The Special Elements of Education.
§ 51. Education in general consists in the development in man of his
inborn theoretical and practical rationality; it takes on the form of
labor, which changes that state or condition, which appears at first
only as a mere conception, into a fixed habit, and transfigures
individuality into a worthy humanity. Education ends in that
emancipation of the youth which places him on his own feet. The special
elements which form the concrete content of all Education in general are
the Life, Cognition, and Will of man. Without life mind has no
phenomenal reality; without cognition, no genuine, i.e. conscious, will;
and without will, no self-assurance of life and of cognition. It is true
that these three elements are in real existence inseparable, and that
consequently in the dialectic they continually pass over into one
another. But none the less on this account do they themselves prescribe
their own succession, and they have a relative and periodical ascendancy
over each other. In Infancy, up to the fifth or sixth year, the purely
physical development takes the precedence; Childhood is the time of
learning, in a proper sense, an act by which the child gains for himself
the picture of the world such as mature minds, through experience and
insight, have painted it; and, finally, Youth is the transition period
to practical activity, to which the self-determination of the will must
give the first impulse.
§ 52. The classification of the special elements of Pedagogics is hence
very simple: (1) the Physical, (2) the Intellectual, (3) the Practical.
(We sometimes apply to these the words Orthobiotics, Didactics, and
Pragmatics.)
--Æsthetic training constitutes only an element of the education of
Intellectual Education, just as social, moral, and religious training
form elements of Practical Education. But because these latter elements
concern themselves with what is external, the name "Pragmatics" is
appropriate. In this sphere, Pedagogics should coincide with Politics,
Ethics, and Religion; but it is distinguished from them through the
aptitude which it brings with it of putting into practice the problems
of the other three. The scientific arrangement of these ideas must
therefore show that the former, as the more abstract, constitutes the
conditions, and the latter, as the more concrete, the ground of the
former, which are presupposed; and in consequence of this it is itself
their principal teleological presupposition, just as in man the will
presupposes the cognition, and cognition life; while, at the same time,
life, in a deeper sense, must presuppose cognition, and cognition
will.--