5. Education as National and as Social.
—As soon as the first enthusiasm for freedom waned, the weakness
of the theory upon the constructive side became obvious. Merely to
leave everything to nature was, after all, but to negate the very idea
of education; it was to trust to the accidents of circumstance. Not
only was some method required but also some positive organ, some
administrative agency for carrying on the process of instruction. The
"complete and harmonious development of all powers," having as its
social counterpart an enlightened and progressive humanity, required
definite organization for its realization. Private individuals here and
there could proclaim the gospel; they could not execute the work. A
Pestalozzi could try experiments and exhort philanthropically inclined
persons having wealth and power to follow his example. But even
Pestalozzi saw that any effective pursuit of the new educational ideal
required the support of the state. The realization of the new education
destined to produce a new society was, after all, dependent upon the
activities of existing states. The movement for the democratic idea
inevitably became a movement for publicly conducted and administered
schools.
So far as Europe was concerned, the historic situation identified the
movement for a state-supported education with the nationalistic movement
in political life—a fact of incalculable significance for
subsequent movements. Under the influence of German thought in
particular, education became a civic function and the civic function was
identified with the realization of the ideal of the national state. The
"state" was substituted for humanity; cosmopolitanism gave way to
nationalism. To form the citizen, not the "man," became the aim of
education.
[5]
The historic situation to which reference is made is the after-effects
of the Napoleonic conquests, especially in Germany. The German states
felt (and subsequent events demonstrate the correctness of the belief )
that systematic attention to education was the best means of recovering
and maintaining their political integrity and power. Externally they
were weak and divided. Under the leadership of Prussian statesmen they
made this condition a stimulus to the development of an extensive and
thoroughly grounded system of public education.
This change in practice necessarily brought about a change in theory.
The individualistic theory receded into the background. The state
furnished not only the instrumentalities of public education but also
its goal. When the actual practice was such that the school system,
from the elementary grades through the university faculties, supplied
the patriotic citizen and soldier and the future state official and
administrator and furnished the means for military, industrial, and
political defense and expansion, it was impossible for theory not to
emphasize the aim of social efficiency. And with the immense importance
attached to the nationalistic state, surrounded by other competing and
more or less hostile states, it was equally impossible to interpret
social efficiency in terms of a vague cosmopolitan humanitarianism.
Since the maintenance of a particular national sovereignty required
subordination of individuals to the superior interests of the state both
in military defense and in struggles for international supremacy in
commerce, social efficiency was understood to imply a like
subordination. The educational process was taken to be one of
disciplinary training rather than of personal development. Since,
however, the ideal of culture as complete development of personality
persisted, educational philosophy attempted a reconciliation of the two
ideas. The reconciliation took the form of the conception of the
"organic" character of the state. The individual in his isolation is
nothing; only in and through an absorption of the aims and meaning of
organized institutions does he attain true personality. What appears to
be his subordination to political authority and the demand for sacrifice
of himself to the commands of his superiors is in reality but making his
own the objective reason manifested in the state—the only way in
which he can become truly rational. The notion of development which we
have seen to be characteristic of institutional idealism (as in the
Hegelian philosophy) was just such a deliberate effort to combine the
two ideas of complete realization of personality and thoroughgoing
"disciplinary" subordination to existing institutions.
The extent of the transformation of educational philosophy which
occurred in Germany in the generation occupied by the struggle against
Napoleon for national independence, may be gathered from Kant, who well
expresses the earlier individual-cosmopolitan ideal. In his treatise on
Pedagogics, consisting of lectures given in the later years of the
eighteenth century, he defines education as the process by which man
becomes man. Mankind begins its history submerged in nature—not
as Man who is a creature of reason, while nature furnishes only instinct
and appetite. Nature offers simply the germs which education is to
develop and perfect. The peculiarity of truly human life is that man
has to create himself by his own voluntary efforts; he has to make
himself a truly moral, rational, and free being. This creative effort
is carried on by the educational activities of slow generations. Its
acceleration depends upon men consciously striving to educate their
successors not for the existing state of affairs but so as to make
possible a future better humanity. But there is the great difficulty.
Each generation is inclined to educate its young so as to get along in
the present world instead of with a view to the proper end of education:
the promotion of the best possible realization of humanity as humanity.
Parents educate their children so that they may get on; princes educate
their subjects as instruments of their own purposes.
Who, then, shall conduct education so that humanity may improve? We must
depend upon the efforts of enlightened men in their private capacity.
"All culture begins with private men and spreads outward from them.
Simply through the efforts of persons of enlarged inclinations, who are
capable of grasping the ideal of a future better condition, is the
gradual approximation of human nature to its end possible.... Rulers
are simply interested in such training as will make their subjects
better tools for their own intentions." Even the subsidy by rulers of
privately conducted schools must be carefully safeguarded. For the
rulers' interest in the welfare of their own nation instead of in what
is best for humanity, will make them, if they give money for the
schools, wish to draw their plans. We have in this view an express
statement of the points characteristic of the eighteenth century
individualistic cosmopolitanism. The full development of private
personality is identified with the aims of humanity as a whole and with
the idea of progress. In addition we have an explicit fear of the
hampering influence of a state-conducted and state-regulated education
upon the attainment of these ideas. But in less than two decades after
this time, Kant's philosophic successors, Fichte and Hegel, elaborated
the idea that the chief function of the state is educational; that in
particular the regeneration of Germany is to be accomplished by an
education carried on in the interests of the state, and that the private
individual is of necessity an egoistic, irrational being, enslaved to
his appetites and to circumstances unless he submits voluntarily to the
educative discipline of state institutions and laws. In this spirit,
Germany was the first country to undertake a public, universal, and
compulsory system of education extending from the primary school through
the university, and to submit to jealous state regulation and
supervision all private educational enterprises.
Two results should stand out from this brief historical survey. The
first is that such terms as the individual and the social conceptions of
education are quite meaningless taken at large, or apart from their
context. Plato had the ideal of an education which should equate
individual realization and social coherency and stability. His
situation forced his ideal into the notion of a society organized in
stratified classes, losing the individual in the class. The eighteenth
century educational philosophy was highly individualistic in form, but
this form was inspired by a noble and generous social ideal: that of a
society organized to include humanity, and providing for the indefinite
perfectibility of mankind. The idealistic philosophy of Germany in the
early nineteenth century endeavored again to equate the ideals of a free
and complete development of cultured personality with social discipline
and political subordination. It made the national state an intermediary
between the realization of private personality on one side and of
humanity on the other. Consequently, it is equally possible to state
its animating principle with equal truth either in the classic terms of
"harmonious development of all the powers of personality" or in the more
recent terminology of "social efficiency." All this reënforces the
statement which opens this chapter: The conception of education as a
social process and function has no definite meaning until we define the
kind of society we have in mind.
These considerations pave the way for our second conclusion.
One of the fundamental problems of education in and for a democratic
society is set by the conflict of a nationalistic and a wider social
aim. The earlier cosmopolitan and "humanitarian" conception suffered
both from vagueness and from lack of definite organs of execution and
agencies of administration. In Europe, in the Continental states
particularly, the new idea of the importance of education for human
welfare and progress was captured by national interests and harnessed to
do a work whose social aim was definitely narrow and exclusive. The
social aim of education and its national aim were identified, and the
result was a marked obscuring of the meaning of a social aim.
This confusion corresponds to the existing situation of human
intercourse. On the one hand, science, commerce, and art transcend
national boundaries. They are largely international in quality and
method. They involve interdependencies and coöperation among the
peoples inhabiting different countries. At the same time, the idea of
national sovereignty has never been as accentuated in politics as it is
at the present time. Each nation lives in a state of suppressed
hostility and incipient war with its neighbors. Each is supposed to be
the supreme judge of its own interests, and it is assumed as matter of
course that each has interests which are exclusively its own. To
question this is to question the very idea of national sovereignty which
is assumed to be basic to political practice and political science.
This contradiction (for it is nothing less) between the wider sphere of
associated and mutually helpful social life and the narrower sphere of
exclusive and hence potentially hostile pursuits and purposes, exacts of
educational theory a clearer conception of the meaning of "social" as a
function and test of education than has yet been attained.
Is it possible for an educational system to be conducted by a national
state and yet the full social ends of the educative process not be
restricted, constrained, and corrupted? Internally, the question has to
face the tendencies, due to present economic conditions, which split
society into classes some of which are made merely tools for the higher
culture of others. Externally, the question is concerned with the
reconciliation of national loyalty, of patriotism, with superior
devotion to the things which unite men in common ends, irrespective of
national political boundaries. Neither phase of the problem can be
worked out by merely negative means. It is not enough to see to it that
education is not actively used as an instrument to make easier the
exploitation of one class by another. School facilities must be secured
of such amplitude and efficiency as will in fact and not simply in name
discount the effects of economic inequalities, and secure to all the
wards of the nation equality of equipment for their future careers.
Accomplishment of this end demands not only adequate administrative
provision of school facilities, and such supplementation of family
resources as will enable youth to take advantage of them, but also such
modification of traditional ideals of culture, traditional subjects of
study and traditional methods of teaching and discipline as will retain
all the youth under educational influences until they are equipped to be
masters of their own economic and social careers. The ideal may seem
remote of execution, but the democratic ideal of education is a farcical
yet tragic delusion except as the ideal more and more dominates our
public system of education.
The same principle has application on the side of the considerations
which concern the relations of one nation to another. It is not enough
to teach the horrors of war and to avoid everything which would
stimulate international jealousy and animosity. The emphasis must be
put upon whatever binds people together in coöperative human pursuits
and results, apart from geographical limitations. The secondary and
provisional character of national sovereignty in respect to the fuller,
freer, and more fruitful association and intercourse of all human beings
with one another must be instilled as a working disposition of mind. If
these applications seem to be remote from a consideration of the
philosophy of education, the impression shows that the meaning of the
idea of education previously developed has not been adequately grasped.
This conclusion is bound up with the very idea of education as a freeing
of individual capacity in a progressive growth directed to social aims.
Otherwise a democratic criterion of education can only be inconsistently
applied.
