Intellectual excellence requires mechanically coerced psycho-physical habits from childhood.

Evidence

In education one is dealing with children in whom one has to inculcate certain habits of diligence, precision, poise (even physical poise), ability to concentrate on specific subjects, which cannot be acquired without the mechanical repetition of disciplined and methodical acts. Would a scholar at the age of forty be able to sit for sixteen hours on end at his work-table if he had not, as a child, compulsorily, through mechanical coercion, acquired the appropriate psycho-physical habits? If one wishes to produce great scholars, one still has to start at this point and apply pressure throughout the educational system in order to succeed in creating those thousands or hundreds or even only dozens of scholars of the highest quality which are necessary to every civilisation. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 358

Categorization

• XREF: Gramsci’s insistence that mechanical repetition produces embodied scholarly habits parallels the embodied, disciplinary self-formation themes central to colonial-psychology and selfhood readings later in the module.
• QUESTION: Gramsci defends ‘mechanical coercion’ in education — worth chasing how this reconciles with his democratic, anti-authoritarian impulses elsewhere in the Notebooks.