Science, which he considers as an object existing in itself, outside of
his and other human minds, and therefore endowed with absolute validity
in all its branches and in the articulations of these branches, is
nothing but the science which _he_ knows. And he knows it because he has
constructed it in the form in which he knows it: _fingit creditique_.
But this absence of consciousness from the constructing, and the
consequent faith in the realistic value of science, determine the
positions and the doctrines which produce the consequences I have
deplored. For he who establishes a school and enacts its regulations
takes as a model his own science, without at all being aware that it is
only his own. It becomes therefore the content of the institution and
determines its method. But a teacher who does not feel inclined to
teach that given science and to adopt that special method creates his
own ideal, which is but the projection of his personal culture; and
unable to account critically for the intrinsic connection existing
between his ideal and his personality, he too _fingit creditique_. He
believes that the school authority has erred, and that Science, as
he understands it, must be kept distinct from the official doctrines.
But in his mind his science is not his own. It is, he is confident,
that Sovereign Science which by his method and through his cult must
enlighten the school over which he rules. And so at the point of
arrival where the realistic conception of methods must work, it is found
to be effective notwithstanding the rebuffs of reality, and it works. It
works and it acts in the only way that it is possible for it to act,
namely, by going amiss. It fails and will always continue to fail, not
so much because every pupil has his own personality and will have his
own particular culture with its corresponding method, but especially
because whatever the number of the pupils in a school, the human mind
knows of no culture which is not also its own free development, its
autonomous ethical becoming. A science, which is supposed to exist
before the spirit, becomes a thing, and will never again be able to
trace its way back to the spirit. By presupposing science, teachers
materialise the culture in whose development education consists; and
this materiality of a culture known to teachers renders impossible
that other culture which is unknown to teachers, which is going to
be not theirs, but the pupils', for whom they work and in whose behalf
the school was instituted.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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