ON MASS EDUCATION AND HERETIC BREED OF INTELLECTUALS

Theodore Zeldin, France, 1848-1945, Volume Two; Intellectual, Taste and Anxiety (Oxford History of Modern Europe) (Oxford: Clarendon Press/Oxford U. Press, 1973) ("Do you know the Arab proverb: If you cannot kill your enemy, give him your daughter in marriage'" Id. at 1106. "Mass education had results which were of three difference kinds. First, it altered the character of politics. It made it possible for democracy and universal suffrage to function with greater reality; it vastly increased the possibilities of communication between the government and the people; it enabled the masses to watch over those whom they appointed to administer the country. But it also made them even more subject to propaganda and to brainwashing, and to persuasion that they should sacrifice their immediate interests and desires to supposedly more important national causes--such as glory or war--which their teachers had the task of enlightening them about. It increased their articulacy, but it also increased the power of the press, which simultaneously told them what to think and spoke in their name. It was in principle egalitarian, but in practice the very opposite, because there were so many different gradations in education that the possession simply of 'primary' education came to be held as a mark of inadequacy. The kind of education that was dispensed was in any case not necessarily democratic, for though the paternalist reformers who universalized it claimed they were doing so in order to educate the electorate--their new masters--the values preached by the teachers were not on the whole values inspired by the masses. Rather, mass education could be seen as an attempt by the elite to avoid a mass civilisation, and to impose aristocratic values on the people. The political significance of the Age of Education is thus ambiguous in the extreme and needs careful analysis." Id. at140-141. "A heretic breed of intellectual developed in the form of technocrats and technicians. These men relegated principle to a secondary place and raised the efficient management of society into a sufficient activity. By concentrating on action they won a directing  position in both the political and economic spheres. The distinction between intellectuals and technocrats was a subtle one; the two were not always mutually exclusive." Id. at 1128.).