The First Amendment; Fritz Ringer Europe

The First Amendment and the Free People Weekly examination of civil liberties in the media in the 1970s produced by WGBH radio Boston in cooperation with the Institute for democratic communication at Boston University the host of the program is the institute's director Dr. Bernard Rubin. What is the what is the relationship between concepts of education and concepts of freedom. What is the relationship with the way we train our people and what they expect of our society. I'm delighted to have as my guest today Professor Fritz keyring or professor of history at Boston University who has just written a very introspective and fascinating study and titled education in society and in modern Europe which will be published in March by the Indiana University Press frittering received his doctorate in modern history from Harvard University. He's taught at Harvard and at Indiana University and has been at Boston University since 1970. He's especially interested in intellectual and social history.

With particular emphasis upon French and German experiences since 1789 his publications include the decline of the German mandarins which has as its base subject the German academic community between 1890 and one thousand thirty three. To return to this book frittering or education in society in modern Europe which is a an an analysis and a comparison of what happened approximately since 800 in France Germany and England. What are the basic beliefs of each of those societies today. Before we get into the early history about what the purposes will say the university really are for their society regardless of the differences between one university and another. Well I think there there has been a kind of duality

in European educational systems since Anyhow the late 19th century. The reality between on the one hand. A general humanistic education with very little professional pre-professional relevance and on the other hand increasingly since the late 19th century the pressure to train people for roles in the kind of advanced technological society in which we now live including to train up white collar specialists essentially And I think in all of these societies there is still a forward conflict that really started in the 19th century between education as a kind of gratuitous human development and education as a more or less useful transference of skills for the economy and for the society. Now originally in all three countries higher education university

education was a symbol of class was it not. In many respects yes I mean I think in two ways First higher education in the Certainly on the continent but also in England in most respects was education of people for the for the academic or learned professions that is to say the future doctors lawyers high officials secondary teachers and so on and theologians and theologians. And. So one sense in which education was for the upper class was for the very small segment of the upper middle class that was going to have that kind of advanced education and hold that kind of position in society. The people who went to the new universities were notables. Their education gave them kind of unusual status in the society. The other sense in which education was for the upper classes there was a

class connotation to the idea of being educated itself. That is education was or was a kind of form of aristocracy. It was a way for the individual to develop his full humanity as over against having to develop himself to be useful in a society the way that say ordinary middle or lower middle class or certainly working class people had to do. There was a kind of heiress to credit implication to the idea of being learned for its own sake. And of course in all of the universities certainly in Oxford and Cambridge along with the formal education you acquired certain lifestyles and outlooks that were let's let's say pseudo heiress to Craddick anyhow and that made you if you were cultivated something distinctive. That had nothing to do with your skills or your abilities on the job afterwards.

You mentioned Astrid in Cambridge and reading in your book I discovered that and correct me where I make an error of fact that they were the two universities in England and Wales. Aside from the University of Edinburgh they were pretty much in it. That's right and then the University of London came along and was not allowed to actually give classes but only to perform an extension service. What was the theory there when the University of London was. Became an extension service. Well the University of London was empowered initially to confer degrees on people who had. Gotten their education at various kinds of colleges that sprang up during the later nineteenth century and many of these colleges had a more vocational more scientific more technical character. Then the education that had been traditionally Oxford and Cambridge. So in the first instance the London the whole role of London University as a university was a kind of

certification of work done and work of a delicately practical sort done at some newer institutions that were coming to rival Oxford and Cambridge in terms of their practical impact if not in terms of prestige. I mean in terms of prestigious of course until the 20th century and even today Oxford and Cambridge are ranked all of the younger rivals but now the government by deliberate policy since we joined our Britain has created these so-called red brick universities Sussex Essex in one hour. Is this a way of expressing the determination of governments to democratize their society and that the percentage of people going to the university was much below what it what a democratic society needs. Well first of all on the matter of the redbrick universities one should really distinguish between a set of older Civic universities that sprang up during the late 19th century and like they were on what Durham is one. Durham goes

back a little further but let's say like. Well Manchester might be an example and then more recent younger civic universities and Sussex there might be a row sample which were really created after the Second World War. Now both have in common and I think more of the older red brick then the younger civic have in common a sense of extending the higher educational opportunity to broader social strata. Also the older red brick universities had a somewhat more vocational and technical outlook and approach. Of course being urban to their for different kind of atmosphere then the older universities now in regard to. The training of people in secondary schools or universities one of the things is brought out in your book is that in Europe unlike the United States this trend toward mass education is a very late one beyond primary school. You like to talk about why it was not considered necessary for

ordinary people to even go on to secondary school in Germany France or England. Well I think partly that stems from the fact that well let's take Germany as an example very early on I mean in the early 19th century secondary education was not conceived as let's say an upward extension of primary education but as a distinctive strand of education that ran completely peril from age 6 on to the education that was primary and that was for the ordinary citizen let's say. And from the beginning there was a sense in which primary education of various forms of post-primary a technical of occasional education were of the explicitly useful kind. But secondary education was on the one hand pre-professional in the sense that it led to the university and to the to the learned occupations and on the other hand it was pure learning in the sense that there was not an Applied of occupational emphasis and a

class connotation the class distinction was from the beginning present in that bipolarity in that practical usefulness was regarded as a trait of ordinary persons. And this sort of distinction of pure learning and self cultivation was regarded as a kind of upper middle class trait the trait of an elite. And to that degree education in being educated in Europe had I think for most of the 19th century and up to the present day a kind of significance for people social standing and their whole person their whole outlook that it has not in general had in America. I mean we have counterparts of that but the American system for one thing never functioned with that degree of integration into people affectional the training in other words in America higher education didn't have the sort of significance that it had in Germany of training high officials theologians et cetera. It was from the beginning a somewhat broader and looser

thing. Thus when in America education expanded in the late 19th century in particular in the interwar period it was really of other undefined sense of what secondary and higher education meant that was extended to a much broader population. The difference between the educated person and the on education person has been a great social difference in Europe. It has been significantly less of a difference in this country. If one can talk relatively one should say that in this country it is well that is the principal sign of social distance. Whereas in Europe differences of education and therefore of style and outlook and status we certainly have relieved in my mind since you tell me that wealth was a symbol of status. I feel much better about it that I now have no status to talk. Let me ask you a question. Let me give an observation in Fleet Street in London. I find there's a hangover of what you said about class and the purposes of higher education. They do not

believe it necessary to hire people for the professions of journalism a mass communication of any knowledge at all they they like to get boys who are 15 years of age to become runners or fetch limbo and then have them sent out on small stories and and that tradition goes on and they really don't understand what the Americans are all about trying to train people. Let's turn from them to women. Say in Germany. Yeah as late as the. 30s before the Nazis came in only about something like 5 percent was it the total student body was women and now it's not very high either that or 20 percent. Yes there has been development of education for women has been much lower in Europe than in this country in the 20th century and in fact really secondary education for women in France and Germany didn't really become common at all common really until the 1920s i.e. until the interwar period. And that again partly because the

significance of education was so closely linked to the learned occupations that doctors etc. that it was in general not thought that women needed that kind of training. I happened to go to a high school in New York State Rochester and so on. And I went through the regents examination system and I was struck by the fact that in German education was a very clear sense of a stab of examinations which you know very profound this is true in France as well as right even more so in France even it's also in France now is to turn to France for a moment. It is my impression that the higher jobs in France in the scientific fields go to people who graduate from one or two or three Polytechnic and if you don't come from there you're not wearing the right time. Is this a new kind of class and caste. Well we're talking about the so-called gangs it cause in France a few of them they call Polytechnic called Normal have been since the

19th century sort of the most elite institutions of higher education they're distinctive. As compared for example with with the French with a German an English systems in that they are non-university institutions of higher education. There are universities in France but unlike in other countries the top prestige institutions are these small non-university institutions rather than university government tends to hire from from them the civil service higher echelon tends to come from there and the the military advisors tend to from those places yes. So they have a pretty much wrapped up. I mean in a sense before the universities really developed in France these were state schools and state training schools for an elite that was going to be in dominant position in the state administration. Let's say also in things like civil engineering and so on. So the linkage of higher education to functions within the officialdom within the bureaucracy the state bureaucracy

gave those schools that confer those positions of particularly high prestige and in France while university education has not been let's say as rare in terms of its social prestige as in Germany for example. The top positions have consistently gone to graduates of these clowns of color which were in general kind of a special enclave for the upper middle class and are to this day to this day in France a position in some of these go on to call secure a way into a high position in France then a place at the university. Well in to move on to the ordinary people. The the emphasis in the United States is upon education for everyone right. In France if we look back upon the rioting in Paris in 1968 one of the student demands was that there were actually no physical places for them if they wanted to go to class they had to buy

notes from professors who made a living with their poor salaries selling notes and they wanted to leave. This is true in Italy as well. They wanted the system to become more democratic at least by way of providing a place for them is this a rip current. Point of agitation. Well yes it's been a recurrent difficulty. But you know I've got an anecdote of my own about that. You know I listened. I think it was in 69 to a debate between somebody from the French Minister of Education one of the student leaders and the Minister of Education said look we only need so many doctors and lawyers et cetera and it went through the upper professions. Therefore we can't have any more students at the university level. The student leaders answer was if we had any kind of decent health service in this country we'd have a lot more doctors. We need many more in these positions and we at present have. But what was interesting about that is that neither side thought for example that it was all

right to have a university educated salesman or a plumber or carpenter. That is what both sides seem to agree on implicitly that university education was for people of a certain sort going to professions of a certain sort i.e. the traditionally academic profession. Now in this country it seems to me rather quickly you had let's say business men sending their children to colleges possibly you know to join fraternities and learn how to dance and make social contact. But afterwards to go into business therefore in this country partly because there wasn't the exam system and the linkage to the bureaucracy in specific professions from the beginning in higher education was a social asset moralist distributable to anybody. And when you had a college education that didn't automatically qualify you for certain specific positions. In some sense you could summarize it by saying that in this country advanced education has meant less in terms of what it's given you in the way of status and power but it has for that very reason

been more broadly available and it has itself served less as a class or status criterion in that sense the American system is more democratic. I find in the book for example that in terms of actual social mobility. The expansion of educational opportunities either in Europe or at a more advanced level in this country has not apparently dramatically increased opportunity social mobility and those things. Therefore the significance for a society of having large number of educated people is really in no way to devalue the having of an education as a kind of sign of social superiority. Well unless unless you do another thing at the same time that you're broadening the educational base and that is to increase the educational standard but broadening the educational base by bringing everybody to also I watch University as you say seems to devalue. But see I don't think that I wouldn't want to devalue education as an intellectual or personal experience. But I have nothing against the value of a devaluing of

education as a kind of social chit. In other words I have no interest and I think Americans ought to have no interest in training people. It's sending people to higher education for the sake of their being able to use that as counters in the sauna but we do that. For example it used to be said I think it still is true that if you went to the Johns Hopkins university you went to Harvard University Yale Princeton brown and so on you had a chip too too. When your daughter went into the law firm a washout. Now I think that's still true. Yes but I think it's to some degree but I say the very fact that you've got a whole rank order of colleges in other words if you didn't go to Johns Hopkins you still went to college and after a while it's not too significant what college you went to. It's almost as the as though the American system were were so to speak devised to hide differences in educational quality whereas the European system by having a uniform education and then or no if you had advanced education at all is designed

to emphasize the difference between the highly educated and the non educate frittering or toward the end of the book you suggest that we are beginning to worry and wonder in all countries of the West what we're doing with universities and what they stand for. Where do you think we're heading with universities what what will they stand for if they. Obviously you cannot go to learn everything about your trade or profession. Obviously you cannot go there anymore to get a social standing that is immutable. Then you also said that the higher education plant seems to mirror the changes in society where are we heading now. That's a tall order. I think that on the whole the expansion of let's say the percentage of an age group that reaches higher education will continue. That means that education as a social counter as as as a social advantage will lose in significance. And

the question is whether we can live with that trend. That is that brings with it certain advantages and certain pains the pains that bring with it brings with it are felt oftentimes by students who go to university and whose parents and who perhaps themselves believe that going to a college or university will give them access to certain kinds of positions. And whoso as we get to the university only to find that everybody else is already there and who quite naturally assume that maybe what they're going to get doesn't have the kind of job value and social value that perhaps we have a problem when we have something I've forgotten with the latest figures but something like 8 million plus students yes out of a population of 200 20 million. We also have another problem in there with the evaluation of the university in terms of social standing as the minorities are beginning to. Good opportunity to come to the university. The university is at war with itself as to what it is offering. It may be that the minorities will feel cheated.

It's as though they've been wrestling to get a slice of a pie which once they finally get it turns out not to be as nourishing in terms of its social and professional yield or access possibilities that it provides as perhaps initially they thought. I think we're getting into a situation where education is so to speak a necessary but not a sufficient condition for advancements and I was we don't get it. You have trouble getting any kind of decent job if you do have it you're not guaranteed anything and I think that's painful. That's the pain of the kind of devaluation I talk about now in another sense so I think it does bring certain advantages. I mean I think there's something about the old tradition of gratuitous education of nonprofessional EDUCATION OF GENERAL of humanistic education which perhaps will survive in a new form in this environment an environment in which education can be pursued so to speak for its own sake because it is no longer

as much of a chit in the social game as perhaps it used to be. And also partly in an environment where the sort of the sort of let's say. Elite character of nonprofessional education that it used to have in Europe can be made available to can be made can be made less elite sounding as so to speak nonprofessional broader education becomes a pertinent to a larger larger numbers of all of this is true and the whole demand for relevance instead of becoming relevant to some large corporation or to the use of the slide rule of the computer becomes a relevancy to my future life the relevance in you to my understanding. It may be that this shift in in understanding of what universities do in the West is perhaps the most significant thing that is happening in terms of human freedom that maybe we have been through enough of the technology of the last 200 years to return to our roots as it were and discover the university again.

That's why I feel in fact very strongly that as the as education is more broadly available as it becomes to some degree unhooked from the issue of job qualification it takes on the one hand a more personal significance something we want for our private lives so that we can read books and on the other hand something that has a civic relevance to us. In other words the old notion that you must be educated to a certain level to resist tyrants and demagogues and bad propaganda that sort of civic and the personal meaning of education one can hope will will re-emerge in a way as the. The sense of the relationship between education and the specific job is diluted but aren't we also going to if we're realistic also going to have a fight with the cretins in the hedonists and the people who are going to fight to the last the last classroom to defend what they have created an image of the university as being something that provides you with a non humanistic

approach to life but something that prepares you for 40 50 $60000 a year. Well I think the thing about those people is that gradually they're beginning to learn that a good education does not in fact guarantee you 40 or 50000 or that position at the top of some organization or some professional needs that it used to guarantee you. And as that's more obvious it's sort of by default on most of that the rest of us who think that education is personally relevant are sort of in control of the future. Is it possible that we may even resurrect the reputation of the professorial group to bring them some some standard of respect or at least admiration or at least some some degree of acceptance in our society. Well I think I personally think that professors in all societies have not been nearly as looked down upon as they like to think of themselves as being.

And I really think that the problem of the professoriate is not the problem of being underestimated or taken lightly it's the problem of wrestling with colleagues who have been devaluing the professoriate. I think it's that part of not being taken seriously in their work in their education. It is a problem of being over identified again with access to upper social positions. I think that's bad for the professoriate and the way a genuinely interested student sees a professor is not as a as a person that's going to help him get a good job but if someone is going to help him think I know my own field maybe we may even be able to escape that would science which became so paramount in political science departments may actually be able to be called politics departments again and talk about the polars of the cosmopolitan metropolitan nature of love affairs frittering or I find your your book education in society even in modern Europe which will be published by the Indiana University Press instructive

and indeed intriguing. So I want to thank you for it and a brash one. One last word that I might ask you is there great hope in in Western Europe for higher education furthering democracy. Yes I think I think there's a possibility of that. Well I'm going to leave our our listeners with that and a good thought for this edition. Bernard Reuben. The First Amendment and a free people a weekly examination of civil liberties and the media program is produced in cooperation with the Institute for democratic communication at Boston University. I don't know you GBH radio Boston which is solely responsible for its Carter. This is the station program exchange.