§ 179. National Education is divided into three special systems: (1) Passive, (2) Active, (3) Individual. It begins with the humility of an abstract subjection to nature, and ends with the arrogance of an abstract rejection of nature.
§ 180. Man yields at first to the natural authority of the family; he obeys unconditionally its behests. Then he substitutes for the family, as he goes on his culture, the artificial family of his caste, to whose rules he again unconditionally yields. To dispense with this artificialty and this tyranny, at last he abstracts himself from the family and from culture. He flees from both, and becoming a monk he again subjects himself to the tyranny of his order. The monks presents to us the mere type of his species.
§ 181. This absolute abstraction from nature and from culture, this quietism of spiritual isolation, is the ultimate result of the Passive system. In opposition to this, the Active system seeks the positive vanquishing of naturalness. Its people are courageous. They attack other nations in order to rule over them as conquerors. They live for the continuation of their life after death, and build for themselves on this account tombs of granite. They brave the dangers of the sea. The abstract prose of the patriarchal-state, the fantastic chimeras of the caste-state, the ascetic self-renunciation of the cloister-state, yield gradually to the recognition of actuality; and the fundamental principle of Persian education consisted in the inculcation of veracity.
§ 182. But the nationality which is occupied with simple, natural elements—other nations, death, the mystery of the ocean—may revert to the abstractions of the previous stage, which in education often take on cruel forms—nay, often truly horrible. First, when the spirit begins not only to suspect its true nature, but rather to recognize itself as the true essence; and when the God of Light places as the motto on his temple the command to self-knowledge, the natural individuality becomes free. Neither the passive nor the active system understands the free self-distinction of the individual from the rest. In them, to be an individuality is a betrayal of the very idea of their existence, and even the suspicion of such a charge suffices utterly and mercilessly to destroy the one to whom it refers. Even the solitary individuality of the despot is not the one-ness of free individuality: he is only an example of his kind; only in his kind is he singular. Nationality rises to individuality through the free dialectic of its race, wherein it dissolves its own presupposition.
§ 183. Nevertheless individuality must always proceed from naturalness. Esthetically it seeks nature, but the nature of the activity itself, in order, by penetrating it with mind, to make of it a work of art; practically it seeks it, partly to disdain it in gloomy resignation, partly to enjoy it in excessive sensual ecstasy, demoniacally to heighten the extravagance of its own internal feeling in wild revels.
—The Germans were not savage in the common signification of this term. They were men each one of whom constituted himself willingly a centre for others, or, if this was not the case, renounced them in proud self-sufficiency. All the glory and all the disgrace of our race lies in the power of individualizing which is divinely breathed into our veins. As a natural element, if this be not controlled, it degenerates easily into intractableness, into violence. The Germans need therefore, in order to be educated, severe service, the imposition of difficult tasks; and for this reason they appropriate to themselves, now the Roman law, now the Greek philology, now Gallic usages, &c., in order to work off their superfluous strength in such opposition. The natural reserve of the German found its solvent in Christianity. By itself, as the history of the German race shows, it would have been destroyed in vain distraction. First of all, the German race, in the confidence of its immediate consciousness, ventured forth upon the sea, and managed the ship upon its waves as if they rode a charger.—
THE SYSTEM OF PASSIVE EDUCATION.
§ 184. All education desires to free man from his finitude, to make him ethical, to unite him with God. It begins therefore with a negative relation to naturalness, but at once falls into a contradiction of its aim, which is to convert the opposition to nature into a natural necessity. Spirit subjects the individual (1) to the rule of the family as naturally spiritual; (2) to the rule of the caste as to a principle in itself spiritual, mediated through the division of labor, which it nevertheless, through its power of being inherited, joins again to the family; (3) to the abstract self-determination of the monkish quietism, which turns itself away as well from the family as from work, and constitutes this flight from nature and history, this absolute passivity, into an educational ideal.
—We shall not here enter into the details of this system, but simply endeavor to remove from their differences the want of clearness which is generally found involved in any mention of them, so that the phrases of hierarchical and theocratical education are used without any historical accuracy.—