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.
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