X. The Tasks of Schools and the Tripartite Social Organism

With the proletarian, a new human being has emerged in the last three to four centuries, but particularly in the nineteenth century: a human being who, in the previous centuries, did not yet exist with this physical and mental and spiritual constitution. What characterizes the proletarian of today is that, in contrast to other members of human society, he is, to a much greater extent than was previously the case, to a certain extent, suspended in the air with his entire human existence. And this must interest us particularly from the pedagogical point of view, that the proletarian in the present is the person who, with regard to his life, must say to himself: If he himself is induced, or if others induce him to give up his position, then he faces nothing. Then, to a certain extent, he no longer feels connected to what holds human society together. On the other hand, it must be said that the education provided by the school, especially in the period during which the proletariat developed in this way, was such that it could not make people into fully-fledged human beings. This was certainly not through the fault of the teaching staff, but through the fault of the school's dependence on the state and on economic powers! In the recent past, it would have been possible to deal with the growing child in the most appropriate way, based on real knowledge of the human becoming. However, as a teacher, one was sandwiched between two powers that basically did not always work in the sense of what the teacher had to consider his task with regard to the education of the human being through the school. Today, with the advent of the school as it has developed out of earlier conditions, the teacher is caught between the parental home and the state. Of course there are exceptions in all fields, and naturally a word that seeks to characterize something cannot always be applied to all individual cases, but on the whole it is true, even if it is radically expressed: Today the teacher has to take over the children from the parents , and when he has to hand them over to the State at the end of their schooldays, the State soon draws out of their souls what the teacher has tried to instil in them. The teacher today is actually stuck between these two extremes, which do not at all work in the sense of education through the school. And when he becomes fully aware of his profession, then he actually groans between these two distortions of his pupil, the distortion by the parental home and the distortion by the state. That is, as I said, a radical way of putting it. But do we not ultimately get different children from the parental home than those who have initially grown up with the parents themselves, who have grown up with the parents in such a way that they enter school with all the prejudices of their parents, that everything that the parents themselves carry in their minds and in their state of mind has rubbed off on them – from the class in which they find themselves? And on the other hand, we release children from school and let them go out into human life, and we have to send them out into the community. What that means for the present time is shown by the terrible situation of humanity in this era.