4. The Threefold Social Order and Educational Freedom

Since political and economic life are not something apart from human nature, but rather the outcome of human nature itself, there need never be any fear that a really free cultural life, placed on its own footing, will produce people who are unworldly. On the contrary, unworldliness results precisely when the existing governmental and economic institutions are allowed to shape educational matters according to their own dictates. For in the state and in economic life attitudes must necessarily be adopted in accordance with the existing order. The development of the growing human being requires entirely different kinds of thought and feeling as its guide. One can only do one's work as an educator when one stands in a free, individual relationship to the pupil one teaches. One must know that, for the guidelines of one's work, one is dependent only on knowledge of human nature, the principles of social life and such things; but not upon regulations or laws prescribed from outside. If one serously desires to transform the present order of society into one in which social attitudes prevail, then one must not be afraid to place the spiritual-cultural life (including the school and educational system) under its own independent control because from such a free, independent system within the social organism men and women will go forth with joy and zeal to take an active part in all its life. After all, only people who lack this joy and zeal can come out of schools ruled by the state and the economic system; these people feel as deadly blight the after-effects of a domination to which they should not have been subjected before they had become fully conscious citizens and co-workers in the state and the economic system. The growing human being should mature with the aid of educators and teachers independent of the state and the economic system, educators who can allow individual faculties to develop freely because their own have been given free rein.