# 69. University and Public Life I

#### I

For some time now, we have been hearing and reading increasingly clear statements to the effect that it is impossible for our higher education system to continue as it has been. The fact that the universities, with their constitution, facilities and teaching methods stemming from a bygone cultural epoch, look downright strange in the context of modern life is being recognized in wider circles. However, the most educated of our contemporaries are not always capable of grasping the question at hand in its full depth. And that is understandable. For our time has lagged so far behind its own demands with regard to the facilities of its educational institutions that those who have received their education in these institutions cannot possibly know what they lack in order to be at the height of the times and their own task. How, for example, could a legal scholar coming out of a contemporary law faculty have any idea of what he lacks in the face of modern cultural life?

A lawyer today is taught an educational content on which that which makes our time great has not had the slightest influence. Today's lawyers have no idea that under the influence of modern scientific achievements and the new knowledge of human nature that follows in their wake, all legal relationships have taken on a different face. The courtroom today is a treasure trove of indescribable comedy for anyone who spends half a day there with the knowledge of modern natural science, psychology and sociology. The law faculties make sure that those they train to cultivate the law are the worst dilettantes in all that the modern educated person knows about the nature and essence of law.

I have given the most striking example that has presented itself to me to illustrate the need for reform in our higher education system. I might not have done so if it were not for the fact that it is the contemporaries educated by the law faculty who are the most annoying. We can take few steps in life without having to deal with a lawyer. And we experience time and again that lawyers are currently the people with the least education.

The situation is much better in the Faculty of Medicine. Here, both a modern scientific spirit and a method that meets the demands of pedagogy prevail. This pedagogy of medicine, which finds its expression in the clinics, is even excellent in every respect. Medicine must, of course, reckon with the scientific achievements of the age. Jurisprudence is not needed. It is possible to govern in a reactionary way, and it is also possible to pass court judgments that strike a blow to modern legal consciousness, but it is not possible to cure in a reactionary way.

The least reactionary universities can be those that deal with the most modern branch of culture, with technology. In this field, modern needs have also produced a corresponding method of teaching. And it can certainly be said that today no electrical engineer teaches as nonsensically as a professor of Roman law or a professor of literary history. Therefore, the electrical engineer will generally produce useful people for public life, the professor of literary history comical figures who are at best suitable as critics of all kinds of journals, who also know a few nice things to say about Ibsen or Gerhart Hauptmann, but who are as alien as possible to modern life.

The medical faculty and the technical colleges prove that the higher institutions best fulfill their pedagogical tasks when they set up their teaching principles in accordance with the demands of modern public life. I have thus pointed out one of the most essential points of difference between the pedagogy of the lower schools and that of the universities.

The lower schools have the enviable task of making people into nothing more than human beings in the most perfect sense of the word. They have to ask themselves: what dispositions lie in every human being, and what must we accordingly develop in every child so that it will one day display human nature in harmonious wholeness? Whether the child later becomes a doctor or a shipbuilder can make no difference to the teacher to whom it is entrusted for training at the age of six. He has to turn this child into a human being.

It is a different matter if the child is to attend a secondary school. A grammar school, a secondary school or a secondary modern school. Modern primary school education has conquered a high degree of freedom. It has really come to study the needs of human nature and demands ever more energetically that the lowest educational system be organized in accordance with these needs. Pestalozzi, Herbart and their numerous disciples basically want nothing other than the teaching and education of children in accordance with the demands of human nature. A pedagogy that is the child of psychology.

The grammar school teacher cannot possibly organize his work in the sense of a pedagogy with similar principles. For the grammar school is a remnant of a cultural period that set itself the task of reshaping the original nature of man in favor of certain religious prejudices. Christianity, which assumed that the original human being should be reshaped in such a way that he was ready for a higher, supernatural life, in connection with the belief that antiquity was once and for all a model for all culture, gave the grammar school its physiognomy. The subject matter taught in grammar schools stems from this premise, not from thinking about the needs of human nature. In the very best sense, a grammar school pedagogy can do no more than establish the principles of how the grammar school curriculum, once established in the manner described, can be grafted into the minds of young people in the best possible way. A real grammar school pedagogy would have to answer, above all other things, the question: what is to be developed in a person between the ages of 2 and 18? I doubt very much whether a judgment based on real psychological knowledge would be the basis for the current grammar school curriculum.

Nor can I believe that such psychological considerations would result in anything remotely resembling what Realgymnasium or Realschule offer young people. These institutions owe their origin to half a realization and half a will. The half-recognition consists in the fact that one has realized - but only halfway - that the grammar school no longer meets the needs of the modern mind. Life makes different demands than can be met by an educational institution that has grown out of views whose medieval nature can hardly be denied. Half of the problem lies in the fact that Realgymnasien and Realschulen were not set up in accordance with modern requirements, but rather that they were turned into a middle ground between the old Gymnasium and the institution in which modern man should be educated.

I have already pointed out that pedagogy has not gone so far as to find teaching objectives and teaching methods for people between the ages of 1 and 18. Nor can it yet decide the question: to what extent may teaching and education at this age still serve the general human nature, and to what extent must they give the person the opportunity to acquire the preliminary knowledge for the future profession. This question can also be formulated differently. One can say: a decision must be made between the demands of general human nature and those of practical public life.

This question arises in a much more anxious way for those who want to decide something about teaching methods at universities. For there is no doubt that the university must serve the needs of public life and that the cultivation of the general human nature must take a back seat to the task it is given. However, it is important to be clear about the extent to which the university, despite the fact that it educates professional people: Lawyers, physicians, grammar school teachers, engineers, chemists, artists, nevertheless and perhaps for this very reason has to fulfill certain pedagogical tasks.

If the men who have united this year under the leadership of *Dr. Schmidkunz* and Professor *Wilhelm Förster* to cultivate a university pedagogy want to set themselves a proper task, they must first contribute something to answering the question I posed above.

Their tendency must be twofold. Firstly, they must find the best teaching methods for the individual sciences. For there can be no question of a general university pedagogy. At the lower levels of teaching, the focus is on general human nature. And it demands very general principles according to which all subjects are treated equally. At university level, the individual sciences assert their special rights. Chemistry requires a different approach to teaching than jurisprudence.

At the same time, however, there is something else to consider. The level of education that a person acquires at university later puts him in a certain higher social position. Accordingly, he has a say in matters for which a completely different education is required than that of his subject. Since a person's public social work is completely inseparable from certain higher professions, the task arises of providing the university student with a corresponding general higher education in addition to his vocational training. In the next issue of this journal, I will discuss how universities should be set up so that they meet the two requirements just outlined.

#### II

It is now a quarter of a century since *Lothar Meyer*, the great theorist of chemistry, complained about the university: "It no longer guides the spirit of the nation in the direction of further development as it once did; history threatens to pass over it to the new agenda. This is the damage that has been done to the university by the narrow-minded intolerance and short-sighted arrogance of its leading circles." (Cf. what A. Riedler says about this in his book "Unsere Hochschulen und die Anforderungen des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts"). As a symptom of the backwardness of university teaching, *Eduard von Hartmann* pointed out years ago that university teachers today still read their lectures as if the art of printing had not been invented. What the university teacher usually reads, the student could acquire more comfortably and better by reading it himself, if it were not read to him, but handed to him as a printed or otherwise reproduced book or booklet. It is superfluous to gather a number of listeners for the purpose of reading to them something that they could better assimilate in their own room. - But it is not just superfluous. It is uneducational in the best sense of the word. A young person becomes tired of a lecture whose content he has not mastered. Just imagine what it means to listen to a lecture on chemical theories when you know nothing at all about chemical theories. And contrast this with the pleasure of a young man who has learned about chemical theories from some guide, and who then hears a university teacher express an opinion about these theories in living speech - in the living speech that gives all things, even the most abstract, the magic of the personal. However, this magic can only come to light if the university teacher does not read, but speaks freely. Then the college has the effect on the student that it should have. The teacher gives the listener something that no printed book can convey. In my opinion, the lectures of the university should be organized in such a way that they convey from the inside of the appointed personalities what no dead textbook or no dead guide can convey. But what such a guide can offer should not be the subject of the lecture. Because for those who can read a guide, a lecture on the guide is superfluous. And only those young people should attend university who can read a guide or a textbook. As a rule, young people are ı8 years old when they come to university. Anyone who is going to do well in life as a chemist can understand a chemistry textbook at this age if they read it. If you set an obvious task for the A-level examination at grammar school, it must be that the pupil understands any scientific book that begins with the basic principles and progresses methodically. Anyone who is unable to do this should not be declared ready to attend a university or other higher education institution.

If it can be assumed that the high school graduate is ready to read a guide to chemistry, mathematics, history, etc., then all of the following is self-evident. The university teacher announces a college, thus at the same time: where to get the book or the autograph booklet on which he bases his lectures. The student buys this book or booklet. He therefore comes to the lecture with a complete command of the subject matter on which the university teacher is lecturing. Now this teacher presents everything that has to be said in person or, on the other hand, has to be heard, i.e. cannot be read. The famous anatomist Hyril demanded of his listeners that they had first learned the chapter he was speaking about in the lecture hall from his book.

I believe that I have expressed an important demand of the university system with the demand that the university teacher should not read a book aloud, but should give on the basis of a book what can only be given personally. For I do not think much of the small questions of how to teach philosophy, mathematics, mechanics, etc. systematically. At the teaching level at which the university stands, the order in which the content of a science is to be presented is not decided by methodological fiddling, but by the natural course of science and the practical needs for the sake of which the subject in question is taught at the university.

At the lower levels of teaching, the subject matter must be arranged in such a way that it can be conveyed in the best possible way to young people. At these levels, for example, one should not ask what form the teaching of animals has taken, but what is necessary to convey to the six to eleven-year-old human being from animal science if the course is to meet the needs of the young human soul and also be arranged in such a way that human nature comes to the fore as well as possible in harmonious totality in each individual personality.

The university cannot ask itself such questions. Its task is not to educate people in general, but to prepare them for a specific, freely chosen profession. Part of the requirements as to how teaching should take place arise from this task. The method according to which this science must be taught results from the respective state of the science itself. Mathematics, zoology, etc., can only be taught in the order and form which the scientific doctrines have presently assumed from themselves, from their scientific nature. In addition, the needs of practical life are decisive. A mechanical engineer must be taught in the way that the practical conditions of mechanical engineering demand today.

Something that is particularly important for university teaching is the fact that the university cannot regard people in general as the goal of education, but rather the specialized person, the lawyer, chemist, mechanical engineer. The university student can demand that chemistry, jurisprudence, mechanical engineering, etc. be taught according to the latest state of science. |

But he can also demand something else from the university. It must offer him the opportunity to be equal to the social position in which a certain profession places him. The social position of a mechanical engineer demands a certain knowledge of history, philosophy, statistics, economics, etc. The university must offer the opportunity to acquire this knowledge of one's own choice. This will only be possible if a faculty for general education is added to the faculties for the professional sciences, in which the student can find everything he needs to supplement his specific professional studies.

The university must make its students the most perfect professional people and the bearers of contemporary culture. It is natural that such a task can only be achieved if there is a unified university for all professions. For only such a unified school can offer, so to speak, the image, the microcosm of contemporary culture. Only such a university can offer electrical engineers the opportunity to learn about the latest developments in zoology if they need to.

The technical colleges, agricultural colleges, art academies, etc. that exist separately today must be affiliated to the universities.

Once this goal has been achieved, it can then be said: what institution must be given to the unified university so that it can fulfill its dual task as described above? This question is the cardinal question of a real university pedagogy. Such a pedagogy is, by its very nature, fundamentally different from all pedagogy of the lower schools. The latter pedagogy focuses on an image of the general human nature and has to answer the question: how should teaching be organized so that the person to be taught comes as close as possible to this image. Higher education pedagogy does not have to deal with such an image of human nature; it does not have to deal with the human being at all, but with an institution, with the university, which it has to make into an image of the current state of culture. How the individual person then integrates himself into the organism of the university, according to his choice of profession, his human needs and inclinations: that is initially his own business.

In my opinion, the tendency to want to create a university pedagogy based on the model of lower-level pedagogy is dangerous for the development of higher education. It would be the death of the university if a template were to be drawn up according to which, for example, philosophy were to be taught according to certain principles in the same way that arithmetic is taught according to principles in elementary school.

The sequence in which the philosophical teachings are to be presented in the college of higher education results in science itself. And there is no point in thinking about any other way than that demanded by science. Above all, the young person who comes to university does not want to suffer from the schoolmaster's question that the teacher, for example, asked himself: how do I have to teach so that I can best convey my subject to the listener in a methodical sequence? The young person wants to know: how does the man I am listening to imagine philosophy, what form does he give it in terms of its scientific nature? I think it is the greatest attraction of university teaching that the listener knows that he is dealing with men of science who present themselves as their personality and their science demand of them, and who do not restrict their nature in teaching rules.

You can see what I demand of the university. It should unite the greatest perfection of a microcosm of the respective cultural state with the highest degree of freedom. The student should be given the opportunity to absorb as much as possible of contemporary culture; but no compulsory rules should accompany him in his development. In connection with this, I would like to recall the barbaric measure of the states that presume to fix the course and time of instruction. Of course, all such measures are connected with the degradation and death which the individual has to suffer at the hands of the state. In view of the infinite diversity of individuals, it is barbaric to demand that the able should study medicine for as long as the less able. The fact that one person can do exactly the same thing in two years that another needs five must be taken into account.

In saying this, I believe I have touched on the most important questions that are currently more or less consciously on the minds of all those who talk about the need to reform our higher education system.