322
JACQUES
JULLIARD
the pretext that a certain fraction of the ruling classes could
be
at–
tracted by such proposals. But you have to make a choice: no matter
what position you adopt on the subject of education, you will always
have compromising allies. I am in any case convinced that as long as
the act of studying
is confined to a certain age group, it will also be
confined to a certain social class.
2. The Abolition of the Teaching Profession.
The reasons that
have led us to demand the abolition of student status lead us to de–
mand, in parallel fashion, the abolition of the teaching profession, at
least in higher education. The role of social critic cannot be valuably
held by a regulated group at a distance from society. All instruction
should come from science and/or experience, and not from a social in–
vestiture as much a mystification for the one who receives it as for
others. One can only really teach what one has known and experienced.
This real knowledge can be of a speculative (research) or a practical
(professional and social activity) order; for, if we proceed otherwise,
if we conceive of formal education as the necessary and qualified
mediator of an entire intellectual field, teaching can only be
repetition
l
given over to the policing of university apprenticeship, whose language
is nothing but the shortest road from the professor's textbook to the
student's mind.
Besides, once all the tasks of instruction in society are no longer
carried on by professional educators, we can wonder if those educators
can reasonably continue to consider themselves as a monopoly corpora–
tion. Their claim to possess and distribute the totality of knowledge
is
challenged by everyone's daily experience. Therefore, every teacher
must accept for himself the necessity to look for his knowledge
else–
where,
and that for that purpose
he must do something else.
From that
point on, the teaching profession is no longer anything but a particular
form of the teaching function which
is
incumbent upon the whole
of
society;
the proclamation of the right for everyone to study according
to his needs and to teach
accordin~
to his capacities is the chief means
at our command, thanks to the struggle inside and outside the univer–
sity, to abolish the social curse that weighs upon manual labor and to
progressively abolish the social division of labor.
Jacques Julliard
(Translated from the French by George Holoch)
1.
Translator's note: Pun in French on
repetiteur:
tutor.
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