Education is a formative struggle against biological instincts, not passive unwinding.

Evidence

Gino Capponi (1792-1876), educationalist, historian and politician, was the author of Frammento sull’educazione (1841), in which he expressed his scepticism about any attempt on the part of teachers to predetermine “from outside” the development of the “spiritual activity” of children. This type of Rousseauesque, liberal theory of learning is criticised by Gramsci, e.g. Int. p. 115: “it is believed that a child’s mind is like a ball of string which the teacher helps to unwind. In reality each generation educates the new generation, i.e. forms it, and education is a struggle against instincts linked to the elementary biological functions, a struggle against nature, to dominate it and create the ‘contemporary’ man of the epoch.” — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2031

Categorization

• XREF: Gramsci’s critique of the ‘ball of string’ child-mind theory is his education version of the anti-spontaneous, anti-liberal stance — connects to his core scaffolding concepts (hegemony, formation of the ‘contemporary man’) that later Islamophobia readings will draw on for how subjects are actively formed rather than naturally developing.
• QUESTION: How does Gramsci’s formation-as-struggle contrast with the Rousseauesque liberal model map onto later theories of colonial subject formation? A parallel worth chasing when reading Fanon’s colonial psychology.