If intellect then and will are one and the same thing, to such an extent
that there is no intellect which in its development is not development
of personality, formation of character, realisation of a spiritual
reality, we shall be able to understand that the ideas of two distinct
spiritual activities, as the basis of the ordinary distinction between
moral and intellectual training, are mere abstractions that tend to lead
us away from the comprehension of the living reality of the spirit. This
distinction appears to me exceedingly harmful, nothing being more
deplorable, from the moral point of view, than to consider any part of
the life we have to live as morally indifferent; and nothing being more
harmful to the school than the conviction that the moral formation of
man is not the entire purpose of education, but only a part of its
content. It is indispensable, I maintain, that the educator have the
reverent consciousness of the extremely delicate moral value of every
single word which he addresses to his pupils and of the profoundly
ethical essence of the instruction which he imparts to them. For the
school which gives instruction with no moral training in reality gives
no instruction at all. All the objections voiced on this score against
education, which we try to meet by adding on to instruction all that
ought to integrate the truly educational function, are the result of
this abstract way of looking upon instruction solely as the culture of
an intellect which in some way differs from the will, from character,
and from moral personality.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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