§ 137. Both Physical and Intellectual Education are in the highest degree practical. The first reduces the merely natural to a tool which mind shall use for its own ends; the second guides the intelligence, by ways conformable to its nature, to the necessary method of the act of teaching and learning, which finally branches out into an objective national life, into a system of mutually dependent school organizations. But in a narrower sense we mean by practical education the methodical development of the Will. This phrase more clearly expresses the topic to be considered in this division than others sometimes used in Pedagogics [Bestrebungs vermögen, conative power]. The will is already the subject of a science of its own, i.e. of Ethics; and if Pedagogics would proceed in anywise scientifically, it must recognize and presuppose the idea and the existence of this science. It should not restate in full the doctrines of freedom of duty, of virtue, and of conscience, although we have often seen this done in empirical works on Pedagogics. Pedagogics has to deal with the idea of freedom and morality only so far as it fixes the technique of their process, and at the same time it confesses itself to be weakest just here, where nothing is of any worth without a pure self-determination.
§ 138. The pupil must (1) become civilized; i.e. he must learn to govern, as a thing external to him, his natural egotism, and to make the forms which civilized society has adopted his own. (2) He must become imbued with morality; i.e. he must learn to determine his actions, not only with reference to what is agreeable and useful, but according to the principle of the Good; he must become virtually free, form a character, and must habitually look upon the necessity of freedom as the absolute measure of his actions. (3) He must become religious; i.e. he must discern that the world, with all its changes, himself included, is only phenomenal; the affirmative side of this insight into the emptiness of the finite and transitory, which man would so willingly make everlasting, is the consciousness of the absolute existing in and for itself, which, in its certainty of its truth, not torn asunder through the process of manifestation, constitutes no part of its changes, but, while it actually presents them, permeates them all, and freely distinguishes itself from them. In so far as man relates himself to God, he cancels all finitude and transitoriness, and by this feeling frees himself from the externality of phenomena. Virtue on the side of civilization is Politeness; on that of morality, Conscientiousness; and on that of religion, Humility.
FIRST CHAPTER.
Social Culture.
§ 139. The social development of man makes the beginning of practical education. It is not necessary to suppose a special social instinct. The inclination of man to the society of men does not arise only from the identity of their nature, but is also in certain cases affected by particular relations. The natural starting-point of social culture is the Family. But this educates the child for Society, and by means of Society the individual passes over into relations with the world at large. Natural sympathy changes to polite behavior, and this to the dexterous and circumspect deportment, whose truth nevertheless is first the ethical purity which combines with the wisdom of the serpent the harmlessness of the dove.
§ 140. (1) The Family is the natural social circle to which man primarily belongs. In it all the immediate differences which exist are compensated by the equally immediate unity of the relationship. The subordination of the wife to the husband, of the children to their parents, of the younger children to their elder brothers and sisters, ceases to be subordination, through the intimacy of love. The child learns obedience to authority, and in this it gives free personal satisfaction to its parents and enjoys the same. All the relations in which he finds himself there are penetrated by the warmth of implicit confidence, which can be replaced for the child by nothing else. In this sacred circle the tenderest emotions of the heart are developed by the personal interest of all its members in what happens to any one, and thus the foundation is laid of a susceptibility to all genuine or real friendship.
—Nothing more unreasonable or inhuman could exist than those modern theories which would destroy the family and would leave the children, the offspring of the anarchy of free-love, to grow up in public nurseries. This would appear to be very humanitarian; indeed these socialists talk of nothing but the interests of humanity—they are never weary of uttering their insipid jests on the institution of the family, as if it were the principle of all narrow-mindedness. Have these fanatics, who are seeking after an abstraction of humanity, ever examined our foundling-hospitals, orphan asylums, barracks, and prisons, to discover in some degree to what an atomic state of barren cleverness a human being grows who has never formed a part of a family? The Family is only one phase in the grand order of the ethical organization; but it is the substantial phase from which man passively proceeds, but into which, as he founds a family of his own, he actively returns. The child lives in the Family in the common joy and grief of sympathy for all, and, in the emotion with which he sees his parents approach death while he is hastening towards the full enjoyment of existence, experiences the finer feelings which are so powerful in creating in him a deeper and more tender understanding of everything human.—
§ 141. (2) The Family rears the children not for itself but for the civil society. In this we have a system of morals producing externally a social technique, a circle of fixed forms of society. This technique endeavors to subdue the natural roughness of man, at least as far as it manifests itself externally. Because he is spirit, man is not to yield himself to his immediateness; he is to exhibit to man his naturalness as under the control of spirit. The etiquette of propriety on the one hand facilitates the manifestation of individuality by means of which the individual becomes interesting to others, and on the other hand, since its forms are alike for all, it makes us recognize the likeness of the individual to all others and so makes their intercourse easier.
—The conventional form is no mere constraint; but essentially a protection not only for the freedom of the individual, but much more the protection of the individual against the rude impetuosity of his own naturalness. Savages and peasants for this reason are, in their relations to each other, by no means as unconstrained as one often represents them, but hold closely to a ceremonious behavior. There is in one of Immerman's stories, "The Village Justice," a very excellent picture of the conventional forms with which the peasant loves to surround himself. The scene in which the townsman who thinks that he can dispense with forms among the peasants is very entertainingly taught better, is exceedingly valuable in an educational point of view. The feeling of shame which man has in regard to his mere naturalness is often extended to relations where it has no direct significance, since this sense of shame is appealed to in children in reference to things which are really perfectly indifferent externalities.—
§ 142. Education with regard to social culture has two extremes to avoid: the youth may, in his effort to prove his individuality, become vain and conceited, and fall into an attempt to appear interesting; or he may become slavishly dependent on conventional forms, a kind of social pedant. This state of nullity which contents itself with the mechanical polish of social formalism is ethically more dangerous than the tendency to a marked individuality, for it betrays emptiness; while the effort towards a peculiar differentiation from others, to become interesting to others, indicates power.