This morning I received the article Who Deserves Education?, by Bernardo Borgo, sent by an esteemed friend. Since we often lunch together, accompanied by our wives, I initially thought of discussing the topic at one of our regular meetings. However, considering that we are in an election period and that, to this day, a large part of the so-called right-wing candidates lack a clear understanding of moderate conservative thought, I found it opportune to set down these reflections in writing—reserving a portion for the timely dialogue with my dear friend—and to digress on some questions not addressed by the author but which I consider relevant.
Bernardo Borgo’s article analyzes the critique by Piotr Kropotkin—one of the leading exponents of anarchism in the nineteenth century and considered the founder of anarcho-communism—of the traditional educational system. The author argues that the school was structured to perpetuate the division between intellectual and manual labor. The central proposal of the anarchist thinker is the adoption of an integral education that fuses science and technical practice, eliminating social hierarchies and restoring full access to knowledge. To structure his critique, Kropotkin presupposes that the educational system was deliberately constructed to separate those who think from those who do—a division that, within his worldview, should never exist.
That is, the anarchist thinker starts from a purely rationalist and abstract categorization (the division between “thinkers” and “executors”) and takes it as the description of the reality to be attacked. From this theoretical deduction, grounded in his own limited experience and oriented by a utopian worldview (anarcho-communism), he concludes that an integral education must be built to fuse academic knowledge with practical knowledge.
It is unnecessary to go further. Without entering into the intrinsic merits of the proposal, the text displays the typical elements of a utopian and rationalist mentality, which represents the exact opposite of conservative prudence and which usually generates more harm than benefit when implemented. As Joel Paese well observed in an article on this blog, under the conditions of limited human rationality, the imposition of utopian visions exacts immediate and real collective costs in exchange for supposed future benefits that are unlikely to materialize.
Let us begin with the author’s diagnosis, subjecting it to simple and pragmatic questions: how does the educational system actually operate? Indeed, of which system are we speaking? The global one or the Brazilian one? Secondary education or primary education? Is it vocational technical education or continuing education? Does it refer to the prestigious Federal Technical School of Mato Grosso or to the Municipal Elementary School Tenente José Maria Pinto Duarte, where I studied fifty years ago?
Any problem of a public nature first requires delimitation and concrete understanding. Grand plans aimed at solving abstract macro-problems usually result in resounding failures. Local realities differ from one another; therefore, the more specific and delimited the scope of the chosen problem, the more viable and effective the remedy applied will be.
It is necessary to diagnose the real situation as it is. It lacks reasonableness to start from a rationalist categorization, idealized by the author’s restricted intellectual experiences, conceived more than a century ago, in order to dictate how the contemporary world “ought to be.”
Moreover, broad social engineering schemes, formulated by “great thinkers” in the isolation of their theoretical abstractions, rarely find an echo in the aspirations of ordinary people. First, because such constructions do not arise from real needs; the fact that the world does not conform to the theorist’s desires does not constitute a legitimate public problem. Second, because society is plural and people do not necessarily share the same utopia (the intellectual rarely knows what the community actually experiences and values). Third, because social hierarchies exist in large part because they perform necessary practical and organizational functions (without prejudice to recognizing that there are hierarchies that need to be corrected). Fourth, because there is an inescapable need for adequacy between means and ends, a presupposition rarely remembered by the “great thinkers.”
I confine myself to this fourth point. Designing an idealized end—such as the eradication of social hierarchies through education—without evaluating whether the institutional, budgetary, and human means possess the concrete capacity to achieve it violates the elementary principle of prudence. Still less prudent is the attempt to transform the educational system into an instrument of social engineering and leveling, subverting its primary and perfectly feasible function: to transmit the cultural legacy and prepare the new generations for the practical realities of life and work. Confusing the abstract desire with the technical viability of the means is the first step toward the waste of resources and collective frustration.
It is also necessary to recognize that the current educational system was not designed by men driven by perversity, devoid of a sense of the common good or of the intelligence to propose something superior. The present system is the historical and cumulative product of the efforts of countless social actors who, for the most part, sought to solve immediate practical problems with the resources they had at their disposal.
In short, there are historical and contingent reasons why Brazilian primary and secondary education are as they are. What were the concrete challenges faced in structuring these systems? What choices were made and under what justifications? What financial, cultural, and human-resource limitations shaped those decisions? Without a reverent understanding of the choices of the past and of the circumstances that dictated them, any attempt at systemic reengineering runs the manifest risk of destroying what works in the eagerness to correct what fails.
Finally, reformers of complex structures usually ignore the law of unintended consequences, one of the pillars of political skepticism. Society and its educational institutions function as living and interdependent ecosystems, and not as clockwork mechanisms that can be dismantled and remade at the pleasure of a central planner. Abrupt institutional changes produce unpredictable results that, in most cases, punish precisely the most vulnerable—those whom the utopia intended to protect. Political prudence dictates that gradual reforms, conducted through pilot projects and properly monitored tests, are the ones that usually produce the best results.
Although it would be possible to deepen the critique, I consider that the fundamental pillars have been set out. What remains for us is the perennial lesson of moderation: the humility to recognize our profound ignorance in the face of the complexity of the social order, as well as the limits of our capacity to alter it deliberately. A healthy dose of skepticism toward grand projects of change is the virtue that usually produces the best and most enduring public policies.
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