Pedagogics as a System

by Karl Rosenkranz

§ 234. The systems of national and theocratic education came to the same result, though by different ways, and this result is the conception of a human race in the unity of which the distinctions of different nations find their Truth. But with them this result is only a conception, being a thing external to their actuality. They arrive at the painting of an ideal of the way in which the Messiah shall come. But these ideals exist only in the mind, and the actual condition of the people sometimes does not correspond to them at all, and sometimes only very relatively. The idea of spirit had in these presuppositions the possibility of its concrete actualization; one individual man must become conscious of the universality and necessity of the will as being the very essence of his own freedom, so that all heteronomy should be cancelled in the autonomy of spirit. Natural individuality appearing as national determinateness was still acknowledged, but was deprived of its abstract isolation. The divine authority of the truth of the individual will is to be recognized, but at the same time freed from its estrangement towards itself. While Christ was a Jew and obedient to the divine Law, he knew himself as the universal man who determines himself to his own destiny; and while only distinguishing God, as subject, from himself, yet holds fast to the unity of man and God. The system of humanitarian education began to unfold from this principle, which no longer accords the highest place to the natural unity of national individuality, nor to the abstract obedience of the command of God, but to that freedom of the soul which knows itself to be absolute necessity. Christ is not a mere ideal of the thought, but is known as a living member of actual history, whose life, sufferings and death for freedom form the security as to its absolute justification and truth. The æsthetic, philosophical, and political ideal are all found in the universal nature of the Christian ideal, on which account no one of them appears one-sided in the life of Christ. The principle of Human Freedom excludes neither art, nor science, nor political feeling.

§ 235. In its conception of man the humanitarian education includes both the national divisions and the subjection of all men to the divine law, but it will no longer endure that one should grow into an isolating exclusiveness, and another into a despotism which includes in it somewhat of the accidental. But this principle of humanity and human nature took root so slowly that its presuppositions were repeated within itself and were really conquered in this reproduction. These stages of culture were the Greek, the Roman, and the Protestant churches, and education was metamorphosed to suit the formation of each of these.

—For the sake of brevity we would wish to close with these general definitions; the unfolding of their details is intimately bound up with the history of politics and of civilization. We shall be contented if we give correctly the general whole.—

§ 236. Within education we can distinguish three epochs: the monkish, the chivalric, and that education which is to fit one for civil life. Each of these endeavored to express all that belonged to humanity as such; but it was only after the recognition of the moral nature of the Family, of Labor, of Culture, and of the conscious equal title of all men to their rights, that this became really possible.

I. The Epoch of Monkish Education.

§ 237. The Greek Church seized the Christian principle still abstractly as deliverance from the world, and therefore, in the education proceeding from it, it arrived only at the negative form, positing the universality of the individual man as the renunciation of self. In the dogmatism of its teaching, as well as in the ascetic severity of its practical conduct, it was a reproduction of the theocratic principle. But when this had assumed the form of national centralization, the Greek Church dispensed with this, and, as far as regards its form, it returned again to the quietism of the Orient.

§ 238. The monkish education is in general identical in all religions, in that, through the egotism of its way of living and the stoicism of its way of thinking, through the separation of its external existence and the mechanism of a thoughtless subjection to a general rule as well as to the special command of superiors, it fosters a spiritual and bodily dulness. The Christian monachism, therefore, as the fulfilment of monachism in general, is at the same time its absolute dissolution, because, in its merely abstracting itself from the world instead of affirmatively conquering it, it contradicts the very principle of Christianity.

§ 239. We must notice as the fundamental error of this whole system, that it does not in free individuality seek to produce the ideal of divine-humanity, but to copy in external reproduction its historical manifestation. Each human being must individually offer up as sacrifice his own individuality. Each biography has its Bethlehem, its Tabor, and its Golgotha.

§ 240. Monachism looks upon freedom from one's self and from the world which Christianity demands only as an abstract renunciation of self, which it seeks to compass, like Buddhism, by the vow of poverty, chastity, and obedience, which must be taken by each individual for all time.