§ 50. Although educators must now leave the youth free, the necessity of
further culture for him is still imperative. But it will no longer come
directly through them. Their pre-arranged, pattern-making work is now
supplanted by self-education. Each sketches for himself an ideal to
which in his life he seeks to approximate every day.
——In the work of self-culture one friend can help another by advice and
example; but he cannot educate, for education presupposes
inequality.——The necessities of human nature produce societies in which
equals seek to influence each other in a pedagogical way, since they
establish by certain steps of culture different classes. They presuppose
Education in the ordinary sense. But they wish to bring about Education
in a higher sense, and therefore they veil the last form of their ideal
in the mystery of secrecy.——To one who lives on contented with himself
and without the impulse toward self-culture, unless his unconcern
springs from his belonging to a savage state of society, the Germans
give the name of Philistine, and he is always repulsive to the student
who is intoxicated with an ideal.——
SECOND PART.
The Special Elements of Education.
§ 51. Education in general consists in the development in man of his
inborn theoretical and practical rationality; it takes on the form of
labor, which changes that state or condition, which appears at first
only as a mere conception, into a fixed habit, and transfigures
individuality into a worthy humanity. Education ends in that
emancipation of the youth which places him on his own feet. The special
elements which form the concrete content of all Education in general are
the Life, Cognition, and Will of man. Without life mind has no
phenomenal reality; without cognition, no genuine, i.e. conscious, will;
and without will, no self-assurance of life and of cognition. It is true
that these three elements are in real existence inseparable, and that
consequently in the dialectic they continually pass over into one
another. But none the less on this account do they themselves prescribe
their own succession, and they have a relative and periodical ascendancy
over each other. In Infancy, up to the fifth or sixth year, the purely
physical development takes the precedence; Childhood is the time of
learning, in a proper sense, an act by which the child gains for himself
the picture of the world such as mature minds, through experience and
insight, have painted it; and, finally, Youth is the transition period
to practical activity, to which the self-determination of the will must
give the first impulse.
§ 52. The classification of the special elements of Pedagogics is hence
very simple: (1) the Physical, (2) the Intellectual, (3) the Practical.
(We sometimes apply to these the words Orthobiotics, Didactics, and
Pragmatics.)
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