(a)Jesuitic Education.
§ 255. Jesuitism combined the maximum of worldly freedom with an appearance of the greatest piety. Proceeding from this stand-point, it devoted itself in education to elegance and showy knowledge, to diplomacy and what was suitable and convenient in morals. To bring the future more into its power, it adapted itself not only to youth in general, but especially to the youth of the nobler classes. To please these, the Jesuits laid great stress upon a fine deportment. In their colleges dancing and fencing were well-taught. They knew how well they should by this course content the noble, who had by preference usurped the name of Education for this technical way of giving formal expression to personality.
—In instruction they developed so exact a mechanism that they gained the reputation of having model school regulations, and even Protestants sent their children to them. From the close of the sixteenth century to the present time they have based their teaching upon theratio et institutio Studiorum Societatis Jesuof Claudius Aquaviva, and, following that, they distinguish two courses of teaching, a higher and a lower. The lower included nothing but an external knowledge of the Latin language, and some fortuitous knowledge of History, of Antiquities, and of Mythology. The memory was cultivated as a means of keeping down free activity of thought and clearness of judgment. The higher course comprehended Dialectics, Rhetoric, Physics, and Morals. Dialectics appeared in the form of Sophistry. In Rhetoric, they favored the polemical-emphatic style of the African fathers of the Church and their pompous phraseology; in Physics, they stopped with Aristotle, and especially advised the reading of the booksDe Generatione et Corruptione, andDe Cœlo, on which they commented after their fashion; finally, in Morals casuistic skepticism was their central point. They made much of Rhetoric on account of their sermons, giving to it much attention, and introduced especially Declamation. Contriving showy public examinations under the guise of Latin School Comedies, they thus amused the public, disposed them to approval, and at the same time quite innocently practised the pupil in dissimulation.—
—Diplomacy in behavior was made necessary to the Jesuits as well by their strict military discipline as by their systemof reciprocal mistrust, espionage, and informing. Abstract obedience was a reason for any act of the pupils, and they were freed from all responsibility as to its moral justification. This empirical exact following out of all commands, and refraining from any criticism as to principles, created a moral indifference, and, from the necessity of having consideration for the peculiarities and caprices of the superior on whom all others were dependent, arose eye-service, and the coldness of isolation sprang from the necessity which each felt of being on his guard against every other as against a tale-bearer. The most deliberate hypocrisy and pleasure in intrigue merely for the sake of intrigue—this most refined poison of moral corruption—were the result. Jesuitism had not only an interest in the material profit, which, when it had corrupted souls, fell to its share, but it also had an interest in the process of corruption. With absolute indifference as to the idea of morality, and absolute indifference as to the moral quality of the means used to attain its end, it rejoiced in the superiority of secrecy, of the accomplished and calculating understanding, and in deceiving the credulous by means of its graceful, seemingly-perfect, moral language.—
—It is not necessary to speak here of the morality of the Order. It is sufficiently recognized as the contradiction, that the idea of morality insists upon the eternal necessity of every deed, but that in the realizing of the action all determinations should be made relative and should vary with the circumstances. As to discipline, they were always guided by their fundamental principle, that body and soul, as in and for themselves one, could vicariously suffer for each other. Thus penitence and contrition were transformed into a perfect materialism of outward actions, and hence arose the punishments of the Order, in which fasting, scourging, imprisonment, mortification, and death, were formed into a mechanical artificial system.—
(b)Pietistic Education.
§ 256. Jesuitism would make machines of man, Pietism would dissolve him in the feeling of his sinfulness: either would destroy his individuality. Pietism proceeded from the principle of Protestantism, as, in the place of the Catholic Pelagianism with its sanctification by works, it offered justicationby faith alone. In its tendency to internality was its just claim. It would have even the letters of the Bible translated into the vivacity of sentiment. But in its execution it fell into the error of one-sidedness in that it placed, instead of the actuality of the spirit and its freedom, the confusion of a limited personality, placing in its stead the personality of Christ in an external manner, and thus brought back into the very midst of Protestantism the principle of monachism—an abstract renunciation of the world. Since Protestantism has destroyed the idea of the cloister, it could produce estrangement from the world only by exciting public opinion against such elements of society and culture which it stigmatized asworldlyfor its members, e.g. card-playing, dancing, the theatre, &c. Thus it became negatively dependent upon works; for since its followers remained in reciprocal action with the world, so that the temptation to backsliding was a permanent one, it must watch over them, exercise an indispensable moral-police control over them, and thus, by the suspicion of each other which was involved, take up into itself the Jesuitical practice, although in a very mild and affectionate way. Instead of the forbidden secrecy of the cloister, it organized a separate company, which we, in its regularly constituted assembly, call a conventicle. Instead of the cowl, it put on its youth a dress like that of the world, but scant and ashen-colored; it substituted for the tonsure closely-cut hair and shaven beard, and it often went beyond the obedience of the monks in its expression of pining humility and prudish composure. Education within such a circle could not well recognize nature and history as manifestations of God, but it must consider them to be limitations to their union with God, from which death can first then completely release them. The soul which knew that its home could be found only in the future world, must feel itself to be a stranger upon the earth, and from such an opinion there must arise an indifference and even a contempt for science and art, as well as an aversion for a life of active labor, though an unwilling and forced tribute might be paid to it. Philosophy especially was to be shunned as dangerous. Bible lectures, the catechism and the hymn-book, were the one thing needful to the "poor in spirit." Religious poetry and music were, of all the arts, the only ones deserving of any cultivation. Theeducation of Pietism endeavored, by means of a carefully arranged series of representations, to create in its disciples the feeling of their absolute nothingness, vileness, godlessness, and abandonment by God, in order to displace the torment of despair as to themselves and the world by a warm, dramatic, and living relation to Christ—a relation in which all the Eroticism of the mystical passion of the begging-friars was renewed in a somewhat milder form and with a strong tendency to a sentimental sweetishness.
2. The Ideal of Culture.
§ 257. Civil Education arose from the recognition of marriage and the family, of labor and enjoyment, of the equality of all before the Law, and of the duty of self-determination. Jesuitism in the Catholic world and Pietism in the Protestant were the reaction against this recognition—a return into the abstract asceticism of the middle ages, not however in its purity, but mixed with some regard for worldly possessions. In opposition to this reaction the commonwealth produced another, in which it undertook to deliver individuality by means of a reversed alienation. On the one hand, it absorbed itself in the conception of the Greek-Roman world. In the practical interests of the present, it externalized man in a past which held to the present no immediate relation, or it externalized him in the affairs which were to serve him as means of his comfort and enjoyment; it created an abstract idealism—a reproduction of the old view of the world—or an abstract Realism in a high appreciation of things which should be considered of value only as a means. In one direction, Individuality proceeded towards a dead nationality; in the other, towards an unlimited world-commonwealth. In one case, the ideal was the æsthetic republicanism of the Greeks; in the other, the utilitarian cosmopolitanism of the Romans. But, in considering the given circumstances, both united in the feeling of humanity, with its reconciliatory and pitying gentleness toward the beggar or the criminal.
(a)The Humanitarian Ideal.
§ 258. The Oriental-theocratic education is immanent in Christian education through the Bible. Through the mediation of the Greek and Roman churches the views of the ancientworld were subsumed but not entirely subdued. To accomplish this was the problem of humanitarian education. It aimed to teach the Latin and Greek languages, expecting thus to secure the action of a purely humane disposition. The Greeks and Romans being sharply marked nationalities, how could one cherish such expectations? It was possible only relatively in contradiction, partly to a provincial population from whom all genuine political sense had departed, partly to a church limited by a confessional, to which the idea of humanity as such had become almost lost in dogmatic fault-findings. The spirit was refreshed in the first by the contemplation of the pure patriotism of the ancients, and in the second by the discovery of Reason among the heathen. In contrast to formlessness distracted by the want of all ideal of culture of provincialism and dogmatic confusions, we find the power of representation of ancient art. The so-called uselessness of learning dead languages imparted to the mind, it knew not how, an ideal drift. The very fact that it could not find immediate profit in its knowledge gave it the consciousness of a higher value than material profit. The ideal of the Humanities was the truth to Nature which was found in the thought-painters of the ancient world. The study of language merely with regard to its form, must lead one involuntarily to the actual seizing of its content. The Latin schools were fashioned intoGymnasia, and the universities contained not merely professors of Eloquence, but also teachers of Philology.
(b)The Philanthropic Ideal.
§ 259. The humanitarian tendency reached its extreme in the abstract forgetting of the present, and the omitting to notice its just claim. Man discovered at last that he was not at home with himself in Rome and Athens. He spoke and wrote Latin, if not like Cicero, at least like Muretius, but he often found himself awkward in expressing his meaning in his mother-tongue. He was often very learned, but he lacked judgment. He was filled with enthusiasm for the republicanism of Greece and Rome, and yet at the same time was himself exceedingly servile to his excellent and august lords. Against this gradual deadening of active individuality, the result of a perverted study of the classics, we find now reactingthe education of enlightenment, which we generally call the philanthropic. It sought to make men friendly to the immediate course of the world. It placed over against the learning of the ancient languages for their own sake, the acquisition of the more needful branches of Mathematics, Physics, Geography, History, and the modern languages, calling these the real studies. Nevertheless it often retained the instruction in the Latin language because the Romance languages have sprung from it, and because, through its long domination, the universal terminology of Science, Art, and Law, is rooted in it. Philanthropy desired to develope the social side of its disciple through an abstract of practical knowledge and personal accomplishments, and to lead him again, in opposition to the hermit-like sedentary life of the book-pedant, out into the fields and the woods. It desired to imitate life even in its method, and to instruct pleasantly in the way of play or by dialogue. It would add to the simple letters and names the contemplation of the object itself, or at least of its representation by pictures; and in this direction, in the conversation-literature which it prepared for children, it sometimes fell into childishness. It performed a great service when it gave to the body its due, and introduced simple, natural dress, bathing, gymnastics, pedestrian excursions, and a hardening against the influences of wind and weather. As this Pedagogics, so friendly to children, deemed that it could not soon enough begin to honor them as citizens of the world, it was guilty in general of the error of presupposing as already finished in its children much that it itself should have gradually developed; and as it wished to educate the European as such, or rather man as such, it came into an indifference concerning the concrete distinctions of nationality and religion. It coincided with the philologists in placing, in a concealed way, Socrates above Christ, because he had worked no miracles, and taught only morality. In such a dead cosmopolitanism, individuality disappeared in the indeterminateness of a general humanity, and saw itself forced to agree with the humanistic education in proclaiming the truth of Nature as the pedagogical ideal, with the distinction, that while Humanism believed this ideal realized in the Greeks and Romans, Philanthropism found itselfcompelled to presuppose an abstract notion, and often manifested a not unjustifiable pleasure in recognizing in the Indians of North America, or of Otaheite, the genuine man of nature. Philosophy first raised these conceptions to the idea of the State, which fashioned the cognition of Reason and of the reform which follows from its idea, into an organic element in itself.
—The course which the developing of the philanthropic ideal has taken is as follows: (1) Rousseau in his writings,Emileand theNouvelle Heloise, first preached the evangel of Natural Education, the abstraction from History, the negation of existing culture, and the return to the simplicity and innocence of nature. Although he often himself testified in his experience his own proneness to evil in a very discouraging way, he fixed as an almost unlimited axiom in French and German Pedagogics his principal maxim, that man is by nature good. (2) The reformatory ideas of Rousseau met with only a very infrequent and sporadic introduction among the Romanic nations, because among them education was too dependent on the church, and retained its cloister-like seclusion in seminaries, colleges, &c. In Germany, on the contrary, it was actualized, and thePhilanthropia, established by Basedow in Dessau, Brunswick, and Schnepfenthal, made experiments, which nevertheless very soon departed somewhat from the ultraism of Basedow and had very excellent results. (3) Humanity existedin concretoonly in the form of nations. The French nation, in their revolution, tried the experiment of abstracting from their history, of levelling all distinctions of culture, of enthroning a despotism of Reason, and of organizing itself as humanity, pure and simple. The event showed the impossibility of such a beginning. The national energy, the historical impulse, the love of art and science, came forth from the midst of the revolutionary abstraction, which was opposed to them, only the more vigorously. Thegrande nation, theirgrande armée, andgloire—that is to say, for France—absorbed all the humanitarian phases. In Germany the philanthropic circle of education was limited to the higher ranks. There was no exclusiveness in thePhilanthropia, for there nobles and citizens, Catholics and Protestants, Russians and Swiss, were mingled; but these were always the children of wealthyfamilies, and to these the plan of education was adapted. Then appeared Pestalozzi and directed education also to the lower classes of society—those which are called, not without something approaching to a derogatory meaning,the people. From this time dates popular education, the effort for the intellectual and moral elevation of the hitherto neglected atomistic human being of the non-property-holding multitude. There shall in future be no dirty, hungry, ignorant, awkward, thankless, and will-less mass, devoted alone to an animal existence. We can never rid ourselves of the lower classes by having the wealthy give something, or even their all, to the poor, so as to have no property themselves; but we can rid ourselves of it in the sense that the possibility of culture and independent self-support shall be open to every one, because he is a human being and a citizen of the commonwealth. Ignorance and rudeness and the vice which springs from them, and the malevolent frame of mind against the human race, which are bound up with crime—these shall disappear. Education shall train man to self-conscious obedience to law, as well as to kindly feeling towards the erring, and to an effort not merely for their removal but for their improvement. But the more Pestalozzi endeavored to realize his ideal of human dignity, the more he comprehended that the isolated power of a private man could not attain it, but that the nation itself must make their own education their first business. Fichte by his lectures first made the German nation fully accept these thoughts, and Prussia was the first state which, by her public schools and her conscious preparation for defence, broke the path for National Education; while among the Romanic nations, in spite of their more elaborate political formalism, it still depends partly upon the church and partly upon the accident of private enterprise. Pestalozzi also laid a foundation for a national pedagogical literature by his story ofLeonard and Gertrude. This book appeared at first in 1784, i.e. in the same year in which Schiller'sRobbersand Kant'sCritique of Pure Reasonannounced a new phase in the Drama and in Philosophy.—
—The incarnation of God, which was, up to the time of the Reformation, an esoteric mystery of the Church, has since then become continually more and more an exoteric problem of the State.—
3. Free Education.
§ 260. The ideal of culture of the humanitarian and the philanthropic education was taken up into the conception of an education which recognizes the Family, social caste, the Nation, and Religion, as positive elements of the practical spirit, but which will know each of these as determined from within through the idea of humanity, and laid open for reciprocal dialectic with the rest. Physical development shall become the subject of a national system of gymnastics fashioned for use, and including in itself the knowledge of the use of arms. Instruction shall, in respect to the general encyclopædic culture, be the same for all, and parallel to this shall run a system of special schools to prepare for the special avocations of life. The method of instruction shall be the simple representation of the special idea of the subject, and no longer the formal breadth of an acquaintance with many subjects which may find outside the school its opportunity, but within it has no meaning except as the history of a science or an art. Moral culture must be combined with family affection and the knowledge of the laws of the commonwealth, so that the dissension between individual morality and objective legality may ever more and more disappear. Education shall, without estranging the individual from the internality of the family, accustom him more and more to public life, because criticism of this is the only thing which can prevent the cynicism of private life, the half-ness of knowledge and will, and the spirit of caste, which has so extensively prevailed. The individual shall be educated into a self-consciousness of the essential equality and freedom of all men, so that he shall recognize and acknowledge himself in each one and in all. But this essential and solid unity of all men shall not evaporate into the insipidity of a humanity without distinctions, but instead it shall realize the form of a determinate individuality and nationality, and shall enlighten the idiosyncrasy of its nation into a broad humanity. The unrestricted striving after Beauty, Truth, and Freedom, actually through its own strength and immediately, not merely mediately through ecclesiastical consecration, will become Religion.
The Education of the State must rise to a preparation for the unfettered activity of self-conscious Humanity.
The translation of "Pedagogics as a System" was prepared and published five years ago. The wide demand for it that has made itself known since that time, especially in normal schools, has proved the value of such works in the domain of education. At the same time, the difficulty the students have always found in its use—a difficulty inseparable from any translation of a German metaphysical treatise—has led us to the conviction that a paraphrase into a more easily understood form is a necessity, if the thought of Rosenkranz is to be appropriated by the very class who are most in need of it. As was remarked in the preface to the translation, we have in English no other work of similar size which contains so much that is valuable to those engaged in the work of education. It is no compendium of rules or formulas, but rather a systematic, logical treatment of the subject, in which the attention is, as it were, concentrated upon the whole problem of education, while that problem is allowed to work itself out before us. To paraphrase the text—or, rather, to translate it from the metaphysical language in which it at present appears into a language more easy of comprehension—without losing the real significance of the statements, is the task which is here undertaken. Free illustrations and suggestions have been interwoven to give point and application to the thoughts and principles stated. This translation, or paraphrase, follows the paragraphs of the original and of the first translation. The analysis of the whole work, as it appeared in the original translation, is appended at the end of the "Introduction," as a guide to the student.
§ 1. The science of Pedagogics may be called a secondary science, inasmuch as it derives its principles from others. In this respect it differs from Mathematics, which is independent. As it concerns the development of the human intelligence, it must wait upon Psychology for an understanding of that upon which it is to operate, and, as its means are to be sciences and arts, it must wait upon them for a knowledge of its materials. The science of Medicine, in like manner, is dependent on the sciences of Biology, Chemistry, Physics, etc. Moreover, as Medicine may have to deal with a healthy or unhealthy body, and may have it for its province to preserve or restore health, to assist a natural process (as in the case of a broken bone), or to destroy an unnatural one (as in the case of the removal of a tumor), the same variety of work is imposed upon Education.1
§ 2. Since the rules of Pedagogics must be extremely flexible, so that they may be adapted to the great variety of minds, and since an infinite variety of circumstances may arise in their application, we find, as we should expect, in all educational literature room for widely differing opinions and the wildest theories; these numerous theories, each of whichmay have a strong influence for a season, only to be overthrown and replaced by others.2It must be acknowledged that educational literature, as such, is not of a high order. It has its cant like religious literature. Many of its faults, however, are the result of honest effort, on the part of teachers, to remedy existing defects, and the authors are, therefore, not harshly to be blamed. It is also to be remembered that the habit of giving reproof and advice is one fastened in them by the daily necessity of their professional work.3
§ 3. As the position of the teacher has ceased to be undervalued, there has been an additional impetus given to self-glorification on his part, and this also—in connection with the fact that schools are no longer isolated as of old, but subject to constant comparison and competition—leads to much careless theorizing among its teachers, especially in the literary field.
§ 4. Pedagogics, because it deals with the human spirit, belongs, in a general classification of the sciences, to the philosophy of spirit, and in the philosophy of spirit it must be classified under the practical, and not the merely theoretical, division. For its problem is not merely to comprehend the nature of that with which it has to deal, the human spirit—its problem is not merely to influence one mind (that of the pupil) by another (that of the teacher)—but to influence it in such a way as to produce the mental freedom of the pupil. The problem is, therefore, not so much to obtain performed works as to excite mental activity. A creative process is required. The pupil is to be forced to go in certain beaten tracks, and yet he is to be so forced to go in these that he shall go of his own freewill. All teaching which does not leave the mind of the pupil free is unworthy of the name. It is true that the teacher must understand the nature of mind, ashe is to deal with mind, but when he has done this he has still his main principle of action unsolved; for the question is, knowing the nature of the mind, How shall he incite it to action, already predetermined in his own mind, without depriving the mind of the pupil of its own free action? How shall he restrain and guide, and yet not enslave?
If, in classifying all sciences, as suggested at the beginning of this section, we should subdivide the practical division of the Philosophy of Spirit, which might be called Ethics, one could find a place for Pedagogics under some one of the grades of Ethics. The education which the child receives through the influence of family life lies at the basis of all other teaching, and what the child learns of life, its duties, and possibilities, in its own home, forms the foundation for all after-work. On the life of the family, then, as a presupposition, all systems of Education must be built. In other words, the school must not attempt to initiate the child into the knowledge of the world—it must not assume the care of its first training; that it must leave to the family.4But the science of Pedagogics does not, as a science, properly concern itself with the family education, or with that point of the child's life which is dominated by the family influence. That is education, in a certain sense, without doubt, but it does not properly belong to a science of Pedagogics. But, on the other hand, it must be remembered that this science, as here expounded, presupposes a previous family life in the human being with whom it has to deal.
§ 5. Education as a science will present the necessary and universal principles on which it is based; Education as an art will consist in the practical realization of these in the teacher's work in special places, under special circumstances, and with special pupils. In the skillful application of the principles of the science to the actual demands of the art lies the opportunity for the educator to prove himself a creative artist; and it is in the difficulty involved in this practicalwork that the interest and charm of the educator's work consists.
The teacher must thus adapt himself to the pupil. But, in doing so, he must have a care that he do not carry this adaptation to such a degree as to imply that the pupil is not to change; and he must see to it, also, that the pupil shall always be worked upon by the matter which he is considering, and not too much by the personal influence of the teacher through whom he receives it.5
§ 6. The utmost care is necessary lest experiments which have proved successful in certain cases should be generalized into rules, and a formal, dead creed, so to speak, should be adopted. All professional experiences are valuable as material on which to base new conclusions and to make new plans, but only for that use. Unless the day's work is, every day, a new creation, a fatal error has been made.
§ 7. Pedagogics as a science must consider Education—
(1) In its general idea;(2) In its different phases;(3) In the special systems arising from this general idea, acting under special circumstances at special times.6
§ 8. With regard to the First Part, we remark that by Education, in its general idea, we do not mean any mere history of Pedagogics, nor can any history of Pedagogics be substituted for a systematic exposition of the underlying idea.
§ 9. The second division considers Education under three heads—as physical, intellectual, and moral—and forms, generally, the principal part of all pedagogical treatises.
In this part lies the greatest difficulty as to exact limitation. The ideas on these divisions are often undefined and apt to be confounded, and the detail of which they are capable is almost unlimited, for we might, under this head, speakof all kinds of special schools, such as those for war, art, mining, etc.
§ 10. In the Third Part we consider the different realizations of the one general idea of Pedagogics as it has developed itself under different circumstances and in different ages of the world.
The general idea is forced into different phases by the varying physical, intellectual, and moral conditions of men. The result is the different systems, as shown in the analysis. The general idea is one. The view of the end to be obtained determines in each case the actualization of this idea. Hence the different systems of Education are each determined by the stand-point from which the general ideal is viewed. Proceeding in this manner, it might be possible to construct a history of Pedagogics,Ã priori, without reference to actual history, since all the possible systems might be inferred from the possible definite number of points of view.
Each lower stand-point will lead to a higher, but it will not be lost in it. Thus, where Education, for the sake of the nation,7merges into the Education based on Christianity, the form is not thereby destroyed, but, rather, in the transition first attains its full realization. The systems of Education which were based on the idea of the nation had, in the fullness of time, outgrown their own limits, and needed a new form in order to contain their own true idea. The idea of the nation, as the highest principle, gives way for that of Christianity. A new life came to the old idea in what at first seemed to be its destruction. The idea of the nation was born again, and not destroyed, in Christianity.
§ 11. The final system, so far, is that of the present time, which thus is itself the fruit of all the past systems, as well as the seed of all systems that are to be. The science of Pedagogics, in the consideration of the system of the present, thus again finds embodied the general idea of education, and thus returns upon itself to the point from whence it set out. In the First and Second Parts there is already given the idea which dominates the system found thus necessarily existing in the present.
FIRST PART.
The General Idea of Education.
§ 12. A full treatment of Pedagogics must distinguish—(1) The nature of Education;(2) The form of Education;(3) The limits of Education.
I.—The Nature of Education.
§ 13. The nature of Education is determined by the nature of mind, the distinguishing mark of which is that it can be developed only from within, and by its own activity. Mind is essentially free—i.e., it has the capacity for freedom—but it cannot be said to possess freedom till it has obtained it by its own voluntary effort. Till then it cannot be truly said to be free. Education consists in enabling a human being to take possession of, and to develop himself by, his own efforts, and the work of the educator cannot be said to be done in any sense where this is not accomplished. In general, we may say that the work of education consists in leading to a full development of all the inherent powers of the mind, and that its work is done when, in this way, the mind has attained perfect freedom, or the state in which alone it can be said to be truly itself.8
The isolated human being can never become truly man. If such human beings (like the wild girl of the forest of Ardennes) have been found, they have only proved to us that reciprocal action with our fellow beings is necessary for the developmentof our powers. Caspar Hauser, in his subterranean prison, will serve as an example of what man would be without men. One might say that this fact is typified by the first cry of the newly-born child. It is as if the first expression of its seemingly independent life were a cry for help from others. On the side of nature the human being is at first quite helpless.
§ 14. Man is, therefore, the only proper object of education. It is true that we speak of the education of plants and of animals, but we instinctively apply other terms when we do so, for we say "raising" plants, and "training" animals. When we "train" or "break" an animal, it is true that we do, by pain or pleasure, lead him into an exercise of a new activity. But the difference between this and Education consists in the fact that, though he possessed capacity, yet by no amount of association with his kind would he ever have acquired this new development. It is as if we impress upon his plastic nature the imprint of our loftier nature, which imprint he takes mechanically, and does not himself recognize it as his own internal nature. We train him for our recognition, not for his own. But, on the contrary, when we educate a human being, we only excite him to create for himself, and out of himself, that for which he would most earnestly strive had he any appreciation of it beforehand, and in proportion as he does appreciate it he recognizes it joyfully as a part of himself, as his own inheritance, which he appropriates with a knowledge that it is his, or, rather, is a part of his own nature. He who speaks of "raising" human beings uses language which belongs only to the slave-dealer, to whom human beings are only cattle for labor, and whose property increases in value with the number.
Are there no school-rooms where Education has ceased to have any meaning, and where physical pain is made to produce its only possible result—a mechanical, external repetition? The school-rooms where the creative word—the only thing which can influence the mind—has ceased to be used as the means are only plantations, where human beings are degraded to the position of lower animals.
§ 15. When we speak of the Education of the humanrace, we mean the gradual growth of the nations of the earth, as a whole, towards the realization of self-conscious freedom. Divine Providence is the teacher here. The means by which the development is effected are the various circumstances and actions of the different races of men, and the pupils are the nations. The unfolding of this great Education is generally treated of under the head of Philosophy of History.
§ 16. Education, however, in a more restricted sense, has to do with the shaping of the individual. Each one of us is to be educated by the laws of physical nature—by the relations into which we come with the national life, in its laws, customs, etc., and by the circumstances which daily surround us. By the force of these we find our arbitrary will hemmed in, modified, and forced to take new channels and forms. We are too often unmindful of the power with which these forces are daily and hourly educating us—i. e., calling out our possibilities into real existence. If we set up our will in opposition to either of these; if we act in opposition to the laws of nature; if we seriously offend the laws, or even the customs, of the people among whom we live; or if we despise our individual lot, we do so only to find ourselves crushed in the encounter. We only learn the impotence of the individual against these mighty powers; and that discovery is, of itself, a part of our education. It is sometimes only by such severe means that God is revealed to the man who persistently misunderstands and defies His creation. All suffering brought on ourselves by our own violation of laws, whether natural, ethical, or divine, must be, however, thus recognized as the richest blessing. We do not mean to say that it is never allowable for a man, in obedience to the highest laws of his spiritual being, to break away from the fetters of nature—to offend the ethical sense of his own people, or to struggle against the might of destiny. Reformers and martyrs would be examples of such, and our remarks above do not apply to them, but to the perverse, the frivolous, and the conceited; to those who are seeking in their action, not the undoubted will of God, but their own individual will or caprice.
§ 17. But we generally use the word Education in a stillnarrower sense than either of these, for we mean by it the working of one individual mind upon or within another in some definite and premeditated way, so as to fit the pupil for life generally, or for some special pursuit. For this end the educator must be relatively finished in his own education, and the pupil must possess confidence in him, or docility. He must be teachable. That the work be successful, demands the very highest degree of talent, knowledge, skill, and prudence; and any development is impossible if a well-founded authority be wanting in the educator, or docility on the part of the pupil.
Education, in this narrowest and technical sense, is an outgrowth of city or urban life. As long as men do not congregate in large cities, the three forces spoken of in §16—i.e., the forces of nature, national customs, and circumstances—will be left to perform most of the work of Education; but, in modern city life, the great complication of events, the uncertainty in the results—though careful forethought has been used—the immense development of individuality, and the pressing need of various information, break the power of custom, and render a different method necessary. The larger the city is, the more free is the individual in it from the restraints of customs, the less subjected to curious criticism, and the more able is he to give play to his own idiosyncrasies. This, however, is a freedom which needs the counterpoise of a more exact training in conventionalities, if we would not have it dangerous. Hence the rapid multiplication of educational institutions and systems in modern times (one chief characteristic of which is the development of urban life). The ideal Telemachus of Fenelon differs very much from the real Telemachus of history. Fenelon proposed an education which trained a youth to reflect, and to guide himself by reason. The Telemachus of the heroic age followed the customs ("use and wont") of his times withnaïveobedience. The systems of Education once sufficient do not serve the needs of modern life, any more than the defenses once sufficient against hostile armies are sufficient against the new weapons adopted by modern warfare.
§ 18. The problem with which modern Education has to deal may be said, in general terms, to be the development in the individual soul of the indwelling Reason, both practical (as will) and theoretical (as intellect). To make a child good is only a part of Education; we have also to develop his intelligence. The sciences of Ethics and Education are not the same. Again, we must not forget that no pupil is simply a human being, like every other human being; he is also an individual, and thus differs from every other one of the race. This is a point which must never be lost sight of by the educator. Human beings may be—nay, must be—educated in company, but they cannot be educated simply in the mass.
§ 19. Education is to lead the pupil by a graded series of exercises, previously arranged and prescribed by the educator, to a definite end. But these exercises must take on a peculiar form for each particular pupil under the special circumstances present. Hasty and inconsiderate workmay, by chance, accomplish much; but no work which is notsystematiccan advance and fashion him in conformity with his tenure, and such alone is to be called Education; for Education implies both a comprehension of the end to be attained and of the means necessary to compass that end.
§ 20. Culture, however, means more and more every year; and, as the sum total of knowledge increases for mankind, it becomes necessary, in order to be a master in any one line, to devote one's self almost exclusively to that. Hence arises, for the teacher, the difficulty of preserving the unity and wholeness which are essential to a complete man. The principle of division of labor comes in. He who is a teacher by profession becomes one-sided in his views; and, as teaching divides and subdivides into specialities, this abnormal one-sideness tends more and more to appear. Here we find a parallelism in the profession of Medicine, with a corresponding danger of narrowness; for that, too, is in a process of constant specialization, and the physician who treats nervous diseases is likely to be of the opinion that all trouble arises from that part of the organism, or, at least, that all remedies shouldbe applied there. This tendency to one-sideness is inseparable from the progress of civilization and that of science and arts. It contains, nevertheless, a danger of which no teacher should be unwarned. An illustration is furnished by the microscope or telescope; a higher power of the instrument implies a narrower field of view. To concentrate our observation upon one point implies the shutting out of others. This difficulty with the teacher creates one for the pupil.
In this view one might be inclined to judge that the life of the savage as compared with that of civilized man, or that of a member of a rural community as compared with that of an inhabitant of a city, were the more to be desired. The savage has his hut, his family, his cocoa-palm, his weapons, his passions; he fishes, hunts, amuses himself, adorns himself, and enjoys the consciousness that he is the center of a little world; while the denizen of a city must often acknowledge that he is, so to speak, only one wheel of a gigantic machine. Is the life of the savage, therefore, more favorable to human development? The characteristic idea of modern civilization is: The development of the individual as the end for which the State exists. The great empires of Persia, Egypt, and India, wherein the individual was of value only as he ministered to the strength of the State, have given way to the modern nations, where individual freedom is pushed so far that the State seems only an instrument for the good of the individual. From being the supreme end of the individual, the State has become the means for his advancement into freedom; and with this very exaltation of the value of the mere individual over the State, as such, there is inseparably connected the seeming destruction of the wholeness of the individual man. But the union of State and individual, which was in ancient times merely mechanical, has now become a living process, in which constant interaction gives rise to all the intellectual life of modern civilization.
§ 21. The work of Education being thus necessarily split up, we have the distinction between general and special schools. The work of the former is to give general development—what is considered essential for all men; that of thelatter, to prepare for special callings. The former should furnish a basis for the latter—i.e., the College should precede the Medical School, etc., and the High School the Normal. In the United States, owing to many causes, this is unfortunately not the case.
The difference between city and country life is important here. The teacher in a country school, and, still more, the private tutor or governess, must be able to teach many more things than the teacher in a graded school in the city, or the professor in a college or university. The danger on the one side is of superficiality, on the other of narrowness.
§ 22. The Education of any individual can be only relatively finished. His possibilities are infinite. His actual realization of those possibilities must always remain far behind. The latter can only approximate to the former. It can never reach them. The term "finishing an education" needs, therefore, some definition; for, as a technical term, it has undoubtedly a meaning. An immortal soul can never complete its development; for, in so doing, it would give the lie to its own nature. We cannot speak properly, however, of educating an idiot. Such an unfortunate has no power of generalization, and no conscious personality. We can train him mechanically, but we cannot educate him. This will help to illustrate the difference, spoken of in §14, between Education and Mechanical training.
We obtain astonishing results, it is true, in our schools for idiots, and yet we cannot fail to perceive that, after all, we have only an external result. We produce a mechanical performance of duties, and yet there seems to be no actual mental growth. It is an exogenous, and not an endogenous, growth, to use the language of Botany.9Continual repetition, under the most gentle patience, renders the movements easy, but, after all, they are only automatic, or what the physicians call reflex.
We have the same result produced in a less degree when weattempt to teach an intelligent child something which is beyond his active comprehension. A child may be taught to do or say almost anything by patient training, but, if what he is to say is beyond the power of his mental comprehension, and hence of his active assimilation, we are only training him as we train an animal (§14), and not educating him. We call such recitations parrot recitations, and, by our use of the word, express exactly in what position the pupils are placed. An idiot is only a case of permanently arrested development. What in the intelligent child is a passing phase is for the idiot a fixed state. We have idiots of all grades, as we have children of all ages.
The above observations must not be taken to mean that children should never be taught to perform operations in arithmetic which they do not, in cant phrase, "perfectly understand," or to learn poetry whose whole meaning they cannot fathom. Into this error many teachers have fallen.
There can be no more profitable study for a teacher than to visit one of these numerous idiot schools. He finds the alphabet of his professional work there. As the philologist learns of the formation and growth of language by examining, not the perfectly formed languages, but the dialects of savage tribes, so with the teacher. In like manner more insight into the philosophy of teaching and of the nature of the mind can be acquired by teaching a class of children to read than in any other grade of work.