the assumption of their scarcity. Economics became the discipline dealing with the application of scarce means to alternate ends. As the concepts used by this discipline became more prestigious, economists too have tried to apply them to long past ages and very distant societies. In economics, however, right from the beginning, this practice, by which the past is homogenized to fit contemporary categories, has been challenged. In the first decade of our century, Elie Halévy demonstrated that social behavior regulated by utilitarian assumptions constitutes a radical break with any previously stated assumption about social relations. Thirty years later, Karl Polanyi focused on the emergence of markets in Greece, India, Mesopotamia. He documented the slow process by which a formal economy comes to be disembedded, but only in a certain society: social interactions based on the assumption of scarcity then appear, and for a long period remain limited to a very precise and narrow domain. By his teaching, Polanyi laid the foundation for the historical study of scarcity. Louis Dumont, more recently, has carefully described how, from Mandeville to Marx, a perception of human nature that fits the perception of scarcity came into being. He calls this construct of the human — man dependent on the use of and acquisition of scarce means — homo oeconomicus. I want to plead for analogous studies on the emergence of homo educandus.

The recognition of homo oeconomicus as a modern social construction has made it possible to understand better what traditional cultures are. All known traditional cultures can be conceived as meaningful configurations that have as their principal purpose the repression of those conditions under which scarcity could become dominant in social relations. Such cultures enforce rules of behavior that obviate the appearance of scarcity, and therefore undercut envy and the fear of it. A clear and simple exposition of this has been made by Muchembled and Dupuy. No doubt, some cultures become so organized that they tolerate enclaves within which the assumption of scarcity can determine new social mechanisms: they allow spaces in which peddlers and hucksters, certain Sikhs, Jews or Chinese, sophists and medicinemen, can sell their skills at the going price. But the tolerance of such behavior in outsiders only underlines that it is perceived as immoral if it were pursued by the insider of the culture. The resistance to the spread of the regime of scarcity throughout society at large is a common feature that distinguishes the human condition from the regime of scarcity that you, Monsieur Debeauvais, have so aptly called: ‘L’univers concentrationnaire.’

I am not saying that the recognition of scarcity as a social construction by economic historians and anthropologists has shaped industrial society, or that it has significantly affected economic thought. Alternative economics have barely been washed by it. However, the recognition of traditional culture as a remedy to the spread of scarcity and envy has laid the foundations for new theoretical departures and a new realism in the history of cultures and mentalities. What I plead for is an analogous attempt by those of us whose bread and butter is education. Once we recognize that the fundamental concepts with which we operate — educational needs, learning, scarce resources, etc. — correspond to a paradigm which is far from natural, the way to a history of homo educandus will be opened.

For two distinct reasons it is important that researchers in comparative education recognize that ‘learning under the assumption of scarce opportunities’ constitutes an incomparable feature of our unique kind of world. First, this would allow comparatists to limit their research to phenomena that do have common phenomenological features. This self-limitation would make the discipline into a more legitimate undertaking. Second, the recognition that the discipline deals with an odd, modern social phenomenon would make it possible to engage in disciplined comparisons between education and other social features that are heteronomous to education and, therefore, cannot be reduced to it. If this were done, comparative education could become one of the rare fields that attempts to clarify one of the least recognized and most characteristic aspects of our age: the survival, even at the heart of highly developed societies, of fantasies, behavioral rules and patterns of action that have successfully resisted colonization by the regime of scarcity. I expect that even though most of you come from education, many of you still know that you have never learned to walk or breathe.