DOCUMENTS
L'EDUCATION SENTIMENTALE
Destroy the University
1.
The university cannot function; it must therefore be pre–
vented from functioning so that this incapacity may become clear. No
reform of any kind can make this institution viable; we must therefore
combat reforms (their practical effects as well as their theoretical justi–
fications) not because they are dangerous but because they are illusory.
The crisis of the institution of the university, as we shall see, goes be–
yond the realm of the university and includes the social and technical
division of labor in its entirety; this crisis must therefore break out.
The moment and the method of bringing this about are subject to
discussion. They are more or less satisfactory. But discussion and crit–
icism can be valuably carried on only by those who recognize that it
is necessary to reject reformism in every area.
2. The origin of the crisis of the university, in France, can be
found in the early sixties in the Fouchet reforms. When the majority
of an age group tends to compete for the
baccalaureat,
and when the
majority of successful candidates tends to enter the university, the
mechanisms of social selection established by the bourgeoisie are under
strong attack; its ideology and its institutions are in crisis.
The ideology of the educational system is
equality of opportunity
for social advancement
by means of education. This equality, as Bour–
dieu and Passeron have demonstrated, has always been fictitious. Never–
theless, the mechanisms and the criteria of student selection were, in
the past, "objective" enough so that their class character and their
arbitrariness were masked: one was eliminated or accepted on the basis
of a group of "aptitudes" and "skills" defined once and for all. Tradi–
tionally, the left fought not against the class criteria of selection-
Destroy the University
first appeared in
Les Temps Modernes,
April 1970. Copy–
right
©
I~JO
by
Les Temps Modernes.
