The Religious or the Secular?

AFTER THE OBSCURANTISTS OF THE CHURCH, HERE COME THE STUPEFYING charlatans of the secular.

What we see going on around kids is an ignoble dispute between parties and sects. They hold the future in their frail little hands, and people are afraid they don’t want to keep to the straight and narrow road and stay within the routine.

And everyone attacks them in a dispute to see who will mold their nascent intelligent to his profit, so that tomorrow they’ll be the sustaining herd, the docile herd of slaves to be sheared and killed.

In the end this is nothing but a fight to exploit this source of wealth. Who will these children be the slaves of? Which dogma, which party will exploit them? Who will they expend their strength and energy for, who will they spill their blood for in the impending slaughterhouses? This is the question.

Will it be in the name of God, for those who dominate by faith, mystical terrors, and inquisitions? Will it be in the name of great fantastic principles, for those who dominate by corruption?

The fight is a bitter one, like all clashes of interests, and will not end soon. For the moment, in a more immediate way, it’s a matter of an electoral campaign, skillfully begun with pro-Ferrer agitation and skillfully continued by the defense of the secular. Isn’t it touching to see anarchists, syndicalists, and parliamentarians fraternizing on the stage? Everyone for the secular! The old farce of the Dreyfus Affair (everyone for the truth!) is beginning once again, showing how true it is that history is a perpetual starting over and that man’s naïveté is unlimited. And isn’t this understandable, since almost everyone has passed through the secular or the religious? With minds steeped either in God by priests or in the state, the sad farces from which we suffer can begin over and over again. There’s no risk that these men will see clearly!

The blindfold that tomorrow’s secularists will put over their eyes is more serious than the old-fashioned religion that every day crumbles a bit more. They’ll no longer be taught the divine legends and they’ll be ignorant of the dream of paradise and the terrors of hell. But they’ll venerate the fatherland, expect everything from beneficent reforms and will live in the respect and fear of the Law. Or else—and doubtless a bit later—they’ll venerate the collectivity and the State and will work at building geometrical cities. There will no longer be either believers or subjects: we’ll all be citizens of the republic or the new socialist order, unified, unionized. And we’ll continue to follow the shepherds to the great abattoirs where treasure of life will be swallowed up in passivity, obedience, and resignation.

The secularist will substitute the breviary of the perfect citizen, the rules of the party and the union card for the Roman catechism. The trade is worth all the trouble!

The role of the secular or the religious school is to prepare children for social life, to adapt them to an unhealthy and irrational environment by annihilating their instinct for revolt and their faculties of logic and initiative. Society wants servile automata for its barracks and factories, and the mission of schools is to provide them. The secular school can be nothing but a factory for soldiers, good workers, and good bosses; a damper and a place of rot.

If it’s republican, socialist, syndicalist, or even anarchist (for those who, by anarchism, mean a body of established doctrines), any school in service to a party or a sect can only be a marvelous tool of enslavement. It will make believers in this or in that; it will engrave in minds new dogmas in place of the old and prepare people for new enslavements. It will kill the individual.

To be member of a sect, to accept a doctrine means thinking as part of a group. Thinking as a gang, with and through others, means no longer thinking for oneself. It is in this way that the individual disappears, drowned in the anonymous crowd of followers, and its passivity perpetuates the murderous oppressions that prevent it from tasting life.

Does the secular teacher, similar in this to the priest, worry himself about creating a determined, strong, independent man? No. In the first place, this isn’t his mission. He is paid to teach for the profit of those who pay him. And then, even if he wanted to he couldn’t, disciplinary measures cutting short any reforming desires. In any case, even if he were allowed to do so he would collide with insurmountable obstacles: the methods, the very principle of education.

Experienced educators have often said this. Spencer, Letourneau, Laisant have laid bare the profound vices of the methods currently in use, an authoritarian education appealing not to the student’s critical faculties and intelligence, but to his memory. The latter need not know; he must admit, believe, and retain. “This is how it is.” “Why?” asks the child, eager to understand. “Because this is how it is!” And let him not try to reason by himself. From which flows the certain destruction of his powers of reasoning and understanding. The child enters school with his intelligence growing, alert and wanting to blossom. He leaves it stuffed with a priori notions, knowing how to believe but incapable of knowing, stupefied.

All dogmatic methods of education unfailingly arrive at these results. Whatever its label, school will produce dried fruits.

Other factors enter into play that must be mentioned. For example, the defective conditions of hygiene and discipline. These, you might say, can be remedied. But as long as schooling is either secular or religious we cannot prevent the depressing effects of study in herds from occurring. In order to fully develop the child must take up the habit of thinking alone and for himself. This should be the sole concern of the educator. How far we are from this.

We are still far from this. But this isn’t a reason for us to take sides in the sad quarrel between secular and religious stupefiers. The difference between them is too small for us to have any preferences. And knowing that every transaction is a diminishment, we have no other way of comporting ourselves than as demolishers.

If the handful of comrades who have been made dizzy by the rhetoric of secularist charlatans saw the horrifying labor of death daily carried out by secular and religious schools; if they took the trouble to observe in real life their pitiful products, the prodigious forces annihilated, the countless minds, innovations, and wills destroyed, they would quickly get a grip on themselves. And when in the morning light they’d see children joyfully bearing their energy to the damper, they too will want to shout at them: “Don’t go there … Flee! … Go play, go anywhere, but don’t go in there. People are perverted there, castrated, killed!”

(l’anarchie, January 20, 1910)