Man in the modern age by Jaspers Karl 1883-1969

Author:Jaspers, Karl, 1883-1969
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Civilization, Modern
Publisher: Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday
Published: 1957-09-19T16:00:00+00:00

teacher fails to achieve what he strives to achieve-namely, the formation of character. Torn hither and thither, the child finds, indeed, fragments of a tradition, but no world into which it can confidently enter.

If the alternative plan is followed, the State acquires control of education for the quiet but forcible moulding of character in accordance with its own purposes. Then we have a unified education at the cost of paralysis of mental freedom. Basic opinions are inculcated with the fixity of religious dogmas, knowledge and accomplishments being drilled into the learner as ways of feeling and valuing. What the bolsheviks and the fascists respectively do in this field and what we learn of the decline of liberty in the United States, differ in respect of many points of detail—but, common to them all, is that human beings are turned out according to standardised types.

The masses are aware of this imposition of uniformity by the force of the State, and they are aware of an aimless multiplicity. But if education is once more to become what it was in its best days, namely the possibility, through historical continuity, of developing into a human being possessed of full selfhood, that can only ensue through a faith which, amid all necessary strictness in learning and practice, indirectly conveys a spiritual value.

No simple recipe can be given for this. Here the power of the State cannot create anything, but can only protect or destroy. It is the mental situation which imposes its demands when, contemplating the future, we become aware of the whole. Education will only be restored to its true level when the valuations of the masses are overridden by a distinction between teaching and discipline, between that which is comprehensible to all, and that which is attainable by an elite through a training of the inner being.

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