It follows from the whole tenor of the following pages, that the
directors of the free spiritual life will have charge also of the
arrangements and course of teaching in those institutes also, which
are specially directed to the service of the State or of the economic
world.--Law-schools, Trades-schools, Agricultural and Industrial
Colleges, would all take their form from the free spiritual life. Many
prejudices are bound to be aroused, when the principles stated in this
book are pursued to these, their right consequences. But from what
do such prejudices proceed? The anti-social spirit in them becomes
evident, when one recognises, that at bottom they proceed from an
unconscious persuasion, that people connected with education must
necessarily be unpractical persons, remote from life,--not the sort of
people whom one could for a moment expect to institute arrangements
that would be of any real use for the practical departments of life,
and that all such arrangements must be instituted by the people
actively engaged in practical life, whilst the educators must work
on the lines laid down for them.
In thinking like this, people do not see, that the educators need
to fix their lines of work themselves, from the smallest things up
to the biggest, that it is when they cannot do so that they grow
unpractical and remote from life. And then you may give them any
principle to work on, laid down by apparently the most practical
persons, and yet their education will not turn out people really
practically equipped for life. Our anti-social conditions are brought
about, because people are turned out into social life not educated
to feel socially. People with social feelings can only come from
a mode of education that is directed and carried on by persons who
themselves feel socially. The social question will never be touched,
until the education question and the question of the spiritual life
are treated as a vital part of it. An anti-social spirit is created
not merely by economic institutions, but through the attitude of the
human beings within these institutions being an anti-social one. And
it is anti-social, to have the young brought up and taught by persons,
who themselves are made strangers to real life by having their lines of
work and the substance of their work laid down for them from outside.
The State establishes law-schools. And it requires, that the substance
of the jurisprudence taught in these law-schools should be the same
as the State has fixed for its own constitution and administration,
from its own points of view. When the law-schools proceed wholly
from a free spiritual life, this free spiritual life itself will
supply the substance of the jurisprudence taught in them. The State
will wait to take its mandate from the spiritual life. It will be
fertilised by the reception of living ideas, such as can issue only
from a spiritual life that is free.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account