Re: [Marxism] Re: The hijab controversy

["Marvin Gandall" <marvgandall@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Johannes Schneider writes:

Marx sees state and church as equally bad influences on education...

Jose Perez quotes Marx as follows:

"Elementary education by the state" is altogether objectionable.
Defining by a general law the expenditures on the elementary schools,
the qualifications of the teaching staff, the branches of instruction,
etc., and, as is done in the United States, supervising the fulfillment
of these legal specifications by state inspectors, is a very different
thing from appointing the state as the educator of the people!
Government and church should rather be equally excluded from any
influence on the school. Particularly, indeed, in the Prusso-German
Empire...

-----------------------------------------------

I think both Johannes and Jose may be confusing Marx's strictures
against "state" education with opposition to "public" education.

It seems apparent from the quote cited above by Jose that Marx
distinguished between the Prussian and other embryonic European school
systems, which were run from the top down by state bureaucrats, and the
American system, where control over the curriculum and other matters was
vested in publicly-elected school boards. In neither case, however, does
Marx oppose the principle of public control over funding, teaching
qualifications, and the organization of the school system, which, he
notes, is "a very different thing from appointing the state as the
educator of the people".

Johannes also says that "Friedrich Engels was even in favour of
tolerance for religious schools. In
1891 he wrote...'You cannot bar the churches from founding schools out
of their own money and teaching their non-sense there" (My translation,
JS)'.

This isn't in dispute. I don't think anyone is proposing the forcible
closure of religious schools (public funding of them is another matter);
Engels was expecting, as we all do, that they would disappear in
accordance with the decline of religion in general. Nevertheless, it's
not hard to understand why impatient French Jacobins, Spanish
anarchists, and Russian Bolsheviks, faced by an openly
counter-revolutionary clergy in conditions of civil war, could,
disregarding Engels, torch churches and shoot priests.




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