Produced by Katherine Ward, Jonathan Ingram, and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
THE REFORM OF EDUCATION
BY GIOVANNI GENTILE
AUTHORIZED TRANSLATION BY DINO BIGONGIARI
With an Introduction by BENEDETTO CROCE
NEW YORK
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY
1922
COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.
PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY
THE QUINN & BODEN COMPANY
RAHWAY, N.J.
CONTENTS
PAGE
Introduction vii
I. Education and Nationality 3
II. Education and Personality 18
III. The Fundamental Antinomy of Education 40
IV. Realism and Idealism in the Concept of Culture 63
V. The Spirituality of Culture 85
VI. The Attributes of Culture 110
VII. The Bias of Realism 139
VIII. The Unity of Education 166
IX. Character and Physical Education 192
X. The Ideal of Education 219
XI. Conclusion 246
NOTE
Shortly after Trieste fell into Italian hands, a series of lectures was
arranged for the school teachers of the city, in order to welcome them
to their new duties as citizens and officials of Italy. The task of
opening the series was assigned to Giovanni Gentile, Professor of
Philosophy in the University of Rome, who delivered the lectures which
constitute the present volume. At my request Signor Gentile has
rewritten the first chapter, eliminating some of the more local of the
allusions which the nature of the original occasion called forth, and
Senatore Croce has very generously contributed his illuminating
Introduction. The volume as it stands is more than a treatise on
education: it is at one and the same time an introduction to the thought
of one of the greatest of living philosophers, and an introduction to
the study of all philosophy. If the teachers of Trieste were able to
understand and to enjoy a philosophic discussion of their chosen work,
why should not the teachers of America?
J. E. S.
INTRODUCTION
The author of this book has been working in the same field with me for
over a quarter of a century, ever since the time when we undertook--he a
very young man, and I somewhat his senior--to shake Italy out of the
doze of naturalism and positivism back to idealistic philosophy; or, as
it would be better to say, to philosophy pure and simple, if indeed
philosophy is always idealism.
Together we founded a review, the _Critica_, and kept it going by our
contributions; together we edited collections of classical authors; and
together we engaged in many lively controversies. And it seems indeed as
though we really succeeded in laying hold of and again firmly
re-establishing in Italy the tradition of philosophical studies, thus
welding a chain which evidently has withstood the strain and destructive
fury of the war and its afterclaps.
By this I do not mean to imply that our gradual achievements were the
result of a definite preconcerted plan. Our work was the spontaneous
consequence of our spontaneous mental development and of the spontaneous
agreement of our minds. And therefore this common task, too, gradually
becoming differentiated in accordance with the peculiarities of our
temperaments, our tendencies, and our attitudes, resulted in a kind of
division of labour between us. So that whereas I by preference have
devoted my attention to the history of literature, Gentile has
dedicated himself more particularly to the history of philosophy and
especially of Italian philosophy, not only as a thinker but as a
scholar too, and as a philologist. He may be said to have covered the
entire field from the Middle Ages to the present time by his works on
Scholasticism in Italy, on Bruno, on Telesio, on Renaissance
philosophy, on Neapolitan philosophy from Genovesi to Galluppi, on
Rosmini, on Gioberti, and on the philosophical writers from 1850 to
1900. And though his comprehensive _History of Italian Philosophy_,
published in parts, is far from being finished, the several sections
of it have been elaborated and cast in the various monographs which I
have just mentioned.
In addition to this, Gentile has been devoting special attention to
religious problems. He took a very important part in the inquiry into
and criticism of "modernism," the hybrid nature of which he laid bare,
exposing both the inner contradictions and the scanty sincerity of the
movement. His handling of this question was shown to be effective by the
fact, among others, that the authors of the encyclical _Pascendi_, which
brought upon Modernism the condemnation of the Church, availed
themselves of the sharp edge of Gentile's logical arguments, prompted
by scientific loyalty and dictated by moral righteousness.
Finally, and in a more close connection with the present work, it will
be remembered that Gentile has done away with the chaotic pedagogy of
the positivistic school, and has also definitely criticised the
educational theory of Herbart. As far back as 1900 he published a
monograph of capital importance, in which he showed that pedagogy in so
far as it is philosophical resolves itself without residuum into the
philosophy of the spirit; for the science of the spirit's education can
not but be the science of the spirit's development,--of its dialectics,
of its necessity.
Indeed, we owe it to Gentile that Italian pedagogy has attained in the
present day a simplicity and a depth of concepts unknown elsewhere. In
Italy, not educational science alone, but the practice of it and its
political aspects have been thoroughly recast and amply developed. And
this, too, is due pre-eminently to the work of Gentile. His authority
therefore is powerfully felt in schools of all grades, for he has lived
intensely the life of the school and loves it dearly.
In addition to these differences arising from our division of labour,
others may of course be noticed, and they are to be found in the form
that philosophical doctrines have taken on in each of us. Identity is
impossible in this field, for philosophy, like art, is closely bound up
with the personality of the thinker, with his spiritual interests, and
with his experiences of life. There is never true identity except in the
so-called "philosophical school," which indicates the death of a
philosophy, in the same way that the poetical school proclaims death in
poetry.
And so it has come about that our general conception of philosophy as
simple philosophy of the spirit--of the subject, and never of nature, or
of the object--has developed a peculiar stress in Gentile, for whom
philosophy is above all that point in which every abstraction is
overcome and submerged in the concreteness of the act of Thought;
whereas for me philosophy is essentially methodology of the one real and
concrete Thinking--of historical Thinking. So that while he strongly
emphasises unity, I no less energetically insist on the distinction and
dialectics of the forms of the spirit as a necessary formation of the
methodology of historical judgment. But of this enough, especially since
the reader can only become interested in these differences after he has
acquired a more advanced knowledge of contemporary Italian philosophy.
I am convinced that the translation and popularisation of Gentile's work
will contribute to the toilsome formation of that consciousness, of that
system of convictions, of that moral and mental faith which is the
profound need of our times. For our age, eager and anxious for Faith, is
perhaps not yet completely resigned to look for the new creed of
humanity there where alone it may be found, where by firm resolve it
may be secured--in pure Thought. Clear-sighted observers have perhaps
not failed to notice that the World War, in addition to every thing
else, has been a strife of religions, a clash of conflicting conceptions
of life, a struggle of opposed philosophies. It is surely not the duty
of thinkers to settle economic and political contentions by ineffective
appeals to the universal brotherhood of man; but it is rather their duty
to compose mental differences and antagonisms, and thus form the new
faith of humanity--a new Christianity or a new Humanism, as we may wish
to call it. Such a faith will certainly not be spared the conflicts from
which ancient Christianity itself was not free; but it may reasonably be
hoped that it will rescue us from intellectual anarchy, from unbridled
individualism, from sensualism, from scepticism, from pessimism, from
every aberration which for a century and a half has been harassing the
soul of man and the society of mankind under the name of Romanticism.
BENEDETTO CROCE.
ROME, April, 1921.
CHAPTER I
EDUCATION AND NATIONALITY
Participation on the part of elementary school teachers in the work and
studies of the Universities has always seemed to me to constitute a real
need of culture and of primary education. For the elementary school, by
the very nature of the professional training of its teachers, is exposed
to a grave danger from which it must be rescued if we mean to keep it
alive.
The training of the elementary school teacher tends to be dogmatic. True
it is that vigilant individuality and passionate love for his
exquisitely spiritual calling impel the school teacher to an untiring
criticism of his methods, of his actual teaching, and of the life of the
school which he directs and promotes. But nevertheless in consequence of
those very studies by which he has prepared himself to be an elementary
instructor, he is led to look upon that learning which constitutes his
mental equipment and the foundation of all his future teaching, as
something quite finished, rounded out, enclosed in definite formulas,
rules, and laws, all of which have been ascertained once for all and are
no longer susceptible of ulterior revision. He looks upon this learning
not as a developing organism, but as something definitely moulded and
stereotyped. From this the conclusion is drawn that a certain kind of
knowledge may serve as a corner stone for the whole school edifice.
Since his discipline and his teaching consist mainly of elements which
because of their abstractness miss the renovating flow of spiritual
life, the teacher slowly but surely ends by shutting himself up in a
certain number of ideas, which are final as far as he is concerned. They
are never corrected or transformed; in their mechanical fixity they
cease to live; and the mind which cherishes and preserves them loses its
natural tendency to doubt. Yet what is doubt but dissatisfaction with
what is known and with the manner of knowing, and a spur to further
inquiry, to better and fuller learning, to self scrutiny, to an
examination of one's own sentiments, one's own character, and an
inducement to broadmindedness, to a welcoming receptiveness of all the
suggestions and all the teachings which life at all moments generously
showers on us?
The remedy against this natural tendency of the teacher's mind is to be
found in the University, where in theory, and so far as is possible, in
practice too, science is presented not as ready-made, definitely turned
out in final theories, enclosed in consecrated manuals; but as inquiry,
as research, as spiritual activity which does not rest satisfied with
its accomplishments, but for ever feels that it does not yet know or
does not know enough, aware of the difficulties which threaten every
attained position, and ready unrestingly to track them, to reveal them,
and meet them squarely. This life, which is perpetual criticism, and
unceasing progress in a learning which is never completed, which never
aspires to be complete, is the serious and fruitful purpose of the
University. Here we must come, to restore freshness to our spiritual
activities, which alone give value to knowledge, and wrest it from
deadening crystallisation, from mechanical rigidity. For this reason, it
seems to me, special provision should be made in the University to
satisfy the needs of school teachers. It is not a question of merely
furnishing them with additional information which they might just as
well get out of books. The University must act on their minds, shake
them, start them going, instil in them salutary doubt by criticism, and
develop a taste for true knowledge.
The following chapters contain a series of University lectures, in
accordance with these criteria, and delivered originally to the
elementary teachers of Trieste, now for the first time again an Italian
city. They constitute a course which aims not to increase the quantity
of culture, but to change its character. It is an attempt to introduce
the elementary teacher into those spiritual workshops which are the
halls of a University, to induce him to take part in the original
investigations which constantly contribute to the formation of our
national learning; which forever make and reshape our ideas and our
convictions as to what we should want Italian science to be, the Italian
concepts of life and literature; as to what constitute the heirloom of
our school, that sacred possession bequeathed to us by our forefathers
which makes us what we are, which gives us a name and endows us with a
personality, by which we are enabled to look forward to a future of
Italy which is not solely economic and political, but moral and
intellectual as well.
And thus, because of the time, the place, the audience, and the subject,
we are from the start brought face to face with a serious question,--a
question which has often been debated, and which in the last few years,
on account of the exasperation of national sentiment brought about by
the World War, has become the object of passionate controversies. For if
it has been frequently argued on one side that science is by nature and
ought to be national, there has been no lack of warning from the other
side as to the dangers of this position. For war, it was said, would,
sooner or later, come to an end and be a thing of the past; whereas
truth never sets, never becomes a thing of the past; it is error alone
that is destined to pass and disappear. We were reminded of the fact
that what is scientifically true and artistically beautiful is beautiful
and true beyond no less than within the national frontier; and that only
on this condition is it worthy of its name. This question therefore
presents itself as a preliminary to our investigation, and it is for us
to examine it. We shall do so in as brief a manner as the subject will
allow.
We shall first point out the inutility of distinguishing science from
culture, education from instruction. Those who insist on these
distinctions maintain that though a school is never national in virtue
of the content of its scientific teaching, it must nevertheless be
national in that it transforms science into culture, makes it over into
an instrument with which to shape consciousness and conscience, and uses
it as a tool for the making of men and for the training of citizens.
Thus we have as an integral part of science a form of action directed on
the character and the will of the young generations that are being
nurtured and raised in accordance with national traditions and in view
of the ends which the state wants to attain. Such distinctions however
complicate but do not resolve the controversy. They entangle it with
other questions which it were better to leave untouched at this
juncture. For it might be said of questions what Manzoni said of books:
one at a time is enough--if it isn't too much.
We shall therefore try to simplify matters, and begin by clarifying the
two concepts of nationality and of knowledge, in order to define the
concept of the "nationality of knowledge." What, then, is the nation? A
very intricate question, indeed, over which violent discussions are
raging, and all the more passionately because the premises and
conclusions of this controversy are never maintained in the peaceful
seclusion of abstract speculative theories, but are dragged at every
moment in the very midst of the concrete interests of the men themselves
who affirm or deny the value of nationalities. So that serious
difficulties are encountered every time an attempt is made to determine
the specific and concrete content of this concept of the nation, which
is ever present, and yet ever elusive. Proteus-like, it appears before
us, but as we try to grasp it, it changes semblance and breaks away. It
is visible to the immediate intuition of every national consciousness,
but it slips from thought as we strive to fix its essence.
Is it common territory that constitutes nationality? or is it common
language? or political life led in common? or the accumulation of
memories, of traditions, and of customs by which a people looks back to
_one_ past where it never fails to find itself? Or is it perhaps the
relationship which binds together all the individuals of a community
into a strong and compact structure, assigning a mission and an
apostolate to a people's faith? One or the other of these elements, or
all of them together, have in turn been proposed and rejected with
equally strong arguments. For in each case it may be true or it may be
false that the given element constitutes the essence of a people's
nationality, or of any historical association whatsoever. All these
elements, whether separately or jointly, may have two different
meanings, one of which makes them a mere accidental content of the
national consciousness, whereas the other establishes them as necessary,
essential, and unfailing constituents. For they may have a merely
natural value, or they may have a moral and spiritual one. Our
birth-land, which nourished us in our infancy, and now shelters the
bodies of our parents, the mountains and the shores that surround it and
individualise it, these are natural entities. They are not man-made; we
cannot claim them, nor can we fasten our existence to them. Even our
speech, our religion itself, which do indeed live in the human mind, may
yet be considered as natural facts similar to the geographical accidents
which give boundaries and elevation to the land of a people. We may,
abstractly, look upon our language as that one which was spoken before
we were born, by our departed ancestors who somehow produced this
spiritual patrimony of which we now have the use and enjoyment, very
much in the same way that we enjoy the sunlight showered upon us by
nature. In this same way a few, perhaps many, conceive of religion: they
look upon it as something bequeathed and inherited, and not therefore as
the fruit of our own untiring faith and the correlate of our actual
personality. All these elements in so far as they are natural are
evidently extraneous to our personality. We do dwell within this
peninsula cloistered by the Alps; we delight in this luminous sky, in
our charming shores smiled upon by the waters of the Mediterranean. But
if we emigrate from this lovely abode, if under the stress of economic
motives we traverse the ocean and gather, a number of us, somewhere
across the Atlantic; and there, united by the natural tie of common
origin, and fastened by the identity of speech, we maintain ourselves as
a special community, with common interests and peculiar moral
affinities, then, in spite of the severance from our native peninsula,
we have preserved our nationality: Italy has crossed the ocean in our
wake. Not only can we sunder ourselves from our land, but we may even
relinquish our customs, forget our language, abandon our religion; or we
may, within our own fatherland, be kept separate by peculiar historical
traditions, by differences of dialects or even of language, by religion,
by clashing interests, and yet respond with the same sentiment and the
same soul to the sound of one Name, to the colours of one flag, to the
summons of common hopes, to the alarm of common dangers.
And it is then that we feel ourselves to be a people; then are we a
nation. It is not what we put within this concept that gives consistency
and reality to the concept itself; it is the act of spiritual energy
whereby we cling to a certain element or elements in the consciousness
of that collective personality to which we feel we belong. Nationality
consists not in content which may vary, but in the form which a certain
content of human consciousness assumes when it is felt to constitute a
nation's character.
But this truth is still far from being recognised. Its existence is not
even suspected by those who utilise a materially constituted nationality
as a title, that is, an antecedent, and a support for political rights
claimed by more or less considerable ethnical aggregates that are more
or less developed and more or less prepared to take on the form of free
and independent states and to secure recognition of a _de facto_
political personality on the strength of an assumed _de jure_
existence.
This truth, however, was grasped by the profound intuition of Mazzini,
the apostle of nationalities, the man who roused our national energies,
and whose irresistible call awakened Italy and powerfully impelled her
to affirm her national being. Even from the first years of the _Giovine
Italia_ he insisted that Italy, when still merely an idea, prior to her
taking on a concrete and actual political reality, was not a people and
was not a nation. For a nation, he maintained, is not something existing
in nature; but a great spiritual reality. Therefore like all that is in
and for the spirit, it is never a fact ready to be ascertained, but
always a mission, a purpose, something that has to be realised--an
action.
The Italians to whom Mazzini spoke were not the people around him. He
was addressing that future people which the Italians themselves had to
create. And they would create it by fixing their souls on one idea--the
idea of a fatherland to be conquered--a sacred idea, so noble that
people would live and die for it, as for that sovereign and ultimate
Good for which all sacrifices are gladly borne, without which man can
not live, outside of which he finds nothing that satisfies him, nothing
that is conducive to a life's work. For Mazzini nationality is not
inherited wealth, but it is man's own conquest. A people can not
faint-heartedly claim from others recognition of their nation, but must
themselves demonstrate its existence, realise it by their willingness to
fight and die for its independence: independence which is freedom and
unity and constitutes the nation. It is not true that first comes the
nation and then follows the state; the nation is the state when it has
triumphed over the enemy, and has overcome the oppression, which till
then were hindering its formation. It is not therefore a vague
aspiration or a faint wish, but an active faith, an energetic volition
which creates, in the freed political Power, the reality of its own
moral personality and of its collective consciousness. Hence the lofty
aim of Mazzini in insisting that Italy should not be made with the help
of foreigners but should be a product of the revolution, that is, of its
own will.
And truly the nation is, substantially, as Mazzini saw and firmly
believed, the common will of a people which affirms itself and thus
secures self-realisation. A nation is a nation only when it wills to be
one. I said, when it really wills, not when it merely says it does. It
must therefore act in such a manner as to realise its own personality in
the form of the State beyond which there is no collective will, no
common personality of the people. And it must act seriously, sacrificing
the individual to the collective whole, and welcoming martyrdom, which
in every case is but the sacrifice of the individual to the universal,
the lavishing of our own self to the ideal for which we toil.
From this we are not, however, to infer that a nation can under no
circumstances exist prior to the formation of its State. For if this
formation means the formal proclamation or the recognition by other
States, it surely does pre-exist. But it does not if we consider that
the proclamation of sovereignty is a moment in a previously initiated
process, and the effect of pre-existing forces already at work; which
effect is never definite because a State, even after it has been
constituted, continues to develop in virtue of those very forces which
produced it; so that it is constantly renewing and continually
reconstituting itself. Hence a State is always a future. It is that
state which this very day we must set up, or rather at this very
instant, and with all our future efforts bent to that political ideal
which gleams before us, not only in the light of a beautiful thought,
but as the irresistible need of our own personality.
The nation therefore is as intimately pertinent and native to our own
being as the State, considered as Universal Will, is one with our
concrete and actual ethical personality. Italy for us is the fatherland
which lives in our souls as that complex and lofty moral idea which we
are realising. We realise it in every instant of our lives, by our
feelings, and by our thoughts, by our speech and by our imagination,
indeed, by our whole life which concretely flows into that Will which is
the State and which thus makes itself felt in the world. And this Will,
this State is Italy, which has fought and won; which has struggled for a
long time amid errors and sorrows, hopes and dejection, manifestations
of strength and confessions of weakness, but always with a secret
thought, with a deep-seated aspiration which sustained her throughout
her entire ordeal, now exalting her in the flush of action, now, in the
critical moment of resistance, confirming and fortifying her by the
undying faith in ultimate triumph. This nation, which we all wish to
raise to an ever loftier station of honour and of beauty, even though we
differ as to the means of attaining this end, is it not the substance of
our personality,--of that personality which we possess not as
individuals who drift with the current, but as men who have a powerful
self-consciousness and who look upward for their destiny?
If we thus understand the nation, it follows that not only every man
must bear the imprint of his nationality, but that also there is no true
science, no man's science, which is not national. The ancients believed,
in conformity with the teachings of the Greeks, that science soars
outside of the human life, above the vicissitudes of mortals, beyond the
current of history, which is troubled by the fatal conflicts of error,
by falterings and doubts, and by the unsatisfied thirst for knowledge.
Truth, lofty, pure, motionless, and unchangeable, was to them the fixed
goal toward which the human mind moved, but completely severed from it
and transcendent. This concept, after two thousand years of speculation,
was to reveal itself as abstract and therefore fallacious,--abstract
from the human mind, which at every given instance mirrors itself in
such an image of truth, ever gazing upon an eternal ideal but always
intent on reshaping it in a new and more adequate form. The modern
world, at first with dim consciousness, and guided rather by a fortunate
intuition than by a clear concept of its own real orientation, then with
an ever clearer, ever more critical conviction, has elaborated a concept
which is directly antithetical to the classical idea of a celestial
truth removed from the turmoil of earthly things. It has accordingly and
by many ways reached the conclusion that reality, lofty though it be,
and truth itself, which nourishes the mind and alone gives validity to
human thought, are in life itself, in the development of the mind, in
the growth of the human personality, and that this personality, though
ideally beyond our grasp, is yet in the concrete always historical and
actual, and realises itself in its immanent value. It therefore creates
its truth and its world. Modern philosophy and modern consciousness no
longer point to values which, transcending history, determine its
movement and its direction by external finalities: they show to man that
the lofty aim which is his law is within himself; that it is in his ever
unsatisfied personality as it unceasingly strains upward towards its own
ideal.
Science is no longer conceived to-day as the indifferent pure matter of
the intellect. It is an interest which invests the entire person, extols
it and with it moves onward in the eternal rhythm of an infinite
development. Science is not for us the abstract contemplation of yore;
it is self-consciousness that man acquires, and by means of which he
actuates his own humanity. And therefore science is no longer an
adornment or an equipment of the mind, considered as diverse to its
content; it is culture, and the formation of this very mind. So that
whenever science is as yet so abstract that it seems not to touch the
person and fails to form it or transform it, it is an indication that it
is not as yet true science.
So we conclude thus: he who distinguishes his person from his knowledge
is ignorant of the nature of knowledge. The modern teacher knows of no
science which is not an act of a personality. It knows no personality
which admits of being sequestered from its ideas, from its ways of
thinking and of feeling, from that greater life which is the nation.
Concrete personality then is nationality, and therefore neither the
school nor science possesses a learning which is not national.
And for this reason therefore our educational reforms which are inspired
by the teachings of modern idealistic philosophy demand that the school
be animated and vivified by the spiritual breath of the fatherland.