THE FUNDAMENTAL ANTIMONY OF EDUCATION
A more precise determination must now be given to the problem, touched
upon in the preceding chapter, which might be called the _fundamental
antinomy of education_, understanding by "antinomy" the conflict of two
contradictory affirmations, either one of which appears to be true and
irrefutable.
The two contradictory affirmations are (1) that man as the object of
education is and must be free, and (2) that education denies man's
freedom. They might perhaps be better re-stated in this way: (1)
Education presupposes freedom in man and strives to increase it. (2)
Education treats man by ignoring the freedom he may originally be
endowed with, and acts in such a way as to strip him entirely of it.
Each of the two propositions must be taken, not as an approximate
affirmation, but as an exact enunciation of an irrefutable truth.
Therefore freedom here means full and absolute liberty; and when we
speak of the negation of freedom, we mean that education as such, and as
far as it is carried, destroys the freedom of the pupil.
Let us first see precisely what is meant by this _freedom_ which we
attribute to man. Each one of us firmly even though obscurely possesses
some conception of it. Every one of us, even though unfamiliar with the
controversies that have raged for centuries on the question of free
will, must have sometimes been compelled by the conditions of human life
to face the difficulties that beset the concept of man's freedom, and
must have been led to question, if not to deny outright, the proposition
that man is free. But on the other hand, every one of us has to admit
that the experience of life has confirmed the belief in our freedom
which for a moment had been shaken by doubt and perplexity; and that
faith, instinctive and incoercible, outlives every time the onslaughts
of negation.
By liberty we mean that power peculiar to man by which he moulds himself
into his actual being and originates the series of facts in which every
one of his actions becomes manifest. In nature, all facts, or, as they
are called, all phenomena appear to us to be so interrelated as to
constitute a universal system in which no phenomenon can ever be
considered as absolutely beginning, but can in each case be traced back
to a preceding phenomenon as its cause, or at any rate as the condition
of its intelligibility. The condensation of the aqueous vapour in the
cloud produces rain; but vapour would not condense without the action
of temperature, nor again would temperature be lowered without the
concurrence of certain meteorological facts which modify it, etc.
But we believe on the other hand that man derives from no one but
himself the principles and the causes of his actions. So that whenever
we see in his conduct the necessary effects of causes that have acted on
his character or momentarily on his will, we cease to consider such acts
as partaking of that moral value through which man's conduct is really
human and completely sundered from the instinctive impulses of the lower
animal, and even more so from the behaviour of the forces of inanimate
matter.
We may in certain moments deny a man's humanity, and see in his conduct
only brutal impulse, fierce cruelty, and unreasoning bestiality. In such
moments we cannot stop either to praise or to blame him. We do not even
strive to reason with him, for we feel that arguments would produce no
impression on his obdurate consciousness. Only through force can we
defend ourselves from his violence; against him we must use the same
weapon that we rely upon in our struggle with the wild beasts and the
blind forces of nature. We then become aware that our soul refuses to
recognise such an individual as a man. We esteem man to be such only
when we believe that we can influence him by words, by arguments that
are directed to reason, which is the birthright of man, and when we are
able to prevail upon those sentiments of his which, as peculiarly human,
appear to be almost the foundation and the understructure of rational
activity. This reason and these sentiments it must be remembered are the
peculiar constituents of human personality. They cannot be imparted to
man from the outside. They are in him from the very start even if only
as germs which he must himself cultivate, and which will, when
developed, enable him to act consciously, that is, with full knowledge
of his acts. This knowledge is twofold, for he knows what he is doing,
and he knows also how his actions must be judged. And so all the causes
that bear on him are practically of no weight in determining a course
which he will take, if he is a man, only after the approval of his own
judgment. What is more natural than to avenge an insult, and to harbour
hatred against an enemy? And yet from the viewpoint of morals, man is
worthy of this name only in so far as he is able to resist his
overpowering passions and to release himself from that force which
compels him to offset harm with more harm, and meet hatred with hatred.
He must pardon; he must love the enemy who harms him. Only when a man is
capable of understanding the beauty of this pardon and of such love,
only when, attracted by their beauty, he acts no longer in compliance
with the force of instinctive nature, does he cease to count as a purely
natural being, and lift himself to a higher level into that moral world
where he must progressively exhibit his human activities. Whether man is
equal to this task or not, we must demand that he satisfy this
requirement before we admit him into the society of mankind. He must
have in himself the strength to withstand the pressure of external
forces which may act on his will, on his personality, on that inner
centre from which his personality moves towards us, speaks to us, and
thus affirms its existence. We make these demands on him; and as we
extol him when by his deeds he shows sufficient capacity for his human
role, so we also blame him every time we find him through weakness
yielding to these forces. And the import of our blame is that he is
responsible for not having the power which he should have had.
It is of no importance that out of compassion, or through sympathy
for human frailty, we lighten or even entirely remove the burden of our
censure. Our disapproval of the deficiency, even though unexpressed,
remains within us side by side with the conviction that the delinquent
may do a great deal, nay, must, aided by us in the future, do
everything in his power to meet successfully the opposing forces of
evil. We surely cannot abandon the unfortunate wretch who through
moral impotence--whether it be the craven submissiveness of the
coward, or the undaunted violence of the overbearing brute--commits an
evil deed. We feel it our duty to watch over him and help him on
the road to redemption, because of our firm conviction that he will
eventually redeem himself; for he is after all a man like the rest of
us, and possesses therefore within himself the source and principle
of a life which will raise him from the slough in which he lies
immersed.
There is, however, a pseudo-science which, on the basis of superficial
and inaccurate observations, dogmatically asserts that certain forms of
criminality give evidence of original and irremediable moral depravity;
and that therefore persons tainted with it are fatally condemned never
to heed sufficiently the voice of duty and ever to yield to their
perverted instinct, which presses unrestrained from the depths of their
being at the slightest provocation and on the occasion of the most
insignificant clash with other human beings.
This is the doctrine of the modern school of criminal anthropology which
has spread throughout the world the fame of some Italian writers. Though
their influence is now on the wane, their observations on the
pathological nature of criminal acts have contributed to establish the
need of a more humane treatment of offenders,--more humane because
rational and effective.
Their doctrine falls in with a series of systems which at all times, and
always for materialistic motives,--materialistic even though disguised
under religious and theological robes,--have denied to man that power
which we call liberty, compelling him therefore to bend down under the
stress of universal determinism, and to behave as the drop that forever
moves with the motion of the boundless ocean, an insignificant particle
of the entire watery mass. What force intrinsic to this drop could ever
stop it on the crest of the wave which hurls it forward? Man, they say,
is no different from this drop: from the time of his birth to the
instant of his death, hemmed in by all the beings of nature, acted upon
by innumerable concurrent causes, he is pushed and dragged at every
moment by the irresistible current of all the forces of the entire mass
of the universe. At times he may delude himself into believing that he
has lifted his consciousness out of the huge flood, that it is within
his power to resist, to stop it as far as he is concerned, and to
control it; that, in short, it rests with him to fashion his own
destiny. But alas! this very belief, this illusion is the determined
result of the forces acting upon him: it is the inevitable effect of the
play of his representations,--representations which have not their
origin in him, but have been impressed upon him by outside forces. So
that the illusion of independence is but a mocking confirmation of the
impossibility of escaping the rush of fatal currents.
I shall not here give a critical presentation of the arguments by which
systems such as these have established the absence of freedom in man.
In our present need, a single remark will suffice, and will permit us,
I believe, to cut the discussion short. A great German philosopher,
who had conceived science and reality, which is the object of
science, in such a way as to preclude the possibility of finding in
reality a place for man's freedom, noticed that freedom, in spite of all
the difficulties which science encounters in accounting for it,
corresponds and answers to an invincible certitude in our soul,
invincible because a postulate of our moral conscience. That is to
say, that whatever our scientific theories and ideas, we have a
conscience which imposes a law upon us,--a law which, though not
promulgated and sustained by any external force, or rather because of
it, compels us in a manner which is absolute. This law is the moral
law. It requires no speculative demonstration. The scrutiny of
philosophers might not be helpful to it. It rises spontaneously and
naturally from the intimate recesses of our spirit; and it demands from
our will, from the will of the most uncouth man, an unconditional
respect. What sense would there be in the word duty, if man were able to
do only those things which his own nature, or worse still, nature in
general, compelled him to do? The existence of duty implies a power to
fulfil it. And the certitude of our moral obligations rests on the
conviction that we have within us the power to meet them. We can
answer the call of duty because we are free.
This consideration, important as it is, cannot however be considered as
sufficient. For this moral conscience, this certitude with which the
moral conscience affirms the existence of an unavoidable duty, might
also be an illusion determined in us by natural causes. Nothing hinders
us from thinking thus, and surely there is no contradiction implied in
this explanation, which in fact because of its possibilities is offered
by the philosophers of materialism.
But the need of liberty is not solely felt when we strive to conceive
our moral obligations; freedom is not only the ground for existence, the
_raison d'etre_ of moral law, as Kant thought--for he is the philosopher
to whom I alluded above;--no! freedom is the condition of the entire
life of the spirit. And the materialist who, having destroyed liberty as
a condition of moral conduct, believes that he is still able to think,
that his intellectual activity can proceed undisturbed after his faith
in the objective value and in the reality of moral laws has been
abandoned, such a materialistic thinker is totally mistaken. For without
freedom, man not only is unable to speak of duty, but he cannot speak at
all,--not even of his materialistic views. This is the same as saying
that the negation of liberty is unthinkable.
A brief reflection will make this clearer. We speak to others or to
ourselves in so far as we think, or say something or make affirmations.
Let us suppose that ideas be present to our minds (as people have
sometimes imagined) without our looking at them, without our noticing
them. Such ideas would have offered themselves in vain, in the same way
that many material objects remain unseen before us, because we do not
turn our gaze toward them. Every object of the mind, that is, every
thought, can only be thought because in addition to it we too are in the
mind: our mental activity is there, the ego of the thinking man, the
subject which is ready to affirm the object. And thought proper consists
in this affirmation of the object by the subject. Now, the subject, that
is, man, must be as free in the affirmation of his thought, by which he
thinks something, as he must be free in every one of his actions in
order that his action be truly his, and really human. In fact, we demand
of man that he give an account of his thoughts as well as of his deeds.
We evaluate not only what he does, but also what he thinks; we praise
him or we disapprove of him because of his sayings, that is, his
thoughts, and we call upon him to correct those thoughts which he should
not entertain. In this way we indicate our conviction that the thought
of each one of us is not simply a logical consequence of its premises,
not an effect determined by a psychic mechanism set in motion by the
universal mechanism of which our individual psyche is a part; we are
convinced that thought depends upon man, upon his capacity, upon his
personality, which is not controlled by any mechanical forces, nor
subject to premises which he may no longer modify once he has accepted
them. We are the masters of our thinking; and if the vigour of the human
personality is indeed shown by the steadfast constancy whereby in
practical life we pursue a hard and toilsome course toward an arduous
goal, it is revealed just as much by the quickness, the readiness, the
assiduousness, the lack of prejudice, the love which we manifest in our
search after truth.
It has therefore been said that cognition in man has moral value, and
that on the other hand the will is operative in the act of the
intellect. Such distinctions are dangerous. But whether we call it will
or intellect, the activity which makes us what we are, by which we
actualise our personality, also by thinking, it is certain that it is a
conscious and discriminating activity, through no force of gravity
precipitating on its object, but approaching it with selective freedom
of determination. And in the manner that every action aims at the good,
because it seems good, and appears in contrast with evil, so every
cognition is the affirmation of what to us is or seems to be a truth in
opposition to error and falseness. Without the antithesis of good to
evil there would be no moral action: without the antithesis of the true
to the false there would be no cognition. But the existence of this
antithesis implies a choice and therefore the liberty of choosing.
Should we deny freedom, and consequently abandon man to the determinism
of the causes acting upon him, we should deny the possibility of
distinguishing between good and evil, between true and false. The
materialist, therefore, when he rejects freedom, is compelled to affirm
that the value which moral conscience attributes to goodness is devoid
of any real grounds, and what is worse, that his very statement is
thereby stripped of all the value of truth. For he must be inwardly
convinced that what he thinks has no reason to be thought and therefore
cannot be thought.
The negation of freedom leads to this _absurdum_, to this impossible
thought, which is the Thought that is being thought as such, and yet
does not admit of being thought. Man, in so far as he thinks, affirms
his faith in freedom, and every attempt on his part to uproot this faith
from his soul is but a glaring confirmation of its existence. This
observation, properly grasped, is sufficient to establish human freedom
on a solid ground.
Freedom, moreover, which man needs in order to be human, cannot be, as
some have supposed, a relative liberty, limited and restricted by
certain conditions, for conditional liberty does not differ from
slavery. Here indeed is the very crux of the problem. Every one would
readily admit the existence of a limited freedom, and the divergence
would then be reduced to a question of degree. But the fact is that
freedom must be absolute or not be at all. Matter, that is, every
material object, is not free for the very reason that it is limited;
whereas the spirit--every spiritual act--is free because it is infinite,
and as such not relative to any thing, and therefore absolute.
Any limitation of the spirit would annihilate its liberty. The slave is
such because his will is constrained within the bounds imposed upon it
by the master's volition. The human spirit is not free in the presence
of nature because nature envelops it and enfolds it within narrow
confines, which allow only a certain development; and this development
therefore cannot be looked upon as a grant of nature but rather as a
condemnation, in that it marks out boundaries which cannot be
trespassed. The lower animal is not free because even if its actions
seem to imply a rationality not very different from that of man, yet in
reality its acts, differently from the doings of man, follow the
straight line pre-established by instinct, which admits of no original
power and allows no individual creation. If there is a limit, there must
be something limiting and something limited; there must be a necessary
relationship of one to the other, so that the thing limited can in no
way free itself from the consequences of this relationship. These
consequences are summed up in the impossibility of _being all_, or in
other words in the necessity of remaining within limits, and to obey
therefore the untransgressable laws set by one's own nature. This
necessity which binds every natural being to the laws of its own nature,
this impossibility of being aught else than what is appointed by nature,
to be a wolf of necessity, and of necessity to be a lamb; this is the
hard lot of natural beings, this is the destiny from which man is
ransomed by the power of his freedom.
The sculptor in the fervour of his inspiration, which proceeds from the
image that lives in his phantasy, searches eagerly for the marble with
which, as though from the very bosom of nature, he may call to life the
phantom of his mind. He fails in his search, and his chisel remains,
must need remain, inactive. The artist then in the utmost intensity of
his creation is baffled by an external impediment, by an obstacle of
nature which therefore seems to have the power of limiting his creative
power. But when we consider what the artist has created in the statue
itself, in this living image of marble, we find nothing that is
material. The artist has transfused into the stone an idea, a sentiment,
a soul, which we, under the influence of the ravishing power of artistic
beauty, are able to seize to the exclusion of all material attributes;
as though we no longer possessed eyes for the whiteness of the marble
and were deprived of the muscle which gives us the impression of its
physical weight. When we are able thus to spiritualise the statue--and
we do so every time we get to know it as a work of art--then all
limitations that might be imposed on the creative power of the artist
disappear. For we see no longer the artist's phantasy, and then his arm,
and then his hand, his chisel, the block which he is carving; all we see
is the phantasy soaring untrammelled in the infinite world of the
artist, with his arm, his hand, his marble, his universe which is
totally different from the universe in which the men live who quarry the
marble and move it and sell it.
There is a point of view from which we see the spirit limited and
enslaved by the conditions in which its life is unfolded. But there is a
higher point of view to which we must ascend if we are bent on
discovering our freedom. If we say, as the psychologists do, this is a
soul and this is a body, here are sensations, there is motion, this is
thought within us and that is the world outside of us, then we are
obliged to consider the spirit as conditioned by physical happenings to
which in some manner our internal determinations correspond. It is not
possible to see without eyes and without the light that strikes them. It
is equally impossible not to see when we have eyes and are surrounded by
light, and according to the greater or lesser velocity of the luminous
waves, we shall of necessity discern now one colour and now another. And
the objects thus seen by us will determine our thoughts; and in turn our
volitions will depend upon these thoughts; and our characters will be
shaped accordingly, and we shall be this or that man in conformity with
the determination of circumstances. Man, according to this conception,
will be the result of time, of place, of environment, of everything
except of his own self.
But there is a higher point of view than the one I have just described,
and to it we must rise, if we mean to understand our nature,--this
marvellous human nature which was first disclosed to our consciousness
at the advent of Christianity and in the course of time made more and
more manifest, until it now loudly proclaims in us our human dignity
exalted above the forces of nature, and is empowered by its cognitive
faculty to dominate these forces, which must bend to man's purposes
without ever blocking or obstructing his progress. Whosoever says: here
is a body and there is a soul--two things, one outside of the
other--such a man does not consider that these two things are two terms
distinguished and differentiated by thought in the bosom of thought,
that is to say, of the soul: of that soul which is truer than the other
for the obvious reason that the latter thinks and therefore reveals its
soul-nature by its own acts, whereas the former is the object of
thinking, is a thing thought, and may therefore be a fallacious entity,
an idolon, and a simple _ens rationis_, like so many other things that
are thought and are subsequently found to have no kind of subsistence.
In speaking of sensation and of motion which generates or somehow
conditions sensation, we lose sight of the fact that sensation is truly
enough a determination of consciousness, but in the same manner as the
motion which is encountered in consciousness when the latter, in
thinking, among other things thinks the displacement of objects in
space.
For everything is within consciousness, and no way can be devised of
issuing forth from it. We say that the brain is external to
consciousness, and that the cranium encloses the brain, which in turn is
enveloped by space luminous and airy, space filled with beautiful plants
and beautiful animals; yet the fact remains that brain and skull and
everything else are the potential or actual object of our thinking
faculty, and cannot but remain therefore within that consciousness to
which for a moment we supposed them to be external. We may start
thinking, keeping in mind this indestructible substance of our thought;
and as we proceed from this centre in which we have placed ourselves as
subjects of thinking, and advance towards an ever-receding horizon, do
we ever come in sight of the point where we must pause and say: "Here my
thought ends; here something begins that is other than my thought"?
Thought halts only before mystery. But even then it thinks it as
mystery, and thinking it, transforms it, and then proceeds, and so never
really stops.
Such being the true life of the spirit, rightly have we called it
universal. At every throb it soars through the infinite, without ever
encountering aught else than its own spiritual actualisations. In this
life, such as we see it from the interior when we do not fantastically
materialise it with our imaginations, the spirit is free because it is
infinite.
Education then posits this liberty in the pupil, for it presupposes in
him a susceptibility of development,--educability, as we may call it.
The learner could not possibly be educable, that is, susceptible of
receiving instruction, unless he were able to think. But thinking, we
have already seen, signifies freedom. And not only is freedom
presupposed by the educator, but it is the very thing he is aiming at in
his work. As a result of his teaching, liberty must be developed in the
same manner that the capacity for thinking and all modes of spiritual
activity are developed. For the development of thought is a development
of reflection, a constant increase of control over our own ideas, over
the content of our consciousness, over our character, over our whole
being in relation to every other being. And this growth of power is what
we mean when we speak of the development of our freedom. It has been
said, in fact, that education consists in liberating the individual from
his instincts. Surely, education is the formation of man, and when we
say man we mean liberty.
Here we stumble upon our antinomy. How are we to reconcile this
presupposition and this aim of the educator with his interference in the
personality of the pupil? This interposition surely signifies that the
disciple must not be left to himself and to his own resources; that he
has to clash with something or somebody that is not his own personality.
Education implies a dualism of terms, the teacher and the learner; and
it is this dualism which destroys the freedom, which sets a limit, and
therefore annihilates infinity in which freedom consists. The disciple
who encounters a stronger mastering will, an intellect equipped with a
multitude of ideas, with an experience which forestalls his own powers
of observation, and his innate zeal for investigation, sees in this more
potent personality either a barrier obstructing his progress towards a
goal which he spontaneously would attain; or else a goad which hurries
him along the way which he would have indeed chosen of his own accord,
but along which he would have liked to advance freely, calmly, joyously,
as our Vittorino da Feltre would have it, and without any unwelcome
compulsion. This pupil then would want to be left alone in order that he
might be free, as free as God when as yet the world was not and he
created it out of nothing by his joyous _fiat_, symbol of the loftiest
spiritual liberty.
For these reasons we have come to believe that the most serious problem
of education is the agreement between the liberty of the pupil and the
authority of the teacher. Therefore great masters who meditated on the
subject of education, from Rousseau to Tolstoi, have exalted the rights
of liberty, but have fallen into the opposite extreme of denying the
duty to authority, and have pursued in their abstractions a vague and
unrealisable ideal of negative education.
But we must not cling to negatives. It should be our purpose to
construct, not to destroy. The school, this glorious inheritance of
human experiences, this ever-glowing hearth where the human spirit
kindles and sublimates life as an object of constant criticism and of
undying love, may be transformed, but cannot be destroyed. Let the
school live, and let us cling to the teacher and maintain his authority,
which limits the spontaneity and the liberty of the pupil. For this
limitation is only apparent.
Apparent, however, when we deal with true education. For the school has
for centuries been the victim of a grave injustice. People have been led
to consider the classroom as a place of confinement and of punishment,
and teachers have been cruelly lashed by the scourge of ridicule cracked
in the face of pedantry. Through this injustice, the school has been
burdened with faults that are not its own, and teachers, genuine
educators, have been confused with the pedantic drill-masters that are
the negation of intelligent education and of inspired ethical
discipline. In order to see whether education really limits the free
activity of the pupil, we must not consider abstractly any school, which
may not be after all a school. We must examine an institution at the
moment and in the act which realises its significance--when the
instructor teaches and the pupils are learning. Such a moment should at
least hypothetically be granted to exist.
Let us take a concrete example and consider a teacher in the act of
giving lessons in Italian. Where is this something which I have called
the Italian language? In the grammar, perchance? Or in the dictionary?
Yes, partly. Provided grammar can invest its rules with the life of the
individual examples that together constitute the expressive power of the
living language; and provided the dictionary does not wither up all
words in the arid abstraction of alphabetical classification; does not
hang each of them by itself as limbs torn from the living body of the
speech in which they had so often resounded and to which they will be
joined again in the fulness of life and expressiveness; but does instead
incorporate, as every good dictionary should, complete phrases, living
utterances of great authors or perhaps of that nameless many-souled
writer that somewhat confusedly is called the people.
But more than in the grammar and more than in the dictionary, the word
is and exists in the writers themselves. The teacher should there point
it out, as he guides his pupils through the authors who were able to
express most powerfully our common thoughts. To his students who are
striving to learn the language--that is the writers--he reads for
example the poems of Leopardi. The poet's word, his soul hovers over
the classroom, as the master reads. It penetrates into the minds of the
pupils, hushes every other sentiment, removes every other thought, and
throbs within them, stirs them, arouses them. It becomes one with the
soul of each pupil, which speaks to itself a language of its own, using,
truly enough, the words of Leopardi, but of a Leopardi who is peculiar
to each of the listeners. Under this spell, the pupil who hears the
poet's word echoing in the depths of his being, will he stop to reflect
that this word is the echo of an echo? That he is under the influence of
something repeated after a first utterance? Our own experience answers:
No! But if any of the audience become absent-minded, if they should lose
the rapt delight of poetical exaltation communicated to their soul by
the teacher's voice, and should say that the word they hear is not their
own but the master's, or rather, the poet's, then they would commit a
serious blunder. For the word they intently listen to in their soul is
their own, exclusively their own. Leopardi does not impart any poesy to
him who, through his love, his study, and the intensity of his feelings,
is unable to live his own poetry. And Leopardi (or the teacher who reads
him) is not materially external to the enraptured listener; he is his
own Leopardi, such as he has been able to create for himself. The
master, as St. Augustine long ago warned us, is within us.
He is within us even if we see him in front of us, away from us seated
in his chair. For in so far as he is a real teacher, he is ever the
object of our consciousness, surrounded and uplifted in our spirit by
the reverence of our feelings and by our trustful affection. He is _our_
teacher, he is our very soul.
The dualism then is non-existent when we are educating. We do notice it
before, and we are thus brought to examine the antinomy; but the
difficulty is removed by the very act of education itself, by the first
word that comes to the pupils' ears from the lips of the teacher. The
dualism however cannot be resolved if the master's word fails to reach
the pupils' soul, but then under those circumstances there is no
education. But even in such cases, if the teacher is not sluggish, if he
displays a real spiritual power, the abiding existence of the barrier
between the two minds proves helpful to the spiritual growth of the
learner, who, because of his incoercible freedom, is impelled by the
insufficiency of the master to affirm his personality with increased
vigour. So that the school is a hearth of liberty, even in spite of the
intentions of the teacher. A school without freedom is a lifeless
institution.