§ 3. The charlatanism of educational literature is also fostered by the fact that teaching has become one of the most profitable employments, and the competition in it tends to increase self-glorification.
—When "Boz" in his "Nicholas Nickleby" exposed the horrible mysteries of an English boarding-school, many teachers of such schools were, as he assures us, so accurately described that they openly complained he had aimed his caricatures directly at them.—
§ 4. In the system of the sciences, Pedagogics belongs to the Philosophy of Spirit,—and in this, to the department of Practical Philosophy, the problem of which is the comprehension of the necessity of freedom; for education is the conscious working of one will on another so as to produce itself in it according to a determinate aim. The idea of subjective spirit, as well as that of Art, Science, and Religion, forms the essential condition for Pedagogics, but does not contain its principle. If one thinks out a complete statement of Practical Philosophy (Ethics), Pedagogics may be distributed among all its grades. But the point at which Pedagogics itself becomes organic is the idea of the Family, because in the family the difference between the adults and the minors enters directly through the naturalness of spirit, and the right of the children to an education and the duty of parents towards them in this respect is incontestable. All other spheres of education, in order to succeed, must presuppose a true family life. They may extend and complement the business of teaching, but cannot be its original foundation.
—In our systematic exposition of Education, we must not allow ourselves to be led into error by those theories which do not recognize the family, and which limit the relation of husband and wife to the producing of children. The Platonic Philosophy is the most worthy representative of this class. Later writers who take great pleasure in seeing the world full of children, but who would subtract from the love to a wife all truth and from that to children all care, exhibit in their doctrine of the anarchy of love only a sickly (but yet how prevalent an) imitation of the Platonic state.—
§ 5. Much confusion also arises from the fact that many do not clearly enough draw the distinction between Pedagogics as a science and Pedagogics as an art. As a science it busies itself with developing à priori the idea of Education in the universality and necessity of that idea, but as an art it is the concrete individualizing of this abstract idea in any given case. And in any such given case, the peculiarities of the person who is to be educated and all the previously existing circumstances necessitate a modification of the universal aims and ends, which modification cannot be provided for beforehand, but must rather test the ready tact of the educator who knows how to make the existing conditions fulfil his desired end. It is exactly in doing this that the educator may show himself inventive and creative, and that pedagogic talent can distinguish itself. The word "art" is here used in the same way as it is used when we say, the art of war, the art of government, &c.; and rightly, for we are talking about the possibility of the realization of the idea.
—The educator must adapt himself to the pupil, but not to such a degree as to imply that the pupil is incapable of change, and he must also be sure that the pupil shall learn through his experience the independence of the object studied, which remains uninfluenced by his variable personal moods, and the adaptation on the teacher's part must never compromise this independence.—
§ 6. If conditions which are local, temporal, and individual, are fixed as constant rules, and carried beyond their proper limits, are systematized as a valuable formalistic code, unavoidable error arises. The formulæ of teaching are admirable material for the science, but are not the science itself.
§ 7. Pedagogics as a science must (1) unfold the general idea of Education; (2) must exhibit the particular phases into which the general work of Education divides itself, and (3) must describe the particular standpoint upon which the general idea realizes itself, or should become real in its special processes at any particular time.
§ 8. The treatment of the first part offers no difficulty. It is logically too evident. But it would not do to substitute for it the history of Pedagogics, simply because all the conceptions of it which appear in systematic treatises can be found there.
—Into this error G. Thaulow has fallen in his pamphlet on Pedagogics as a Philosophical Science.—