Levana

Front matter

THE DOCTRINE OF EDUCATION.

TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN OF

AUTHOR OF "flower, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES," " TITAN," ETC., BrC

Author's Preface

OYERRE only required from a good director of the ballet — besides the art. of dancing — geometry, music, poetry, painting, and anatomy. But to write upon education, means to write upon almost everything at once ; for it has to care for, and watch over, the development of an entire, tliough miniature, world in little, — a microcosm of the microcosm. All the energies with which nations liave labored and signalized themselves once existed as germs in the hand of the educator. If we carried the subject still further, every century, every nation, and even every boy and every girl, would require a distinct system of education, a differeut primer, and domestic French governess, etc.

If, consequently, on a subject like this, only acta sanctorum^ or, more correctly, sanctifi candor um (acts less of saints than of those to be made saints), can be written, and if a folio be nothing more than a fragment, there cannot be, on sucli an inexhaustible subject, one book too much, even after the best, except the worst ; and where frag-

X AUTHOR'S PREFACE.

ments alone are possible, all that arc possible com* pletc tlie whole.

The Author trusts thus to excuse his boldness as well as his poverty ; for both, as in the state, are nearly connected. He has not read every tiling wliich has been written upon education, but here and there something. First and last he names Rousseau's Emile. No preceding work can be compared to his ; the succeeding imitators and transcribers seem to resemble him more. Not Rousseau's individual rules, many of which may be erroneous without injury to the whole, but the spirit of education which fills and animates the work, has shaken to their foundations and purified all the school-rooms and even the nurseries in Europe. In no previous work on education was the ideal so richly and beautifully combined with actual observation as in his. He was a man, could therefore easily become a child, and so he manifested and saved the nature of children. Basedow was his intelligent translator and publisher in Germany, — this land of pedagogopsedists (of education of children's educators) and of love of children, — and Pestalozzi is now confirming Rousseau among the people.

Individual rules, without the spirit of education, rcsoinhle a dictionary without a grammar of the language.. A book of rules is not merely incapable of exhausting and distinguishing tlie infinite variety of individual dispositions and circumstances ; but, even granting it were perfect itself, and able

AUTHOR'S PREFACE. XI

to make others perfect, it yet would but be like a system of remedies laboring to counteract some one symptom of a disease ; recommending, for instance, something of a reducing nature, to be taken before fainting, and to prevent tingling in tlic ears, and unnatural brilliancy of eye ; a tonic to cure paleness and coldness of the face ; an aperient for nausea. But this is worthless ! Do not, like common educators, water tlie individual branches, but the roots, and they will moisten and unfold the rest. Wisdom and morality are no ants' colonies of separate, co-operating workmen, but organic parents of the mental future, which only require animating nourishment. We merely reverse the ignorance of the savages, who sowed gunpowder instead of making it, when we attempt to compound what can only be developed.

But although the spirit of education, always watching over the ^hole, is nothing more thain an endeavor to liberate, by means of a freeman, the ideal human being which lies concealed in every child ; and though, in the application of the divine to the cliild's nature, it must scorn some iiseful things, some seasonable, individual, or immediate ends ; yet it must incorporate itself in the most definite applications, in order to be clearly manifested.

Here the Author diffei^ — but to his phi/osophical disadvantage — from those transcende^^tal superintendents of the school-room slopes. -v^l>o write thereon with so round a piece '^f ^^ 'k^h^ that one xii AUTHOR'S TEEFACE.

may find in their broad strokes wliatev er he desires, and who lay down a complete Brownian system of education in the two words, — strong, weak ; though, indeed, Brown's disciple, Schmidt, only uttered one word, — strong. Dr. Tamponet declared that he would trace heresies in the Lord's Prayer, if any one desired it ; our age, on the contrary, knows how to find, a Lord's Prayer in every heresy. A mother who has a particular child to educate can certainly extract no advantage from such philosophical indifierentism ; although that class of fine, high-sounding compilations always hears witness to a certain amount of artistic talent in their sonorousness and. their theft ; hence. Gall justly found for this sense a place between the organs of music and purloining.

But this language docs not belong to the Preface, and the object of this work has forbidden it to find a place in the book itself; wherefore, this may be regarded in form as my most serious production, to which only a short, occasional, comic Appendix shall be added.

The reader will please to take it patiently if he find what has been already printed again printed here. What has been printed is necessary as the bond and bast-matting of what has not been printed ; but the bast-matting must not cover the whole garden, instead of merely tying up the trees. But there are two still better excuses. Known rules in education gain new force if new experience verifies them. The Author has three times

AUTHOR'S PREFACE. xiii

been in the position of trying them upon different children of all ages and talents ; and he now enjoys with his own the pedagogic jus trium liberorum (law of three children) ; and every other person's experience related in this book has been made his own. Secondly, printing-ink now is like sympathetic ink, it becomes as quickly invisible as visible ; wherefore it is good to repeat old thoughts in the newest books, because the old works in which they stand are not read. New translations of many truths, as of foreign standard works, must be given forth every half-century. And, indeed, I wish that even old German standard books were turned into new German from time to time, and so could find their way into the circulating libraries.

Why are there flower and weed gleanings of everything, but no wine or corn gleanings of the innumerable works on education ? Why should one single good observation or rule be lost because it is imprisoned in some monstrous folio, or blown away in some single sheet ? For dwarfs and giants, even in books, do not live long. Our age, this balloon, or air-ship, which, by simultaneous lighting of new lamps, and throwing out of old iiallast, has constantly mounted higher and higher, might now, I should think, cease to throw out, and rather lovingly endeavor to collect than to disperse the old.

However little so disjointed a collection of thoughts could teach rules, it would yet arouse xiv AUTHOR'S TREFACE.

and sliarpen the educational sense, from which they originally sprung. Therefore every mother — still better every bride — ought to read the many-volumed and, in another sense, many-sided revision of education, to which no nation can oppose anything similar ; slie should read it, and cut and polish herself, like a precious stone, by it on every side, so that her individuality of character may all the more readily discover, protect, revere, and cherish the dim manifestations of it in her child.

Something very different from such a progressive cabinet of noble thoughts, or even from my weak Levana, with her fragments in her arms, is the usual kind of complete system of education which one person after another has written, and will write. It is difficult, — I mean the end, not the means. For it is very easy to proceed with bookbinder's and bookmaker's paste, and fasten together a thousand selected thoughts with five of your own, especially if you conscientiously remark in the Preface that you have availed yourself of the labors of your predecessors, yet make no mention of one in the work itself, but sell such a min iatiiro library in one volume to the reader as a nientnl facsimile of yourself. How much better in this case were a hole-maker than a liolc-hider ! How much better were it if associated authors (I mean those friendly hundreds who move along one ])ath, uttering precisely the same sound) entirely died out, — as Humboldt tells us that in the tropi-

AUTHOR'S PREFACE. XV

cal regions there are none of those sociable plants which make our forests monotonous, but next each tree a perfectly different one grows. A diary about an ordinary child would be much better than a book upon children by an ordinary writer. Yes, every man's opinions about education would be valuable if he only wrote what he did not copy. The author, unlike a partner, should always only say " I," and no other word.

The first part of this work treats at large of the budding — the second and third of the blossoming — season of childhood. In the first, tlie three early years, like the academic triennium, after which the gate of the soul, language, is opened, are the object of care and observation. Here, educators are the Hours who open or close the gates of heaven. Here, true education, the developing-, is yet possible ; by whose means the long second, the curative, may be spared. For the child, — yet in native innocence, before his parents have become his serpents on the tree, — speechless, still unsusceptible of verbal empoisonment, — led by customs, not by words and reasons, therefore all the more easily moved on the narrow and small pinnacle of sensuous experience ; — for the child, I say, on this boundary-line between the monkey and the man, the most important era of life is contained in the years which immediately follow his non-existence, in which, for the first time, he colors and moulds himself by companionship with others. The parent's hand may cover and shelter the gerxvi AUTHOR'S PREFACE.

minating seed, but not the luxuriant tree : consequently, first faults are the greatest ; and mental maladies, unlike the small-pox, are the more dangerous the earlier they are taken. Every new educator effects less than his predecessor ; until at last, if we regard all life as an educational institution, a circumnavigator of the world is less influenced by all the nations he has seen than by his nurse.

At least this book has been composed with warmest love for the little beings, the delicate flowergods of a soon fading Eden. May Levana, the motherly goddess, who was formerly entreated to give a father's heart to fathers, hear tlie prayer which the title of this book addresses to her, and, in doing so, justify both it and this. The demands of the state or of learning, unfortunately, rob the child of half its father. The education of most fathers is but a system of rules to keep the child at a respectful distance from them, and to form him more with regard to their quiet than his powers ; or, at most, under a tornado of wrath, to impart as much meal of instruction as he can scatter. But I would ask men of business what education of souls rewards more delightfully and more immediately than that of the innocent, who resemble rosewood, which imparts its odor even while being carved and shaped ? Or what now remains to the decaying world — among so many ruins of what is noblest and ancicntcst — except children, the pure beings yet unfalsificd by the age and the world ? Only

AUTHOR'S PREFACE. xvii

they, with a higher object than that for which they were formerly used, can behold futurity and truth in the magic mirror, and with bandaged eyes draw the precious lot from the wheel of chance. The words that the father speaks to his children in the privacy of home are not heard by the world ; but, as in whispering-galleries, they are clearly heard at the end, and by posterity.

It would be my greatest reward if, at the end of twenty years, some reader as many years old should return thanks to me, that the book which he is then reading was read by his parents.

JEAN PAUL FR. KICHTER.

Baikeuth, May 2, 1806.

Contents

FIRST FRAGMENT.

Chap. Pagb

I. Importakce of Education 1

Appendix To The Third Fragment

On Physical Education 127

COMIC APPENDIX AND EPILOGUE TO THE FIRST YOLUilE.

A DREAMED Letter to the late Professor Gellert, in which the Author begs for a Tutor .... 148

FOURTH FRAGMENT.

ON FEMALE EDUCATION.

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

III. Nature of Women 175

IV. Education of Girls 188 I

V. Private Instructions of a Prince to the Gov- i

euness of his Daughter 226 J

FIFTH FRAGMENT.

I. On the Education of a Prince 241

SIXTH FRAGMENT.

ox THE MORAL EDUCATION OF BOYS.

1 277

II. Truthfulness 299

III. Education «»k the Affections 310

IV Suri'LEMKNTARV APPENDIX TO MoRAL EDUCATION . 325

CONTEXTS. xxi

SEVENTH FRAGMENT.

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

II. Speech and Writing 345

III. Attention, and the Power of Adaptive Combina-

tion 353

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 IZducation of the Recollection, — not of

the Memory 370

EIGHTH FRAGMENT.

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

NINTH FRAGMENT, ok Conclusion .... 390

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, H 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 distmction ; 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 honeybearing 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, hke 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 whethei', 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, — tlie 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 him.

Although a system of education must, in the first instance, provide for the beings endowed wnth 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 individuah 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 chikl 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 wuth a pole star, wdiich may ever guide him in whatever new countries he may afterwards reach.

§3.

A perfect child w^ould 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 liim without interference, better than a Spartan or Jew^ish 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 re 1, — possessing

PRESENT INEFFICIENCY OF EDUCATION. 5

in their sovereign their bread-master, as well as their pain and pleasure master, and protected against him by 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, lar 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.

INAUGURAL DISCOURSE AT THE JOHANNEUM-PAULLINUM ; 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 shall, 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 conse ;[uences, 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.

Fu-st, 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

I RESENT INEFFICIENCY OF EDUCATION. 7

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 estabhshments 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 m 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 centurv is here meant the real century, wliich may as often truly consist of ten years, as of ten tliousand, and which is dated, hke religious eras, only from great men.

What can insulated words do against hving 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 light 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

PRESEXT INEFFICIENCY OF EDUCATION. 9

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 marriage?, 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 Stael) 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, like 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 ot study, but also of I* lo LEVANA.

education. Like the fresco-painter, the teacher lays colors on tlie wet plaster which ever fade away, and which he must ever renew until they remain and brightly shine. "VVho then, at Naples for instance, Liys 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 fixmilies there educates, besides the ])opular ma>ses, a pedagogic crowd of people ; at least, ibr 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, wdio 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?