68. School and University I

I

On November 21, 1898, Professor Wilhelm Förster gave a lecture: " School and University in the Light of the New Conditions of Life." This lecture was the first public manifestation of the efforts of a number of men from all parts of Germany and Austria to give higher education the position it deserved among the sciences. The center of these efforts must naturally be Berlin. The main purpose of these efforts is to collect the experiences and insights gained to date in the field of university education and to find ways and means of expanding them and making them fruitful for university life. The task set here is naturally a difficult one. The justified demand that teaching at the university should be free and the result of the intellectual individuality of the scholar seems to be in conflict with any attempt to prescribe laws for this teaching. University teachers today are first and foremost caretakers of their science. After all, the university is supposed to be the custodian and the image bearer of science. Should this justified tendency be contrasted with the other: that the university teacher should also be a teacher? And how is such teaching compatible with the interests of free science? In short, what demands are made on university teaching by university pedagogy, and within what limits can they be met? This is the question that the above-mentioned association will have to solve. This question will be addressed in eight lectures, of which Förster's was the first. The others will take place in the near future, namely on Monday, November 28 (8½ o'clock in the evening in the auditorium of the Friedrich-Werdersche Gymnasium): Dr. Hans Schmidkunz on "University Pedagogy". This lecture, which dealt with the aims and future intentions of the young movement, will be reported on in the next issue of this journal. The other lectures are: Monday, December 5, Dr. Bruno Meyer: "Kunstunterricht"; Monday, December 12, Dr. Rudolf Steiner: "Hochschulpädagogik und öffentliches Leben"; Monday, January 9, Dr. Hans Schmidkunz: "Die Einheitlichkeit im Universitätsunterricht"; Monday, January 16, Dr. Alexander Wernicke (Professor at the Technical University in Braunschweig): "The transition from school to university"; Monday, January 23, Dr. Wilhelm Förster: "Mathematics and science teaching"; Monday, January 30, Ludwig Schultze-Strelitz, editor of "Kunstgesanges": "The science and art of singing".

The lecture by Professor Förster on "School and university in the light of the new living conditions" may be briefly outlined here: The "new conditions of life" consist in the conditions and movements created by the great development of science, as well as technology and transportation. The following phenomena can be regarded as the main characteristics of these conditions and movements: The diminution of the influence of the past and of the authorities founded on it, as a result of the extraordinary expansion and enrichment of the common treasure of the results of science and of the creations of art and technology, and as a result of the associated expansion and enrichment of the world of ideas of all classes of the population of cultural countries; furthermore, the increase in the division of labor and the segregation of interests with a simultaneous increase in the mutual dependence of all on each other; accordingly, an increase in the devotion of individuals to narrower communities, combined with an intensification of the special spirit of these narrower communities and the selfishness of the individuals belonging to them against other communities and their members, but at the same time an increase in general compassion and the recognition of the solidarity of the human world; finally, the struggle of the new spiritual creations for comprehensive clear organization and guiding effectiveness in relation to the spiritual creations of the past or in fusion with them.

Corresponding to the changed living conditions, the new tasks of schools today have also become different from those of the past. According to the authorities of social and political life, the primary task of schools is to ensure the closest possible connection to the past for the souls of the young people who are to be educated and trained. Only in second place in this view is the task of educating the youth for the understanding, utilization and perfection of all the spiritual possessions acquired by mankind.

It corresponds to the motives of this view that the higher the educational level of the youth to be taught, the more the latter task comes into its own in the state school institutions and services, namely the more it is called to higher intellectual cooperation in the preservation and increase of the so-called cultural goods, i.e. in the highest levels of secondary schools and in the universities; that, on the other hand, at the lowest level, in elementary schools, where it does not seem to be a matter of preparation for such cooperation, but only of the most essential knowledge of the elementary means of communication and work and of the existing institutions and regulations, the former task occupies almost the entire field of vision of the school authorities, as well as of the teachers and the pupils. But also in secondary schools, even up to the upper classes of grammar schools and secondary modern schools, the fulfillment of the more comprehensive teaching tasks is often severely disturbed by this authoritative restriction of the transmission of intellectual possessions. In the interests of the nation's efficiency, the governing authorities are well aware that the universities must be protected from such restrictions, but the fanatical advocates of the unchanged preservation of what already exists have already begun to make the governments uncertain and wavering in this respect as well, and have recently begun to seriously question the effectiveness of the insightful improvements that have already been granted to the universities in terms of perfecting their pedagogical achievements.

Does it really seem feasible to make the powerful forces that have created the new living conditions merely the obedient servants of a minority, however intelligent and well-meaning, but narrow-minded and fearful?

But are not schools and universities called upon for all of us to bring the healthy and imperishable principles of self-discipline arising from the fullest freedom of spirit to clear recognition and general validity, especially in the current storm and urge of intellectual and social movements, and thereby to definitively secure the stability of human communities, not authoritatively, but on the basis of serious, free conviction and self-legislation?

The rest of the lecture was rich in thoughts on schools and universities in connection with public life and the general ethics of the people. In particular, the following suggestion should be emphasized: Professor Förster said: "I believe that the path long trodden by great educators of the past of encouraging young people themselves to teach each other should finally be pursued with full vigour and consistency in general and at all levels of the school system. In this way, the most important and effective teachers can be freed up, partly to lead the general education of all for genuine education in the sense described above, and partly for the most intensive and beneficial instruction of pupils who are particularly gifted in the most diverse areas. And these latter, whose own learning time could be reduced to small fractions of the time spent so far by freeing the lessons from the heavy weight of the less gifted, would then, under the supervision of the teachers, be entrusted with the instruction and promotion of the less gifted fellow pupils and the younger levels, a wonderful familiarization with the exercise of social duties, according to the higher gifts, combined at the same time with clarification and consolidation of one's own knowledge. It may very well happen that one and the same youth instructs his friends in one subject and is instructed by them in another. The objection that many of the less gifted are in need of greater pedagogical skill is easily countered by the fact that this skill and experience can also be sufficiently brought to bear in the general management of direct instruction, and that, on the other hand, there is the richest experience of how much more directly young people are able to influence and encourage each other than the much older person is able to do towards the young.

Just look at the extraordinarily intensive teaching power that even the temporary free cooperatives of young people about to take one and the same exam develop among themselves and the lasting success of this mutual encouragement, in which the more gifted so often have to pass quite difficult tests of the noblest social spirit.

In university teaching, related ideas are already contained in the development of free private lecturing; there are also already approaches to the mutual promotion of students in some aspects of the seminaristic institutions, as well as in the free or specialist associations of students, and even more so at the technical colleges than at the universities. I would like to believe that much more could be achieved in this direction, perhaps even, in time, a more humane and appropriate organization of the entire examination system. Cultivating learning and teaching communities at an early stage and encompassing all school levels would certainly benefit the entire social education for humanity and justice extraordinarily and then also help to reduce the excesses of devotion to narrower community formations, namely the unhealthy exaggerations of the corps and camaraderie spirit with its exclusivities and ostracisms in all circles of life.

The following reprints include contributions by Rudolf Steiner that were inadvertently not included in the first edition of this volume.

The second of the lectures on "Higher Education" announced for this winter was given by Dr. Hans Schmidkunz on November 28. He set himself the task of discussing the principles and aims of university education, as he brought the entire university education movement into being. We will have to save a brief summary of his lecture for the next issue due to lack of space.

The lecture given by Dr. Bruno Meyer on December 5 on "Art Education" will be reported on in the next issue of this journal.

On December 12 (8½ o'clock in the evening, Friedrich-Werdersches Gymnasium), Dr. Rudolf Steiner will speak on "University Education and Public Life".

II

The lecture by Dr. Hans Schmidkunz, already mentioned in the last issue, has roughly the following content: The eight lectures on "School and University" present a pedagogical movement to the public, whose goals can be summarized in the catchword "university pedagogy", and whose common ground, apart from the individual topics of the other speakers, is to be presented in today's, so to speak, central lecture.

Whoever entrusts their child to an elementary school relies on its pedagogy; it is mainly the teacher training seminars in which this is rooted. This trust is already lower in the case of "higher" schools; however, their pedagogy is also improving and a system of seminars is also developing for them. Those who entrust their youth to a university have the least confidence in pedagogy; the capable scholar or artist is far from being a capable teacher. In response to the puzzled question as to the legitimacy of such claims, the answer is: there is a pedagogy of science and art, or in short a university pedagogy; it is our task to implement its attempts.

The pedagogy of higher education has, on the one hand, a general content that is common to all other pedagogies and, on the other hand, a specific content. The objections to its justification are partly settled by the historical analogy of grammar school pedagogy and partly by the question of whether the basic demands of pedagogy should be reduced to nothing at all as soon as it is a matter of science and art and the highest age of youth. We cannot develop the specific content of university pedagogy here and now. But it must be recognized that it already has young advances, that we should not oppose the university teachers, but rather go with them, and that we are also entitled to address the public beyond them.

It is far from us to dictate to current university teachers, even though there are general rules for university teaching. What we need as a means for our purposes is primarily two things. Firstly, a collection point for everything worth knowing, which would, however, have to be richly equipped. Secondly, the transfer of the principle of seminar-based teacher training to our area, i.e. the creation of a university pedagogical seminar. The plan for such a seminar has been worked out. Its realization is also not possible without ample resources.

As bold as this idea may seem, it should be complemented by the conviction that only those who are deeply aware of their own imperfections are fit to be educators and, in particular, university educators. And the more we feel the need of our present intellectual conditions, the more we will hope to be able to overcome this need by perfecting the education of the future generation of leaders of the people. May everyone do their part!

III

The third lecture on "School and University" was given on December 5 by Professor Dr. Bruno Meyer on "Art Education". The main point of the lecture was that "university education" has not been around for a long time in the field of art. However, it has the great advantage of being able to be traced back to a very specific starting point. After art as an individual faculty - even within the so-called "schools" of art history - had only ever been transferred from master to apprentice, it was not until the XVIth century that an art academy came into being as the creation of the Caracci in Bologna. However, there is still no sign of any organization. The only fundamentally new aspect was that the artistic idiosyncrasy of the master was no longer naively communicated as best he could, but the study of art was seen as an objective one, and it was a matter of preserving the historical highlights of what had been achieved through teaching as a permanent possession for future generations. The great ingenuities of the epoch that had just passed seemed to preclude competition with the individual. But it could not escape anyone's notice that they had not attained their rank by the same merits. If each of them could not be surpassed in his own direction, the attempt to pave the way to higher heights of art by uniting their separate merits was obvious: eclecticism began. What was he doing other than what every artist does who does not find his ideal embodied in a model, but lets it emerge combinatorially on the basis of numerous studies of nature? But this comparison does not apply, and the eclectic school fails because of this error. A naturalistic counter-effect of the old style asserts itself and obscures the successes of the new school.

Despite this, the future of art teaching lay in this direction. Demands are made on the modern artist - as on modern man in general - which cannot be met if his training remains within the narrow confines of tradition from person to person. So the only question was where the inevitable organization would be found. The epoch-making basis for this necessary new creation was the emergence of the Paris Academy in the years 1648-71. The year 1666 in particular saw the crowning of the building by the French Academy in Rome. It was here that a conscious scholastic organization first appeared: Subject organization, regular competitions, Roman prizes with several years of study in Italy. An opulent and understanding state support of the arts, which also awakens the patronage of private patrons and guides them in the right direction, does its part to secure and reap the fruits of the university's work.

And yet there is hardly anything more controversial, more bitterly opposed than the art academies, which have proliferated astonishingly over time. In fact, the Paris Model Foundation was unable to stop the decline that had set in. Nor did it remain free of pedantry. The new, however, is even more individual in art than in science and defies the constraints of rules. Nevertheless, the rich development of French art over the past quarter of a millennium, and especially in the last century, hardly any ground-breaking master, indeed almost none of the more important ones, has not made his way through the Academy. No artistic style survives the storms of revolution; but the Academy under David forms the calming pole in the flight of phenomena. And everywhere, art life is grouped around the academies - however sad the experiences some of them have with their most talented students (and vice versa!). Suffice it to mention Paris-Berlin, Vienna, Antwerp, Düsseldorf and Munich.

If the art academies, whose necessity and irreplaceability it is sheer folly to doubt, are to achieve something worthwhile, everything depends on their boundaries and their management.

The art academy must not be confused with the art school. There is a subaltern practice of art, like every highest human intellectual activity, a merely routine utilization and use of what already exists. Special educational establishments have to ensure the ability to do this.

Academies must be just as prudent in setting themselves apart from the building schools, not against the institutions roughly parallel to the aforementioned art schools, which are called "building trade schools" and similar, but against the colleges of architecture. Because of the far-reaching functional and technical conditionality of architecture, these have their proper place within the framework of polytechnics, and insofar as architecture is required as an ingredient of a universal education of the performing artist, it must be given a special, appropriate representation at the art academies that are specifically to be called such.

It need only be pointed out that the drawing teacher seminars do not fall within the framework of artistic university education. - How and where the pedagogical training of future art university teachers is to be imparted remains a special question that has nothing to do with the training of drawing teachers.

Furthermore, the art academies must be fundamentally separated from the artists' academies. The two simply have nothing to do with each other, any more than the science academies have anything to do with the "schools of scholars". This also cuts off the unhealthy interference of the art academies (as teaching institutions) in public exhibitions.

Finally, the art academies also have to orient themselves appropriately with regard to their relationship to general education and the places where it is cultivated. The fact that they have to make special demands on the latter can be disputed all the more if the assertion is maintained - and rightly so - that a technically thorough education requires an early start to academic art studies. According to this, leaving school occurs at such an early stage that there can be no question of modifying the lessons to be given up to that point with a view to the future profession. On the other hand, this type of university is obliged to take into account the development of the general education of its students to a considerable degree, and to take these studies under very strict scholastic control.

Of course, however, the focus of the "management" of an art college is on solving its specific tasks. This concerns the organization and method of instruction necessary for the future artist. Here the absolutely dominant point of view must be that art as such is completely unteachable. One can only transfer knowledge, practise skills and - ennoble the will. The latter purely educational task differs in no way from that associated with any teaching. In the first two directions, art pedagogy usually has the difficulty in common with all pedagogy of having to cope with a daily increasing amount of material in a time that cannot be significantly expanded. It can only cope with this by enriching itself with disciplines and improving its methods. It is not possible to go into this exhaustively here. In a short presentation, it is only possible to report that many educational details were touched on at appropriate points throughout the lecture and, in particular, discussed in a broader context at the end.

The following is a reprint of contributions by Rudolf Steiner that were inadvertently not included in the first edition of this volume.

Lecture given on December 12, 1898 by Dr. Rudolf Steiner, editor of the "Magazin für Literatur"

Lecture

The principles on which popular education is based today are taken from the study of general human nature. The question has been asked: What is the natural path of development that a person must follow in the first years in which he receives instruction? And to make this path as perfect as possible is the task of the elementary school. It is a task that is set by human nature in general. The primary school teacher is not concerned with what the child will become in life. He should bring out the general humanity in the future physician just as well as in the future historian. Here, in the field of elementary school teaching, a completely general pedagogy is possible, because the elementary school has to ask nothing more than about the general human nature and its necessary educational needs. - Things are different in the field of so-called grammar school pedagogy. It cannot become a science or art with a very specific physiognomy as long as the question has not been answered in a generally recognized way: in what way should the young person be educated and taught between the ages of 11 and 18? For the institution of the grammar school is a remnant of a long-gone cultural state in which Christian thinking and blind faith in antiquity went hand in hand and which, in the form of grammar school teaching, protrudes like an embodied anachronism into our age dominated by the achievements of natural science and the advances of technology. Realgymnasium and Realschule, however, are clumsy attempts to meet the demands of our time. Grammar school education is not without preconditions. It accepts the current state of the grammar school as a given. And then asks: What are the best teaching methods for this situation? We will only have such a pedagogy, a grammar school pedagogy, as long as the general pedagogy for adolescents from the age of 12 to 18 has not yet been developed. This pedagogy will require a completely different organization of the current grammar schools, intermediate grammar schools and secondary modern schools.

But above all, it will have to answer one question: What are the means of education and teaching demanded by the development of the human soul?

University education will never be able to ask itself this question in the same general sense. The university releases people into public life. The law faculty should turn the student into a capable lawyer, the technical university into a good engineer. Up to the age of 18, the schoolmaster can take care of general human affairs. The university teacher can no longer do this. His pedagogical tasks are not set by human nature; they are set by practical life. How ridiculous it would be if a professor of chemistry at a university asked himself: How must I teach in order to satisfy the need for chemical knowledge in the general human nature? This professor must teach in such a way that his pupil will one day fulfill his profession as a practical chemist as well as possible. Human culture determines the principles of the lower, public life determines those of the universities.

One thing, however, must not be ignored. The person who receives the training for a certain practical profession through the university must at the same time receive the education through this very university that enables him to fulfill the social duties associated with this profession. An engineer has a certain influence in public life due to his social position. Therefore, the university that trains him also has the duty to provide him with the education he needs to fulfill his social position in a worthy manner. The lecturer has undertaken to describe the educational tasks of the university that arise from public life.

A more detailed summary of this lecture can be found in numbers 50 and 51 of the "Magazin für Literatur".