Pedagogics as a System Part 3

THIRD CHAPTER.

_s.e.xual Education._

NOTE.--The paragraphs relating to s.e.xual Education are designed for parents rather than for teachers, the parent being the natural educator of the family and s.e.xual education relating to the preservation and continuance of the family. This chapter is accordingly, for the most part, omitted here. It contains judicious reflections, invaluable to parents and guardians.--_Tr._

-- 72. Gymnastic exercises fall naturally into a systematic arrangement determined by the chronological order of development through infancy, childhood, and youth. Walking, running, and leaping belong, to the first period; lifting, swinging, and throwing, to the second; swimming, riding, and bodily contests, to the third, and these last may also be continued into manhood. But with the arrival at youth, a new epoch makes its appearance in the organism. It prepares itself for the propagation of the species. It expands the individual through the need which he feels of uniting himself with another individual of the same species, but who is a polar opposite to him, in order to preserve the two in a new individual. The blood rushes more vigorously; the muscular strength becomes more easily roused into activity; an indefinable impulse, a sweet melancholy takes possession of the being. This period demands a special care in the educator.

-- 73. The general preventive guards must be found in a rational system of food and exercise. By care in these directions, the development of the bones, and with them of the brain and spinal cord at this period, may be led to a proper strength, and that the easily-moulded material may not be perverted from its normal functions in the development of the body to a premature manifestation of the s.e.xual instinct.

-- 74. Special forethought is necessary lest the brain be too early over-strained, and lest, in consequence of such precocious and excessive action, the foundation for a morbid excitation of the whole nervous system be laid, which may easily lead to effeminate and voluptuous reveries, and to brooding over obscene representations. The excessive reading of novels, whose exciting pages delight in painting the love of the s.e.xes for each other and its sensual phases, may lead to this, and then the mischief is done.

SECOND DIVISION.

INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION.

-- 80. _Mens sana in corpore sano_ is correct as a pedagogical maxim, but false in the judgment of individual cases; because it is possible, on the one hand, to have a healthy mind in an unhealthy body, and, on the other hand, an unhealthy mind in a healthy body. To strive after the harmony of soul and body is the material condition of all proper activity. The development of intelligence presupposes physical health.

Here we are to speak of the science of the art of Teaching. This had its condition on the side of nature, as was before seen, in physical Education, but in the sphere of mind it is related to Psychology and Logic. It unites, in Teaching, considerations on Psychology as well as a Logical method.

FIRST CHAPTER.

_The Psychological Presupposition._

-- 81. If we would have a sound condition of Philosophy, it must, in intellectual Education, refer to the conception of mind which has been unfolded in Psychology; and it must appear as a defect in scientific method if Psychology, or at least the conception of the theoretical mind, is treated again as within Pedagogics. We must take something for granted. Psychology, then, will be consulted no further than is requisite to place on a sure basis the pedagogical function which relates to it.

-- 82. The conception of _attention_ is the most important to Pedagogics of all those derived from Psychology. Mind is essentially self-activity.

Nothing exists for it which it does not itself posit as its own. We hear it not seldom implied that something from outside conditions must make an impression on the mind, but this is an error. Mind lets nothing act upon it unless it has rendered itself receptive to it. Without this preparatory self-excitation the object does not really penetrate it, and it pa.s.ses by the object unconsciously or indifferently. The horizon of perception changes for each person with his peculiarities and culture.

Attention is the adjusting of the observer to the object in order to seize it in its unity and diversity. Relatively, the observer allows, for a moment, his relation to all other surroundings to cease, so that he may establish a relation with this one. Without this essentially spontaneous activity, nothing exists for the mind. All result in teaching and learning depends upon the clearness and strength with which distinctions are made, and the saying, _bene qui distinguit bene docit_, applies as well to the pupil.

-- 83. Attention, depending as it does on the self-determination of the observer, can therefore be improved, and the pupil made attentive, by the educator. Education must accustom him to an exact, rapid, and many-sided attention, so that at the first contact with an object he may grasp it sufficiently and truly, and that it shall not be necessary for him always to be adding to his acquisitions concerning it. The twilight and partialness of intelligence which forces us always to new corrections because a pupil at the very commencement did not give entire attention, must not be tolerated.

[Sidenote: _Psychological Faculties._]

-- 84. We learn from Psychology that mind does not consist of distinct faculties, but that what we choose to call so are only different activities of the same power. Each one is just as essential as the other, on which account Education must grant to each faculty its claim to the same fostering care. If we would construe correctly the axiom _a potiori fit denominatio_ to mean that man is distinguished from animals by thought, and that mediated will is not the same as thought, we must not forget that feeling and representing are not less necessary to a truly complete human being. The special direction which the activity of apprehending intelligence takes are (1) Perception, (2) Conception, (3) Thinking. Dialectically, they pa.s.s over into each other; not that Perception rises into Conception, and Conception into Thinking, but that Thinking goes back into Conception, and this again into Perception. In the development of the young, the Perceptive faculty is most active in the infant, the Conceptive in the child, and the Thinking in the youth; and thus we may distinguish an intuitive, an imaginative, and a logical epoch.

--Great errors arise from the misapprehension of these different phases and of their dialectic, since the different forms which are suitable to the different grades of youth are mingled. The infant certainly thinks while he perceives, but this thinking is to him unconscious. Or, if he has acquired perceptions, he makes them into conceptions, and demonstrates his freedom in playing with them. This play must not be taken as mere amus.e.m.e.nt; it also signifies that he takes care to preserve his self-determination, and his power of idealizing, in opposition to the pleasant filling of his consciousness with material.

Herein the delight of the child for fairy tales finds its reason. The fairy tale constantly destroys the limits of common actuality. The abstract understanding cannot endure this arbitrariness and want of fixed conditions, and thus would prefer that children should read, instead, home-made stories of the "Charitable Ann," of the "Heedless Frederick," of the "Inquisitive Wilhelmine," &c. Above all, it praises "Robinson Crusoe," which contains much heterogeneous matter, but nothing improbable. When the youth and maiden of necessity pa.s.s over into the earnestness of real life, the drying up of the imagination and the domination of the understanding presses in.--

I. _The Intuitive Epoch._

-- 85. Perception, as the beginning of intellectual culture, is the free grasping of a content immediately present to the spirit. Education can do nothing directly toward the performance of this act; it can only a.s.sist in making it easy:--(1) it can isolate the subject of consideration; (2) it can give facility in the transition to another; (3) it can promote the many-sidedness of the interest, by which means the return to a perception already obtained has always a fresh charm.

-- 86. The immediate perception of many things is impossible, and yet the necessity for it is obvious. We must then have recourse to a mediated perception, and supply the lack of actual seeing by representations. But here the difficulty presents itself, that there are many objects which we are not able to represent of the same size as they really are, and we must have a reduced scale; and there follows a difficulty in making the representation, as neither too large nor too small. An explanation is then also necessary as a judicious supplement to the picture.

-- 87. Pictures are extremely valuable aids to instruction when they are correct and characteristic. Correctness must be demanded in these subst.i.tutes for natural objects, historical persons and scenes. Without this correctness, the picture, if not an impediment, is, to say the least, useless.

--It is only since the last half of the seventeenth century, i.e. since the disappearance of real painting, that the picture-book has appeared as an educational means; first of all, coming from miniature painting.

Up to that time, public life had plenty of pictures of arms, furniture, houses, and churches; and men, from their fondness for constantly moving about, were more weary of immediate perception. It was only afterwards when, in the excitement of the thirty-years' war, the arts of Sculpture and Painting and Christian and Pagan Mythology became extinct, that there arose a greater necessity for pictured representations. The _Orbis Rerum Sensualium Pictus_, which was also to be _janua linguarum reserata_, of Amos Comenius, appeared first in 1658, and was reprinted in 1805. Many valuable ill.u.s.trated books followed. Since that time innumerable ill.u.s.trated Bibles and histories have appeared, but many of them look only to the pecuniary profit of the author or the publisher.

It is revolting to see the daubs that are given to children. They are highly colored, but as to correctness, to say nothing of character, they are good for nothing. With a little conscientiousness and scientific knowledge very different results could be obtained with the same outlay of money and of strength. The uniformity which exists in the stock of books which German book-selling has set in circulation is really disgraceful. Everywhere we find the same types, even in ethnographical pictures. In natural history, the ill.u.s.trations were often drawn from the imagination or copied from miserable models. This has changed very much for the better. The same is true of architectural drawings and landscapes, for which we have now better copies.--

-- 88. Children have naturally a desire to collect things, and this may be so guided that they shall collect and arrange plants, b.u.t.terflies, beetles, sh.e.l.ls, skeletons, &c., and thus gain exactness and reality in their perception. Especially should they practise drawing, which leads them to form exact images of objects. But drawing, as children practise it, does not have the educational significance of cultivating in them an appreciation of art, but rather that of educating the eye, as this must be exercised in estimating distances, sizes, and colors. It is, moreover, a great gain in many ways, if, through a suitable course of lessons in drawing, the child is advanced to a knowledge of the elementary forms of nature.

--That pictures should affect children as works of art is not to be desired. They confine themselves at first to distinguis.h.i.+ng the outlines and colors, and do not yet appreciate the execution. If the children have access to real works of art, we may safely trust in their power, and quietly await their moral or aesthetic effect.--

-- 89. In order that looking at pictures shall not degenerate into mere diversion, explanations should accompany them. Only when the thought embodied in the ill.u.s.tration is pointed out, can they be useful as a means of instruction. Simply looking at them is of as little value towards this end as is water for baptism without the Holy Spirit. Our age inclines at present to the superst.i.tion that man is able, by means of simple intuition, to attain a knowledge of the essence of things, and thereby dispense with the trouble of thinking. Ill.u.s.trations are the order of the day, and, in the place of enjoyable descriptions, we find miserable pictures. It is in vain to try to get behind things, or to comprehend them, except by thinking.

-- 90. The ear as well as the eye must be cultivated. Music must be considered the first educational means to this end, but it should be music inspired by ethical purity. Hearing is the most internal of all the senses, and should on this account be treated with the greatest delicacy. Especially should the child be taught that he is not to look upon speech as merely a vehicle for communication and for gaining information; it should also give pleasure, and therefore he should be taught to speak distinctly and with a good style, and this he can do only when he carefully considers what he is going to say.

--Among the Greeks, extraordinary care was given to musical cultivation, especially in its ethical relation. Sufficient proof of this is found in the admirable detailed statements on this point in the "Republic" of Plato and in the last book of the "Politics" of Aristotle. Among modern nations, also, music holds a high place, and makes its appearance as a constant element of education. Piano-playing has become general, and singing is also taught. But the ethical significance of music is too little considered. Instruction in music often aims only to train pupils for display in society, and the tendency of the melodies which are played is restricted more and more to orchestral pieces of an exciting or baccha.n.a.lian character. The railroad-gallop-style only makes the nerves of youth vibrate with stimulating excitement. Oral speech, the highest form of the personal manifestation of mind, was also treated with great reverence by the ancients. Among us, communication is so generally carried on by writing and reading, that the art of speaking distinctly, correctly, and agreeably, has become very much neglected.

Practice in declamation accomplishes, as a general thing, very little in this direction. But we may expect that the increase of public speaking occasioned by our political and religious a.s.semblies may have a favorable influence in this particular.--

II. _The Imaginative Epoch._

-- 91. The activity of Perception results in the formation of an internal picture or image of its ideas which intelligence can call up at any time without the sensuous, immediate presence of its object, and thus, through abstraction and generalization, arises the conception. The mental image may (1) be compared with the perception from which it sprang, or (2) it may be arbitrarily altered and combined with other images, or (3) it may be held fast in the form of abstract signs or symbols which intelligence invents for it. Thus originate the functions (1) of the verification of conceptions, (2) of the creative imagination, and (3) of memory; but for their full development we must refer to Psychology.

-- 92. (1) The mental image which we form of an object may be correct; again, it may be partly or wholly defective, if we have neglected some of the predicates of the perception which presented themselves, or in so far as we have added to it other predicates which only seemingly belonged to it, and which were attached to it only by its accidental empirical connection with other existences. Education must, therefore, foster the habit of comparing our conceptions with the perceptions from which they arose; and these perceptions, since they are liable to change by reason of their empirical connection with other objects, must be frequently compared with our conceptions previously formed by abstractions from them.

-- 93. (2) We are thus limited in our conceptions by our perceptions, but we exercise a free control over our conceptions. We can create out of them, as simple elements, the manifold mental shapes which we do not treat as given to us, but as essentially our own work. In Pedagogics, we must not only look upon this freedom as if it were only to afford gratification, but as the reaction of the absolute ideal native mind against the dependence in which the empirical reception of impressions from without, and their reproduction in conceptions, place it. In this process, it does not only fas.h.i.+on in itself the phenomenal world, but it rather fas.h.i.+ons out of itself a world which is all its own.

-- 94. The study of Art comes here to the aid of Pedagogics, especially with Poetry, the highest and at the same time the most easily communicated. The imagination of the pupil can be led by means of the cla.s.sical works of creative imagination to the formation of a good taste both as regards ethical value and beauty of form. The proper cla.s.sical works for youth are those which nations have produced in the earliest stages of their culture. These works bring children face to face with the picture which mind has sketched for itself in one of the necessary stages of its development. This is the real reason why our children never weary of reading Homer and the stories of the Old Testament.

Polytheism and the heroism which belongs to it are just as substantial an element of childish conception as monotheism with its prophets and patriarchs. We stand beyond both, because we are mediated by both, and embrace both in our stand-point.

--The purest stories of literature designed for the amus.e.m.e.nt of children from their seventh to their fourteenth year, consist always of those which were honored by nations and the world at large. One has only to notice in how many thousand forms the stories of Ulysses are reproduced by the writers of children's tales. Becker's "Tales of Ancient Times," Gustav Schwab's most admirable "Sagas of Antiquity,"

Karl Grimm's "Tales of Olden Times," &c., what were they without the well-talking, wily favorite of Pallas, and the divine swine-herd? And just as indestructible are the stories of the Old Testament up to the separation of Judah and Israel. These patriarchs with their wives and children, these judges and prophets, these kings and priests, are by no means ideals of virtue in the notion of our modern lifeless morality, which would smooth out of its pattern-stories for the "dear children"

everything that is hard and uncouth. For the very reason that the shadow-side is not wanting here, and that we find envy, vanity, evil desire, ingrat.i.tude, craftiness, and deceit, among these fathers of the race and leaders of "G.o.d's chosen people," have these stories so great an educational value. Adam, Cain, Abraham, Joseph, Samson, and David, have justly become as truly world-historical types as Achilles and Patroclus, Agamemnon and Iphigenia, Hector and Andromache, Ulysses and Penelope.--

-- 95. There may be produced also, out of the simplest and most primitive phases of different epochs of culture of one and the same people, stories which answer to the imagination of children, and represent to them the characteristic features of the past of their people.

--The Germans possess such a collection of their stories in their popular books of the "h.o.r.n.y Sigfried," of the "Heymon Children," of "Beautiful _Magelone_," "Fortunatus," "The Wandering Jew," "Faust," "The Adventurous Simplicissimus," "The _Schildburger_," "The Island of Felsenburg," "Lienhard and Gertrude," &c. Also, the art works of the great masters which possess national significance must be spoken of here, as the Don Quixote of Cervantes.--

-- 96. The most general form in which the childish imagination finds exercise is that of fairy-tales; but Education must take care that it has these in their proper shape as national productions, and that they are not of the morbid kind which poetry so often gives us in this species of literature, and which not seldom degenerate to sentimental caricatures and silliness.

--The East Indian stories are most excellent because they have their origin with a childlike people who live wholly in the imagination. By means of the Arabian filtration, which took place in Cairo in the flouris.h.i.+ng period of the Egyptian caliphs, all that was too characteristically Indian was excluded, and they were made in the "Tales of Scheherezade," a book for all peoples, with whose far-reaching power in child-literature, the local stories of a race, as e.g. Grimm's admirable ones of German tradition, cannot compare. Fairy-tales made to order, as we often see them, with a mediaeval Catholic tendency, or very moral and dry, are a bane to the youthful imagination in their stale sweetness. We must here add, however, that lately we have had some better success in our attempts since we have learned to distinguish between the nave natural poetry, which is without reflection, and the poetry of art, which is conditioned by criticism and an ideal. This distinction has produced good fruits even in the picture-books of children. The pretensions of the gentlemen who printed ill.u.s.trated books containing nothing more solid than the alphabet and the multiplication table have become less prominent since such men as Speckter, Frohlich, Guts.m.u.ths, Hofman (the writer of "Slovenly Peter"), and others, have shown that seemingly trivial things can be handled with intellectual power, if one is blessed with it, and that nothing is more opposed to the child's imagination than the _childishness_ with which so many writers for children have fallen when they attempted to descend with dignity from their presumably lofty stand-point. Men are beginning to understand that Christ promised the kingdom of heaven to little children on other grounds than because they had as it were the privilege of being thoughtless and foolish.--

-- 97. For youth and maidens, especially as they approach manhood and womanhood, the cultivation of the imagination must allow the earnestness of actuality to manifest itself in its undisguised energy. This earnestness, no longer through the symbolism of play but in its objective reality, must now thoroughly penetrate the conceptions of the youth so that it shall prepare him to seize hold of the machinery of active life. Instead of the all-embracing Epos they should now read Tragedy, whose purifying process, through the alternation of fear and pity, unfolds to the youth the secret of all human destiny, sin and its expiation. The works best adapted to lead to history on this side are those of biography--of ancient times, Plutarch; of modern times, the autobiographies of Augustine, Cellini, Rousseau, Goethe, Varnhagen, Jung Stilling, Moritz, Arndt, &c. These autobiographies contain a view of the growth of individuality through its inter-action with the influences of its time, and, together with the letters and memoirs of great or at least noteworthy men, tend to produce a healthy excitement in the youth, who must learn to fight his own battles through a knowledge of the battles of others. To introduce the youth to a knowledge of Nature and Ethnography no means are better than those of books of travel which give the charm of first contact, the joy of discovery, instead of the general consciousness of the conquests of mind.

--If educative literature on the one hand broadens the field of knowledge, on the other it may also promote its elaboration into ideal forms. This happens, in a strict sense, through philosophical literature. But only two different species of this are to be recommended to youth: (1) well-written treatises which endeavor to solve a single problem with spirit and thoroughness; or, (2) when the intelligence has grown strong enough for it, the cla.s.sical works of a real philosopher.

German literature is fortunately very rich in treatises of this kind in the works of Lessing, Herder, Kant, Fichte, Schleiermacher, Humboldt, and Schiller. But nothing does more harm to youth than the study of works of mediocrity, or those of a still lower rank. They stupefy and narrow the mind by their empty, hollow, and constrained style. It is generally supposed that these standard works are too difficult, and that one must first seize them in this trivial and diluted form in order to understand them. This is one of the most prevalent and most dangerous errors, for these Introductions or Explanations, easily-comprehended Treatises, Summary Abstracts, are, because of their want of originality and of the acuteness which belongs to it, much more difficult to understand than the standard work itself from which they drain their supplies. Education must train the youth to the courage which will attempt standard works, and it must not allow any such miserable preconceived opinions to grow up in his mind as that his understanding is totally unable to comprehend works like Fichte's "Science of Knowledge," the "Metaphysics" of Aristotle, or Hegel's "Phenomenology."

No science suffers so much as Philosophy from this false popular opinion, which understands neither itself nor its authority. The youth must _learn how to learn to understand_, and, in order to do this, he must know that one cannot immediately understand everything in its finest subdivisions, and that on this account he must have patience, and must resolve to read over and over again, and to think over what he has read.--

-- 98. (3) Imagination returns again within itself to perception in that it replaces, for conceptions, perceptions themselves, which are to remind it of the previous conception. These perceptions may resemble in some way the perception which lies at the basis of the conception, and be thus more or less symbolical; or they may be merely arbitrary creations of the creative imagination, and are in this case pure signs.

In common speech and writing, we call the free retaining of these perceptions created by imagination, and the recalling of the conceptions denoted by them, _Memory_. It is by no means a particular faculty of the mind, which is again subdivided into memory of persons, names, numbers, &c. As to its form, memory is the stage of the dissolution of conception; but as to its content, it arises from the interest which we take in a subject-matter. From this interest results, moreover, careful attention, and from this latter, facility in the reproductive imagination. If these acts have preceded, the fixing of a name, or of a number, in which the content interesting us is as it were summed up, is not difficult. When interest and attention animate us, it seems as if we did not need to be at all troubled about remembering anything. All the so-called mnemonic helps only serve to make more difficult the act of memory. This act is in itself a double function, consisting of, first, the fixing of the sign, and second, the fixing of the conception subsumed under it. Since the mnemonic technique adds to these one more conception, through whose means the things with which we have to deal are to be fixed in order to be able freely to express them in us, it trebles the functions of remembering, and forgets that the mediation of these and their relation--wholly arbitrary and highly artificial--must also be remembered. The true help of memory consists in not helping it at all, but in simply taking up the object into the ideal regions of the mind by the force of the infinite self-determination which mind possesses.