As far as I am aware, Georg Simmel never wrote an essay about education. But Simmel’s set of concepts were comprehensive and theoretical enough to be applied to any number of social phenomenon, what he called “formal”, which included all the parts essential to the very fact of bei9ng part of social engagement, such as conflict or hierarchy, and matters to be regarded by Simmel as “historical”, which met structures originated in time and therefore to adapt and decay, such as socialism or democracy. It should be noted that American functionalists thought that social structures were permanent or more or less so rather than historically contingent.According to Parsons, bureaucracies performed a useful function and so existed at least as long as the pyramids. Simmel, however, was more concerned about formal matters and so the establishment of education is an application of a possibility that exists in all social relationships, which is the secret society, and so let us see how education has always been and is still presently an example of a secret society and how that is a profound criticism of what is happening to education in the past few generations.
A secret society is a group whose members share a fact that is not disclosed to those who are not members. It is a possibility available to any group because of the power that information has to remain undisclosed and it leads to a solidarity of the members and makes them feel special. Such secret societies such as the Free Masons and college fraternities have secrets that are trivial other than that they are closely hidden and so overtly attest to the distinctiveness of the group, but there are other less trivial secret societies have important secrets that have a major impact on societies, Highly classified matters of national security are closely monitored by government agencies and the attempt to gain access to them can be punished by death, as in the case of ethel and Julius Rosenberg, and an ex=President may soon be indicted for having treated some secret information cavalierly. Now it may be true that any group can be said to have secrets in the sense that members have accumulated the knowledge and lore of its organizational history, but it is not a secret society unless there is an effort to keep non disclosure in place and the secret to be retained as worth keeping. Married people have their secrets and, indeed, modern marriages are based on their sense of their own private dealings with one another, whether about sex or whether they know their favorite foods, noone else but a mother caring about some idiosyncratic ones, but that does not make it a secret society because modesty and an interest in someone else’s personal tastes are deeper matters having to do with intimacy while secret societies are deliberately organized for large numbers of people to share and guard its secrets.
A religion can be considered a secret society if we include it to mean the facts or beliefs that members of the group subscribe to even if not shared by the general population and also including the experiences that are affiliated with those members that arise from or are consequent to these beliefs.The members have some special knowledge or experience which they are graced to appreciate or fated by birth to become acquainted with. By and large, their rites and beliefs of the group are not secret in that people outside the group are kept hidden. With few exceptions, like the Mormons, people are free to visit the churches and synagogues and mosques. What is distinctive is that, for the most part, only believers would want to visit or participate in the communal activities as signs and gestures of an internal transformation of the ideas and spirit of the congregation. Each of those members have a secret, which is that particular belief or wish to exhibit having such a belief or experience that is shared with the other congregants that makes the person so special even if philosophically, as a limiting principle, there is no experience or knowledge available to the member that is not available to an outsider other than the declaration of having experienced and known the idea as true and the experience as special. A non believer can also study the Bible and know the emotions associated with original sin or redemption through suffering but are not members of the body because they do not ascribe to it, endorse it or identify with it. The consequence of that peculiar standard of exclusivity means that a member of this secret society is recognized by its fidelity to its truth rather than to the tests by which its truths are demonstrated when supposedly a science is disciplined by its experiments and theory as those are available through the exercises of those who pursue the advancement and the distribution of truths that are ascertained and amplified. Religions, therefore, are secret in the additional sense of how deeply they each personally sense their awe at the beliefs and experiences that unfold from their religion. A priest or congregant may not disclose their innermost feelings and ideas not only because they might be subject to have the platitudes of a faith disproven or simply superficial but also because it would be immodest to openly avow what is held so close and intimate to an idea and experience.
Now to education, which is unique in the exact sense that there is nothing at all like it in the social or metaphysical world in that it is a transaction where people do not surrender a good when educational information is transmitted to a stu8dent. Indeed. People say that they learn something better when they are required to explain their knowledge to someone else. Teachers may surrender a time to service a customer, the student, but that is to pay for the convenience of engaging in the enterprise rather than something about information itself even if the entrance way into education costs considerable amounts of money and people may softguard through patents and copyrights the access to information, these precisely because it is useful to monetize information because information is in itself free floating. It goes against the grain of education to think of culture as a property of an ethnic group or a nation, culturally exploited by other people, because the knowledge cuts across boundaries, free to influence anyone, whether the African roots of music, like jazz, or the wisdom of the Buddha, because it is in human nature to be curious and become subject to the ideas and experiences created by other people, everyone assimilable to other cultures and therefore assimilated from them.
That makes education similar but not the same thing as religion in that the validation of the knowledge and experience of a religion comes from the affirmation of the co-congregants and so is a matter of fidelity even if education differs from religion in that it has to do with the internally tested rational truths when religion, as Saint Augustine said, can explain what of its truths it can explain, such as the trinity, while not explaining what it can't explain, such as how people in Heaven can be reunited with their families when there are multiple past generations as well as multiple future generations. Presumably, there is no limit to dealing more deeply with matters of knowledge even while admitting that there are limits about what is yet known about evolution or the theory of narrative.Yes, education is an endless inquiry into science and reason, and certainly so since Plato went on this inquiry, and therefore contrary to the folklore and dogmas which are present in religion and other kinds of organized examination. Education is therefore a subject of which societies are always wary because there is no telling where it can go.
Here is a way to understand outside of Simmel how an educational institution is a secret society. Lawrence Lafore was a professor of history at an elite college. He wrote a novel in the Sixties about college life, but about education itself rather than the bonding and long time friendships of classmates, as in Mary MacCarthy’s “The Group”. Lafore sharply distinguished the facty, who were educated, to the undergraduates, who were not, and indeed, entitled the novel “Learner’s Permit” to provide an analogy to what was happening to them. The great divide consisted in that the faculty knew what it was to be educated. I presume that to mean that each of them had become familiar enough with the ideas and subject matters and their traits of reasoning whereby they could be said to know history or biology or physics so that despite the difference between the arts and sciences, each of them knew how to analyze themselves and the world around them and so were part of that elite who had been transformed into becoming members of the secret society which was in the know of what knowing was while students were just trying out or honing their knowledge and analytic skills partly by conversing with one another and reading books but mostly by being exposed to the already educated people who were their teachers. Students were trying out their sails learning how to prepare essays and experiments and how to argue. The students were acolytes while the faculty exuded their learning both in the classroom and in casual conversation. Often encouraged to have dinner with the students so that the faculty would ‘rub off' onto the students, pick up the magic of becoming educated. An attempt to write about Tolstoy honed a student’s ability to apply the jaundiced perspective the student developed so that they could look analytically and objectively to the problems of managing a brand of soap flakes or hiring and firing subordinates in a company. Or so people thought at the time. The illuminated ones transferred their consciousness to those of the postulants so that they might have that new consciousness, as that was measured by the number of courses and years of exposure as being sufficient to do the job.
This process of enlightenment occurred on all levels of education. Elementary school teachers were more organized and articulate than their students even if they knew only the same things that most adults did but were able to convey the students in a way that was more easily accumulated than if the students had tried by trial and error to pick up some education. Education, as opposed to learning, was purposive, while learning happened anywhere and anytime were a young person to notice that they were influenced by their elders. Direct instruction was distinctive even if students also noticed the practices that students could pick up from interacting with teachers from a higher social class than their own. A fourth grade teacher always had a copy of the Times under her arm when she came to school, which suggested that it was a better paper, one to be emulated, rather than the Daily News or the Journal-Ameri9can,. But I was more importantly corrected when I faked it and described the Seminole Indians as having teepees rather than huts and was grateful that she did not inquire further. I had to sustain and improve my standards. By satisfying teachers, I satisfied myself and so became a bit more of the educated.
Here is another non-Simmelian way to see that education is a secret society. Knowledge, once “acquired”, or whatever other metaphor is used to describe that it becomes understood to a person, is unalienable in that it is a part of a person/s identity, what seems inevitable to them, just as in the other cases of inalienability, such as rights nopticed by and fundamental with Jefferson, sexual attractions, whereby a person seems as if their object, whether polymorphous or not, cannot be otherwise, or land before the time of the Enclosure Acts.You can’t or couldn’t sell land and you only with great difficulty give up what you know. It may well be true that there can be a decay of learning, such as happens when people are not in school because of Covid, but just think of knowledge as a matter of degree: things deeply learned stay with you, are “part” of you, while an only passing acquaintance with calculus will allow forgetting the rules for differentiation. But something solidly placed makes it very difficult to think you cannot think of not knowing it. An amnesia of prior ignorance arises. Was there a time when you couldn’t add up a column of numbers? That is stable in your mind even if you have other forms of amnesia or forget who preceded Grover Cleveland as President, much less use your personal devices for reasoning, such as providing examples or distinguishing metaphors from exact and denotative terms. To do so is to be what you are and so that amalgam of ideas and facts and forms of reasoning, when sufficiently complex and honed, make you an enlightened person, part of the cognoscenti, a member of those who can do those cognitive things, and so different from those who cannot, always beholden to those mentors who provider standards, while the outsiders manage as best they can without self-consciously acquiring their mental apparatus.
Simmel view of education, however much abstracted to be a characteristic of an essential aspect of social relations, rather than the way of education in a particular nation,is in fact in keeping with the German tradition of education which goes back to Kant, which is that educational institutions should be autonomous institutions so that they can pursue their peculiar and esoteric activity of transmitting and enhancing knowledge and thought. Kant’s view was that academic institutions could do that, retain their academic freedom, by eschewing interests in politics so as not to get constrained by governments. The more familiar version of that idea is Weber’s idea of education as a vocation, similar to a religious calling, where people are devoted to their scholarship and their objectivity, never mind the political and other distractions, which makes Weber’s view founded on a psychological propensity to learning for its own sake, while Simmel emphasizes the secretiveness itself for the institution, more like a monastery than, as in Weber, the person who is monastic.
All three Germans sharply differ from Durkheim’s view of French education, whereby the purpose of education is to buttress and further the lore and values of the nation, to make education an instrument rather than independent of the state. Education has a function in the social order rather than a reason for itself, worthwhile in itself, though, of course, French education, back down to the Scholastics , were enquirers so as to inquire. Moreover, American education was also seen as an extension of the state because it would educate the masses of the people so that they were trained for work as well as to meet the elements of citizenship , turning the school into a factory made up of classrooms as cells for efficient production of these masteries.It is a good question whether any of these three educational models were better or different at achieving their goals. All three of them achieved widespread education and managed the transition from a classical; education to being the mixture of humanities and science that has prevailed until recently.
The underlying premise of Simmel’s view of education, as is the case with even so radically different a view as that of John Dewey, is that learning is indivisible. Whether a stu8dent devotes himself to one of the humanities or to one of the sciences, or to the applied disciplines of law or medicine, s person who masters a field has become informed with reason, that the person can think more clearly and can apply that to any endeavor, and so is akin to what psychometricians regard as the g factor that underlies whatever intelligence test is used to measure it. All learning is grist for the mill. As Alex Trebeck said, there are no trivial facts. A machinist working on confidence variances is using the same mathematics as those used in physics and the variations in argument when arguing about the reasons for the American Civil War are the same sort of arguments to explain the Age of Exploration: what are the economic and political reasons and how are they to be balanced? All knowledge serves reason, which is that undefinable property to which the illuminated of the secret society become ever more acquainted.
But what if that is no longer the case that reason is pervasive? What if there are only discrete bodies of knowledge and analysis that do not hone that single elemental trait? Rather than ask the philosophical issue of whether that is possible, that reason is divisible into types of reasoning, notice the institutional arrangements whereby education becomes regarded as divisible, separate areas where each is sufficient in its own right rather than becoming just more or less of the same thing so that people from Ivy League schools have superior amounts of knowledge and analysis than peop[le from junior colleges but sufficient for the knowledge and techniques to satisfy some occupational niche. After all, I have known mathematicians and medical doctors who have no sense of politics even if, on the other hand, Larry Tribe, the distinguished law professor, started out in life to be a mathematician. So it may be that reason is put aside and replaced by what is needed for mastery of the particular skill and knowledge and so regarded as a segment of what might be known. There would be a great number of secret societies rather than a single universal one, the customs differing the universal Church which by its nature cannot otherwise be exclusive, just as when Vatican II decided that everyone, Catholic or not, might respond to authentic religious feeling and so all part of human nature whether or not they affirmed allegiance to Catholicism. Each to their own coterie in education, as in religion, would seem to diminish the prospect, but the large-scale introduction of different curricula and intellectual orientations happening nowadays throughout higher education would seem to jeopardize that universalist dictum about education.