§ 248. The idea of the State had gradually worked itself up to a higher
plane with trade and industry, and found in Protestantism its spiritual
confirmation. Protestantism, as the self assurance of the individual
that he was directly related to God without any dependence on the
mediation of any man, rose to the truth in the autonomy of the soul, and
began out of the abstract phantasmagoria of monachism and chivalry to
develope Christianity, as the principle of humanitarian education, into
concrete actuality. The cities were not merely, in comparison with the
clergy and the nobility, the "third estate"; but the citizen who himself
managed his commonwealth, and defended its interests with arms,
developed into the citizen of a state which absorbed the clergy and
nobility, and the state-citizen found his ultimate ideal in pure
Humanity as cognized through reason.
§ 249. The phases of this development are (1) Civil education as such,
in which we find chivalric education metamorphosed into the so-called
noble, both however being controlled as to education, within Catholicism
by Jesuitism, within Protestantism by Pietism. (2) Against this tendency
to the church, we find reacting on the one hand the devotion to a study
of antiquity, and on the other the friendly alliance to immediate
actuality, i.e. with Nature. We can name these periods of Pedagogics
those of its ideals of culture. (3) But the truth of all culture must
forever remain moral freedom. After Education had arrived at a knowledge
of the meaning of Idealism and Realism, it must seize as its absolute
aim the moral emancipation of man into Humanity; and it must conform its
culture by this aim, since technical dexterity, friendly adroitness,
proficiency in the arts, and scientific insight, can attain to their
proper rank only through moral purity.
_1. Civil Education as such._
§ 250. The one-sidedness of monkish and chivalric education was
cancelled by civil education inasmuch as it destroyed the celibacy of
the monk and the estrangement of the knight from his family, doing this
by means of the inner life of the family; for it substituted, in the
place of the negative emptiness of the duty of holiness of the celibate,
the positive morality of marriage and the family; while, instead of the
abstract poverty and the idleness of the monkish piety and of
knighthood, it asserted that property was the object of labor, i.e. it
asserted the self-governed morality of civil society and of commerce;
and, finally, instead of the servitude of the conscience in
unquestioning obedience to the command of others, and instead of the
freakish self-sufficiency of the caprice of the knights, it demanded
obedience to the laws of the commonwealth as representing his own
self-conscious, actualized, practical Reason, in which laws the
individual can recognize and acknowledge himself.
--As this civil education left free the sensuous enjoyment, freedom in
this was without bounds for a time, until, after men became accustomed
to labor and to their freedom of action, the possibility of enjoyment
created from within outward a moderation which sumptuary laws and
prohibitions of gluttony, drunkenness, &c., could never create from the
external side. What the monk inconsistently enjoyed with a bad
conscience, the citizen and the clergyman could take possession of as a
gift of God. After the first millennium of Christianity, when the earth
had not, according to the current prophecies, been destroyed, and after
the great plague in the fourteenth century, there was felt an immense
pleasure in living, which manifested itself externally in the fifteenth
century in delicate wines, dainty food, great eating of meat, drinking
of beer, and, in the domain of dress, in peaked shoes, plumes, golden
chains, bells, &c. There was much venison, but, as yet, no potatoes, tea
and coffee, &c. The feeling of men was quarrelsome. For a more exact
painting of the Education of this time, very valuable authors are
Sebastian Brant, Th. Murner, Ulrich von Hutten, Fischart, and Hans
Sachs. Gervinus is almost the only one who has understood how to make
this material useful in its relation to spirit.--
§ 251. In contrast with the heaven-seeking of the monks and the
sentimental love-making of the knight, civil education established, as
its principle, Usefulness, which traced out in things their conformity
to a proposed end in order to gain as great a mastery over them as
possible. The understanding was trained with all exactness that it might
clearly seize all the circumstances. But since family-life did not allow
the egotism of the individual ever to become as great as was the case
with the monk and the knight, and since the cheer of a sensuous
enjoyment in cellar and kitchen, in clothing and furniture, in common
games and in picturesque parades, penetrated the whole being with soft
pleasure, there was developed with all propriety and sobriety a
house-morality, and, with all the prose of labor, a warm and kindly
disposition, which left room for innocent merriment and roguery, and
found, in conformity to religious services, its serious transfiguration.
Beautiful burgher-state, thou wast weakened by the thirty years' war,
and hast been only accidentally preserved sporadically in Old England
and in some places in Germany, only to be at last swept away by the
flood of modern world-pain, political sophistry, and anxiety for the
future!
§ 252. The citizen paid special attention to public education,
heretofore wholly dependent upon the church and the cloister; he
organized city schools, whose teachers, it is true, for a long time
compassed only accidental culture, and were often employed only for
tumultuous and short terms. The society of the brotherhood of the
Hieronymites introduced a better system of instruction before the close
of the fourteenth century, but education had often to be obtained from
the so-called travelling scholars (_vagantes_, _bacchantes_,
_scholastici_, _goliardi_). The teachers of the so-called _scholæ
exteriores_, in distinction from the schools of the cathedral and
cloister, were called now _locati_, then _stampuales_--in German,
_Kinder-Meister_. The institution of German schools soon followed the
Latin city schools. In order to remove the anarchy in school matters,
the citizens aided the rise of universities by donations and
well-invested funds, and sustained the street-singing of the city
scholars (_currende_), an institution which was well-meant, but which
often failed of its end because on the one hand it was often misused as
a mere means of subsistence, and on the other hand the sense of honor of
those to whom it was devoted not unfrequently became, through their
manner of living, lowered to humiliation. The defect of the monkish
method of instruction became ever more apparent, e.g. the silly tricks
of their mnemotechnique, the utter lack of anything which deserved the
name of any practical knowledge, &c. The necessity of instruction in the
use of arms led to democratic forms. Printing favored the same. Men
began to concern themselves about good text-books. Melanchthon was the
hero of the Protestant world, and as a pattern was beyond his time. His
Dialectics, Rhetoric, Physics, and Ethics, were reprinted innumerable
times, commented upon, and imitated. After him Amos Comenius, in the
seventeenth century, had the greatest influence through his _Didactica
Magna_ and his _Janua Reserta_. In a narrower sphere, treating of the
foundation of Gymnasial Philology, the most noticeable is Sturm of
Strasburg. The universities in Catholic countries limited themselves to
the Scholastic Philosophy and Theology, together with which we find
slowly struggling up the Roman Law and the system of Medicine from
Bologna and Salerno. But Protestantism first raised the university to
any real universality. Tübingen, Königsberg, Wittenberg, Jena, Leipzic,
Halle, Göttingen, &c., were the first schools for the study of all
sciences, and for their free and productive pursuit.
§ 253. The Commons, which at first appeared with the clergy and the
nobility as the Third Estate, formed an alliance with monarchy, and both
together produced a transformation of the chivalric education.
Absolutism reduced the knights to mere nobles, to whom it truly conceded
the prerogative of appointment as spiritual prelates as well as officers
and counsellors of state, but only on the condition of the most complete
submission; and then, to satisfy them, it invented the artificial
drinking festivals, of a splendid life at court, and a
temptingly-impressive sovereignty of beauty. In this condition, the
education of the nobles was essentially changed in so far as to cease to
be alone military. To the art of war, which moreover was made so very
much milder by the invention of fire-arms, must be now added an activity
of the mind which could no longer dispense with some knowledge of
History, Heraldry, Genealogy, Literature, and Mythology. Since the
French nation soon enough gave tone to the style of conversation, and
after the time of Louis XIV. controlled the politics of the continent,
the French language, as conventional and diplomatic, became a constant
element in the education of the nobility in all the other countries of
Europe.
--Practically the education of the noble endeavored to make the
individual quite independent, so that he should, by means of the
important quality of an advantageous personal appearance and the
prudence of his agreeable behavior, make himself into a ruler of all
other men, capable of enjoying his own position, i.e. he should copy in
miniature the manners of an absolute sovereign. To this was added an
empirical knowledge of men by means of ethical maxims, so that they
might discover the weak side of every man, and so be able to outwit him.
_Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur._ According to this, every man had
his price. They did not believe in the Nemesis of a divine destiny; on
the contrary, disbelief in the higher justice was taught. One must be so
elastic as to suit himself to all situations, and, as a caricature of
the ancient ataraxy, he must acquire as a second nature a manner
perfectly indifferent to all changes, the impassibility of an
aristocratic repose, the amphibious _sang-froid_ of the "gentleman." The
man in the world as the man of the world sought his ideal in endless
dissimulation, and in this, as the flowering of his culture, he took the
highest interest. Intrigue, in love as well as in politics, was the soul
of the nobleman's existence.--
--They endeavored to complete the refinement of manners by sending the
young man away with a travelling tutor. This was very good, but
degenerated at last into the mechanism of the foolish travelling of the
tourist. The noble was made a foreigner, a stranger to his own country,
by means of his abode at Paris or Venice, while the citizen gradually
outstripped him in genuine culture.--
§ 254. The education of the citizen as well as that of the noble was
taken possession of, in Catholic countries by the Jesuits, in Protestant
countries by the Pietists: by the first, with a military strictness; by
the second, in a social and effeminate form. Both, however, agreed in
destroying individuality, inasmuch as the one degraded man into a
will-less machine for executing the commands of others, and the other
deadened him in cultivating the feeling of his sinful worthlessness.
(_a_) _Jesuitic Education._
§ 255. Jesuitism combined the maximum of worldly freedom with an
appearance of the greatest piety. Proceeding from this stand-point, it
devoted itself in education to elegance and showy knowledge, to
diplomacy and what was suitable and convenient in morals. To bring the
future more into its power, it adapted itself not only to youth in
general, but especially to the youth of the nobler classes. To please
these, the Jesuits laid great stress upon a fine deportment. In their
colleges dancing and fencing were well-taught. They knew how well they
should by this course content the noble, who had by preference usurped
the name of Education for this technical way of giving formal expression
to personality.
--In instruction they developed so exact a mechanism that they gained
the reputation of having model school regulations, and even Protestants
sent their children to them. From the close of the sixteenth century to
the present time they have based their teaching upon the _ratio et
institutio Studiorum Societatis Jesu_ of Claudius Aquaviva, and,
following that, they distinguish two courses of teaching, a higher and a
lower. The lower included nothing but an external knowledge of the Latin
language, and some fortuitous knowledge of History, of Antiquities, and
of Mythology. The memory was cultivated as a means of keeping down free
activity of thought and clearness of judgment. The higher course
comprehended Dialectics, Rhetoric, Physics, and Morals. Dialectics
appeared in the form of Sophistry. In Rhetoric, they favored the
polemical-emphatic style of the African fathers of the Church and their
pompous phraseology; in Physics, they stopped with Aristotle, and
especially advised the reading of the books _De Generatione et
Corruptione_, and _De Coelo_, on which they commented after their
fashion; finally, in Morals casuistic skepticism was their central
point. They made much of Rhetoric on account of their sermons, giving to
it much attention, and introduced especially Declamation. Contriving
showy public examinations under the guise of Latin School Comedies, they
thus amused the public, disposed them to approval, and at the same time
quite innocently practised the pupil in dissimulation.--
--Diplomacy in behavior was made necessary to the Jesuits as well by
their strict military discipline as by their system of reciprocal
mistrust, espionage, and informing. Abstract obedience was a reason for
any act of the pupils, and they were freed from all responsibility as to
its moral justification. This empirical exact following out of all
commands, and refraining from any criticism as to principles, created a
moral indifference, and, from the necessity of having consideration for
the peculiarities and caprices of the superior on whom all others were
dependent, arose eye-service, and the coldness of isolation sprang from
the necessity which each felt of being on his guard against every other
as against a tale-bearer. The most deliberate hypocrisy and pleasure in
intrigue merely for the sake of intrigue--this most refined poison of
moral corruption--were the result. Jesuitism had not only an interest in
the material profit, which, when it had corrupted souls, fell to its
share, but it also had an interest in the process of corruption. With
absolute indifference as to the idea of morality, and absolute
indifference as to the moral quality of the means used to attain its
end, it rejoiced in the superiority of secrecy, of the accomplished and
calculating understanding, and in deceiving the credulous by means of
its graceful, seemingly-perfect, moral language.--
--It is not necessary to speak here of the morality of the Order. It is
sufficiently recognized as the contradiction, that the idea of morality
insists upon the eternal necessity of every deed, but that in the
realizing of the action all determinations should be made relative and
should vary with the circumstances. As to discipline, they were always
guided by their fundamental principle, that body and soul, as in and for
themselves one, could vicariously suffer for each other. Thus penitence
and contrition were transformed into a perfect materialism of outward
actions, and hence arose the punishments of the Order, in which fasting,
scourging, imprisonment, mortification, and death, were formed into a
mechanical artificial system.--
(_b_) _Pietistic Education._
§ 256. Jesuitism would make machines of man, Pietism would dissolve
him in the feeling of his sinfulness: either would destroy his
individuality. Pietism proceeded from the principle of Protestantism,
as, in the place of the Catholic Pelagianism with its sanctification by
works, it offered justication by faith alone. In its tendency to
internality was its just claim. It would have even the letters of the
Bible translated into the vivacity of sentiment. But in its execution it
fell into the error of one-sidedness in that it placed, instead of the
actuality of the spirit and its freedom, the confusion of a limited
personality, placing in its stead the personality of Christ in an
external manner, and thus brought back into the very midst of
Protestantism the principle of monachism--an abstract renunciation of
the world. Since Protestantism has destroyed the idea of the cloister,
it could produce estrangement from the world only by exciting public
opinion against such elements of society and culture which it
stigmatized as _worldly_ for its members, e.g. card-playing, dancing,
the theatre, &c. Thus it became negatively dependent upon works; for
since its followers remained in reciprocal action with the world, so
that the temptation to backsliding was a permanent one, it must watch
over them, exercise an indispensable moral-police control over them, and
thus, by the suspicion of each other which was involved, take up into
itself the Jesuitical practice, although in a very mild and affectionate
way. Instead of the forbidden secrecy of the cloister, it organized a
separate company, which we, in its regularly constituted assembly, call
a conventicle. Instead of the cowl, it put on its youth a dress like
that of the world, but scant and ashen-colored; it substituted for the
tonsure closely-cut hair and shaven beard, and it often went beyond the
obedience of the monks in its expression of pining humility and prudish
composure. Education within such a circle could not well recognize
nature and history as manifestations of God, but it must consider them
to be limitations to their union with God, from which death can first
then completely release them. The soul which knew that its home could be
found only in the future world, must feel itself to be a stranger upon
the earth, and from such an opinion there must arise an indifference and
even a contempt for science and art, as well as an aversion for a life
of active labor, though an unwilling and forced tribute might be paid to
it. Philosophy especially was to be shunned as dangerous. Bible
lectures, the catechism and the hymn-book, were the one thing needful to
the "poor in spirit." Religious poetry and music were, of all the arts,
the only ones deserving of any cultivation. The education of Pietism
endeavored, by means of a carefully arranged series of representations,
to create in its disciples the feeling of their absolute nothingness,
vileness, godlessness, and abandonment by God, in order to displace the
torment of despair as to themselves and the world by a warm, dramatic,
and living relation to Christ--a relation in which all the Eroticism of
the mystical passion of the begging-friars was renewed in a somewhat
milder form and with a strong tendency to a sentimental sweetishness.
_2. The Ideal of Culture._
§ 257. Civil Education arose from the recognition of marriage and the
family, of labor and enjoyment, of the equality of all before the Law,
and of the duty of self-determination. Jesuitism in the Catholic world
and Pietism in the Protestant were the reaction against this
recognition--a return into the abstract asceticism of the middle ages,
not however in its purity, but mixed with some regard for worldly
possessions. In opposition to this reaction the commonwealth produced
another, in which it undertook to deliver individuality by means of a
reversed alienation. On the one hand, it absorbed itself in the
conception of the Greek-Roman world. In the practical interests of the
present, it externalized man in a past which held to the present no
immediate relation, or it externalized him in the affairs which were to
serve him as means of his comfort and enjoyment; it created an abstract
idealism--a reproduction of the old view of the world--or an abstract
Realism in a high appreciation of things which should be considered of
value only as a means. In one direction, Individuality proceeded towards
a dead nationality; in the other, towards an unlimited
world-commonwealth. In one case, the ideal was the æsthetic
republicanism of the Greeks; in the other, the utilitarian
cosmopolitanism of the Romans. But, in considering the given
circumstances, both united in the feeling of humanity, with its
reconciliatory and pitying gentleness toward the beggar or the criminal.
(_a_) _The Humanitarian Ideal._
§ 258. The Oriental-theocratic education is immanent in Christian
education through the Bible. Through the mediation of the Greek and
Roman churches the views of the ancient world were subsumed but not
entirely subdued. To accomplish this was the problem of humanitarian
education. It aimed to teach the Latin and Greek languages, expecting
thus to secure the action of a purely humane disposition. The Greeks and
Romans being sharply marked nationalities, how could one cherish such
expectations? It was possible only relatively in contradiction, partly
to a provincial population from whom all genuine political sense had
departed, partly to a church limited by a confessional, to which the
idea of humanity as such had become almost lost in dogmatic
fault-findings. The spirit was refreshed in the first by the
contemplation of the pure patriotism of the ancients, and in the second
by the discovery of Reason among the heathen. In contrast to
formlessness distracted by the want of all ideal of culture of
provincialism and dogmatic confusions, we find the power of
representation of ancient art. The so-called uselessness of learning
dead languages imparted to the mind, it knew not how, an ideal drift.
The very fact that it could not find immediate profit in its knowledge
gave it the consciousness of a higher value than material profit. The
ideal of the Humanities was the truth to Nature which was found in the
thought-painters of the ancient world. The study of language merely with
regard to its form, must lead one involuntarily to the actual seizing of
its content. The Latin schools were fashioned into _Gymnasia_, and the
universities contained not merely professors of Eloquence, but also
teachers of Philology.
(_b_) _The Philanthropic Ideal._
§ 259. The humanitarian tendency reached its extreme in the abstract
forgetting of the present, and the omitting to notice its just claim.
Man discovered at last that he was not at home with himself in Rome and
Athens. He spoke and wrote Latin, if not like Cicero, at least like
Muretius, but he often found himself awkward in expressing his meaning
in his mother-tongue. He was often very learned, but he lacked judgment.
He was filled with enthusiasm for the republicanism of Greece and Rome,
and yet at the same time was himself exceedingly servile to his
excellent and august lords. Against this gradual deadening of active
individuality, the result of a perverted study of the classics, we find
now reacting the education of enlightenment, which we generally call the
philanthropic. It sought to make men friendly to the immediate course of
the world. It placed over against the learning of the ancient languages
for their own sake, the acquisition of the more needful branches of
Mathematics, Physics, Geography, History, and the modern languages,
calling these the real studies. Nevertheless it often retained the
instruction in the Latin language because the Romance languages have
sprung from it, and because, through its long domination, the universal
terminology of Science, Art, and Law, is rooted in it. Philanthropy
desired to develope the social side of its disciple through an abstract
of practical knowledge and personal accomplishments, and to lead him
again, in opposition to the hermit-like sedentary life of the
book-pedant, out into the fields and the woods. It desired to imitate
life even in its method, and to instruct pleasantly in the way of play
or by dialogue. It would add to the simple letters and names the
contemplation of the object itself, or at least of its representation by
pictures; and in this direction, in the conversation-literature which it
prepared for children, it sometimes fell into childishness. It performed
a great service when it gave to the body its due, and introduced simple,
natural dress, bathing, gymnastics, pedestrian excursions, and a
hardening against the influences of wind and weather. As this
Pedagogics, so friendly to children, deemed that it could not soon
enough begin to honor them as citizens of the world, it was guilty in
general of the error of presupposing as already finished in its children
much that it itself should have gradually developed; and as it wished to
educate the European as such, or rather man as such, it came into an
indifference concerning the concrete distinctions of nationality and
religion. It coincided with the philologists in placing, in a concealed
way, Socrates above Christ, because he had worked no miracles, and
taught only morality. In such a dead cosmopolitanism, individuality
disappeared in the indeterminateness of a general humanity, and saw
itself forced to agree with the humanistic education in proclaiming the
truth of Nature as the pedagogical ideal, with the distinction, that
while Humanism believed this ideal realized in the Greeks and Romans,
Philanthropism found itself compelled to presuppose an abstract notion,
and often manifested a not unjustifiable pleasure in recognizing in the
Indians of North America, or of Otaheite, the genuine man of nature.
Philosophy first raised these conceptions to the idea of the State,
which fashioned the cognition of Reason and of the reform which follows
from its idea, into an organic element in itself.
--The course which the developing of the philanthropic ideal has taken
is as follows: (1) Rousseau in his writings, _Emile_ and the _Nouvelle
Heloise_, first preached the evangel of Natural Education, the
abstraction from History, the negation of existing culture, and the
return to the simplicity and innocence of nature. Although he often
himself testified in his experience his own proneness to evil in a very
discouraging way, he fixed as an almost unlimited axiom in French and
German Pedagogics his principal maxim, that man is by nature good. (2)
The reformatory ideas of Rousseau met with only a very infrequent and
sporadic introduction among the Romanic nations, because among them
education was too dependent on the church, and retained its
cloister-like seclusion in seminaries, colleges, &c. In Germany, on the
contrary, it was actualized, and the _Philanthropia_, established by
Basedow in Dessau, Brunswick, and Schnepfenthal, made experiments, which
nevertheless very soon departed somewhat from the ultraism of Basedow
and had very excellent results. (3) Humanity existed _in concreto_ only
in the form of nations. The French nation, in their revolution, tried
the experiment of abstracting from their history, of levelling all
distinctions of culture, of enthroning a despotism of Reason, and of
organizing itself as humanity, pure and simple. The event showed the
impossibility of such a beginning. The national energy, the historical
impulse, the love of art and science, came forth from the midst of the
revolutionary abstraction, which was opposed to them, only the more
vigorously. The _grande nation_, their _grande armée_, and
_gloire_--that is to say, for France--absorbed all the humanitarian
phases. In Germany the philanthropic circle of education was limited to
the higher ranks. There was no exclusiveness in the _Philanthropia_, for
there nobles and citizens, Catholics and Protestants, Russians and
Swiss, were mingled; but these were always the children of wealthy
families, and to these the plan of education was adapted. Then appeared
Pestalozzi and directed education also to the lower classes of
society--those which are called, not without something approaching to a
derogatory meaning, _the people_. From this time dates popular
education, the effort for the intellectual and moral elevation of the
hitherto neglected atomistic human being of the non-property-holding
multitude. There shall in future be no dirty, hungry, ignorant, awkward,
thankless, and will-less mass, devoted alone to an animal existence. We
can never rid ourselves of the lower classes by having the wealthy give
something, or even their all, to the poor, so as to have no property
themselves; but we can rid ourselves of it in the sense that the
possibility of culture and independent self-support shall be open to
every one, because he is a human being and a citizen of the
commonwealth. Ignorance and rudeness and the vice which springs from
them, and the malevolent frame of mind against the human race, which are
bound up with crime--these shall disappear. Education shall train man to
self-conscious obedience to law, as well as to kindly feeling towards
the erring, and to an effort not merely for their removal but for their
improvement. But the more Pestalozzi endeavored to realize his ideal of
human dignity, the more he comprehended that the isolated power of a
private man could not attain it, but that the nation itself must make
their own education their first business. Fichte by his lectures first
made the German nation fully accept these thoughts, and Prussia was the
first state which, by her public schools and her conscious preparation
for defence, broke the path for National Education; while among the
Romanic nations, in spite of their more elaborate political formalism,
it still depends partly upon the church and partly upon the accident of
private enterprise. Pestalozzi also laid a foundation for a national
pedagogical literature by his story of _Leonard and Gertrude_. This book
appeared at first in 1784, i.e. in the same year in which Schiller's
_Robbers_ and Kant's _Critique of Pure Reason_ announced a new phase in
the Drama and in Philosophy.--
--The incarnation of God, which was, up to the time of the Reformation,
an esoteric mystery of the Church, has since then become continually
more and more an exoteric problem of the State.--
_3. Free Education._
§ 260. The ideal of culture of the humanitarian and the philanthropic
education was taken up into the conception of an education which
recognizes the Family, social caste, the Nation, and Religion, as
positive elements of the practical spirit, but which will know each of
these as determined from within through the idea of humanity, and laid
open for reciprocal dialectic with the rest. Physical development shall
become the subject of a national system of gymnastics fashioned for use,
and including in itself the knowledge of the use of arms. Instruction
shall, in respect to the general encyclopædic culture, be the same for
all, and parallel to this shall run a system of special schools to
prepare for the special avocations of life. The method of instruction
shall be the simple representation of the special idea of the subject,
and no longer the formal breadth of an acquaintance with many subjects
which may find outside the school its opportunity, but within it has no
meaning except as the history of a science or an art. Moral culture must
be combined with family affection and the knowledge of the laws of the
commonwealth, so that the dissension between individual morality and
objective legality may ever more and more disappear. Education shall,
without estranging the individual from the internality of the family,
accustom him more and more to public life, because criticism of this is
the only thing which can prevent the cynicism of private life, the
half-ness of knowledge and will, and the spirit of caste, which has so
extensively prevailed. The individual shall be educated into a
self-consciousness of the essential equality and freedom of all men, so
that he shall recognize and acknowledge himself in each one and in all.
But this essential and solid unity of all men shall not evaporate into
the insipidity of a humanity without distinctions, but instead it shall
realize the form of a determinate individuality and nationality, and
shall enlighten the idiosyncrasy of its nation into a broad humanity.
The unrestricted striving after Beauty, Truth, and Freedom, actually
through its own strength and immediately, not merely mediately through
ecclesiastical consecration, will become Religion.
The Education of the State must rise to a preparation for the
unfettered activity of self-conscious Humanity.