Gramsci's Common Sense: Inequality and Its Narratives by Kate Crehan

Author:Kate Crehan [Crehan, Kate]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, Sociology, Political Philosophy, Politics, Marxism, Hegemony, Ideology
ISBN: 9780822373742
Google: sIARDQAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0822362392
Goodreads: 28592468
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2016-09-21T23:00:00+00:00

[T]he understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects too are, perhaps, always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. . . . The uniformity of his stationary life . . . corrupts even the activity of his body, and renders him incapable of exerting his strength with vigour and perseverance, in any other employment than that to which he has been bred. His dexterity at his own particular trade seems, in this manner, to be acquired at the expence of his intellectual, social and martial virtues. But in every improved and civilized society this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it. (Smith 1976, 781–82)

It would seem that a degree of stunting of the mass of the population, however regrettable, is an inevitable cost of civilization unless the government steps in. Given his popular image as the great champion of laissez-faire, we should note his implicit argument here that it is the government’s responsibility to “take some pains to prevent” this stunting. And, indeed, he goes on to advocate that “the most essential parts of education . . . to read, write and account” should be made available even to poor children who must necessarily begin working at an early age. As he sees it, “For a very small expence the publick can facilitate, can encourage, and can even impose upon almost the whole body of the people, the necessity of acquiring those most essential parts of education” (785).

Significantly, the rationale is not that of efficiency. The “labouring poor” do not need such education to perform their allotted tasks. Given that their employment in “civilized” societies involves no more than the endless repetition of the same few simple tasks, education is not required to generate productive workers. Rather, the argument for educating “the whole body of the people” stems from the conviction that without education a human being is a sad, stunted being. Someone “without the proper use of the intellectual faculties of a man . . . seems to be mutilated and deformed,” lacking an “essential part of the character of human nature” (Smith 1976, 788). And I think we can assume that just as Smith believes that the mass of the population has a right to be “tolerably well fed, cloathed and lodged,” so, too, he sees them as having the right to a certain level of education. As a man of his time, he saw any form of formal public education as essentially concerned with the education of boys.

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