Levana; or, The doctrine of education

Front matter

OR,

THE DOCTRINE OF EDUCATION.

TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN

Contents

Page 1

FIRST FRAGMENT.

Chap.

Appendix To The Third Fragment

On Physical Education . . • 127

COMIC APPENDIX AND EPILOGUE TO THE FIRST VOLUME. A DREAMED LeTTER TO THE LATE PROFESSOR GeLLERT, IN

\YHicH THE Author begs for a Tutor .... 148

FOURTH FRAGMENT.

ON FEMALE EDUCATION.

1 161

II. On the Destination of the Female Sex . . 168

III. Nature of Women 175

IV. Education of Girls 188

V. Private Instructions of a Prince to the Governess OF his Daughter 226

FIFTH FRAGMENT.

I. On the Education of a Prince 241

SIXTH FRAGMENT.

ON THE MORAL EDUCATION OF BOYS.

.1 277

II. Truthfulness 299

III. Education of the Affections 310

IV. Supplementary Appendix to Moral Education . 325

CONTENTS. xxi

SEVENTH FRAGMENT.

I. On the Development of the Desire for Intellectual Progress 342

II. Speech and Writin^ 345

III. Attention, and the Power of Adaptive Combina-

tion 853

IV. Development of Wit 362

V. Development of Reflection, Abstraction, and

Self-Knowledge ; together with an extra Paragraph on the Powers of Action and Business . 368 VI. On the Education of the Recollection, — not of

the Memory 370

EIGHTH FRAGMENT.

I. Development of the Sense of Beauty . . . 378 II. Classical Education 384

NINTH FRAGMENT, or Conclusion . . . .390

OR,

THE DOCTRINE OF EDUCATION.

FIRST FRAGMENT.

Chap. I. Importance of Education, §§ 1-3. — Chap. IT. Discourse against its Influence, §§ 4 - 15. — Chap. III. Discourse for the same, §§ 16-20.

Chapter I. Importance Of Education

§ 1.

HEN Antipater demanded fifty children as hostages from the Spartans, they offered him, in their stead, a hundred men of distinction ; unhke ordinary educators, who precisely reverse the offering. The Spartans thought rightly and nobly. In the world of childhood all posterity stands before us, upon which we, like Moses upon the promised land, may only gaze, but not enter ; and at the same time it renews for us the ages of the young world, behind which we must appear ; for the child of the most civilized capital is a born Otaheitan, and the one-year-old Sans-culotte a first Christian, and the last children of the earth came upon the world with the paradise of our first parents. So, according to Bruyn, the children of the

1 A

Samojeds are beautiful, and only the parents ugly. If there were a perfect and all-powerful system of education, and a unity of educators with themselves and with one another ; then, since each generation of children begins the history of the world anew, the immediate, and through it the distant future, into which we can now gaze and grasp so little, would stand much more fairly in our power. For deeds and books — the means by which we have hitherto been able to work upon the world — always find it already defined, and hardened and full of people like ourselves ; only by education can we sow upon a pure, soft soil the seeds of poison or of honeybeai'ing flowers ; and as the gods to the first men, so do we, physical and spiritual giants to children, descend to these little ones, and form them to be great or small. It is a touching and a mighty thought that now, before their educator, the great spirits and teachers of our immediate posterity creep, as the sucklings of his milk-store, — that he guides future suns, like little wandering stars, in his leading-strings. And it is all the more important because he can neither know whether he has before him, to unfold to good or evil, a hell-god for humanity, or a protecting and light-giving angel ; nor can foresee at what dangerous moment of futurity the magician, who, transformed into a little child, now plays before him, will rise up a giant.

§2.

Our immediate future demands thought : our earth is filled with gunpowder, — like the age of the migration of nations, ours prepares itself for spiritual and political wanderings, and under all state buildings, professorial chairs, and temples the earth quakes. Do you know whether the little boy who plucks flowers at your side may not one day, from his island Corsica, descend as a war-god, into a stormy universe, to play with storms and to destroy, or to purify and to sow ? Would it then be indifferent whether, in educating him, you had been his Fenelon, his Cornelia, or his Dubois ? For, although you might not be able to break or bend the power of genius, — the deeper the sea, the more precipitous the coast, — yet in the most important initiatory decade of life, in the first, at the opening dawn of all feelings, you might surround and overlay the slumbering lion energies with all the tender habits of a gentle heart and all the bands of love. Whether an angel or a devil educate that great genius is of far more importance than whether a learned doctor or a Charles the Simple teach liim.

Although a system of education must, in the first instance, provide for the beings endowed with genius ; since these, though they seldom arise, yet alone rule the world's history, either as leaders of souls, or of bodies, or of both ; yet would such a system too much resemble a practical exposition of how to conduct one's self in case of winning the great prize, if it did not observe that the multitude of mediocre talents on which a great one can act are quite as important in the mass as the man of genius is in the individual. And therefore, since, on the one hand, you give to posterity, as alms to a beggar, through children ; and, on the other, must send these last, like unarmed men, into a hidden period whose poisonous gales you know not ; so there is nothing more important to posterity, than whether you send forth your pupil as the seed-corn of a harvest, or the powder-train of a mine, which destroys itself and everything with it : and nothing is more important to the child, than whether you have or have not given him a magic jewel which may preserve and conduct him uninjured.

Let a child be more holy to you than the present, which consists of things and matured men. By means of the child, — although with difficulty, — by means of the short lever-arm of humanity, you set in motion the long one, whose mighty arc you can scarcely define in the height and depth of time. But there is something else you certainly know, — namely, that the moral development — which is education, as the intellectual is instruction — knows and fears no time nor futurity. In this you give to the child a heaven with a pole star, which may ever guide him in whatever new countries he may afterwards reach.

§3.

A perfect child would be a heavenly aurora of the soul ; at least its appearance would not be so variously restrained and so difficult as that of a perfect man. On him everything, from the state down to himself, exercises a forming influence ; but on the fresh child, parents repeat with full power the lawgiving, moulding, character of Lycurgus and of Moses ; they can separate their pupil from others, and form him without interference, better than a Spartan or Jewish state could do. Consequently one ought to expect more from the unlimited monarchy of parents. Children living in this kingdom, without Salic law, and in such an overflow of laws and lawgivers that the rulers are often more numerous than the ruled, and the governing house larger than the governed, — having everywhere before them cabinet orders, and offended majesties, and most rapid mandata sine clausula, and behind the glass the exalted sceptre of the rod, — possessing in their sovereign their bread-master, as well as their pain and pleasure master, and protected against him bj no foreign power ; for maltreatment of slaves is punished in many countries, even of cattle in England, but nowhere of children, — children, then, thus absolutely governed without opposition party, or anti-ministerial gazette, and without representatives, should issue, one would think, out of this smallest state within the state, far better educated than grown-up persons educated in the greatest of all educational establishments, the state itself

Nevertheless, both educational establishments and states seem to work so uniformly, that it is worth while, next to the necessity of education, to consider, in the two following discourses, its possibility.

Chapter II

INAUGURAL DISCOURSE AT THE JOHANNEUM-PAULLINÜM ; OR, PROOF THAT EDUCATION EFFECTS LITTLE.

§4.

MOST honored Inspector of Schools, Rector, Conand Sub-rector, master of the third class ! most worthy teacher of the lower classes and fellow-laborers ! I hope I sliall, to the best of my abilities, express my pleasure at being inducted as lowest teacher into your educational establishment, by entering on my post of honor with the proof that school education, as well as home education, has neither evil consequences, nor any other. If I am so fortunate as to lead us all to a quiet conviction of this absence of consequences, I may also possibly obtain that we shall all fill our laborious offices easily and cheerfully, without boasting, and with a certain confidence that needs fear nothing ; every day we shall walk in and out among the pupils, sit on our teaching-chair as on an easy-chair, and let everything take its own course.

First, I believe, I must set forth who are the educators and complete fashioners of children, — for fashioned, in one way or another, they are ; and in which way, rests with and in us ; — and afterwards I will naturally touch upon ourselves, and point out the easy change which may be effected.

§5.

"Whence comes it that hitherto no age has spoken, counselled, and done so much about education as our own ; and again, among nations, none so much as Germany, into which Rousseau's winged seeds have been blown out of France and ploughed in ? The ancients wrote and did little for it ; their schools were rather for young men than children, and in the philosophical schools of Athens, the learner frequently was, or might be, older than the teacher. Sparta was a Stoa, or garrison-school, at once for parents and children. The Romans had Grecian slaves for their schoolmasters, and yet their children became neither Greeks nor slaves. In the ages when the great and glorious deeds of Christendom, and knighthood, and freedom rose like stars on the dark horizon of Europe, school buildings lay scattered around as mere dull, little, dark, savage huts, or monks' cells. And what have the political vowels of Europe, the English, whose island is a school of citizens, and whose election every seven years is a wandering seven-day Sunday school ? — what have they hitherto better than mere establishments for mal-education ? Where do the children more resemble the parents — and to anything else than a mirror of himself, be it a flat, a concave, or a convex one, the teacher cannot wish to mould and polish his pupil — than even in those places where the educators are silent, among savages, Greenlanders, and Quakers ?

And the further one looks back through past ages, to the hoary nations of antiquity, the fewer school-books and Cyropedias — in fact, from want of all books — were there : all the more was the man lost in the state ; all the less was the woman, who might have educated, formed for it : nevertheless, every child was the image of its parents, which is more than the best ought to desire, since God can only behold his own image in men as a caricature. And are not our present improved educational institutions a proof that men can raise themselves freely and without aid from bad to better, and, consequently, to all other establishments of a similar kind ?

§6.

But who then educates in nations and ages ? — Both ! — The living time, which, for twenty or thirty years struggles unceasingly with men through actions and opinions, tossing them to and fro as with a sea of waves, must soon wash away or cover the precipitate of the short school years, in which only one man, and only words taught. The century is the spiritual climate of man, mere education the hot-house and forcing-pit, out of which he is taken and planted forever in the other. By century is here meant the real century, which may as often truly consist of ten years, as of ten thousand, and which is dated, hke religious eras, only from great men.

What can insulated words do against living present action ? The present has for new deeds also new words ; the teacher has only dead languages for the, to all appearance, dead bodies of his examples.

The educator has himself been educated, and is already possessed, even without his knowledge, by the spirit of the age, which he assiduously labors to banish out of the youth (as a whole city criticises the spirit of the whole city). Only, alas! every one believes himself to stand so precisely and accurately in the zenith of the universe, that, according to his calculation, all suns and nations must culminate over his head ; and he himself, like the countries at the equator, cast no shadow save into himself alone. For were this not so, how could so many — as I also hereafter propose to do — speak of the spirit of the age, when every word implies a rescue from, and elevation above it; just as we cannot perceive the ebb and flow of the tide in the ocean, but only at its boundaries, the coasts. In like manner, a savage cannot depict a savage so clearly as a civilized man can do. But in truth, the painters of the spirit of the age have for the most part represented the last one, nothing more. The great man, the poet and thinker, has never been so clearly known to himself, that the crystal light-holder and the hght have become one ; much less then have other men. However easily blooming every man may open towards the sky, he is yet drawn down by a root into the dark, fast earth.

§7.

The spirit of the nation and of the age decides, and is at once the schoolmaster and the school ; for it seizes on the pupil to form him with two vigorous hands and powers ; with the living lesson of action, and with its unalterable unity. If — to begin with unity — education must be, like the Testament, a continuous endeavor to withdraw the force of interrupting mixtures, then nothing builds up so strong as the present, which ceases not for a moment, and eternally repeats itself; and which, with joy and sorrow, with towns and books, with friends and enemies, in short, with thousand-handed life, presses and seizes on us. No teacher of the people continues so uniformly one with himself as the teaching people. Minds molten into masses lose something of their free movements: which bodies, for instance, that of the world, perhaps that of the universe, seem to gain by their very massiveness, and, like a heavy colossus, to move all the more easily along the old, iron-covered track. For however much marriages, old age, deaths and enmities, are in the individual case subject to the law of freedom, yet in a whole nation, lists of births and deaths can be made, by which it may be shown that in the Canton of Berne (according to Mad. de Sta^l) the number of divorces, as in Italy that of murders, is the same from year to year. Must not, now, the little human being placed on such an eternally and ever similarly acting world, be borne as upon a flying earth, where the only directions that a teacher can give avail nothing, because he has first unconsciously received his line of movement upon it ? Thence, in spite of all reformers and informers, nations, hke meadows, reach ever a similar verdure ; thence, even in capital cities, where all school-books and schoolmasters, and even parents of every kind, educate, the spirit maintains itself unalterably the same.

Repetition is the mother not only of study, but also of 1* lO LEVANA.

education. Like the fresco-painter, the teacher lays colors on the wet plaster which ever fade away, and which he must ever renew until they remain and brightly shine. Who then, at Naples for instance, lays the colors most frequently on the spiritual tablet of one individual, the one tutor, or the multitude of 30,000 advocates, 30,000 lazzaroni, and 30,000 monks; a threefold company of fates, or ninefold one of nine murderers, compared with which Vesuvius is a quiet man who suffers himself to be entreated by Saint Januarius * (although not in January) ? Certainly one might say that also in families there educates, besides the popular masses, a pedagogic crowd of people; at least, for instance, aunts, grandfathers, grandmothers, father, mother, godparents, friends of the family, the yearly domestics, and at the end of all the instructor beckons with his forefinger, so that — could this force continue as long as it would gladly be maintained — a child, under these many masters, would resemble, much more than one thinks, an Indian slave, who wanders about with the inburnt stamps of his various masters. But how does the multitude disappear compared with the higher one, by which it was colored ; just as all the burnt marks of the slave yet cannot overcome the hot black coloring of the sun, but receive it as a coat of arms in a sable field?

§8.

The second mighty power by which the spirit of the age and people teaches and conquers is the living action. Not the cry, says a Chinese author, but the rising, of a wild duck impels the flock to follow^ him in upward flight. One war fought against a Xerxes inflames the heart quite differently, more purely and more strongly, than the pe- * The protecting saint of the Neapolitans against Vesuvius.

PRESENT INEFFICIENCY OF EDUCATION. II

rusal of it three times in Cornelius, Flutarch, and Herodotus : for this last, along with the whole teaching of school phrases, is merely an intellectual imitation in cork (a phelloplastic, according to Böttiger's retranslation into the Greek) in order easily to represent ancient temples and magnificent buildings in light cork forms. Yea, the mere ancestral images of deeds in Plutarch's Westminster Abbey cast the seeds of the divine word more deeply into the heart than one or a few thousand volumes of sermons full of true pulpit eloquence. Heaven ! if words could be compressed to deeds, only a thousand to one, could they yet arouse upon an earth in which j^ulpits, professors' chairs, and libraries of all ages snow do^Ti unceasingly their most pure cold exhortations, one single passion to hurl forth volcanic fire ? Would not history then be surrounded with mere snow craters and icebergs ? Ah ! most respected teachers, if even we, with our great college libraries, that preach to us for tens of years, have never once been brought so far as to become holy men for a month, nay for a week, what dare we expect from the few volumes of words which we let fall in schoolhours? Or what more should the parents at home expect?

The pedagogic powerlessness of words is unfortunately confessed in a peculiar manner, which is daily renewed in each of us. Namely, every individual being is divided into a teacher and his scholars ; or is split up into the teacher's chah' and the scholars' form. Should you now believe that this perpetual house-tutor in the four chambers of the brain, — who daily gives private lessons to the sharer of his apartment, philanthropist, and boarder, — who is a morning, evening, and night preacher, — who never ceases with his conversatorium and repetitorium, — who accompanies the pupil, whom he loves as himself and conversely, everywhere with notes of instruction as tutor on his travels, in idle hours and wine-drinkings, by seats on the throne, by the chair of instruction and elsewhere, — who, as the most unlimited head-master to be found under the skull, ever sleeps with his scholar, as a sergeant with a recruit, in the same bed, and from time to time reminds him of much when a man has forgotten himself, — in short, could you believe that this so extremely rare Mentor, who «from the pineal-gland, as the lodging-place of the high light, eternally teaches downward ; nevertheless, after fifty and more judgments and years, has experienced nothing better in his Telemachus, than what the pure Minerva (the well-known and anonymous Mentor in the Telemachus), with all her modesty, in the greatest head of the «world, in that of Jupiter, also had to experience, namely, that she could not spare her pupil a single one of his animal transformations ? This, indeed, were scarcely to be believed, if we did not daily see the most lamentable instances of it in ourselves. There is, for example, in the history of the learned something very usual and very pitiful : — that excellent men have resotved for many years to rise earlier in a morning, without much coming of it, — unless they may perhaps break through the habit at the last day.

§9.

Permit us to return : and since we have easily asked whether a man may be more effectually moved by a thousand outward foreign words, than by a billion of his own inward ones, let us not be very much astonished if the stream of words which is given to the youth, in order that he may thereby guide and bear himself up in the ocean, should be dissipated by the winds and waves on every side. But give us leave to remark, that we lay many things to the account of school-rooms, that is, of words, which have in fact had their sole origin on the common teaching-ground of action ; just as, in former times, general pestilences were ascribed to the poisoning of particular wells by the Jews. The school-house of the young soul does not merely consist of lecture and lesson rooms, but also of the school-ground, the sleeping-room, the eating-room, the play-ground, the staircase, and of every place. Heaven ! what intermixture of other influences, always either to the advantage or prejudice of education ! The physical growth of the pupil nourishes and draws forth a mental one ! Nevertheless, this is ascribed to the pedagogic tan-bed ; just as if one must not necessarily grow cleverer and taller at the same time ! One might quite as properly attribute the service of the muscles to the leading-strings. Parents very often in their own children regard that as the effect of educational care and attention which in strangers they would merely consider the consequence of human growth. There are so many illusions ! If a great man have gone through any one educational establishment, he is ever after explained by that : either he did not resemble it, and then it is held to have been a moulding counter-irritation ; or he did, and then it acted as an incitement to life. In the same way one might regard the blue library, whose binding taught the librarian Duval his first lessons in ai'ithmetic, as an arithmetical book, and school for arithmetic. If parents, or men in general, in all their education seek nothing else than to make their physical image into their more perfect mental one, and consequently to varnish over this copy with the departed brightness of the original, then must thej readily fall into the mistake of esteeming an inborn resemblance an acquired one, and physical fathers spiritual ones, and nature freedom. But in this and the former consideration, that holds true of children which does of nations : there were found in the new world ten customs of the old, — six Chinese in Peru, four Hotten totish in Western America,* — without any other nearer descent to account for these resemblances than the general one from Adam, or humanity.

§10.

We may, excellent fellow-workers, especially flatter ourselves with services to humanity, when the position is proved true, that we effect little, or nothing, by education. As in the mechanical world every motion, if the opposition of friction were removed, would be unceasingly continued, and every change become eternal ; so, in the spiritual world, if the pupil less bravely opposed and vanquished the teacher, a more beggarly life would be eternally repeated than we can at all picture to ourselves. I mean this : if all the streets and times of this poor earth were to be filled with dull, stiff images from the pedagogic princely mirrors, that is, with counterfeits of school-men, so that every age might be impressed by the other, manikin on manikin ; what else is wanted for this tedious misery, but that education should succeed beyond our expectations, and a tutor and schoolmaster allow his head, like a crowned one, to pass stamped in all hands and corners ? And a whole bench of knights might become an assembly of candidates fit for the tournament, because they had been previously clean and well copied after the quiet burgher's pattern ?

* Zimmermann's History of Man, b. 3.

PRESENT INEFFICIENCY OF EDaCATION. 15

But we will venture to hope the opposite ; the schoolmaster and tutor is ever afterwards connected with the nobleman, as God with nature ; concerning which Seneca justly writes, Semel Jussit, semper paret, — i. e. the tutor's study is very soon closed, and the antechamber and audience-hall opened.

In order not to fall into the error of those who introduce the bird Phoenix, and the man in the moon unwived, I have here in my thoughts girls also, on whom, as on doves and canary-birds, false colors are painted by governesses, as well as by tutors, which the first rain or moulting removes. But, as has been said, every woman becomes in time something peculiar ; a beautiful Idioticon of her many provinces of language.

§11.

Through long teaching, to which no advance of the pupil is sufficiently proportioned, schoolmasters of understanding may arrive at the question : " How will the poor scholar be able to walk in the right path without our leading-strings, since even with them he runs into error ? " — and also at this wish : " God ! that we could but wind him up, and fix him, exactly like an astronomical hundred-yeared chronometer, so that he might show the hours, and positions of the planets and everything quite accurately, long after our death ! " — and consequently at this opinion : " that they were in fact the soul of his inner man, and had to raise his every limb, or were at least, his supporting mould, in which he ought not merely to carry his broken arm, as in a gentle bandage, but also his leg, his head, and his entrails, so as to be completely strengthened." If the tutor accompany his young master to the university, the one goes into much good society without the other : and if they both at last set off on their travels, the young gentleman goes into much of a suspicious nature, and the tutor ends his anxiety, — which resembles the anxiety of a mother, as to how the poor naked foetus can exist, when it comes into this cold blowing world, and is no longer nourished by her blood.

Truly your singing-bird of a pupil will continue to whistle for you through the night ; because, by a nightlight, that is, by an education out of season, you delude him into the belief of an artificial daylight ; but when he once flies into the open air, he will then only arrange his notes and sound them at the general break of day.

If we place ourselves on another eminence, to contemplate thence the directions, fears, and demands of teachers, we almost feel tempted to drive them down, especially because they, the educators, assume and presume so much ; that is, they do not take and set before them the great world-plan as their school-plan, nor the all-educator as an example to the poor hedge-schoolmaster man, — but do so anxiously endeavor, with their narrow views, to assist the infinite Pedagogiarch (Prince of teachers), — M'ho permits sun to revolve round sun, and child round father, and so the child's and father's father are alike, — as if humanity, neglected for thousands of years, were laid before them, hidden nook creators, like warm wax, on which they had to impress their own individual induration, to produce future indurations ; so that they might as re-creators agreeably surprise the creator with a living seal and paste cabinet of their coats of arms and heads.

A long period, and here again a long period.

§12.

None of all my hearers, of whom I am the nearest, can have forgotten that at the commencement I asked why so much at present in Germany is written about education, and grounded upon it, as I also myself intend to lay some printed ideas on the subject before the public. I answer, for this reason ; because by cultivation all humanity has become a speaking machine, and the flesh a word. The more education, the more notions ; the less action, the more speech ; man is becoming a man by profession, as there were formerly Christians by profession ; and the ear his sensorium commune. The beggar, for instance, passes by the great citizen unnoticed ; the one has fled from the other, not merely in deed, \mi beyond that, in word ; just as battles, pestilences, and such like, pass over us only as gentle sounds. Therefore is poetry so beneficial as a counterbalance to civilization, because it draws an artistic life round the thin shadows, and erects on the battle-field of mere sensuous views its own glorious visions. But as the German spends no time so willingly as a time for consideration, — to the most important step he made, namely, that into life, he took an eternity of consideration, — he prefei'S steady, slow writing, to quick hither and thither roving speech ; unlike the Southerns, he is less a speechloving than a writing-loving people, as his registries and book-shelves prove. " A word, a man," * means now " black on white, a man." Writing and fact, or clothing and body, are now as distinct from one another as shoe and foot, which, as a measure, mean with us the same thing. It all depends on one little stroke, whether Christ is God or not ; namely, on the well-known passage, 1 Tim. iii. 16, in the Alexandrine copy, where a little stroke with the back of the pen changes OC into eC