PARTISAN REVIEW
321
form. Their general revolutionary culture is as distant from reality, as
little operative, as the general bourgeois culture they denounce. The
lengthening of the time spent in school, combined with the growth of
the number of students, has made the university a magic circle within
which masses of the young are concentrated, artificially maintained in
the state of prolonged minors. Left without responsibilities, they become
irresponsible.
Let's not disguise the fact: two years ago, it was their situation in
a waking dream that enabled them to shake off the false consciousness,
the deceptive constraints, in which French society had fallen asleep–
a historic moment, a moment that has passed. Utopia has lost its de–
sanctifying force: nonconformity has lost its scandalous quality. The
hardest thing remains to be done:
to
participate in real struggles. The
time is past when the intellectuals could, from the outside, bring "class
consciousness" to the laboring masses; from now on it is only from inside
society that social criticism can arise.
That is why, rather than destroying the university, the revolution–
ary students should struggle to dissociate it from the two permanent
bodies that monopolize it: students and professors. To put an end to
the chronological dissociation between student life and active life is to
permit social experience
to
penetrate the domain of study, to permit social
criticism to penetrate the domain of life.
We would therefore have to envisage, beginning now, a new course
of study in which, after a necessary period of full-time instruction
concentrated especially on the acquisition of basic languages (French,
foreign languages, mathematics, the arts), instruction would overlap
with active life. This mixed period should itself be on a sliding scale:
at the beginning, time devoted to instruction should be preponderant
and only diminish progressively, without ever disappearing. From now
on, school and university training at the beginning of life should no
longer be considered anything but a particular form of permanent
training.
Let us add that this drastic transformation of the student condi–
tion is also justified on pedagogic grounds by the difficulty, which in–
creases with age, of acquiring knowledge out of simple natural curiosity,
without precise motivation, without a definite objective.
It
is the con–
crete experience of his lacunae in the course of work or research which
leads anyone to constitute for himself a more coherent and deeper
culture.
I will no doubt be accused of proposing the "professionalization"
of the university - while it's a question of exactly the opposite - on
