4. The Threefold Social Order and Educational Freedom

The public nurturance of spiritual and cultural life in education has in recent years become more and more a matter for the state. That the schools are the state's business is presently a notion so deeply rooted in people's minds that anyone who tries to dislodge it is regarded as an unworldly “ideologue.” Yet this is a sphere of life that presents matter for the most serious consideration. People who complain in this way of “unworldliness” have no idea of how far what they uphold is removed from the world. Our school system is marked especially by features that reflect the tendencies toward decline in modern cultural life. The social structures of modern governments have not followed the requirements of actual life. For instance, they have taken on a form that does not satisfy the economic demands of modern humanity. They have also set this same backward stamp upon the school system, which, having liberated it from the religious confessions, they have now brought into complete dependence on themselves. At every level, schools mold human beings into the form the state requires for doing what the state deems necessary. Arrangements in the schools reflect the government's requirements. There is much talk, certainly, of striving to achieve an all-around development of the person, and so on; but the modern person unconsciously feels so completely a part of the whole order of the state that he does not even notice, when talking about the all-around development of the human being, that what is meant is molding the human being into a useful servant of the state.