Pedagogics as a System Part 8

II. _Caste Education._

-- 189. The members of the Family are certainly immediately distinguished among each other as to s.e.x and age, but this difference is entirely immaterial as far as the nature of their employment goes. In China, therefore, every man can attain any position; he who is of humblest birth in the great state-family can climb to the highest honor.

But the progress of spirit now becomes so mediated that the division of labor shall be made the principle on which a new distinction shall arise in the family: each one shall perfect himself only in that labor which was allotted to him as his own through his birth into a particular family. This fatalism (caste-distinction) breaks up the life, but increases its tension, for spirit works on the one hand towards the deepening of its distinctions; on the other, towards leading them back into the unity which the natural determining directly opposes.

-- 190. The chief work of education thus consists in teaching each one the rights and duties of his caste so that he shall act only exactly within their limits, and not pollute himself by pa.s.sing beyond them. As the family-state concerns itself with fortifying the natural distinction by a far-reaching and vigorous ceremonial, so the caste-state must do the same with the distinction of cla.s.s. A painful etiquette becomes more and more endless in its requisitions the higher the caste, in order to make the isolation more sharply defined and more perceptible.

--This feature penetrates all exclusively caste-education. The aristocracy exiles itself on this account from its native country, speaks a foreign language, loves its literature, adopts foreign customs, lives in foreign countries--in Italy, Paris, &c. In this way man becomes distinguished from others. But that man should strive thus to distinguish himself has its justification in the mystery of his birth, and this is a.s.suredly always the principle of the caste-state in which it exists. The castes lead to genealogical records, which are of the greatest importance in determining the destiny of the individual. The Brahmin may strike down one of a lower caste who has defiled him by contact, without becoming thereby liable to punishment; rather would he be to blame if he did not commit the murder. Thus formerly was it with the officer who did not immediately kill the citizen or the common soldier who struck him a blow, &c.--

-- 191. The East Indian culture is far deeper and richer than the Chinese. The theoretical culture includes Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic; but these are subordinate, as mere means for the higher activities of Poetry, Speculation, Science, and Art. The practical education limits itself strictly by the lines of caste, and since the caste system const.i.tutes a whole in itself, and each for its permanence needs the others, it cannot forbear giving utterance suggestively to what is universally human in the free soul, in a mult.i.tude of fables (Hitopadesa) and apothegms (sentences of Bartrihari). Especially for the education of princes is a minor of the world sketched out.

--Xenophon's Cyropedia is of Greek origin, but it is Indian in its thought.--

III. _Monkish Education._

-- 192. Family Education demands unconditional obedience towards parents and towards all who stand in an a.n.a.logous position. Caste Education demands unconditional obedience to the duties of the caste. The family punishes by whipping; the caste, by excommunication, by loss of honor.

The opposition to nature appears in both systems in the form of a rigid ceremonial, distinguishing between the differences arising from nature.

The family as well as the caste has within it a manifold fountain of activity, but it has also just as manifold a limitation of the individual. Spirit is forced, therefore, to turn against nature in general. It must become indifferent to the family. But it must also oppose history, and the fixed distinctions of division of labor as necessitated by nature. It must become indifferent to work and the pleasure derived from it. That it may not be conditioned either by nature or by history, it denies both, and makes its action to consist in producing an abstinence from all activity.

-- 193. Such an indifference towards nature and history produces the education which we have called monkish. Those who support this sect care for food, clothing, and shelter, and for these material contributions, as the laity, receive in return from those who live this contemplative life the spiritual contribution of confidence in the blessings which wait upon ascetic contemplation. The family inst.i.tution as well as the inst.i.tution of human labor is subordinated to abstract isolation, in which the individual lives only for the purification of his soul. All things are justified by this end. Castes are found no more; only those are bound to the observance of a special ceremonial who as nuns or monks subject themselves to the unconditional obedience to the rules of the cloister, these rules solemnly enjoining on the negative side celibacy and cessation from business, and on the positive side prayer and perfection.

[Sidenote: _Buddhistic Education--System of Active Education._]

-- 194. In the school of the Chinese Tao-tse, and in the command to the Brahmin after he has established a family to become a recluse, we find the transition as it actually exists to the Buddhistic Quietism which has covered the rocky heights of Thibet with countless cloisters, and reared the people who are dependent upon it into a childlike amiability, into a contented repose. Art and Science have here no value in themselves, and are regarded only as ministering to religion. To be able to read in order to mutter over the prayers is desirable. With the premeditated effort in the state of a monk to reduce self to nothing as the highest good, the system of pa.s.sive education attains its highest point. But the spirit cannot content itself in this abstract and dreamy absence of all action, though it demands a high stage of culture, and it has recourse therefore to action, partly on the positive side to conquer nature, partly to double its own existence in making history. Inspired with affirmative courage, it descends triumphantly from the mountain heights, and fears secularization no more.

SECOND GROUP.

THE SYSTEM OF ACTIVE EDUCATION.

-- 195. Active Education elevates man from his abstract subjection to the family, the caste, asceticism, into a concrete activity with a definite aim which subjects those elements as phases of its mediation, and grants to each individual independence on the condition of his ident.i.ty with it. These aims are the military state, the future after death, and industry. There is always an element of nature present from which the activity proceeds; but this no longer appears, like the family, the caste, the sensuous egotism, as immediately belonging to the individual, but as something outside of himself which limits him, and, as his future life, has an internal relation to him, yet is essential to him and a.s.signs to him the object of his activity. The Persian has as an object of conquest, other nations; the Egyptian, death; the Phnician, the sea.

I. _Military Education._

-- 196. That education which would emanc.i.p.ate a nation from the pa.s.sivity of abstraction must throw it into the midst of an historical activity. A nation finds not its actual limits in its locality: it can forsake this and wander far away from it. Its true limit is made by another nation.

The nation which knows itself to be actual, turns itself therefore against other nations in order to subject them and to reduce them to the condition of mere accidents of itself. It begins a system of conquest which has in itself no limitations, but goes from one nation to another, and extends its evil course indefinitely. The final result of this attack is that it finds itself attacked and conquered.

--The early history of the Persian is twofold: the patriarchal in the high valleys of Iran, and the religio-hierarchical among the Medes. We find under these circ.u.mstances a repet.i.tion of the princ.i.p.al characteristics of the Chinese, Indian, and Buddhist educations. In ancient Zend there were also castes. Among the Persians themselves, as they descended from their mountains to the conquest of other nations, there was properly only a military n.o.bility. The priesthood was subjected to the royal power which represented the absolute power of actuality. Of the Persian kings, Cyrus attacked Western Asia; Cambyses, Africa; Darius and Xerxes, Europe; until the reaction of the spiritually higher nationality did not content itself with self-preservation, but under the Macedonian Alexander made the attack on Persia itself.--

-- 197. Education enjoined upon the Persians (1) to speak the truth; (2) to learn to ride and to use the bow and arrow. There is implied in the first command a recognition of actuality, the negation of all dreamy absorption, of all fantastical indetermination; and in this light the Persian, in distinction from the Hindoo, appears to be considerate and reasonable. In the second command is implied warlike practice, but not that of the nomadic tribes. The Persian fights on horseback, and thus appears in distinction from the Indian hermit seclusion and the quietism of the Lamas as restless and in constant motion.

--The Family increases in value as it rears a large number of warriors.

Many children were a blessing. The king of Persia gave a premium for all children over a certain number. Nations were drawn in as nations by war; hence the immense mult.i.tude of a Persian army. Everything--family, business, possessions--must be regardlessly sacrificed to the one aim of war. Education, therefore, cultivated an unconditional, all-embracing obedience to the king, and the slightest inclination to a.s.sert an individual independence was high treason and was punished with death. In China, on the contrary, duty to the family is paramount to duty to the state, or rather is itself duty to the state. The civil officer who mourns the loss of one of his family is released during the period of mourning from the duties of his function.--

-- 198. The theoretical education, which was limited to reading, writing, and to instruction, was, in the usages of culture, in the hands of the Magians, the number of whom was estimated at eighty thousand, and who themselves had enjoyed the advantages of a careful education, as is shown by their gradation into Herbeds, Moheds, and Destur-Moheds; i.e.

into apprentices, journeymen, and masters. The very fundamental idea of their religion was military; it demanded of men to fight on the side of the king of light, and guard against the prince of darkness and evil. It gave to him thus the honor of a free position between the world-moving powers and the possibility of a self-creative destiny, by which means vigor and chivalrous feeling were developed. Religion trained the activity of man into actualization on this planet, increasing by its means the dominion of the good, by purifying the water, by planting trees, by extirpating troublesome wild beasts. Thus it increased bodily comfort, and no longer, like the monk, treated this as a mere negative.

II. _Priestly Education._

-- 199. War has in death its force. It produces this, and by its means decides who shall serve and who obey. But the nation that finds its activity in war, though it makes death its absolute means, yet finds its own limit in death. Other nations are only its boundaries, which it can overpa.s.s in fighting with and conquering them. But death itself it can never escape, whether it come in the sands of the desert--which buried for Cambyses an army which he sent to the oracle of the Libyan Ammon--or in the sea, that scorns the rod of the angry despot, or by the sword of the freeman who guards his household G.o.ds. On this account, that people stands higher that in the midst of life reflects on death, or rather lives for it. The education of such a nation must be priestly because death is the means of the transition to the future life, and consequently equivalent to a new birth, and becomes a religious act.

Neither the family-state, nor the caste-state, nor the monkish nor military-state, are hierarchies in the sense that the leading of the national life by a priesthood produces. But in Egypt this was actually the case, because the chief educational tribunal was the death-court which concerned only the dead, in awarding to them or denying them the honor of burial as the result of their whole life, but in its award affected also the honor of the surviving family.

-- 200. General education here limited itself to imparting the ability to read, write, and calculate. Special education consisted properly only in an habitual living into a definite business within the circle of the Family. In this fruitful and warm land the expense of supporting children was very small. The division into cla.s.ses was without the cruel features of the Indian civilization, and life itself in the narrow Nile valley was very social, very rich, very full of eating and drinking, while the familiarity with death heightened the force of enjoyment. In a stricter sense only, the warriors, the priests, and the kings, had, properly speaking, an education. The aim of life, which was to determine in death its eternal future, to secure for itself a pa.s.sage into the still kingdom of Amenth, manifested itself externally in the care which they expended on the preservation of the dead sh.e.l.l of the immortal soul, and on this account worked itself out in building tombs which should last for ever. The Chinese builds a wall to secure his family-state from attack; the Hindoo builds paG.o.das for his G.o.ds; the Buddhist erects for himself monastic cells; the Persian constructs in Persepolis the tomb of his kings, where they may retire in the evening of their lives after they have rioted in Ecbatana, Babylon, and Susa; but the Egyptian builds his own tomb, and carries on war only to protect it.

III. _Industrial Education._

-- 201. The system of active education was to find its solution in a nation which wandered from the coast of the Red Sea to the foot of the Lebanon mountains on the Mediterranean, and ventured forth upon the sea which before that time all nations had avoided as a dangerous and destructive element. The Phnician was industrial, and needed markets where he could dispose of the products of his skill. But while he sought for them he disdained neither force nor deceit; he planted colonies; he stipulated that he should have in the cities of other nations a portion for himself; he urged the nations to adopt his pleasures, and insensibly introduced among them his culture and even his religion. The education of such a nation must have seemed profane, because it fostered indifference towards family and one's native land, and made the restless and pa.s.sionate activity subservient to gain. The understanding and usefulness rose to a higher dignity.

-- 202. Of the education of the Phnicians we know only so much as to enable us to conclude that it was certainly various and extensive: among the Carthaginians, at least, that their children were practised in reading, writing, and arithmetic, in religious duties; secondly, in a trade; and, finally, in the use of arms, is not improbable. Commerce became with the Phnicians a trade, the egotism of which makes men dare to plough the inhospitable sea, and to penetrate eagerly the horror of its vast distances, but yet to conceal from other nations their discoveries and to wrap them in a veil of fable.

--It is a beautiful testimony to the disposition of the Greeks, that Plato and others a.s.sign as a cause of the low state of Arithmetic and Mathematics among the Phnicians and Egyptians the want of a free and disinterested seizing of them.--

THIRD GROUP.

THE SYSTEM OF INDIVIDUAL EDUCATION.

-- 203. One-sided pa.s.sivity as well as one-sided activity is subsumed under Individuality, which makes itself into its own end and aim. The Phnician made gain his aim; his activity was of a utilistic character.

Individuality as a pedagogical principle is indeed egotistic in so far as it endeavors to achieve its own peculiarity, but it is at the same time n.o.ble. It desires not to _have_ but to _be_. Individuality also begins as natural, but it elevates nature by means of art to ideality.

The solution of beauty is found in culture, since this renounces the charm of appearance for the knowledge of the True. The aesthetic individuality is followed by the practical, which has indeed no natural basis, but proceeds from an artificial basis as a state formed for a place of refuge. In order internally to create a unity in this, is framed a definite code of laws; in order externally to a.s.sure it, the invincible warrior is demanded. Education is therefore, more exactly speaking, juristic and military practice. The morality of the state is loosened as it reduces into its mechanism one nation after another, until the individuality, become daemonic, makes its war-hardened legions tremble with weakness. We characterize this individuality as daemonic because it desires recognition simply for its own sake. Not for its beauty and culture, not for its knowledge of business and its bravery, only for its peculiarity as such does it claim value, and in the effort to secure this it is ready to hazard life itself. In its naturally-growing existence this individuality is deep, but at the same time without self-limit. The nations educate themselves to this individuality when they destroy the world of Roman world--that of self-limit and balance--which they find.

I. _aesthetic Education._

-- 204. The system of individual education begins with the transfiguration of the immediate individuality into beauty. On the side of nature this system is pa.s.sion, for individuality is given through nature; but on the side of spirit it is active, for spirit must determine itself to restrain its measure as the essence of beauty.

-- 205. Here the individual is of value only in so far as he is beautiful. At first beauty is apprehended as natural, but then it is carried over into the realm of spirit, and the Good is posited as identical with the Beautiful. The ideal of aesthetic education remains always that there shall be also an external unity of the Good with the Beautiful, of Spirit with Nature.

--We cannot here give in detail the history of Greek Education. It is the best known among us, and the literature in which it is worked out is very widely spread. Among the common abridged accounts we mention here only the works of Jacobs, of Cramer & Bekker's "Charinomos." We must content ourselves with mentioning the turning-points which follow from the nature of the principle.--

-- 206. Culture was in Greece thoroughly national. Education gave to the individual the consciousness that he was a Greek and no barbarian, a free man and so subject only to the laws of the state, and not to the caprice of any one person. Thus the nationality was freed at once from the abstract unity of the family and from the abstract distinction of caste, while it appeared with the manifold talents of individuals of different races. Thus the Dorian race held as essential, gymnastics; the aeolians, music; the Ionics, poetry. The aeolian individuality was subsumed in the history of the two others, so that these had to proceed in their development with an internal antagonism. The education of the Dorian race was national education in the fullest sense of the word; in it the education of all was the same, and was open to all, even including the young women; among the Ionic race it was also in its content truly national, but in its form it was varied and unlike, and, for those belonging to various great families, private. The former, reproducing the Oriental phase of abstract unity, educated all in one mould; the latter was the nursery of particular individualities.

-- 207. (1) Education in the heroic age, without any systematic arrangement on the subject, left each one perfectly free. The people related the histories of the adventures of others, and through their own gave material to others again to relate stories of them.

--The Greeks began where the last stage of the active system of education ended--with piracy and the seizure of women. Swimming was a universal practice among the sea-dwelling Greeks, just as in England--the mistress of the ocean--rowing is the most prominent exercise among the young men, and public regattas are held.--

-- 208. (2) In the period of state-culture proper, education developed itself systematically; and gymnastics, music, and grammatics, or literary culture, const.i.tuted the general pedagogical elements.

-- 209. Gymnastics aimed not alone to render the body strong and agile, but, far more, to produce in it a n.o.ble carriage, a dignified and graceful manner of appearance. Each one fashioned his body into a living, divine statue, and in the public games the nation crowned the victor.

--Their love of beautiful boys is explicable not merely by their interest in beautiful forms, but especially by their interest in individuality. The low condition of the women could not lie at the foundation of it, for among the Spartans they were educated as nearly as possible like the men, and yet among them and the Cretans the love of boys was recognized in their legislation. To be without a beloved (??t??), or a lover (e?sp???a?), was among them considered as disgraceful as the degradation of the love by unchast.i.ty was contemptible. What charm was there, then, in love? Manifestly only beauty and culture. But that a person should be attracted by one and not by another can be accounted for only by the peculiar character, and in so far the boy-love and the man-friendship which sprang from it, among the Greeks, are very characteristic and noteworthy phenomena.--

-- 210. It was the task of Music, by its rhythm and measure, to fill the soul with well-proportioned harmony. So highly did the Greeks prize music, and so variously did they practise it, that to be a musical man meant the same with them as to be a cultivated man with us. Education in this respect was very painstaking, inasmuch as music exercises a very powerful influence in developing discreet behavior and self-possession into a graceful naturalness.

--Among the Greeks we find an unrestricted delight in nature--a listening to her manifestations, the tone of which betrays the subjectivity of things as subjectivity. In comparison with this tender sympathy with nature of the Greeks--who heard in the murmur of the fountains, in the dashing of the waves, in the rustling of the trees, and in the cry of animals, the voice of divine personality--the sight and hearing of the Eastern nations for nature is dull.--