...  Through the heat of conflict, keeps the law
In calmness made, and sees what he foresaw.

Neglect for the claims of human personality both amongst pupils and teachers is the chief danger of a State system of education.  The State is always tempted to put its own claims first and those of its citizens second—­to regard the citizen as existing for the State, instead of the State for its citizens.  It is one of the ironies of history that no man was more alive to this danger than Wilhelm von Humboldt, the gifted creator of the Prussian system of education.  As the motto of one of his writings he adopted the words, “Against the governmental mania, the most fatal disease of modern governments,” and when, contrary to his own early principles, he undertook the organisation of Prussian education he insisted that “headmasters should be left as free a hand as possible in all matters of teaching and organisation.”  But the Prussian system was too strong for him and his successors, and his excellent principles now survive as no more than pious opinions.  The fact is that in an undemocratic and feudal State such as Germany then was, and still largely is, respect for the personality of the individual is confined to the upper ranks of society.

“I do not know how it is in foreign countries,” says one of Goethe’s heroes,[1] “but in Germany it is only the nobleman who can secure a certain amount of universal or, if I may say so, personal education.  An ordinary citizen can learn to earn his living and, at the most, train his intellect; but, do what he will, he loses his personality....  He is not asked, ’What are you?’ but only, ’What have you? what attainments, what knowledge, what capacities, what fortune?’ ...  The nobleman is to act and to achieve.  The common citizen is to carry out orders.  He is to develop individual faculties, in order to become useful, and it is a fundamental assumption that there is no harmony in his being, nor indeed is any permissible, because, in order to make himself serviceable in one way, he is forced to neglect everything else.  The blame for this distinction is not to be attributed to the adaptability of the nobleman or the weakness of the common citizen.  It is due to the constitution of society itself.”  Much has changed in Germany since Goethe wrote these words, but they still ring true.  And they have not been entirely without their echo in Great Britain itself.[2]

[Footnote 1:  Wilhelm Meister’s Lehrjahre, Book v. chapter iii.]

[Footnote 2:  The contrast which has been drawn in the preceding pages, as working-class readers in particular will understand, is between the aims, not the achievements, of German and British education.  The German aims are far more perfectly achieved in practice than the British.  Neither the law nor the administration of British education can be acquitted of “neglect for the claims of human personality.”  The opening words of the English code, quoted on p. 359 above, are, alas! not a statement of fact but an aspiration.  We have hardly yet begun in England to realise the possibilities of educational development along the lines of the British ideal, both as regards young people and adults.  If we learn the lesson of the present crisis aright, the war, so far from being a set-back to educational progress, should provide a new stimulus for effort and development.]