Johann Gottlieb Fichte

“ Henceforth education for manhood must be taken from the influence of this mysterious and incalculable force and put under the direction of a deliberate art, which will surely and infallibly accomplish its purpose with everyone entrusted to it; or which, if somehow it does not accomplish it, will at least know that it has not done so, and that therefore the training is still incomplete. The education proposed by me, therefore, is to be a reliable and deliberate art for fashioning in man a stable and infallible good will. ”

“ He who must still exhort himself, and be exhorted, to will the good, has as yet no firm and ever-ready will, but wills a will anew every time he needs it. But he who has such a stable will, wills what he wills for ever, and cannot under any circumstances will otherwise than he always wills. For him freedom of the will is destroyed and swallowed up in necessity. The past age had neither a true conception of education for manhood nor the power to realize that conception. ”

“ Whether the image created by the pupil be true can be judged most easily by an education which alone is in possession of this true image. Whether it is created by the pupil’s spontaneous activity, and not simply passively accepted and credulously repeated in school fashion, and, further, whether it is raised to the proper clearness and vividness, education will be able to judge, just as it has hitherto correctly judged other things in this respect. Yet all this is a matter for mere knowledge, and remains within the domain of knowledge, which is very accessible in this system of education. ”

“ That power to create spontaneously images, which are not simply copies of reality, but can become its prototypes, should be the starting-point for the moulding of the race by means of the new education. To create images spontaneously, I said, and in such a way that the pupil will produce them by his own power; but not indeed that he will merely be capable of receiving passively the image presented to him by education, of understanding it sufficiently, and of reproducing it just as it is presented to him, as if it were a question simply of the existence of such an image. ”

“ Then, in order to define more clearly the new education which I propose, I should reply that that very recognition of, and reliance upon, free will in the pupil is the first mistake of the old system and the clear confession of its impotence and futility. For, by confessing that after all its most powerful efforts the will still remains free, that is, hesitating undecided between good and evil, it confesses that it neither is able, nor wishes, nor longs to fashion the will and (since the latter is the very root of man) man himself, and that it considers this altogether impossible. ”

“ Under the new system of education the pupils, although separated from the adult community, will, nevertheless, undoubtedly live together among themselves, and so form a separate and self-contained community with its organization precisely defined, based on the nature of things and demanded throughout by reason. The very first image of a social order which the pupil’s mind should be stimulated to create will be that of the community in which he himself lives. ”

“ But when it is satisfied, he has little inclination to let his fancy dwell on the painful image of it, or to keep it in his mind. He is much more inclined to free his thoughts and turn them without restraint to the consideration of whatever attracts the attention of his senses. Nor, indeed, does he scorn a poetic flight to ideal worlds, for he has by nature but little interest in the temporal, in order that his taste for the eternal may have scope for development. ”

“ But it is clear, as I have already said, that this free activity of the mind is developed with the intention that by it the pupil may voluntarily create the image of a moral order of life that actually exists, may lay hold of this image with the love that is also already developed in him, and be spurred on by this love to realize it actually in and by his life. The question is, how can the new education prove to itself that it has achieved this, its true and final purpose with the pupil. ”

“ This, again, is merely the work of knowledge. Now, in real life under this social arrangement every individual has continually to abstain, for the sake of the community, from much that he could do without hesitation if he were alone. It will be fitting, therefore, that the legislation, and the instruction concerning the constitution which is to be based thereon, should represent to each individual all the others as animated by a love of order exalted to the ideal, which perhaps no one person really has, but which all ought to have. ”

“ The new education, in fact, aims especially and directly only at stimulating regular and progressive mental activity. Knowledge, as we saw above, results only incidentally and as an inevitable consequence. Now, if it is only in such knowledge that our pupil can conceive the image of real life which shall stimulate him to serious activity when he becomes a man, knowledge is certainly an important part of the training which is to be obtained. Yet it cannot be said that the new education aims directly at such knowledge; knowledge is only incidental to it. ”

“ Everyone is supposed to fulfil this expectation voluntarily, not compulsorily; for anyone who is unwilling is free to refuse. He is to expect neither reward for it, for under this system of government all are quite equal in regard to work and pleasure, nor even praise, for the attitude of mind prevailing in the community is that it is just everyone’s duty to act thus; but he alone enjoys the pleasure of acting and working for the community, and of succeeding, if that should fall to his lot. ”

“ The reason for demanding self-activity in regard to that image is this; only on that condition can the image created engage the active pleasure of the pupil. For it is one thing merely to allow oneself to be pleased at something and to have nothing against it; such passive pleasure can arise at best only from passive submission. But it is quite another thing to be so affected by pleasure at something that this pleasure becomes productive and stirs up all our energy to the act of creation. We speak not of the former, which happened no doubt even in the old education, but of the latter. ”

“ Moreover, man can will only what he loves; his love is the sole and at the same time the infallible motive of his will and of all his vital impulses and actions. Hitherto, in its education of the social man the art of the State assumed, as a sure and infallible principle, that everyone loves and wills his own material welfare. ”

“ Therefore, in place of that love of self, with which nothing for our good can be connected any longer, we must set up and establish in the hearts of all those whom we wish to reckon among our nation that other kind of love, which is concerned directly with the good, simply as such and for its own sake. ”

“ They will remain strong, and become even stronger, in their feeling of power and activity. Such pupils education can confidently send out into the world; it has achieved its purpose with them. Their love has been kindled and burns down to the root of their vital impulse; from now onwards it will lay hold of everything, without exception, that comes in contact with this vital impulse. In the larger community, which they now enter, they can never be anything but the steady and constant beings they have been in the little community they are now leaving. ”

“ This education, therefore, results at the very outset in knowledge which transcends all experience, which is abstract, absolute, and strictly universal, and which includes within itself beforehand all subsequently possible experience. On the other hand, the old education was concerned, as a rule, only with the actual qualities of things as they are and as they should be believed and noted, without anyone being able to assign a reason for them. It aimed, therefore, at purely passive reception by means of the power of memory, which was completely at the service of things. ”

“ But, although this mental development does not let self-seeking come to life and provides indeed the form of a moral will, it is not yet, however, the moral will itself. If the new education which we propose did not go further, it would at best train excellent men of learning, as in the past, of whom only a few are needed, and who would be able to do no more for our true human and national aim than such men have done hitherto—exhort, and exhort again, get themselves wondered at, and occasionally abused. ”

“ To this natural love it artificially linked, by means of the motives of fear and hope, that good will which it desired, namely, interest in the common weal. Anyone who has become outwardly a harmless or even useful citizen as a result of such a system of education remains, nevertheless, inwardly a bad man; for badness consists essentially in loving solely one’s own material welfare and in being influenced only by the motives of fear or hope for that welfare, whether in the present or in some future life. ”

“ Thus from the very outset, knowledge was set up as a servant of material welfare; and this education, which was described above, from the point of view of its content, as simply incapable of developing a moral sense, was in fact obliged, in order to reach the pupil at all, to implant and develop moral corruption in him and to unite its own interest with that of this corruption. ”

“ This quality of the old education shows clearly why the pupil generally learned unwillingly, and therefore slowly and but little, and why, because learning itself was not attractive, extraneous motives had to be introduced; it also shows the reason for the exceptions to the rule hitherto. Memory, if employed alone and without serving any other purpose in the mind, is a passive condition rather than an activity of the mind, and it is easy to understand that the pupil will be very unwilling to accept this passive state. ”

“ This creative mental activity which is to be developed in the pupil is undoubtedly an activity according to rules, which become known to the active pupil until he sees from his own direct experience that they alone are possible—that is, this activity produces knowledge, and that, too, of general and infallible laws. Moreover, in the free development that begins at this point it is impossible to undertake anything contrary to the law, and no act results until the law is obeyed. ”

“ Above all it is clear that the mental activity of the pupil, which has been exercised already on other objects, should be stimulated to create an image of the social order of mankind as it ought to be, simply in accordance with the law of reason. ”

“ Should anyone, misled by our usual daily experience, doubt the very existence of such a fundamental law, we would remind him over and over again that man is indeed by nature merely material and self-seeking, so long as immediate necessity and present material need spur him on, and that he does not let any spiritual need or feeling of consideration prevent him from satisfying that material need. ”

“ Modern education must not think it can defend itself against this reproach by appealing to its oft-declared contempt for mechanical rote-learning and to its well-known masterpieces in the Socratic manner. On this point it was fully informed long ago from another source that these Socratic reasonings are also learned by heart purely mechanically, and that this is a much more dangerous form of rote-learning, because it makes the pupil who does not think appear capable of thinking. ”

“ We are, therefore, compelled by necessity to wish to mould men who are inwardly and fundamentally good, since it is through such men alone that the German nation can still continue to exist, whereas through bad men it will inevitably be absorbed in the outside world. ”

“ In place of this natural freedom from care there appears anxiety, in which tomorrow’s hunger and all possible future states of hunger in their whole long series hang over even him who is satiated, as the one thing that occupies his mind and evermore goads and drives him on. ”

“ On the other hand, the new education must consist essentially in this, that it completely destroys freedom of will in the soil which it undertakes to cultivate, and produces on the contrary strict necessity in the decisions of the will, the opposite being impossible. Such a will can henceforth be relied on with confidence and certainty. ”

“ Further, it will be found that the natural talent, which, as an exception to the rule, learned willingly and therefore well in schools under the old education, overcame the moral corruption of the environment and kept its character pure, thanks to this greater love that governed it. ”

“ But develop, if you can, his spiritual wings; let him exercise them and make them strong, and without any exhortation from you he will want, and will be able, to do nothing but fly.
15. The new education must produce this stable and unhesitating will according to a sure and infallible rule. It must itself inevitably create the necessity at which it aims. Those who in the past became good did so thanks to their natural disposition, which outweighed the influence of their bad environment, and not because of their education in any way, for otherwise all the pupils would have become good. ”

“ Anyone who discovers an improvement, or understands most clearly, and before the others, an improvement proposed by a teacher, is expected to work it out by his own efforts, without being set free for this purpose from his other personal tasks of learning and working which are understood. ”