Excerpts from “Communal Luxury"

“But underlying much of the Commune’s ideas about schooling at a more pragmatic as well as a more theoretical level was the notion of “integral education”—professional schools where the child, girl or boy, would become capable of both working intellectually and earning a livelihood. Education, in the words of Fourier, should be “unitaire et intégrale-composée”

“Integral” or polytechnic education answered the desire to learn a useful trade and at one and the same time escape the enforced specialization caused by the division of labor that resulted in separating educated from uneducated.”

“It was at this time that the ruling elites began to think that the barbarians—whether at the gates, in the workshops, or out plowing the fields—must be given a little instruction, if only to reduce social tensions. Instruction might serve to both enlighten the people and keep them in their place.”

“The right to education is thought throughout to be the condition for the formation of political judgment. One learns to become a citizen. A system of education must be established whose task is essentially one of uplift and integration through knowledge: the worker or peasant is raised to the status of a sovereign citizen—raised, that is, to a dignity he or she possesses by right but not in fact.”

Kristin Ross, "Communal Luxury"