Chapter I: =Home Education=

330. On discovering that his own efforts encounter impediments, the individual teacher might easily come to think that society could do everything, if it only would, and if it possessed the necessary insight. Further reflection, however, reveals the existence of difficulties peculiar both to state and family.

331. The state needs soldiers, farmers, mechanics, officials, etc., and is concerned with their efficiency. Its attitude toward a large number of persons, whose existence as individuals has significance only in a narrow sphere, is, in general, far more that of supervision designed to prevent the harm they might do, than one of direct helpfulness. He who is able to render competent service receives preferment; the weaker has to give way to the stronger; the shortcomings of one are made good by another.

332. The state applies its tests to what can be tested, to the outward side of conduct and of knowledge. It does not penetrate to the inner life. Teachers in public schools cannot penetrate much farther; they, too, are more concerned with the sum total of knowledge imparted by them, than with the individual and the way in which he relates his knowledge to himself.

333. To the family, however, no stranger can make up for what one of its members lacks; to the family the inner condition becomes so manifest, and is often felt so keenly, that the merely external does not satisfy. It is obvious, therefore, that moral education will always remain essentially a home task, and that the institutions of the state are to be resorted to for educative purposes only with a view to supplementing the home.

But on closer inspection it is found that family life is very often too busy, too full of care, or too noisy, for that rigor which is undeniably required both for instruction and for morality. Luxury and want alike harbor dangers for youth. Consequently families lean on the state for support more than they ought.

334. Private institutions as such do not possess the same motive power as either state or family, and are seldom able to make themselves independent of the comparisons to which they are exposed, because of the fact that they are expected in one case to take the place of the state schools, and in another that of the family.

Nevertheless, sturdy minds which do not require the emulation obtaining in schools can be advanced more rapidly, and instruction adapted more easily to individual needs, than in public institutions. As for training, moreover, the evils that may spring from environment can be prevented more successfully than is possible in many families.

If the institutions in question could choose from among many teachers and many pupils, they might, under otherwise favorable circumstances, be able to achieve great results. But the fact of a picked set of pupils alone shows how little the whole need of education would be met. Besides, even those that were chosen would bring with them their earliest impressions; they would incline toward the social conditions for which they believe themselves to be destined; the faults of individuality (294 _et seq._) would cling to them, unless such faults were recognized before the selection, and were avoided by exclusion.

335. As much as possible, then, education must return to the family. In many cases private tutors will be found to be indispensable. And of instructors excellently equipped as to scholarship, there will be the less lack, the better the work done by the gymnasia.

It must be noted, also, that instead of being the most difficult, the most advanced instruction is the easiest of all, because imparted with the least departure from the way in which it was received. People are therefore mistaken when they assume that private tutors are capable of furnishing an equivalent only for the lowest classes in gymnasia. A far greater difficulty lies in the fact that even the most skilful and active tutor cannot give as many lessons as a school provides, and that accordingly more has to be left to the pupil’s own efforts. To be sure, this is exactly the mode of instruction which suits the bright student better than one that must accommodate itself to the many, and which on that account must progress but slowly.

336. But home education presupposes that sound pedagogical views have been arrived at in the home, and that their place is not occupied by absurd whims or half knowledge. (Niemeyer’s famous work, “The Principles of Education and of Instruction,” is intelligible to every educated person, and has been widely known for many years.)

337. The necessity of sound pedagogical knowledge in the home becomes all the more urgent where teachers, private or public, change frequently--whereby inequalities of instruction and treatment are introduced which need to be corrected.