XXIX.Francisco Ferrer

XXIX FRANCISCO FERRER Francisco Ferrer, founder of the Modern School in Spain, born near Barcelona, Spain, 1859. Parents were well-to-do farmers and devout Catholics, but he became a Freethinker when very young. In 1879 proclaimed himself a republican; took part in revolution led by General Villacampa; fled to Paris, became secretary to Spanish republican leader, Ruix Zorrilla. Returned to Spain, 1901, and started the first of his Modern Schools; used as textbooks one of the greatest radical and scientific works of the day and tore education in Spain from the cloisters. The Roman Catholic Church bitterly opposed his Modern Schools and looked for excuses to suppress them; accused Ferrer of complicity in bomb-throwing at King and Queen, imprisoned him for one year, but could not prove anything; accused him again, in 1909, when uprising took place in Barcelona inspired by indignation against unjust war in Morocco; arrested on charge of being head of uprising, a charge which later investigations by the State proved to be false, and was condemned to death by a court-martial and shot at Montjuich fortress Oct. 13, 1909. His last words were: "Long live the Modern School." The selections are from The Modern School.

The Modern School To those who wish to renovate the education of children two methods are open: To work for the transformation of the school by studying the child, so as to prove scientifically that the present organization of education is defective and to bring about progressive modification; or, to found new schools in which shall be directly applied those principles corresponding directly to the ideal of society and of its units, as held by those who eschew the conventionalities, prejudices, cruelties, trickeries, and falsehoods, upon which modern society is based. The first method certainly offers great advantages. It corresponds to that evolutionary conception which all men of science defend, and which alone, according to them, can succeed. In theory they are right, and we are quite ready to recognize it. It is evident that experiments in psychology and physiology must lead to important changes in matters of education: that teachers, being better able to understand the child, will know 488 Liberty and the Great Libertarians better how to adapt their instruction to natural laws. I even grant that such evolution will be in the direction of liberty, for I am convinced that constraint arises only from ignorance, and that the educator who is really worthy of the name will obtain his results through the spontaneous response of the child, whose desires he will learn to know, and whose development he will try to further by giving it every possible gratification.

But in reality, I do not believe that those who struggle for human emancipation can expect much from this method. Governments have ever been careful to hold a high hand over the education of the people. They know, better than anyone else, that their power is based almost entirely on the school. Hence, they monopolize it more and more. The time is past when they opposed the diffusion of instruction, and when they sought to restrain the education of the masses. These tactics were formerly possible, because the economic life of the nations allowed the prevalence of popular ignorance, that ignorance which renders mastery easy. But circumstances have changed. The progress of science, discoveries of all kinds, have revolutionized the conditions of labor and production. It is no longer possible for a people to remain ignorant: it must be educated in order that the economic situation of one country may hold its own and make headway against the universal competition.

In consequence, governments want education; they want a moreend more complete organization of the school, not because they hop'e for the renovation of society through education, but because they need individuals, workmen, perfected instruments of labor, to make their industrial enterprises and the capital employed in them profitable. And we have seen the most reactionary governments follow this movement; they have realized perfectly that their former tactics were becoming dangerous to the economic life of the nations, and that it is necessary to adapt popular education to new necessities. But it would be a great mistake to suppose that the directors Francisco Ferrer 489 have not foreseen the dangers which the intelligent development of the people might create for them, and that it was necessary for them to change their methods of keeping the mastery. These methods have likewise been adapted to the new conditions of life, and they have labored to keep a hold over the evolution of ideas. At the same time that they seek to preserve the beliefs upon which social discipline was formerly based, they have sought to give to conceptions born of scientific effort a signification which could do no harm to established institutions. And to that end they took possession of the school.

They who formerly left the priests in charge of the education of the people, because the priests were perfectly suited to the task, their instruction being at the service of authority, now took up everywhere the direction of scholarly education. The danger, for them, lay in the awakening of human intelligence to the new outlook on life; the awakening, in the depths of men's consciousness, of a will towards emancipation. It would have been foolish to combat the evolving forces; they had to be driven into channels. That is the reason why, far from adhering to the old procedures of government, they adopted new ones, and evidently efficacious ones. It did not require great genius to find this solution; the simple pressure of facts led the men in power to understand what they must oppose to the apparent perils. Oh, what have people not expected, what do they not expect still, from education! The majority of progressive men expect everything from it, and it is only in these later days that some begin to understand that it offers nothing but illusions. We perceive the utter uselessness of this learning, acquired in the schools by the systems of education at present in practice; we see that we expected and hoped in vain. It is because the organization of the school, far from spreading the ideal which we imagined, has made education the most powerful means of enslavement in the hands of the governing powers today.

Their teachers are only the conscious or unconscious instru490 Liberty and the Great Libertarians ments of these powers, modeled moreover according to their principles; they have from their youth up, and more than any one else, been subjected to the discipline of their authority; few indeed are those who have escaped the influence of this domination; and these remain powerless, because the school organization constrains them so strongly that they cannot but obey it. It is not my purpose here to examine the nature of this organization. It is sufficiently well known for me to characterize it in one word: constraint The school imprisons children physically, intellectually, and morally, in order to direct the development of their faculties in the paths desired. It deprives them of contact with nature, in order to model them after its own pattern. And this is the explanation of all which I have here set forth: The care which governments have taken to direct the education of the people, and the bankruptcy of the hopes of believers in liberty. The education of today is nothing more than drill. I refuse to believe that the systems employed have been combined with any exact design for bringing about the results desired. That would presuppose genius.

But things take place precisely as if this education responded to some vast entire conception in a manner really remarkable. It could not have been better done. What accomplished it, was simply that the leading inspiration was the principle of discipline and of authority which guides social organizers at all times. They have but one clearly defined idea, one will, viz.: Children must be accustomed to obey, to believe, to think, according to the social dogmas which govern us. Hence, education cannot be other thai* what it is today. It is not a matter of seconding the spontaneous development of the faculties of the child, of leaving it free to satisfy its physical, intellectual, and moral needs; it is a matter of imposing readymade ideas upon it; a matter even of preventing it from ever thinking otherwise than is willed for the maintenance of the institutions of this society; it is a matter of making it an individual strictly adapted to the social mechanismFrancisco Ferrer 491 No one should be astonished that such an education has this evil influence upon human emancipation. I repeat, it is but a means of domination in the hands of the governing powers.

They have never wanted the uplift of the individual, but his enslavement; and it is perfectly useless to hope anything from the school of today. Now, what has been resulting up until today will continue to result in the future. There is no reason for governments to change their systems. They have succeeded in making education serve their advantage; they will likewise know how to make use of any improvements that may be proposed to their advantage. It is sufficient that they maintain the spirit of the school, the authoritarian discipline which reigns therein, for all innovations to be turned to their profit. And they will watch their opportunity; be sure of that. I would like to call the attention of my readers to this idea: All the value of education rests in respect for the physical, intellectual, and moral will of the child. Just as in science no demonstration is possible save by facts, just so there is no real education save that which is exempt from all dogmatism, which leaves to the child itself the direction of its effort, and confines itself to the seconding of that effort. Now there is nothing easier than to alter this purpose, and nothing harder than to respect it. Education is always imposing, violating, constraining; the real educator is he who can best protect the child against his (the teacher's) own ideas, his peculiar whims; he who can best appeal to the child's own energies.

One may judge by this with what ease education receives ,the stamp they wish to put upon it, and how easy is the task of those who wish to enslave the individual. The best methods become in their hands only themore powerful and perfect instruments of domination. Our own ideal is certainly that of science, and we demand that we be given the power to educate the child by favoring its development through the 492 Liberty and the Great Libertarians satisfaction of all its needs, in proportion as these arise and grow. We are convinced that the education of the future will be of an entirely spontaneous nature; certainly we cannot as yet realize it, but the evolution of methods in the direction of a wider comprehension of the phenomena of life, and the fact that all advances toward perfection mean the overcoming of some constraint,—all this indicates that we are in the right when we hope for the deliverance of the child through science. . . .

We shall follow the labors of the scientists who study the child with the greatest attention, and we shall eagerly seek for means of applying their experience to the education we wish to build up, in the direction of an ever fuller liberation of the individual. But how can we attain our end? Shall it not.be by putting ourselves directly to the work favoring the foundation of new schools, which shall be ruled as much as possible by this spirit of liberty, which we forefeel will dominate the entire work of education in the future? A trial has been made which, for the present, has already given excellent results. We can destroy all which in the present school answers to the organization of constraint, the artificial surroundings by which the children are separated from nature and life, the intellectual and moral discipline made use of to impose readymade ideas upon them, beliefs which deprave and annihilate natural bent. Without fear of deceiving ourselves, we can restore the child to the environment which entices it, the environment of nature in which he will be in contact with all that he loves, and in which impressions of life will replace fastidious book-learning. If we did no more than that, we should already have prepared in great part the deliverance of the child.

In such conditions we might already freely apply the data of science, and labor most fruitfully. I know very well that we could not thus realize all our hopes, that we should often be forced, for lack of knowledge, to employ undesirable methods; but a certitude would sustain Francisco Ferrer 493 us in our effort, namely, that even without reaching our aim completely we should do more and better in our still imperfect work than the present school accomplishes. I like the free spontaneity of a child who knows nothing, better than the world-knowledge and intellectual deformity of a child who has been subjected to our present education Every cultivated person of my acquaintance has agreed with me as to the best means to be employed in order to make men and create strong and good types of humanity, and of these means education and instruction were those most apropos. I detest the shedding of blood; I labor for the regeneration of humanity, and I love the good for the good's own sake.

That which violence wins for us today, another*act of violence may wrest from us tomorrow. Those stages of progress are alone durable which have rooted themselves in the mind and conscience of mankind before receiving the final sanction of legislators. The only means of realizing what is good is to teach it by education and propagate it by example.