Chapter III: The Limits of Education (6)

§ 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.

THE SCIENCE OF EDUCATION.

A PARAPHRASE OF DR. KARL ROSENKRANZ'S
PAEDAGOGIK ALS SYSTEM.

BY ANNA C. BRACKETT.

ST. LOUIS:
G. I. JONES AND COMPANY.
1878.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1878, by
WILLIAM T. HARRIS,
In the office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.