THE UNITY OF EDUCATION
Having exemplified the prejudices of realism in the phases that are most
harmful to education, I shall now proceed to discuss the fundamental
corollary of the idealistic thesis as an effective remedy against the
ravages of realism. For, as I have already shown, the realistic
conception of life and culture is by no means a minor error which could
be corrected as soon as discovered. Originating in a primitive tendency
which impels the human spirit on through a realistic phase before it can
freely emerge into the loftier consciousness of self and power (which is
the conquest of idealism), this error again and again crops out of even
the most convinced anti-realistic consciousness. So that if at any
moment our higher reflection slackens its vigilance, the error creeps
back into the midst of our ideas, gains control of our intelligence, and
resumes its former sway over thought. It is not sufficient then to
become aware of the faults of realism and of the prejudices in which it
is mirrored; we must, in addition to all this, strengthen in our minds
the intuition of the spirituality of culture, render it more subtle,
more accurate, more certain, and bring to it the energy of a faith
which, after taking possession of our souls, shall become our life's
character.
We must therefore look intently at the significance of that principle
which identifies culture with man's personality, notice its most
important consequences, and set these up as the laws of education,
since by education we mean the creation of a living culture which
shall be the life of the human mind. The first and foremost of these
consequences, the direct corollary of our proposition, is the
concept of the _Unity of Education_. Though often referred to, it has
not yet been attained by pedagogical doctrines, nor has it been the aim
of the work of teachers. Neither theory nor practice--more intimately
connected than is ordinarily supposed--shows as yet that this concept
is understood and adequately appreciated. It is opposed with full
force by the realistic conception which, keeping man distinct from
his culture, and materialising this culture, naturally attributes to
it, and to education in which it is reflected, that multiplicity and
fragmentariness which is the characteristic of things material.
This scrappiness of culture and of education is the error on which all
the prejudices of realistic pedagogy are grounded. It is the enemy that
must be vanquished in the course of the crusade that has been preached
by idealism in its endeavour to liberate instruction from the deadly
oppression of mechanism. But in order to combat this foe we must first
know it: and we must gain a clear understanding of that unity of
education which it antagonises with uncompromising opposition.
If we open a treatise on pedagogy or examine a schedule of courses,
if we look through a programme or stop to consider our every-day
technical terminology, we cannot help noticing that education is
broken up by divisions and subdivisions _ad infinitum_, exactly as
though it were a material object, which because material possesses
infinite divisibility. Textbooks tell us that education is (1)
physical, (2) intellectual, (3) moral. Then narrowing the subject
down to one section, the intellectual, which for good reasons has
been treated more carefully and sympathetically by traditional
pedagogy, we find some such subdivisions: artistic, scientific,
literary, philosophical, religious, etc. Again, artistic education will
be split up into as many sections as there are arts, and scientific
instruction in the same way; for pedagogy assigns to each branch of
the classification its corresponding method of teaching. It goes without
saying that the sciences of any given branch are different among
themselves, and the study of botany, for example, is not the study
of zoology. And there are as many forms of culture to be promoted by
education as there are sciences; which is clearly shown by school
announcements assigning to certain years, and for definite days and
hours, the several courses of the curriculum, that is, the several
educations.
It is taken for granted that Education, properly so called, will
result from the ensemble of these particular educations--physical,
intellectual, moral, etc.,--each one of which contributes its share to
the final result, and is therefore a part of the entire education. And
each field produces certain peculiar results which it would be idle
to demand of another section, just as we never expect an olive grove
to yield a crop of peaches. Every part, self-contained and quite
distinct from the rest, absolutely excludes all other parts from
itself. Therefore the subjects taught in a school are numerous, and
there must accordingly be specialised teachers. And again each
instructor must be careful not to mix up the several parts which
compose his subject. The teacher of history, for example, when he takes
up the French Revolution, must forget the unification of Italy, and
treat each event in order and in turn; and the instructor of Italian
will take up the history of literature on a certain day of the week,
and devote some other hour to the study of the individual works
themselves.
So also we never fail to distinguish and carefully separate the two
parts of the teacher's work, his ability as a disciplinarian and his
skill in imparting information, for it is an accepted commonplace of
school technique that ability to teach is one thing, and the power to
maintain discipline is another. It is one thing to be able to keep the
class attentive to the discussion of a given subject, and quite another
to treat this subject suitably for the needs and attainments of the
pupils. Discipline is considered thus as a mere threshold; the real
teaching comes after. For, it is argued, discipline has no cultural
content; it is nothing more than the spiritual disposition and
adaptation which should precede the acquisition, or if we so wish to
call it, the development of real culture,--a disposition which is
obtained when respect for the authority of the teacher is ensured.
The recognition of that authority simply means the establishment of a
necessary condition; as for the real work of education, that is yet to
come. And if we should stop at what we have called the threshold, we
should have no school at all. There are teachers, in fact, who keep good
discipline, but who are yet unable to teach, either through lack of
culture or because they are deficient in methods.
All these are commonplaces to which we often resort without stopping to
consider their validity. And, in truth, it is because of this lack of
consideration that we are able to use them without noticing their
absurdities and without therefore feeling the necessity of emending our
ways. This lack of reflection resolves itself into a lack of precision
in the handling of these concepts. They are formulated without much
rigour with a great deal of elasticity, and in the spirit of
compromising with that truth against which they would otherwise too
jarringly clash.
First of all, no one has ever conceived the possibility of separating
discipline from education. What is often done is to distinguish
discipline from that part of education which is called instruction, and
to consider the two as integrating the total concept of education.
Mention is often made of the educational value of discipline. But this
kind of co-ordination of the two forms of education--discipline and
instruction--and their subordination to the generic concept of education
are more easily formulated than comprehended. For if we should
distinguish them simply on the grounds that one is the necessary
antecedent of the other, we should have a relationship similar to that
which connects any part of instruction with the part which must be
presupposed before it as an antecedent moment in the same process of
development. But the relationship which exists between any two parts of
instruction cannot serve to distinguish from instruction a thing which
is different from it.
We might wish, perhaps, to consider as characteristic of this absolute
antecedence the establishment of the authority without which teaching,
properly so called, cannot begin. But the objection to this would be
that every moment of the teaching process presupposes a new authority,
which can never be considered as definitely acquired, which is
constantly being imposed anew, and which must proceed at every given
instance from the effective spiritual action exercised by the teacher
upon the pupil. In other words, I mean to say that no teacher is able
independently of the merits of his teaching to maintain discipline
simply and solely on the strength of his personal prestige, of his force
of character, or any other suitable qualification. For whoever he may
be, and whatever the power by which at the start he is able to attract
the attention of his pupils and to keep it riveted on his words, the
teacher as he begins to impart information ceases to be what he was
immediately before, and becomes to the eyes of his pupils an ever
changing individual,--bigger or smaller, stronger or weaker, and
therefore more or less worthy of that attention and that respect of
which boys are capable in their expectance of spiritual light and joy.
The initial presentation is nothing more than a promise and an
anticipation. In the course of teaching this anticipation must not be
disappointed, this promise must be constantly fulfilled and more than
fulfilled by the subsequent developments. The teacher's personality as
revealed at the beginning must be borne out by all that he does in the
course of the lesson. Experience confirms this view, and the reason of
it is to be found in the doctrine now familiar to us of the spirit that
never _is_ definitely, but is always constituting itself, always
_becoming_. And every man is esteemed and appreciated on the strength
of what he shows himself to be at any given moment, and in virtue of the
experience which we continue to have of his being,--a being which is the
development in which he realises himself.
So, then, discipline is never enforced definitely and in such a way that
the teacher may proceed to build on it as on a firm basis without any
further concern. And it is therefore difficult to see how we could
possibly sever with a clean cut the task of keeping discipline from the
duty of imparting instruction.
Nor is it any more plausible to maintain that discipline, though it may
not chronologically precede instruction, is its logical antecedent, in
the sense that there are at every instant of the life of the school both
discipline and instruction, the former as a condition of the latter. The
difficulty here is that if we assumed this, we ought to be able to
indicate the difference between the condition and the conditioned; which
difference, unless we rest content with vague words, is not forthcoming,
and cannot be found. I maintain that were it possible for the teacher
definitely to enthrone, so to speak, discipline in his school, all his
work were done. He would have fulfilled his entire duty, acquitted his
obligation, and achieved the results of his mission, whether we look
upon this mission in the complex of its development, or whether we
consider it ideally in the instant of its determined act, which is yet
a process and therefore a development. For what, in fact, is discipline?
Is it established authority? But this authority is the whole of
education. For authority cannot be, as I have explained before, a mere
claim: it must become actual in the effective action performed by the
educating personality, and this action _is_ education. And when this
education consists, for example, in the imparting of a rule of syntax,
education becomes actual when the pupil really apprehends that rule from
his instructor exactly as it is taught to him, and thus appropriates the
teacher's manner of thinking and his intellectual behaviour on that
special subject, and acts and does as the teacher wants him to. And from
the point of view of discipline, this is all we want at that moment.
If in the course of education, considered as a whole or at any
particular moment of it, we should separate discipline from instruction,
now turning our attention to the one and now to the other, we know from
experience that we should never get anywhere. As a matter of fact, the
distinction thrusts itself to the fore only when the problem of
discipline is erroneously formulated by treating it abstractly. For who
is it that worries over discipline as such, and as though it were a
thing different from teaching? Who is it that looks upon this problem as
an insoluble one? Only the teacher who, unable to maintain discipline,
frets over it and failing to discover it where it is naturally to be
found, desperately looks for it where it is not, where it could not
possibly be. And so he is helplessly perturbed, like the man who,
feeling upon himself the concentrated gaze of all the guests seated in a
parlour, is no longer able to walk across the floor; it is the same
difficulty and impediment we encounter every time we try to watch and
study our movements. In the same way the spontaneous outburst of
eloquent sentiments that flow from the fulness of our hearts is checked
by the endeavour to analyse them, to study the words--to substitute art
for nature.
The real teacher, the naturally gifted teacher, never bothers about
these puzzling questions of pedagogical discipline. He teaches with such
devotion; he is so close spiritually to his pupils, so sympathetic with
their views; his work is so serious, so sincere, so eager, so full of
life, that he is never compelled to face a recalcitrant, rebellious
personality that could only be reduced by resorting to the peculiar
means of discipline. The docility of the pupils in the eyes of the able
teacher is neither an antecedent nor a consequent of his teachings; it
is an aspect of it. It originates with the very act by which he begins
to teach, and ceases with the end of his teaching. Concretely, the
discipline which good teachers enforce in the classroom is the natural
behaviour of the spirit which adheres to itself in the seriousness and
inwardness of its own work. Discipline, authority, and respect for
authority are absent whenever it is impossible to establish that unique
superior personality, in which the spiritual life of the pupils and of
the teachers are together fused and united. Whenever the students fail
to find their ideal in the teacher; when they are disappointed by his
aspect, his gaze, his words, in the complex concreteness of his
spiritual personality, which does not rise to the ideal which at every
moment is present in their expectations, then the order of discipline is
lacking. But when this actual unity obtains--this unity which is the
task of the teacher, and the aim of all education--then discipline,
authority, and respect are present as never failing elements.
This pedagogical problem of discipline would never have arisen if
immature reflection had not distinguished two empirically different
aspects of human personality, the practical and the theoretical, whereby
it would appear that man, when he does things, should not be considered
in the same light as when he thinks and understands, knows and learns.
From this point of view, discipline of deportment is to be referred to
the pupil as practical spiritual activity, while teaching aims at his
theoretic activity. The former should guide the pupil, regulate his
conduct as a member of that special community which we call the school,
and facilitate the fulfilment of the obligations which he has toward the
institution, toward his fellow-pupils, and toward himself. The latter,
on the other hand, assuming the completion of this practical
edification, proceeds to the mental formation of the personality,
considered as progressive acquirement of culture. Discipline in this
system appears to be the morals of the school. I use the word morals in
a very broad sense--just as morality might be considered as the
discipline of society and of life in general. For everybody, it is
argued, distinguishes between the character of man and his intelligence,
between his conduct and his knowledge. The two terms may indeed be drawn
together, but they also exist quite apart. So that a man devoid of
character, or possessed with an indomitable will for evil, may
nevertheless be extremely learned and shrewd, or as subtle as the
serpent; whereas a moral man, through lack of understanding, may become
the sport of rogues, and remain illiterate, devoid of all, even of the
slightest accomplishments. For will is one thing, they say, and the
intellect is another.
The question of the abstractness of discipline impels us now to examine
the legitimacy of this broader distinction, which does not simply
concern the problems of the school, but extends to the fundamental
principles of the philosophy of the spirit. Under its influence,
contemporary thought attacks all the surviving forms of this ancient
distinction between will and intellect, which rested on a frankly
realistic intuition of the world. The philosopher who crystallised this
distinction, and fastened it so hard that it could not be broken up
completely in the course of all subsequent speculation, was Aristotle. A
thoroughgoing realist, like all Greek philosophers, he conceived reality
as something external and antecedent to the mind which thinks it and
strives to know it. When thought, whose function is the knowing of
reality, is thus placed outside of this reality, it is evident that the
knowledge to which it aspired never could have been an activity which
produces reality. It was accordingly maintained that knowledge could not
be more than a mere survey, a view of reality (intuition, theory),
almost like a reflected image, totally extrinsic to the essence of the
real. But since it was evident that man as spiritual activity does
produce a world of his own, for which he is praised if it is deemed
good, but blamed if it is judged bad, it had to follow that there were
two distinct aspects in human life: one by which man contemplates
reality, the other by which he creates his own world,--a world, however,
which is but a transformation of the true and original reality. These
two aspects are the will and the intellect.
It should not now be necessary to criticise this concept of a reality
assumed to exist, in antecedence to the activity of the spirit, and
which is the sole support of this distinction between will and
intellect. We might say perhaps that though everything does indeed
depend from the spirit, and though all is spirit, yet this completely
spiritual reality is on one hand what is produced, the realisation of
new realities (will), but on the other hand it is but the knowledge of
its own reality, and by this knowledge gives no increment to its being.
However, if we adopted this view, we would slip back to the position we
abandoned as untenable, since a thought which propounds the problem of
its essence and of the essence of the reality which it cognises can be
but mere knowing. For it is again faced by a reality--even though it has
in this case been arbitrarily presumed identical with it--a reality
which is as an antecedent to it, and leaves to it only the task of
looking on. So we must conclude that the life of the spirit is never
mere contemplation. What seems to be contemplation--that consciousness
which the spirit acquires of itself, and, acquiring which, realises
itself--is a creation: a creation not of things but of its own self. For
what are things but the spirit as it is looked at abstractly in the
multiplicity of its manifestations?
We shall more easily understand that our knowing and our doing are
indiscernible, if we recall that our doing is not what is also perceived
externally, a motion in space caused by us. This external manifestation
is quite subordinate and adventitious. The essential character of our
doing is the internal will, which does not, properly speaking, modify
things, but does modify us, by bringing out in us a personality which
otherwise would not have been. This is the substance of the will, which
we cannot deny to thought, if thought is, as I have shown, development,
and therefore continuous self-creation of the personality.
If intellect then and will are one and the same thing, to such an extent
that there is no intellect which in its development is not development
of personality, formation of character, realisation of a spiritual
reality, we shall be able to understand that the ideas of two distinct
spiritual activities, as the basis of the ordinary distinction between
moral and intellectual training, are mere abstractions that tend to lead
us away from the comprehension of the living reality of the spirit. This
distinction appears to me exceedingly harmful, nothing being more
deplorable, from the moral point of view, than to consider any part of
the life we have to live as morally indifferent; and nothing being more
harmful to the school than the conviction that the moral formation of
man is not the entire purpose of education, but only a part of its
content. It is indispensable, I maintain, that the educator have the
reverent consciousness of the extremely delicate moral value of every
single word which he addresses to his pupils and of the profoundly
ethical essence of the instruction which he imparts to them. For the
school which gives instruction with no moral training in reality gives
no instruction at all. All the objections voiced on this score against
education, which we try to meet by adding on to instruction all that
ought to integrate the truly educational function, are the result of
this abstract way of looking upon instruction solely as the culture of
an intellect which in some way differs from the will, from character,
and from moral personality.
I wish here to call attention to one of the most controverted questions
connected with popular education, because it brings out very clearly the
impossibility of keeping moral education distinct from intellectual
instruction. It is constantly asserted that the instruction of the
common people, that real education which is the main purpose of the
modern state, is not a question of mere reading and spelling; that
these do not constitute culture, but are as means to an end, and
ought never to be allowed to take the place of the end to which they
are subservient. The school therefore, if it cannot shape men, should
at least rough-hew them and give them a conscience, whereas now, it
teaches but often does not educate: it gives to the learner the means of
culture, and then abandons him to his own resources. The optimism of
educators in the eighteenth century, their promise that marvels would
come out of elementary instruction propagated and spread by popular
schools devised for this purpose, was constantly met in the course
of the last century by an ever-growing mistrust of instruction generally
restricted to the notion of mere instrumentality. For in addition to
other shortcomings it was felt that this instrument might be put to a
very bad use; that elementary learning might be a dangerous thing if
it were not accompanied by something that instruction pure and simple
cannot give, namely, soundness of heart, strength of mind, and
conscience strong enough to uphold intelligence by the vigorous and
uncompromising principles of moral rectitude. The hopefulness of that
past optimism is fast yielding ground to the pessimistic denunciation
of the insufficiency of mere instruction for the moral ends of life.
There is a serious error in this frequent indictment brought against
mere instruction as a means of attaining what is called culture. It
proceeds from the attempt to separate something that was not meant to be
separated. "What God hath united together, man shall not put asunder."
And, in any event, a separation as illegitimate as this is not possible.
Superficially we may distinguish and apparently sunder instruction from
moral training, cut off the means from the end, and separate the ability
to read and write from what we are thereby enabled to read and write. In
fact the letters of the alphabet are taught without teaching the
syllables which they compose, and without the words that are made up of
these syllables, and the thoughts that are expressed by these words, and
man's life which becomes manifest and real in these thoughts. The
elementary school is in fact, as it is in name, the teaching of the
elements. Reading, writing, arithmetic, all subjects called for by the
school programme are taken up as mere elements with which the pupil is
expected, later on, to compose his Book of Life, complete in all its
sections. But in the meantime it is thought unwise to burden his
youthful mind with the weighty and complicated problems that can be
solved only by the experience of a more mature life. Of course after he
has gone forth from the school into the outer world the young man will
look upon this elementary knowledge as the raw material of his future
mentality. As he carves out his path to this or that goal, in accordance
with his spiritual interests and in compliance with the contingencies of
life, he will avail himself of this initial instruction, use it to
further his progress towards this or that end, good or evil as the case
may be. For intellectual instruction, it is argued, can be made
subservient either to noble impulses or to base motives.
Careful consideration, however, will show that the responsibility of a
school for what is called moral insufficiency, but is in reality
educational defectiveness, cannot be removed by this kind of
considerations. The alphabet begins to be such when it ceases to be a
series of physical marks corresponding to the sounds into which all the
words of a language may be decomposed. The alphabetic symbol is
effectively such when it is a sound, and it is sound when it is an
image, or rather a concrete form of an internal vibration of the mind.
The child begins to see the alphabet when he reads with it. Up to that
time he simply draws images or inwardly gazes at the semblance of
the picture he intends to draw, but he does not read. As soon as the
symbol is read, it becomes a word. That is why every spelling book
presents the letters in the syllables and the syllables in the words. In
this way they cease to be mere scrawls drawn on the paper, and become
thoughts. They may be dim, vague, and mysterious; they may be sharply
defined or they may blend and fuse into a suggestive haze; but they are
in every given instance thoughts that are being awakened in the mind
of the child. These thoughts have in them the power to develop, to
organise themselves and become a discourse. From the simple sentences
and the nursery rhymes of the primer, they grow into an ever-richer
significance. From the sowing to the harvesting, from the green stalk to
the sturdy trunk, it is _one_ life and one sole process. The mind that
will soar over the dizzy heights of thought begins its flight in the
humble lowlands. And it first becomes conscious of its power to rise,
when the life of thought is awakened by the words of the spelling book.
The moment the child begins reading, he must of necessity read
_something_. There is no mere instrument without the material to which
it is to be applied. The infant who opens his eyes and strives to look
cannot but see something. The "picture," insignificant for the teacher,
has its own special colouring for the child's mind. He fixes his gaze on
it; he draws it within himself, cherishes it, and fosters it with his
fancies. Such is the law of the spirit! It may be violated, but the
consequences of transgression are commensurate with the majesty of this
law.
Grammars too, like spelling primers and rhetorics and logic and every
kind of preceptive teaching, may be assumed as a form separated from its
contents, as something empty and abstract. The child is taught for
instance that the letter _m_ in _mamma_ does not belong to that word (we
call it a "word," and forget that to him at least it is not a word but
his own mother). That letter _m_, we tell him, is found in other words,
_mat_, _meat_, etc. We show him that it is in all of them, and yet in
none of them. We therefore can and must abstract it from all concrete
connections, isolate and fix it as that something which it is in
itself--the letter _m_. In the same manner we abstract the rule of
grammar from a number of individual examples. We exalt it over them, and
give it an existence which is higher, and independent of theirs. And so
for rhetoric, and so for logic.
But in this process of progressive abstraction, in this practice of
considering the abstract as something substantial, and of reducing
the concrete and the particular to the subordinate position of the
accessory, life recedes and ebbs away. The differences between this and
that word, between two images, two thoughts, two modes of thinking, of
expressing, of behaving, at first become slight, then negligible,
then quite inexistent, and the soul becomes accustomed to the generic,
to the empty, to the indifferent. It knows no longer how to fix the
peculiarities of things, how to notice the different traits of men's
characters, their interests, their diverse values, until finally it
becomes indifferent and sceptical. Words lose their meaning; they no
longer smack of what they used to; their value is gone. Things lose
their individuality, and men their physiognomies. This scepticism
robs man of his own faith, of his character and personality. The
fundamental aim of education ceases to exist. Abstract education is
no education at all. It is not even instruction. For it does not teach
the alphabet as it really exists, as something inseparable from the
sound, and from the word, and from the human soul! All it gives is a new
materialised and detached abstraction.
The alphabet is real and concrete, not abstract; it is not a means
but an end; it is not mere form but also content. It is not a weapon
which man may wield indifferently either for good purposes or for
evil motives. It is man himself. It is the human soul, which should
already flash in the very first word that is spelled, if it is read
intelligently. And it ought to be a good word, worthy of the child and
of the future man, a word in which the youthful pupil ought already to
be able to discover himself,--not himself in general, but that better
self which the school gradually and progressively will teach him to
find within himself. So considered, the alphabet is a powerful
instrument of human formation and of moral shaping. It is education.
For this reason the school must have a library, and should adopt all
possible means to encourage the habit and develop the taste of reading,
since the word which truly expresses the soul of man is not _that_ one
word, nor the word of _that_ one book. A word or a book will always be a
mere fragment of life, and many of them therefore will be needed. Many,
very many books, to satisfy the ever-growing needs of the child's mind!
Books that will spur his thought constantly towards more distant goals,
and his heart and imagination with it. Thus the child grows to be a
man.
Instruction then which is not education is not even instruction. It
is a denuded abstraction, violently thrust like other abstractions
into the life of the spirit where it generates that monstrosity
which we have described as material culture, mechanical and devoid of
spiritual vitality. That culture, being material, has no unity, is
fragmentary, inorganic, capable of growing indefinitely without in any
way transforming the recipient mind or becoming assimilated to the
process of the personality to which it simply adheres extrinsically.
This mechanical teaching is commensurate with things, and grows
proportionately with them; but it has no intimate relation with the
spirit. He who knows one hundred things has not a greater nor a
different intellectual value from him who knows ten, since the hundred
and the ten are locked up in both in exactly the same way that two
different sums of money are deposited in two different vaults. What
merit is there in the safe which contains the greater sum? The merit
would belong to the man who had accumulated the greater amount by a
greater sum of labour, for it would then be commensurate with work,
which is the developing process itself and the life of the human
personality to which we must always have recourse when we endeavour
to establish values. For as we have seen, nothing is, properly
speaking, thinkable except in relation to the human spirit.
Whether one reads a single book or an entire library, the result is the
same, if what is read fails to become the life of the reader--his
feelings and his thoughts, his passions and his meditation, his
experience and the extolment of his personality. The poet Giusti has
said: "Writing a book is worse than useless, unless it is going to
change people." Reading a book with no effect is infinitely worse. Of
course the people that have to be transformed, both for the writer and
for the reader (who are not two very different persons after all), are
not the others, but first of all the author himself. The mere reading of
a page or even a word inwardly reconstitutes us, if it does consist in a
new throb of our personality, which continuously renews itself through
the incessant vibrations of its becoming. This then is the all-important
solution,--that the book or the word of a teacher arouse our souls and
set them in motion; that it transform itself into our inner life; that
it cease to be a thing, special and determinate, one of the many, and
become transfused into our personality. And our personality in its act,
in the act, I say, and not in the abstract concept which we may somehow
form of it,--is absolute unity: that moving unity to which education can
in no wise be referred, unless it is made identical with its movement,
and therefore entirely conformant to its unity.
The man whose culture is limited, or, rather, entirely estranged from
the understanding of life, is called _homo unius libri_. We might just
as well call him _homo omnium librorum_. For he who would read all books
need have a leaking brain like the perforated vessel of the daughters of
Danaus,--a leak through which all ideas, all joys, all sorrows, and all
hopes, everything that man may find in books, would have to flow
unceasingly, without leaving any traces of their passage, without ever
forming that personality which, having acquired a certain form or
physiognomy, reacts and becomes selective, picks what it wants out of
the congeries, and chooses, out of all possible experiences, only what
it requires for the life that is suited to it. We should never add books
upon books _ad infinitum_! It is not a question of quantity. What we
need is the ability to discover our world in books,--that sum total of
interests which respond to all the vibrations of our spirit, which
assuredly, as Herbart claimed, has a multiplicity of interests, but all
of them radiating from a vital centre. And everything is in the centre,
since everything originates there.
Education which strives to get at the centre of the personality, the
sole spot whence it is possible to derive the spiritual value of a
living culture, is essentially moral, and may never be hemmed in within
the restricted bounds of an abstract intellectual training. There is in
truth a kind of instruction which is not education; not because it is in
no way educative, but because it gives a bad education and trains for
evil. This realistic education, which is substantially materialistic,
extinguishes the sentiment of freedom in man, debases his personality,
and stifles in him the living consciousness of the spirituality of the
world, and consequently of man's responsibility.
The antithesis between instruction and education is the antithesis
between realistic and idealistic culture, or again, that existing
between a material and a spiritual conception of life. If the school
means conquest of freedom, we must learn to loathe the scrappiness of
education, the fractioning tendency which presumes to cut off one part
from the rest of the body, as if education, that is, personality, could
have many parts. We must learn to react against a system of education
which, conceiving its role to be merely intellectualistic, and such as
to make of the human spirit a clear mirror of things, proceeds to an
infinite subdivision to match the infinite multiplicity of things. Unity
ought to be our constant aim. We should never look away from the living,
that is, the person, the pupil into whose soul our loving solicitude
should strive to gain access in order to help him create his own
world.