If Plato is right, it is easy to understand in what way we, today, suffer from a deficit in education.
Until modern times, few people reached the university level. It was not so much because fewer could afford it, although it certainly was a factor. Rather, this factor depended on another: it was because people learnt their trade and occupation not in a university class but gained experience and training by the side of a master. One became a mason, a carpenter, a glass-blower, not by taking classes at a university, but by working with a master who would teach the students his skills, and thus allowing him to gain first-hand experience. Universities and secondary education institutions, on the other hand, were the vector of transmission, up until the 20th century, of a certain culture, marked by a strong Classicism, which was to make the student into a citizen of his country. The German word ‘Gymnasium’ and the French ‘Lycee,’ both meaning high-school, reflect this ideal sought by the modern nation-state, that education, a Classical education, was to build the citizen to a certain perfection.
This education, which still echoed Plato, though only to a certain extant, was associated primarily with the educated class, the aristocracy that was in power, a characteristic which would later result in the first failure of education: it is in this aristocracy and bourgeoisie’s blossom that was also created the ideology of nationalism and colonialism. To this elite, a perfected education was to include a strong component of Classical studies, including Greek and Latin; yet, if the ideal of perfection remained, its coexistence with those other characterizing elements (nationalism, colonialism, capitalism) would prove lethal. At times, through the educated elites who ruled over the colonies, and who were also associated by many with the capitalistic class, education would become the tool that differentiated at home this upper-middle class form the rest of the population, and, in the world, the one that would become the cultural model justifying the colonial enterprise, setting Western European culture as the only criteria of culture (“la mission civilisatrice”). In spite of itself, then, this education, provided by higher education institutions, became not a way to conform one’s soul to the divine, but a political and cultural tool which would necessarily fall once the institutions it was seen to justify fell. When colonialism was discarded, when the frenetic capitalism of the 19th century became rejected, the elite who promoted these fell, and its education with it.
