Ideologie of Education - Destutt de Tracy

Napoleon contemptuously referred to France's foremost ideologist, Destutt de Tracy, as an ideologue once the Ideologists were of no further use to him. They had presumed to preach political science from their chairs at the Institute of Political and Moral Sciences. Napoleon, who had an honorary chair there, did an about face and called the Institute of "miserable metaphysicians" a "college of atheists."

The notions of the founders of ideologie (the science of ideas) posed a threat to Napoleon's conservative authoritarian regime, but the Ideologists were by no means radical republicans (democrats) or Jacobins: they were intellectual elitists. Tracy wanted to provide a high education to the elite,  those who had sufficient leisure to receive it because of their social status. He had little confidence in popular public education except as a device to inculcate republican principles in the lower classes. By "republican principles," in this case we mean bourgeois representative republicanism versus Crown and Church, and, of course, an educated elite versus the irrational masses. Needless to say, the Ideologists had their aristocratic prejudices: Tracy was one of the largest landed proprietors and absentee landlords in France, one who believed in economic determinism and who complained, when his rational agenda was opposed by the irrational self-interest of members of his own class, that it was of no avail to tell the idle rich that they were good for nothings.

On February 22,1799,  Tracy joined a council convened to establish public policy on education - the Council on Public Instruction - and proceeded to describe his ideological education program. Tracy divided humankind into "two species of man" - manual and intellectual workers. Children born into the manually laboring class would get a primary education, while those born into the educated class would get an intellectual or higher education, via the ecoles central.  As far as Tracy was concerned, it was better to get no education at all than a bad education - in useless Latin and metaphysics. Therefore in France a master course in Ideologie was to take precedence over all other courses. An education in this improved course of moral (mental) and political science - ala the sensationalists Locke and Condillac - would be a prerequisite to obtaining public employment.

Students of Ideologie would learn from previous analysts how to analyze ideas, boil off metaphysical vapors, reduce nebulous notions to elementary ideas. This course would of course enable them to think for themselves instead of relying on traditional authority. Ideologie, we should note again, was the tail end of the Enlightenment, and as such was suffering the Romantic reaction to Reason. Tracy had his own doubts about the utility of his ideologie, yet he hoped it would help wipe priests and kings - who had waged war on genuine knowledge (science) since the time of Pythagoras - from the face of the Earth.

Tracy was too late, or he was ahead of his time. Napoleon's public, fearing further "excesses" of the Revolution, was generally hostile to his "anti-religious" imposition of an enlightened or reasonable curriculum for the education of the sons of France. The Romantic reaction naturally opposed heretical, anti-authoritarian ideas, especially those ideas included in revolutionary arguments which made too much common sense.

"I see the fury of destroying everything," complained Tracy in his 1801 Project d' elements d' ideology a l'usage ecoles centrales de le Republique francois, "has been replaced by the mania of allowing nothing to be established and that, under the pretext of hating the Revolution, a war has been declared on everything it has produced. This is the fashion...."

Not all Frenchmen, however, found Tracy's ideological course reprehensible. Teachers, on the whole, liked the imposed course in Ideologie, even though they had little academic freedom to vary from the course - only the Rhenish departments favored the German idealists over Locke and Condillac. A number of parents also approved of the enlightened education of their children. Tracy valiantly defended the ideological program of education on the basis of the real improvements already made in the field, but Napoleon Bonaparte and the press were fulminating against it. The Council of Public Instruction was suppressed, then dissolved by Lucien Bonaparte in 1800.

"Why should anyone want to silence the organs of the political and moral sciences," an angry parent asked, "when every citizen who knows and respects his dignity cries out with the Constituent Assembly that ignorance, forgetfulness, or the disdain of the rights of man are the sole causes of public calamities and the corruption of government?"

The purge of the Ideologists (now called "vermin") from their seats in the Tribunate and Legislature began in 1802. The Concordat with the Church was passed - even the atheists were in favor of it since they believed Catholicism would keep order among the ingorant public. The romantically inclined Chateaubriand, an old friend of the Ideologists, published the greatest apology for Christianity ever, Genie du chirstianisme. The preface eulogizes Napoleon.

"All metaphysics," declared Chateaubriand, "which is separate from theology is futile because it lacks purpose."

Ideologie, particularly the courses in political and moral science, was purged from France's school system and replaced by military courses and training. Political economics, however, was retained. On the other hand, in the United States of America, Thomas Jefferson, a son of the French Enlightment, deleted Theology from his curriculum and inserted Ideology.