Hegel-by-HyperText

Hegel on Education

Hegel’s first job after completing his studies was as a tutor for the von Steiger family in
Berne, from 1793 to 1796 and then briefly for Johann Gogol in Frankfurt, before moving
to Jena in 1801. From 1801 to 1807 he worked as an unpaid lecturer whilst composing
his earliest works. After the publication of the Phenomenology and a brief stint as editor
of the Bamberger Zeitung, Hegel was Headmaster of the Gymnasium at Nuremberg for
seven years, thanks to the support of his best friend Friedrich Niethammer, Commissioner
of Education in Munich, for whom Hegel wrote a report on the teaching of philosophy in
1812. During this period the Science of Logic was published and he took up a
Professorship in Heidelberg and then Berlin where he lectured both to students and the
general public until his death in 1831. With a speech impediment that affected him when
lecturing, though not in personal communication, he was far more of a teacher than a
writer. Were it not for the work of his students in popularising his work after his death,
then he may not have been remembered, for his own writing is almost incomprehensible.
But his students obviously understood him well and proved to be effective
communicators.

Despite a lifetime spent as an educator, and evidence that he was an effective teacher
within the Prussian education system of Wilhelm von Humboldt, which served as a model
for countries such as the US and Japan, Hegel never wrote a systematic theory of
education. Nonetheless, a great deal can be inferred about his ideas on education from
his other works, which include asides on educational questions. In the Subjective Spirit,
there is an extended Zusätze on the development of the mind through the course of life
which has ample commentary on matters educational, and his report to Niethammer is
very informative as well.

To a great extent, Hegel agreed with Aristotle when he said that the practical problem
of education is to prepare the person to be a good citizen of a good state. Rather than
offering a systematic overview, we will give Hegel’s opinions on a number of important
issues in education.

Education is a right and responsibility of both Child and State

“Man has to acquire for himself the position which he ought to attain; he is not already in
possession of it by instinct. It is on this fact that the child’s right to education is based. ...
The services which may be demanded from children should therefore have education as
their sole end and be relevant thereto; they must not be ends in themselves, since a child
in slavery is in the most unethical of all situations whatever” (Philosophy of Right, §174a).

“In its character as a universal family, civil society has the right and duty of superintending
and influencing education, inasmuch as education bears upon the child’s capacity to
become a member of society. Society’s right here is paramount over the arbitrary and
contingent preferences of parents, particularly in cases where education is to be
completed not by the parents but by others. To the same end, society must provide public
educational facilities so far as is practicable. ... society has a right to act on principles
tested by its experience and to compel parents to send their children to school, to have
them vaccinated, and so forth.” (Philosophy of Right, §239).

... in [the family], the child is accepted in its immediate individuality, is loved whether its
behavior is good or bad. In school, on the other hand, the immediacy of the child no longer
counts; here it is esteemed only according to its worth, according to its achievements, is
not merely loved but criticised and guided in accordance with universal principles,
moulded by instruction according to fixed rules, in general, subjected to a universal order
which forbids many things innocent in themselves because everyone cannot be permitted
to do them. The school thus forms the transition from the family into civil society. But to
the latter the boy [sic!] has at first only an undefined relationship; his interest is still divided
between learning and playing” (Subjective Spirit §396n).

Education aims to Actualise what a person potentially is

“...the reason of the child as child is at first a mere inward, in the shape of his natural
ability or vocation, etc. This mere inward, at the same time, has for the child the form of
a mere outward, in the shape of the will of his parents, the attainments of his teachers,
and the whole world of reason that environs him. The education and instruction of a child
aim at making him actually and for himself what he is at first only potentially and therefore
for others, viz., for his grown up friends. The reason, which at first exists in the child only
as an inner possibility, is actualised through education: and conversely, the child by these
means becomes conscious that the goodness, religion, and science which he had at first
looked upon as an outward authority, are his own nature” (Shorter Logic §140n).

“Think for yourself” is a Nonsensical phrase

‘Think for yourself’ is a phrase which people often use as if it had some special
significance. The fact is, no man can think for another, any more than he can eat or drink
for him. “In point of contents, thought is only true in proportion as it sinks itself in the facts;
and in point of form it is no private act of the subject, but rather that attitude of
consciousness where the abstract self, freed from all the special limitations to which its
ordinary states are liable, restricts itself to that universal action in which it is identical with
all individuals” (Shorter Logic, §23).

“According to the modern craze, especially in pedagogy, one is not so much to be

instructed in the content of philosophy as to learn how to philosophize without any content.
That amounts to saying that one is to travel endlessly without getting to know along the
way any cities, rivers, countries, men, etc. ...

“Thus in learning the content of philosophy one not only learns to philosophize but indeed
really philosophizes. ...
“The unfortunate urge to educate the individual in thinking for himself and being self-
productive has cast a shadow over truth. As if, when I learn what substance, cause, or
anything is, I myself were not thinking. As if I did not myself produce these determinations
in my own thought but rather tossed them in my head as pebbles. As if, further, when I
have insight into their truth, into the proofs of their synthetic relations or dialectical
transitions, I did not receive this insight myself, as if I did not convince myself of these
truths. As if when I have become acquainted with the Pythagorean theorem and its proof
I have failed to know this theorem and prove its truth myself! As much as philosophical
study is in and for itself self-activity, to that degree also is it learning: the learning of an
already present, developed science. This science is a treasure of hard-won, ready-
prepared, formed content. This inheritance ready at hand must be earned by the
individual, i.e., learned. The teacher possesses this treasure; he pre-thinks it. The
pupils re-think it. The philosophical sciences contain universal true thoughts of their
objects. They constitute the end product of the labor of genial thought in all ages. These
true thoughts surpass what an uneducated young man comes up with thinking by himself
to the same degree that such a mass of inspired labor exceeds his effort. The original,
peculiar views of the young on essential objects are in part still totally deficient and empty,
but in part - in infinitely greater part - they are opinion, illusion, half-truth, distortion, and
indeterminateness. ...

“Moreover, one learns to think abstractly by thinking abstractly. Either one can try to begin
from what is sensory or concrete, working it up through analysis into abstraction, thus
following the apparent natural order, as also the order which proceeds from what is easier
to what is more difficult. Or one can begin right away with abstraction itself, taking it in
and for itself, teaching it and making it understandable. First of all, in contrasting these
two ways, the first is certainly more conformable to nature, but just for that reason is the
unscientific course. Although it is more natural for a disk from a tree trunk that roughly
encompasses a circle to be gradually rounded off by stripping off uneven little pieces that
protrude, this is nonetheless not the way in which the geometer proceeds; he rather uses
a circular instrument, or straightaway a free movement of the hand, to draw an exact
abstract circle. And because what is pure, higher, and true is by nature first [natura prius],
the procedure conforming to the matter itself is to make it first in science, too. For science
is the reverse of merely natural, i.e., nonspiritual, representation. What is pure is first in
truth, and science ought proceed in accordance with truth. In the second place, it is a
complete error to assume that the path which begins naturally with the concrete sensory
[content] and from there progresses to thought is easier. It is on the contrary more
difficult.” (Report to Niethammer, 23 October 1812).

Discipline and Self-Will in the Child

“One of the chief factors in education is discipline, the purport of which is to break down
the child’s self-will and thereby eradicate his purely natural and sensuous self. We must
not expect to achieve this by mere goodness, since it is just the immediate will which acts
on immediate fancies and caprices, not on reasons and representative thinking. If we
advance reasons to children, we leave it open to them to decide whether the reasons are
weighty or not, and thus we make everything depend on their whim. So far as children
are concerned, universality and the substance of things reside in their parents, and this
implies that children must be obedient. If the feeling of subordination, producing the
longing to grow up, is not fostered in children, they become forward and impertinent”
(Philosophy of Right, §174a).

“With regard to one side of education, namely, discipline, the boy should not be allowed
to follow his own inclination; he must obey in order that he may learn to command.
Obedience is the beginning of all wisdom; for the will which as yet does not know what is
true and objective, does not make this its goal and therefore far from being truly self-
dependent and free is still immature; such a will is enabled through obedience inwardly
to accept the authority of the rational will coming to it externally and gradually to make
this his own. On the other hand, to allow children to do as they please, to be so foolish as
to provide them into the bargain with reasons for their whims, is to fall into the worst of all
educational practices; such children develop the deplorable habit of fixing their attention
on their own inclinations, their own peculiar cleverness, their own selfish interests, and
this is the root of all evil. By nature, the child is neither bad nor good, since it starts without
any knowledge either of good or of evil. To deem this unknowing innocence an ideal and
to yearn to return to it would be silly; it has no value and is short-lived. Self-will and evil
soon make their appearance in the child. This self-will, this germ of evil, must be broken
and destroyed by discipline” (Subjective Spirit §396n.)

“The concepts of what is to be understood by discipline and school discipline have altered
very much with the progress of culture. Since upbringing has increasingly been
considered from the correct standpoint that it requires essentially more support than
suppression of the awakening self-feeling, that it must be a cultivation of self-sufficiency,
the upbringing in families as well as institutions has increasingly lost the manner of
inculcating in young people a feeling of subjection and unfreedom, and of making
themselves obedient more to another than to their own will even in matters which are
indifferent – demanding empty obedience for the sake of obedience, and reaching
through hardness what more properly belongs merely to the feeling of love, respect and
the seriousness of the subject matter... From this liberality follows also the setting of
boundaries on the discipline which the school can exercise” (Werke 4:350-351).

“the assertion that the teacher should carefully adjust himself to the individuality of each
of his pupils, studying and developing it, must be treated as idle chatter. He has simply
no time to do this. The peculiarities of children are tolerated within the family circle; but at
school there begins a life subject to general regulations, to a rule which applies to all; it is
the place where mind must be brought to lay aside its idiosyncracies, to know and to
desire the universal, to accept the existing general culture This reshaping of the soul, this
alone is what education means. The more educated a man is, the less is there apparent
in his behaviour anything peculiar only to him, anything therefore that is merely
contingent.

“Now the peculiarity of the individual has various aspects. These are distinguished as
natural disposition, temperament, and character.
“By disposition is understood the natural endowments of a man in contrast to what he has
become by his own efforts. These natural endowments include talent and genius. Both
words express a definite direction which the individual mind has been given by Nature.
Genius, however, is wider in scope than talent; the product of the latter lies only in the
sphere of the particular, whereas genius creates a new genre. But since talent and genius
are, to begin with, merely dispositions, they must be developed - if they are not to be
wasted or squandered or to degenerate into a spurious originality - in accordance with
universally valid principles. It is only by the development of these dispositions that their
existence can be demonstrated, as also their power and range. Prior to such development
one can be deceived about the existence of a talent; to busy oneself when young with
painting, for example, may seem to betray talent for this art an yet this hobby can fail to
accomplish anything. Talent alone is, therefore. not to be esteemed higher than Reason
which by its own activity has come to a knowledge of its Concept, as an absolutely free
thinking and willing. In philosophy, genius by itself does not carry one very far; it must
subject itself to the strict discipline of logical thinking; it is only by this subjection that
genius succeeds in philosophy in achieving its perfect freedom. As regards the will,
however, one cannot say that there is a genius for virtue; for virtue is something universal,
to be required of all men; it is not innate but is to be produced in the individual by his own
efforts. Difference in natural dispositions are, therefore of no importance whatever for
ethics; they would come into account only if we may so express ourselves, in a natural
history of the mind” (Subjective Spirit §395n.).

Play is not for the Schoolroom

“The necessity for education is present in children as their own feeling of dissatisfaction
with themselves as they are, as the desire to belong to the adult world whose superiority
they divine, as the longing to grow up. The play theory of education assumes that what is
childish is itself already something of inherent worth and presents it as such to the
children; in their eyes it lowers serious pursuits, and education itself, to a form of
childishness for which the children themselves have scant respect. The advocates of this
method represent the child, in the immaturity in which he feels himself to be, as really
mature and they struggle to make him satisfied with himself as he is. But they corrupt and
distort his genuine and proper need for something better, and create in him a blind
indifference to the substantial ties of the intellectual world, a contempt of his elders
because they have thus posed before him, a child, in a contemptible and childish fashion,
and finally a vanity and conceit which feeds on the notion of its own superiority”
(Philosophy of Right, §175a).

To begin with, this incipient self-dependence expresses itself in a child’s learning to play
with tangible things. But the most rational thing that children can do with their toys is to
break them.

“In passing from play to the seriousness of learning, the child becomes a boy. At this
stage children begin to be curious, especially for stories; what interests them in these is
ideas which do not come to them in an immediate manner. But here the main thing is the
awakening feeling in them that as yet they are not what they ought to be, and the active
desire to become like the adults in whose surroundings they are living. It is this desire
which gives rise to the imitativeness of children. Whereas the feeling of immediate unity
with the parents is the spiritual mother’s milk on which children thrive, it is the children’s
own need to grow up which acts as the stimulus to that growth. This striving after
education on the part of children themselves is the immanent factor in all education. But
since the boy is still at the stage of immediacy, the higher to which he is to raise himself
appears to him, not in the form of universality or of the matter in hand, but in the shape of
something given, of an individual, an authority. It is this or that man who forms the ideal
which the boy strives to know and to imitate; only in this concrete manner does the child
at his stage perceive his own essential nature. What the child is to learn must therefore
be given to him on and with authority; he has the feeling that what is thus given to him is
superior to him. This feeling must be carefully fostered in education. For this reason we
must describe as completely preposterous the pedagogy which bases itself on play, which
proposes that children should be made acquainted with serious things in the form of play
and demands that the educator should lower himself to the childish level of intelligence
of the pupils instead of lifting them up to an appreciation of the seriousness of the matter
in hand. This education by playing at lessons can results on the boy throughout his whole
life treating everything disdainfully. Such a regrettable result can also be produced by
perpetually stimulating children to indulge in argument and disputation, a method
recommended by unintelligent pedagogues; this can easily make children impertinent.
Children must, of course, be roused to think for themselves; but the worth of the matter
in hand should not be put at the mercy of their immature, vain understanding” (Subjective
Spirit §396n).

“... in [the family], the child is accepted in its immediate individuality, is loved whether its
behavior is good or bad. In school, on the other hand, the immediacy of the child no longer
counts; here it is esteemed only according to its worth, according to its achievements, is
not merely loved but criticised and guided in accordance with universal principles,
moulded by instruction according to fixed rules, in general, subjected to a universal order
which forbids many things innocent in themselves because everyone cannot be permitted
to do them. The school thus forms the transition from the family into civil society. But to
the latter the boy has at first only an undefined relationship; his interest is still divided
between learning and playing” (Subjective Spirit §396n).

Teachers should have freedom to adapt to circumstances

“Since every new concept in a systematic whole really arises from what precedes by
dialectic, a teacher acquainted with the nature of philosophizing everywhere enjoys as
often as possible the freedom to advance the inquiry by means of dialectic; and where
dialectic finds no access, he is free to pass on to the next concept without it” (Report to
Niethammer 23 October 1812).

Children are travelling a road already levelled by past generations

“The task of conducting the individual mind from its unscientific standpoint to that of
science had to be taken in its general sense; we had to contemplate the formative
development (Bildung) of the universal [or general] individual, of self-conscious spirit. As
to the relation between these two [the particular and general individual], every moment,
as it gains concrete form and its own proper shape and appearance, finds a place in the
life of the universal individual. The particular individual is incomplete mind, a concrete
shape in whose existence, taken as a whole, one determinate characteristic
predominates, while the others are found only in blurred outline. In that mind which stands
higher than another the lower concrete form of existence has sunk into an obscure
moment; what was formerly an objective fact is now only a single trace: its definite shape
has been veiled, and become simply a piece of shading. The individual, whose substance
is mind at the higher level, passes through these past forms, much in the way that one
who takes up a higher science goes through those preparatory forms of knowledge, which
he has long made his own, in order to call up their content before him; he brings back the
recollection of them without stopping to fix his interest upon them. The particular
individual, so far as content is concerned, has also to go through the stages through which
the general mind has passed, but as shapes once assumed by mind and now laid aside,
as stages of a road which has been worked over and levelled out. Hence it is that, in the
case of various kinds of knowledge, we find that what in former days occupied the
energies of men of mature mental ability sinks to the level of information, exercises, and
even pastimes, for children; and in this educational progress we can see the history of
the world’s culture delineated in faint outline. This bygone mode of existence has already
become an acquired possession of the general mind, which constitutes the substance of
the individual, and, by thus appearing externally to him, furnishes his inorganic nature. In
this respect culture or development of mind (Bildung), regarded from the side of the
individual, consists in his acquiring what lies at his hand ready for him, in making its
inorganic nature organic to himself, and taking possession of it for himself. Looked at,
however, from the side of universal mind qua general spiritual substance, culture means
nothing else than that this substance gives itself its own self-consciousness, brings about
its own inherent process and its own reflection into self” (Phenomenology §28).

“When a father inquired about the best method of educating his son in ethical conduct, a
Pythagorean replied: ‘Make him a citizen of a state with good laws’. (The phrase has also
been attributed to others.)” (Philosophy of Right §153 note)

“The educational experiments, advocated by Rousseau in Emile, of withdrawing children

from the common life of every day and bringing them up in the country, have turned out
to be futile, since no success can attend an attempt to estrange people from the laws of
the world. Even if the young have to be educated in solitude, it is still useless to hope that
the fragrance of the intellectual world will not ultimately permeate this solitude or that the
power of the world mind is too feeble to gain the mastery of those outlying regions. It is
by becoming a citizen of a good state that the individual first comes into his right.”
(Philosophy of Right §153 addition)
Children should be taught ethics early

“In fact, if one waits to acquaint the human being with such things [substantial moral
principles] until he is fully capable of grasping ethical concepts in their entire truth, then
few would ever possess this capacity, and these few hardly before the end of their life. It
is precisely the lack of ethical reflection which delays the cultivation of this grasp, just as
it delays the cultivation of moral feeling” (Werke 4:347).

Children should be exposed to the Classics

“Education must have an earlier material and object, upon which it labours, which it alters
and forms anew. It is necessary that we acquire the world of antiquity, not only so as to
possess it, but even more in order to have something that we can work over”
(Werke 4:320-321).

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