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.A very significant observation! And Herman Bahr made another observation which is also very significant.He said: when in the '90s you were invited out to dinner in Berlin you had a lady on your right and on your left hand, but you really could not distinguish them from each other, except that you knew one was on your right hand and the other on your left.Then another day you were perhaps invited somewhere else, and it might easily happen that you could not be sure: is this yesterday's lady, or the lady of the day before?In short, a certain uniformity has come over humanity, and this is a proof that there has been no true education in the preceding years.We must learn from these things what is really necessary in the transformation of our educational life, for education has a deep and far-reaching influence on the whole cultural life of the times.Therefore we can say: at those times in life when man is not confronted with any one particular fact, his concepts are living in the unconscious.Concepts can live in the unconscious.Judgments can only live as habits of judgment in the semi-conscious, in the dreaming life.And conclusions should really only hold sway in the fully conscious waking life.That is to say, you must take great care to talk over with the children beforehand anything that is related to conclusions, and not let them store up ready-made conclusions.They should only store up what can develop and ripen into a concept.Now how can we bring this about?Suppose you are forming concepts, and they are dead concepts.Then you graft the corpses of concepts into the human being.You graft dead concepts right into the bodily nature of man when you implant dead concepts on him.What kind of a concept should we then give the children? It must be a living concept if man has to live with it.Man is alive, thus the concept must also be alive.If in the child's ninth or tenth year you graft into him concepts which are meant to retain their same form in him until he is thirty or forty years of age, then you will be imputing him with the corpses of concepts, for the concept will not follow the life of the human being as he grows and develops.You must give the child such concepts as are capable of change in his later life.The educator must aim at giving the child concepts which will not remain the same throughout his life, but will change as the child grows older.If you do this you will be implanting live concepts in the child.And when is it that you give him dead concepts? When you continually give the child definitions, when you say: “A lion is.” this or that, and make him learn it by heart, then you are grafting dead concepts into him; and you are expecting that at the age of thirty he will retain these concepts in the precise form in which you are now say: the making of many definitions is death to living teaching.What then must we do? In teaching we must not make definitions but rather must endeavour to make characterisations.We characterise things when we view them from as many standpoints as possible.If in Natural History we give the children simply what is to be found, for example, in the Natural History books of the present day, then we are really only defining the animal for him.We must try in all branches of our teaching to characterise the animal from different sides showing for example how men have gradually come to know about this animal, how they have come to make use of its work, and so on.But in a reasonable curriculum this characterisation will arise of itself, if, for instance, the teacher does not merely describe consecutively, say: first the cuttlefish, and then the mouse, and finally man, each in turn, in natural-historical order — but rather places cuttlefish, mouse and man side by side and relates them with one another.The interrelationships will prove so manifold that there will result, not a definition, but a characterisation.A right kind of teaching will aim, from the outset, at characterisation rather than definition.It is of very great importance to make it your constant and conscious aim not to destroy anything in the growing human being, but to teach and educate him in such a way that he continues to be full of life, and does not dry up and become hard and rigid.You must therefore distinguish carefully between mobile concepts which you give the child and such concepts as need undergo no change.These concepts will give the child a kind of skeleton in his soul.Therefore you must realise that you have to give the child things which can remain with him throughout his life.You must not give him dead concepts of all the details of life — concepts which must not remain with him — rather must you give him living concepts of the details of life and of the world, concepts which will develop with him organically.But you must connect everything with man.In the child's comprehension of the world everything must finally flow together into the idea of man.This idea of man should endure.All that you give a child when you tell him a fable and apply it to man, when in natural history you connect cuttlefish and mouse with man, or when in teaching the children Morse telegraphy you arouse a feeling of the wonder of the earth as a conductor — all these are things which unite the whole world in all its details with the human being.This is something that can remain with him.But the concept “man” is only built up gradually; you cannot give the child a ready-made concept of man.But when you have built it up then it can remain [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]