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.
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