Particular Systems of Education.
§ 175. The definite actuality of Education originates in the fact that
its general idea is individualized, according to its special elements,
in a specific statement which we call a pedagogical principle. The
number of these principles is not unlimited, but from the idea of
Education contains only a certain number. If we derive them therefore,
we derive at the same time the history of Pedagogics, which can from its
very nature do nothing else than make actual in itself the possibilities
involved in the idea of Education. Such a derivation may be called an _à
priori_ construction of history, but it is different from what is
generally denoted by this term in not pretending to deduce single events
and characters. All empirical details are confirmation or illustration
for it, but it does not attempt to seek this empirical element _à
priori_.
--The history of Pedagogics is still in the stage of infancy. At one
time it is taken up into the sphere of Politics; at another, into that
of the history of Culture. The productions of some of the most
distinguished writers on the subject are now antiquated. Cramer of
Stralsund made, in 1832, an excellent beginning in a comprehensive and
thorough history of Pedagogy; but in the beginning of his second part he
dwelt too long upon the Greeks, and lost himself in too wide an
exposition of practical Philosophy in general. Alexander Kapp has given
us excellent treatises on the Pedagogics of Aristotle and Plato. But
with regard to modern Pedagogics we have relatively very little. Karl v.
Raumer, in 1843, began to publish a history of Pedagogics since the time
of the revival of classical studies, and has accomplished much of value
on the biographical side. But the idea of the general connection and
dependence of the several manifestations has not received much
attention, and since the time of Pestalozzi books have assumed the
character of biographical confessions. Strümpell, in 1843, developed the
Pedagogics of Kant, Fichte, and Herbart.--
[Sidenote: _Particular Systems of Education._]
§ 176. Man is educated by man for humanity. This is the fundamental idea
of all Pedagogics. But in the shaping of Pedagogics we cannot begin with
the idea of humanity as such, but only with the natural form in which it
primarily manifests itself--that of the nation. But the naturalness of
this principle disappears in its development, since nations appear in
interaction on each other and begin dimly to perceive their unity of
species. The freedom of spirit over nature makes its appearance, but to
the spirit explicitly in the transcendent form of abstract theistic
religion, in which God appears as the ruler over Nature as merely
dependent; and His chosen people plant the root of their nationality no
longer in the earth, but in this belief. The unity of the abstractly
natural and abstractly spiritual determinateness is the concrete unity
of the spirit with nature, in which it recognizes nature as its
necessary organ, and itself as in its nature divine. Spirit in this
stage, as the internal presupposition of the two previously named, takes
up into itself on one hand the phase of nationality, since this is the
form of its immediate individualization; but it no longer distinguishes
between nations as if they were abstractly severed the one from the
other, as the Greeks shut out all other nations under the name of
barbarians. It also takes up into itself the phase of spirituality,
since it knows itself as spirit, and knows itself to be free from
nature, and yet it does not estrange itself as the Jews did in their
representation of pure spirit, in reference to which nature seems to be
only the work of its caprice. Humanity knows nature as its own, because
it knows the Divine spirit and its creative energy manifesting itself in
nature and history, as also the essence of its own spirit. Education can
be complete only with Christianity as the religion of humanity.
§ 177. We have thus three different systems of religion--(1) the
National; (2) the Theocratic; and (3) the Humanitarian. The first works
in harmony with nature since it educates the individual as a type of his
species. The original nationality endeavors sharply to distinguish
itself from others, and to impress on each person the stamp of its
uniform type. One individual is like every other, or at least should be
so. The second system in its manner of manifestation is identical with
the first. It even marks the national difference more emphatically; but
the ground of the uniformity of the individuals is with it not merely
the natural common interest, but it is the consequence of the spiritual
unity, which abstracts from nature, and as history, satisfied with no
present, hovers continually outside of itself between past and future.
The theocratic system educates the individual as the servant of God. He
is the true Jew only in so far as he is this; the genealogical identity
with the father Abraham is a condition but not the principle of the
nationality. The third system liberates the individual to the enjoyment
of freedom as his essence, and educates the human being within national
limits which no longer separate but unite, and, in the consciousness
that each individual, without any kind of mediation, has a direct
relation to God, makes of him a man who knows himself to be a member of
the spiritual world of humanity. We can have no fourth system beyond
this. From the side of the State-Pedagogics we might characterize these
systems as that of the nation-State, the God-State, and the
humanity-State. From the time of the establishment of the last, no one
nation can attain to any sovereignty over the others. By means of the
world-religion of Christianity, the education of nations has come to the
point of taking for its ideal, man as determining himself according to
the demands of reason.