II.Practical Education.
§ 217. The truth of the solution of the beautiful individuality is the promise of the activity conformable to its purpose [i.e. teleological activity], which on the one hand considers carefully end and means, and on the other hand seeks to realize the end through the corresponding means, and in this deed subjects mere beauty of form. The practical individuality is therefore externally conditioned, since it is not its own end like the Beautiful, whether Stoical or Epicurean, but has an end, and finds its satisfaction not so much in this after it is attained as in the striving for its attainment.
§ 218. The education of this system begins with very great simplicity. But after it has attained its object, it abandons itself to using the results of æsthetic culture as a recreation without any specific object. What was to the Greeks a real delight in the Beautiful became therefore with the Romans simply an æsthetic amusement, and as such must finally be wearisome. The earnestness of individuality made itself in mysticism into a new aim, which was distinguished from the original one in that it concealed in itself a mystery and exacted a theoretically æsthetic practice.
§ 219. (1) The first epoch of Roman education, as properly Roman, was the juristic-military education of the republic. The end and aim of the Roman was Rome; and Rome, as from the beginning an eclectic state, could endure only while its laws and external politics were conformable to some end. It bore the same contradiction within itself as in its external attitude. This forced it into robbery, and the plebeians were related to the patricians in the same way, for they robbed them gradually of all their privileges. On this account education directed itself partly to giving a knowledge of the Law, partly to communicating a capacity for war. The boyswere obliged to commit to memory and recite the laws of the twelve tables, and all the youths were subject to military service. The Roman possessed no individuality of native growth, but one mediated through the intermingling of various fugitives, which developed a very great energy. Hence from the first he was attentive to himself, he watched jealously over the limits of his rights and the rights of others, measured his strength, moderated himself, and constantly guarded himself. In contrast with the careless cheerfulness of the Greeks, he therefore appears gloomy.
—The Latin tongue is crowded with expressions which paint presence of mind, effort at reflection, a critical attitude of mind, the importance of personal control: asgravitas morum, sui compos esse, sibi constare, austeritas, vir strenuus, vir probus, vitam honestam gerere, sibimet ipse imperare, &c. The Etruscan element imparted to this earnestness an especially solemn character. The Roman was no more, like the Greek, unembarrassed at naturalness. He was ashamed of nakedness;verecundia, pudor, were genuinely Roman.Vitam præferre pudoriwas shameful. On the contrary, the Greek gave to Greeks a festival in exhibiting the splendor of his naked body, and the inhabitants of Crotona erected a statue to Philip only because he was so perfectly beautiful. Simply to be beautiful, only beautiful, was enough for the Greek. But a Roman, in order to be recognized, must have done something for Rome:se bene de republica mereri.—
§ 220. In the first education of children the agency of the mother is especially influential, so that woman with the Romans took generally a more moral, a higher, and a freer position. It is worthy of remark that while, as the beautiful, she set the Greeks at variance, among the Romans, through her ethical authority, she acted as reconciler.
§ 221. The mother of the Roman helped to form his character; the father undertook the work of instruction. When in his fifteenth year the boy exchanged thetoga prætextatafor thetoga virilis, he was usually sent to some relative, or to some jurist, as his guardian, to learn thoroughly, under his guidance, of the laws and of the state; with the seventeenth began military service. All education was for a long time entirely a private affair. On account of the necessity ofa mechanical unity in work which war demands, the greatest stress was laid upon obedience. In its restricted sense education comprised Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic; the last being, on account of its usefulness, more esteemed by the Romans than by the Greeks, who gave more time to Geometry. The schools, very characteristically, were calledLudi, because their work was, in distinction from other practice, regarded simply as a recreation, as play.
—The Roman recognized with pride this distinction between the Greek and himself; Cicero's Introduction to his Essay on Oratory expresses it. To be practical was always the effort of the reflective character of the Romans, which was always placing new ends and seeking the means for their attainment; which loved moderation, not to secure beauty thereby, but respected it as a means for a happy success (medium tenuere beati); which did not possess serene self-limitation, or σωφÏοσÏνη, but calculationquid valeant humeri, quid ferre recusent; but which, in general, went far beyond the Greeks in persistency of will, inconstantia animi. The schools were at first held publicly in shops; hence the nametrivium. Very significant for the Roman is the predicate which he conferred upon theoretical subjects when he called themartes bonæ, optimæ, liberales, ingenuæ, &c., and brought forth the practical element in them.—
§ 222. (2) But the practical education could no longer keep its ground after it had become acquainted with the æsthetic. The conquest of Greece, Asia Minor, and Egypt, made necessary, in a practical point of view, the acquisition of the Grecian tongue, so that these lands, so permeated with Grecian culture, might be thoroughly ruled. The Roman of family and property, therefore, took into his service Greek nurses and teachers who should give to his children, from their earliest years, Greek culture. It is, in the history of education, a great evil when a nation undertakes to teach a foreign tongue to its youth. Then the necessity of trade with the Greeks caused the study of Rhetoric, so that not only in the deliberations of the senate and people, but in law, the ends might be better attained. Whatever effort the Roman government made to prevent the invasion of the Greek rhetorician was all in vain. The Roman youth sought for thisknowledge, which was so necessary to them in foreign lands, e.g. in the flourishing school of rhetoric on the island of Rhodes. At last, even the study of Philosophy commended itself to the practical Roman, in order that he might recover for himself confidence amid the disappointments of life. When his practical life did not bring him any result, he devoted himself in his poverty to abstract contemplation. The Greeks would have Philosophy for its own sake; the ataraxy of the Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics even, desired the result of a necessary principle; but the Roman, on the contrary, wished to lift himself by philosophemes above trouble and misfortune.
—This direction which Philosophy took is noteworthy, not alone in Cicero and Seneca, but at the fall of the Roman empire, when Boethius wrote in his prison his immortal work on the consolations of Philosophy.—
§ 223. The earnestness which sought a definite end degenerated in the very opposite of activity with him who had no definite aim. The idleness of the wealthy Roman, who felt himself to be the lord of a limitless world, devoted itself to dissipation and desire for enjoyment, which, in its entire want of moderation, abused nature. The finest form of the extant education was that inbelles-lettres, which also for the first time came to belong to the sphere of Pedagogics. There had been a degeneration of art in India and Greece, and also an artistic trifling. But in Rome there arose a pursuit of art in order to win a certain consideration in social position, and to create for one's self a recreation in the emptiness of a soul satiated with sensual debauchery. Such a seizing of art is frivolous, for it no longer recognizes its absoluteness, and subordinates it as a means to subjective egotism. Literarysalonsthen appear.
—In the introduction to hisCataline, Sallust has painted excellently this complete revolution in the Roman education. The younger Pliny in his letters furnishes ample material to illustrate to us this pursuit ofbelles-lettres. In Nero it became idiotic. We should transgress our prescribed limits did we enter here into particulars. An analysis would show the perversion of the æsthetic into the practical, the æsthetic losing thereby its proper nature. But the Roman could notavoid this perversion, because, according to his original aim, he could not move except towards theutile et honestum.—
§ 224. (3) But this pursuit of fine art, this aimless parade, must at last weary the Roman. He sought for himself again an object to which he could vigorously devote himself. His sovereignty was assured, and conquest as an object could no more charm him. The national religion had fallen with the destruction of the national individuality. The soul looked out over its historical life into an empty void. It sought to establish a relation between itself and the next world by means of dæmonic forces, and in place of the depreciated nationality and its religion we find the eclecticism of the mystic society. There were, it is true, in national religions certain secret signs, rites, words, and meanings; but now, for the first time in the history of the world, there appeared mysteries as pedagogical societies, which concerned themselves only with private things and were indifferent to nationality. Everything was profaned by the roughness of violence. Man believed no longer in the old gods, and the superstitious faith in ghosts became only a thing fit to frighten children with. Thus man took refuge in secrecy, which had for his satiety a piquant charm.
§ 225. The education of the mysteries was twofold, theoretical and practical. In the theoretical we find a regular gradation of symbols and symbolical acts through which one seemed gradually to attain to the revelation of the secret; the practical contained a regular gradation of ascetic actions alternating with an abandonment to wild orgies. Both raised one from the rank of the novice to that of the initiated. In the higher orders they formed an ethical code of laws, and this form Pedagogics has retained in all such secret culture,mutatis mutandis, down to the Illuminati.
—In the Roman empire, its Persian element was the worship of Mithras; its Egyptian, that of Isis; its Grecian, the Pythagorean doctrines. All these three, however, were much mingled with each other. The Roman legions, who really no longer had any native country, bore these artificial religions throughout the whole world. The confusion of excitement led often to Somnambulism, which was not yet understood, and to belief in miracles. Apollonius of Tyana, themessiah of Ethnicism, is the principal figure in this group; and, in comparison with him, Jamblichus appears only as an enthusiast and Alexander of Abonoteichos as an impostor.—
III.Abstract Individual Education.
§ 226. What the despair of the declining nations sought for in these mysteries was Individuality, which in its singularity is conscious of the universality of the rational spirit, as its own essence. This individuality existed more immediately in the Germanic race, which nevertheless, on account of its nature, formed first in Christianity its true actualization. It can be here only pointed out that they most thoroughly, in opposition to nature, to men, and to the gods, felt themselves to be independent; as Tacitus says, "Securi adversus homines, securi adversus Deos." This individuality, which had only itself for an end, must necessarily be destroyed, and was saved only by Christianity, which overcame and enlightened its dæmonic and defiant spirit. We cannot speak here of a system of Education. Respect for personality, the free acknowledgment of the claims of woman, the loyalty to the leader chosen by themselves, loyalty to their friends (the idea of fellowship),—these features should all be well-noted, because from them arose the feudalism of the middle ages. What Cæsar and Tacitus tell us of the education of the Germans expresses only the emancipation of individuality, which in its immediate crudeness had no other form in which to manifest itself than wars of conquest.
—To the Roman there was something dæmonic in the German. He perceived dimly in him his future, his master. When the Romans were to meet the Cimbri and Teutons in the field, their commander had first to accustom them for a whole day to the fearful sight of the wild, giant-like forms.—
Second Division.
THE SYSTEM OF THEOCRATIC EDUCATION.
§ 227. The system of National Education founded its first stage on the substantial basis of the family-spirit; its second stage on the division of the nation by means of division of labor which it makes permanent in castes; its third stage presents the free opposition of the laity and clergy; in itsnext phase it makes war, immortality, and trade, by turns, its end; thirdly, it posits beauty, patriotic youth, and the immediateness of individuality, as the essence of mankind, and at last dissolves the unity of nationality in the consciousness that all nations are really one since they are all human beings. In the intermixture of races in the Roman world arises the conception of the human race, thegenus humanum. Education had become eclectic: the Roman legions levelled the national distinctions. In the wavering of all objective morality, the necessity of self-education in order to the formation of character appeared ever more and more clearly; but the conception, which lay at the foundation, was always, nevertheless, that of Roman, Greek, or German education. But in the midst of these nations another system had striven for development, and this did not base itself on the natural connection of nationality, but made this, for the first time, only a secondary thing, and made the direct relation of man to God its chief idea. In this system God himself is the teacher. He manifests to man His will as law, to which he must unconditionally conform for no other reason than that He is the Lord, and man His servant, who can have no other will than His. The obedience of man is therefore, in this system, abstract until through experience he gradually attains to the knowledge that the will of God has in it the very essence of his own will. Descent, Talent, Events, Work, Beauty, Courage,—all these are indifferent things compared with the subjection of the human to the divine will. To be well-pleasing to God is almost the same as belief in Him. Without this identity, what is natural in national descent is of no value. According to its form of manifestation, Judaism is below the Greek spirit. It is not beautiful, but rather grotesque. But in its essence, as the religion of the contradiction between the idea and its existence, it goes beyond nature, which it perceives to be established by an absolute, conscious, and reasonable Will; while the Greek concealed from himself only mythically his dependence on nature, on his mother-earth. The Jews have been preserved in the midst of all other culture by the elastic power of the thought of God as One who was free from the control of nature. The Jews have a patriotism in common with the Romans. The Maccabees,for example, were not inferior to the Romans in greatness.
—Abraham is the genuine Jew because he is the genuinely faithful man. He does not hesitate to obey the horrible and inhuman command of his God. Circumcision was made the token of the national unity, but the nation may assimilate members to itself from other nations through this rite. The condition always lies in belief in a spiritual relation to which the relation of nationality is secondary. The Jewish nation makes proselytes, and these are widely different from theSociiof the Romans or theMetoeciof the Athenians.—
§ 228. To the man who knows Nature to be the work of a single, incomparable, rational Creator, she loses independence. He is negatively freed from her control, and sees in her only an absolute means. As opposed to the fanciful sensuous intuitions of Ethnicism, this seems to be a backward step, but for the emancipation of man it is a progress. He no longer fears Nature but her Lord, and admires Him so much that prose rises to the dignity of poetry in his telological contemplation. Since man stands over and beyond nature, education is directed to morality as such, and spreads itself out in innumerable limitations, by means of which the distinction of man from nature is expressly asserted as a difference. The ceremonial law appears often arbitrary, but in its prescriptions it gives man the satisfaction of placing himself as will in relation to will. For example, if he is forbidden to eat any specified part of an animal, the ground of this command is not merely natural—it is the will of the Deity. Man learns therefore, in his obedience to such directions, to free himself from his self-will, from his natural desires. This exact outward conformity to subjectivity is the beginning of wisdom, the purification of the will from all individual egotism.
—The rational substance of the Law is found always in the Decalogue. Many of our modern much-admired authors exhibit a superficiality bordering on shallowness when they comment alone on the absurdity of the miracles, and abstract from the profound depth of the moral struggle, and from the practical rationality of the ten commandments.—
§ 229. Education in this theocratical system is on one side patriarchal. The Family is very prominent, because it is considered to be a great happiness for the individual to belong from his very earliest life to the company of those who believe in the true God. On its other side it is hierarchical, as its ceremonial law develops a special office, which is to see that obedience is paid to its multifarious regulations. And, because these are often perfectly arbitrary, Education must, above all, practise the memory in learning them all, so that they may always be remembered. The Jewish monotheism shares this necessity with the superstition of ethnicism.
§ 230. But the technique proper of the mechanism is not the most important pedagogical element of the theocracy. We find this in its historical significance, since its history throughout has a pedagogical character. For the people of God show us always, in their changing intercourse with their God, a progress from the external to the internal, from the lower to the higher, from the past to the future. Its history, therefore, abounds in situations very interesting in a pedagogical point of view, and in characters which are eternal models.
§ 231. (1) The will of God as the absolute authority is at first to them, as law, external. But soon God adds to the command to obedience, on one hand, the inducement of a promise of material prosperity, and on the other hand the threat of material punishment. The fulfilment of the law is also encouraged by reflection on the profit which it brings. But, since these motives are all external, they rise finally into the insight that the law is to be fulfilled, not on their account, but because it is the will of the Lord; not alone because it is conducive to our happiness, but also because it is in itself holy, and written in our hearts: in other words, man proceeds from the abstract legality, through the reflection of eudæmonism, to the internality of moral sentiment—the course of all education.
—This last stand-point is especially represented in the excellent Gnomic of Jesus Sirach—a book so rich in pedagogical insight, which paints with master-strokes the relations of husband and wife, parents and children, master and servants, -friend and friend, enemy and enemy, and the dignity of labor as well as the necessity of its division. This priceless book forms a side-piece from the theocratic stand-point to theRepublicof Plato and his laws on ethical government.—
§ 232. (2) The progress from the lower to the higher appeared in the conquering of the natural individuality. Man, as the servant of Jehovah, must have no will of his own; but selfish naturalness arrayed itself so much the more vigorously against the abstract "Thou shalt," allowed itself to descend into an abstraction from the Law, and often reached the most unbridled extravagance. But since the Law in inexorable might always remained the same, always persistent, in distinction from the inequalities of the deed of man, it forced him to come back to it, and to conform himself to its demands. Thus he learned criticism, thus he rose from naturalness into spirit. This progress is at the same time a progress from necessity to freedom, because criticism always gradually opens a way for man into insight, so that he finds the will of God to be the truth of his own self-determination. Because God is one and absolute, there arises the expectation that His Will will become the basis for the will of all nations and men. The criticism of the understanding must recognize a contradiction in the fact that the will of the true God is the law of only one nation; feared by other nations, moreover, by reason of their very worship of God as a gloomy mystery, and detested asodium generis humani. And thus is developed the thought that the isolation of the believers will come to an end as soon as the other nations recognize their faith as the true one, and are received into it. Thus here, out of the deepest penetration of the soul into itself, as among the Romans out of the fusion of nations, we see appear the idea of the human race.
§ 233. (3) The progress from the past to the future unfolded the ideal servant of God who fulfils all the Law, and so blots out the empirical contradiction that the "Thou shalt" of the Law attains no adequate actuality. This Prince of Peace, who shall gather all nations under his banner, can therefore have no other thing predicated of him than Holiness. He is not beautiful as the Greeks represented their ideal, notbrave and practical as was the veneratedVirtusof the Romans; he does not place an infinite value on his individuality as the German does: but he is represented as insignificant in appearance, as patient, as humble, as he who, in order to reconcile the world, takes upon himself the infirmities and disgrace of all others. The ethnical nations have only a lost Paradise behind them; the Jews have one also before them. From this belief in the Messiah who is to come, from the certainty which they have of conquering with him, from the power of esteeming all things of small importance in view of such a future, springs the indestructible nature of the Jews. They ignore the fact that Christianity is the necessary result of their own history. As the nation that is to be (des Seinsollens), they are merely a historical nation, the nation among nations, whose education—whenever the Jew has not changed and corrupted its nature through modern culture—is still always patriarchal, hierarchal, and mnemonic.
Third Division.
The System of Humanitarian Education
§ 234. The systems of national and theocratic education came to the same result, though by different ways, and this result is the conception of a human race in the unity of which the distinctions of different nations find their Truth. But with them this result is only a conception, being a thing external to their actuality. They arrive at the painting of an ideal of the way in which the Messiah shall come. But these ideals exist only in the mind, and the actual condition of the people sometimes does not correspond to them at all, and sometimes only very relatively. The idea of spirit had in these presuppositions the possibility of its concrete actualization; one individual man must become conscious of the universality and necessity of the will as being the very essence of his own freedom, so that all heteronomy should be cancelled in the autonomy of spirit. Natural individuality appearing as national determinateness was still acknowledged, but was deprived of its abstract isolation. The divine authority of the truth of the individual will is to be recognized, but at the same time freed from its estrangement towards itself. While Christ was a Jew and obedient to thedivine Law, he knew himself as the universal man who determines himself to his own destiny; and while only distinguishing God, as subject, from himself, yet holds fast to the unity of man and God. The system of humanitarian education began to unfold from this principle, which no longer accords the highest place to the natural unity of national individuality, nor to the abstract obedience of the command of God, but to that freedom of the soul which knows itself to be absolute necessity. Christ is not a mere ideal of the thought, but is known as a living member of actual history, whose life, sufferings and death for freedom form the security as to its absolute justification and truth. The æsthetic, philosophical, and political ideal are all found in the universal nature of the Christian ideal, on which account no one of them appears one-sided in the life of Christ. The principle of Human Freedom excludes neither art, nor science, nor political feeling.
§ 235. In its conception of man the humanitarian education includes both the national divisions and the subjection of all men to the divine law, but it will no longer endure that one should grow into an isolating exclusiveness, and another into a despotism which includes in it somewhat of the accidental. But this principle of humanity and human nature took root so slowly that its presuppositions were repeated within itself and were really conquered in this reproduction. These stages of culture were the Greek, the Roman, and the Protestant churches, and education was metamorphosed to suit the formation of each of these.
—For the sake of brevity we would wish to close with these general definitions; the unfolding of their details is intimately bound up with the history of politics and of civilization. We shall be contented if we give correctly the general whole.—
§ 236. Within education we can distinguish three epochs: the monkish, the chivalric, and that education which is to fit one for civil life. Each of these endeavored to express all that belonged to humanity as such; but it was only after the recognition of the moral nature of the Family, of Labor, of Culture, and of the conscious equal title of all men to their rights, that this became really possible.
I.The Epoch of Monkish Education.
§ 237. The Greek Church seized the Christian principle still abstractly as deliverance from the world, and therefore, in the education proceeding from it, it arrived only at the negative form, positing the universality of the individual man as the renunciation of self. In the dogmatism of its teaching, as well as in the ascetic severity of its practical conduct, it was a reproduction of the theocratic principle. But when this had assumed the form of national centralization, the Greek Church dispensed with this, and, as far as regards its form, it returned again to the quietism of the Orient.
§ 238. The monkish education is in general identical in all religions, in that, through the egotism of its way of living and the stoicism of its way of thinking, through the separation of its external existence and the mechanism of a thoughtless subjection to a general rule as well as to the special command of superiors, it fosters a spiritual and bodily dulness. The Christian monachism, therefore, as the fulfilment of monachism in general, is at the same time its absolute dissolution, because, in its merely abstracting itself from the world instead of affirmatively conquering it, it contradicts the very principle of Christianity.
§ 239. We must notice as the fundamental error of this whole system, that it does not in free individuality seek to produce the ideal of divine-humanity, but to copy in external reproduction its historical manifestation. Each human being must individually offer up as sacrifice his own individuality. Each biography has its Bethlehem, its Tabor, and its Golgotha.
§ 240. Monachism looks upon freedom from one's self and from the world which Christianity demands only as an abstract renunciation of self, which it seeks to compass, like Buddhism, by the vow of poverty, chastity, and obedience, which must be taken by each individual for all time.
—This rejection of property, of marriage, and of self-will, is at the same time the negation of work, of the family, and of responsibility for one's actions. In order to avoid the danger of avarice and covetousness, of sensuality and of nepotism, of error and of guilt, monachism seizes the convenient -way of abstract severance from all the objective world without being able fully to carry out this negation. Monkish Pedagogics must, in consequence, be very particular about an external separation of their disciples from the world, so as to make the work of abstraction from the world easier and more decided. It therefore builds cloisters in the solitude of deserts, in the depth of forests, on the summits of mountains, and surrounds them with high walls having no apertures; and then, so as to carry the isolation of the individual to its farthest possible extreme it constructs, within these cloisters, cells, in imitation of the ancient hermits—a seclusion the immediate consequence of which is the most limitless and most paltry curiosity.—
§ 241. Theoretically the monkish Pedagogics seeks, by means of the greatest possible silence, to place the soul in a state of spiritual immobility, which at last, through the want of all variety of thought, goes over into entire apathy, and antipathy towards all intellectual culture. The principal feature of the practical culture consists in the misapprehension that one should ignore Nature, instead of morally freeing himself from her control. As she, again and again asserts herself, the monkish discipline proceeds to misuse her, and strives through fasting, through sleeplessness, through voluntary self-inflicted pain and martyrdom, not only to subdue the wantonness of the flesh, but to destroy the love of life till it shall become a positive loathing of existence. In and for itself the object of the monkish vow—property, the family, and will—is not immoral. The vow is, on this account, very easy to violate. In order to prevent all temptation to this, monkish Pedagogics invents a system of supervision, partly open, partly secret, which deprives one of all freedom of action, all freshness of thinking and of willing, and all poetry of feeling, by means of the perpetual shadow of spies and informers. The monks are well versed in all police-arts, and the regular succession of the hierarchy spurs them on always to distinguish themselves in them.
§ 242. The gloomy breath of this education penetrated all the relations of the Byzantine State. Even the education of the emperor was infected by it; and in the strife for freedom waged by the modern Greeks against the Turks, theIgumeniof the cloisters were the real leaders of the insurrection. The independence of individuality, as opposed to monkish abstraction, more or less degenerates into the crude form of soldier and pirate life. And thus it happened that this principle was not left to appear merely as an exception, but to be built up positively into humanity; and this the German world, under the guidance of the Roman Church, undertook to accomplish.
II.The Epoch of Chivalric Education.
§ 243. The Romish Church negated the abstract substantiality of the Greeks through the practical aim which she in her sanctity in works founded, and by means of which she raised up German individuality to the idealism of chivalry, i.e. a free military service in behalf of Christendom.
§ 244. It is evident that the system of monkish education was taken up into this epoch as one of its elements, being modified to conform to it: e.g. the Benedictines were accustomed to labor in agriculture and in the transcribing of books, and this contradicted the idea of monachism, since that in and for itself tends to an absolute forgetfulness of the world and a perfect absence of all activity in the individual. The begging orders were public preachers, and made popular the idea of love and unselfish devotion to others. They labored toward self-education, especially by means of the ideal of the life of Christ; e.g. in Tauler's classical book on the Imitation of Jesus, and in the work of Thomas-à -Kempis which resembles it. Through a fixed contemplative communion with the conception of the Christ who suffered and died for Love, they sought to find content in divine rest and self-abandonment.
§ 245. German chivalry sprang from Feudalism. The education of those pledged to military duty had become confined to practice in the use of arms. The education of the chivalric vassals pursued the same course, refining it gradually through the influence of court society and through poetry, which devoted itself either to the relating of graceful tales which were really works of art, or to the glorification of woman. Girls were brought up without especial care. The boy until he was seven years old remained in the hands of women;then he became a lad (a young gentleman), and learned the manner of offensive and defensive warfare, on foot and on horseback; between his sixteenth and eighteenth year, through a formal ceremony (the laying on of the sword), he was duly authorized to bear arms. But whatever besides this he might wish to learn was left to his own caprice.
§ 246. In contradistinction to the monkish education, Chivalry placed an infinite value on individuality, and this it expressed in its extreme sensibility to the feeling of honor. Education, on this account, endeavored to foster this reflection of the self upon itself by means of the social isolation in which it placed knighthood. The knight did not delight himself with common possessions, but he sought for him who had been wronged, since with him he could find enjoyment as a conqueror. He did not live in simple marriage, but strove for the piquant pleasure of making the wife of another the lady of his heart, and this often led to moral and physical infidelity. And, finally, the knight did not obey alone the general laws of knightly honor, but he strove, besides, to discover for himself strange things, which he should undertake with his sword, in defiance of all criticism, simply because it pleased his caprice so to do. Hesought adventures.
§ 247. The reaction against the innumerable number of fantastic extravagancies arising from chivalry was the idea of the spiritual chivalry which was to unite the cloister and the town, abstract self-denial and military life, separation from the world and the sovereignty of the world—an undeniable advance, but an untenable synthesis which could not prevent the dissolution of chivalry—this chivalry, which, as the rule of the stronger, induced for a long time the destruction of all regular culture founded on principles, and brought a period of absence of all education. In this perversion of chivalry to a grand vagabondism, and even to robbery, noble souls often rushed into ridiculous excesses. This decline of chivalry found its truth in Citizenship, whose education, however, did not, like the πόλις and thecivitasof the ancients, limit itself to itself, but, through the presence of the principle of Christianity, accepted the whole circle of humanity as the aim of its culture.
III.The Epoch of Education fitting one for Civil Life.
§ 248. The idea of the State had gradually worked itself up to a higher plane with trade and industry, and found in Protestantism its spiritual confirmation. Protestantism, as the self assurance of the individual that he was directly related to God without any dependence on the mediation of any man, rose to the truth in the autonomy of the soul, and began out of the abstract phantasmagoria of monachism and chivalry to develope Christianity, as the principle of humanitarian education, into concrete actuality. The cities were not merely, in comparison with the clergy and the nobility, the "third estate"; but the citizen who himself managed his commonwealth, and defended its interests with arms, developed into the citizen of a state which absorbed the clergy and nobility, and the state-citizen found his ultimate ideal in pure Humanity as cognized through reason.
§ 249. The phases of this development are (1) Civil education as such, in which we find chivalric education metamorphosed into the so-called noble, both however being controlled as to education, within Catholicism by Jesuitism, within Protestantism by Pietism. (2) Against this tendency to the church, we find reacting on the one hand the devotion to a study of antiquity, and on the other the friendly alliance to immediate actuality, i.e. with Nature. We can name these periods of Pedagogics those of its ideals of culture. (3) But the truth of all culture must forever remain moral freedom. After Education had arrived at a knowledge of the meaning of Idealism and Realism, it must seize as its absolute aim the moral emancipation of man into Humanity; and it must conform its culture by this aim, since technical dexterity, friendly adroitness, proficiency in the arts, and scientific insight, can attain to their proper rank only through moral purity.
1. Civil Education as such.
§ 250. The one-sidedness of monkish and chivalric education was cancelled by civil education inasmuch as it destroyed the celibacy of the monk and the estrangement of the knight from his family, doing this by means of the innerlife of the family; for it substituted, in the place of the negative emptiness of the duty of holiness of the celibate, the positive morality of marriage and the family; while, instead of the abstract poverty and the idleness of the monkish piety and of knighthood, it asserted that property was the object of labor, i.e. it asserted the self-governed morality of civil society and of commerce; and, finally, instead of the servitude of the conscience in unquestioning obedience to the command of others, and instead of the freakish self-sufficiency of the caprice of the knights, it demanded obedience to the laws of the commonwealth as representing his own self-conscious, actualized, practical Reason, in which laws the individual can recognize and acknowledge himself.
—As this civil education left free the sensuous enjoyment, freedom in this was without bounds for a time, until, after men became accustomed to labor and to their freedom of action, the possibility of enjoyment created from within outward a moderation which sumptuary laws and prohibitions of gluttony, drunkenness, &c., could never create from the external side. What the monk inconsistently enjoyed with a bad conscience, the citizen and the clergyman could take possession of as a gift of God. After the first millennium of Christianity, when the earth had not, according to the current prophecies, been destroyed, and after the great plague in the fourteenth century, there was felt an immense pleasure in living, which manifested itself externally in the fifteenth century in delicate wines, dainty food, great eating of meat, drinking of beer, and, in the domain of dress, in peaked shoes, plumes, golden chains, bells, &c. There was much venison, but, as yet, no potatoes, tea and coffee, &c. The feeling of men was quarrelsome. For a more exact painting of the Education of this time, very valuable authors are Sebastian Brant, Th. Murner, Ulrich von Hutten, Fischart, and Hans Sachs. Gervinus is almost the only one who has understood how to make this material useful in its relation to spirit.—
§ 251. In contrast with the heaven-seeking of the monks and the sentimental love-making of the knight, civil education established, as its principle, Usefulness, which traced out in things their conformity to a proposed end in order to gainas great a mastery over them as possible. The understanding was trained with all exactness that it might clearly seize all the circumstances. But since family-life did not allow the egotism of the individual ever to become as great as was the case with the monk and the knight, and since the cheer of a sensuous enjoyment in cellar and kitchen, in clothing and furniture, in common games and in picturesque parades, penetrated the whole being with soft pleasure, there was developed with all propriety and sobriety a house-morality, and, with all the prose of labor, a warm and kindly disposition, which left room for innocent merriment and roguery, and found, in conformity to religious services, its serious transfiguration. Beautiful burgher-state, thou wast weakened by the thirty years' war, and hast been only accidentally preserved sporadically in Old England and in some places in Germany, only to be at last swept away by the flood of modern world-pain, political sophistry, and anxiety for the future!
§ 252. The citizen paid special attention to public education, heretofore wholly dependent upon the church and the cloister; he organized city schools, whose teachers, it is true, for a long time compassed only accidental culture, and were often employed only for tumultuous and short terms. The society of the brotherhood of the Hieronymites introduced a better system of instruction before the close of the fourteenth century, but education had often to be obtained from the so-called travelling scholars (vagantes,bacchantes,scholastici,goliardi). The teachers of the so-calledscholæ exteriores, in distinction from the schools of the cathedral and cloister, were called nowlocati, thenstampuales—in German,Kinder-Meister. The institution of German schools soon followed the Latin city schools. In order to remove the anarchy in school matters, the citizens aided the rise of universities by donations and well-invested funds, and sustained the street-singing of the city scholars (currende), an institution which was well-meant, but which often failed of its end because on the one hand it was often misused as a mere means of subsistence, and on the other hand the sense of honor of those to whom it was devoted not unfrequently became, through their manner of living, lowered to humiliation. The defectof the monkish method of instruction became ever more apparent, e.g. the silly tricks of their mnemotechnique, the utter lack of anything which deserved the name of any practical knowledge, &c. The necessity of instruction in the use of arms led to democratic forms. Printing favored the same. Men began to concern themselves about good text-books. Melanchthon was the hero of the Protestant world, and as a pattern was beyond his time. His Dialectics, Rhetoric, Physics, and Ethics, were reprinted innumerable times, commented upon, and imitated. After him Amos Comenius, in the seventeenth century, had the greatest influence through hisDidactica Magnaand hisJanua Reserta. In a narrower sphere, treating of the foundation of Gymnasial Philology, the most noticeable is Sturm of Strasburg. The universities in Catholic countries limited themselves to the Scholastic Philosophy and Theology, together with which we find slowly struggling up the Roman Law and the system of Medicine from Bologna and Salerno. But Protestantism first raised the university to any real universality. Tübingen, Königsberg, Wittenberg, Jena, Leipzic, Halle, Göttingen, &c., were the first schools for the study of all sciences, and for their free and productive pursuit.
253. The Commons, which at first appeared with the clergy and the nobility as the Third Estate, formed an alliance with monarchy, and both together produced a transformation of the chivalric education. Absolutism reduced the knights to mere nobles, to whom it truly conceded the prerogative of appointment as spiritual prelates as well as officers and counsellors of state, but only on the condition of the most complete submission; and then, to satisfy them, it invented the artificial drinking festivals, of a splendid life at court, and a temptingly-impressive sovereignty of beauty. In this condition, the education of the nobles was essentially changed in so far as to cease to be alone military. To the art of war, which moreover was made so very much milder by the invention of fire-arms, must be now added an activity of the mind which could no longer dispense with some knowledge of History, Heraldry, Genealogy, Literature, and Mythology. Since the French nation soon enough gave tone to the style of conversation, and after the time of Louis XIV. controlledthe politics of the continent, the French language, as conventional and diplomatic, became a constant element in the education of the nobility in all the other countries of Europe.
—Practically the education of the noble endeavored to make the individual quite independent, so that he should, by means of the important quality of an advantageous personal appearance and the prudence of his agreeable behavior, make himself into a ruler of all other men, capable of enjoying his own position, i.e. he should copy in miniature the manners of an absolute sovereign. To this was added an empirical knowledge of men by means of ethical maxims, so that they might discover the weak side of every man, and so be able to outwit him.Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur.According to this, every man had his price. They did not believe in the Nemesis of a divine destiny; on the contrary, disbelief in the higher justice was taught. One must be so elastic as to suit himself to all situations, and, as a caricature of the ancient ataraxy, he must acquire as a second nature a manner perfectly indifferent to all changes, the impassibility of an aristocratic repose, the amphibioussang-froidof the "gentleman." The man in the world as the man of the world sought his ideal in endless dissimulation, and in this, as the flowering of his culture, he took the highest interest. Intrigue, in love as well as in politics, was the soul of the nobleman's existence.—
—They endeavored to complete the refinement of manners by sending the young man away with a travelling tutor. This was very good, but degenerated at last into the mechanism of the foolish travelling of the tourist. The noble was made a foreigner, a stranger to his own country, by means of his abode at Paris or Venice, while the citizen gradually outstripped him in genuine culture.—
§ 254. The education of the citizen as well as that of the noble was taken possession of, in Catholic countries by the Jesuits, in Protestant countries by the Pietists: by the first, with a military strictness; by the second, in a social and effeminate form. Both, however, agreed in destroying individuality, inasmuch as the one degraded man into a will-less machine for executing the commands of others, and the other deadened him in cultivating the feeling of his sinful worthlessness.