Fifth Lecture

Our schools are terrible in this respect. The schoolmasters, who actually correct every seemingly clumsy but at least original thought in terms of convention, commit great crimes in school. One should search for every awkward but substantially individual sentence that any boy or girl writes at school. One should use it to start discussions at school and not use the cursed red ink to replace what comes out of youthful individuality with convention. For today it is most important to look at what comes out of youthful individualities. Perhaps it will reveal itself in a way that we do not always find comfortable, that we easily see as flawed. If one wanted to correct Goethe's youthful letters with the eye of a high school teacher, then many things would have to be corrected! The Austrian poet Robert Hamerling received the worst grade in the “German essay” in his teaching examination! And there is still some truth to what Hebbel wrote in his diary, as I have often mentioned: he wanted to write a drama with the motif that a high school teacher of the higher grades in particular has a student who is the reincarnation of Plato, with whom he reads Plato in class; then the teacher finds that this “reincarnation of Plato” does not understand the slightest thing about Plato! The poet Friedrich Hebbel noted down this motif for a drama that was then not carried out. But there is some truth to it.