ABSTRACT
The polytechnical principle has become one of the major components of communist educational theory and practice in recent years. It is intended to contribute decisively to the unification of school and life, and to constitute an essential foundation for linking school instruction with productive work. Yet the word “polytechnic” itself is not new. For Western European students it will be associated with the idea of an educational institution offering high-level training in several technologies, such as the French “école polytechnique” and the Regent Street “Poly” in London. This coincidence of terminology is in some ways unfortunate, as the social and educational philosophies underlying these usages are quite other than those underlying the modern communist use of the word. For the true origins of the modern concept of polytechnic education we have to turn, not to institutions bearing that name, but to the educational ideals of social reformers; for the idea is not merely the basis for modifications in the curriculum, or for the imparting of technological bias to traditional subjects, but is a fundamental principle embedded in the educational system emerging from a radical transformation of society and a radical reassessment of the nature of man and of his place in his society and in the cosmos. For this reason, although communist educationists pay some tribute to the so-called Utopian socialists of earlier times, such as Thomas More, Thomas Campanella, Charles Fourier and Robert Owen, and although they date the beginnings of modern didactics to Ratke and Comenius, they attribute to Karl Marx the credit for the first valid systematic formulation of educational theory. These and other earlier thinkers may have seen into the ills of their own societies, and may have produced creditable schemes for the extension and improvement of education, but only one who was simultaneously educator, economist, and revolutionary could, we are told, see into the character of polytechnic education as an integral part of a socialist society of which it shares the historical inevitableness. 1
