1. The plasticity, or educability, of the pupil is the fundamental postulate of pedagogics.
The concept plasticity, or capacity for being moulded, extends far beyond the confines of pedagogics. It takes in even the primary components of matter. It has been traced as far as the elementary substances entering into the chemical changes of organic bodies. Signs of plasticity of will are found in the souls of the higher animals. Only man, however, exhibits plasticity of will in the direction of moral conduct.
Had not the youthful mind the capacity to receive culture, education would be impossible. This educability of the young has rarely if ever been questioned in actual practice. Much philosophical strife, however, has raged about the various conceptions of WILL, and the consequent possibility of teaching virtue, or of training the moral character. The extremes have been fatalism, or the determination of conduct by means of forces lying entirely outside the power of the individual; and absolute caprice of will, or the determination of conduct entirely by the individual himself without regard to outside influences. The doctrine of fatalism makes moral education mechanical; that of volitional caprice makes it futile. Educational theory must therefore assume a middle ground, in which the self-activity of the individual and the moulding influence of education are both recognized.
2. Pedagogics as a science is based on ethics and psychology. The former points out the goal of education; the latter the way, the means, and the obstacles.
This relationship involves the dependence of pedagogics on experience, inasmuch as ethics includes application to experience, while psychology has its starting-point, not in metaphysics alone, but in experience correctly interpreted by metaphysics. But an exclusively empirical knowledge of man will not suffice for pedagogics. It is the less adequate in any age the greater the instability of morals, customs, and opinions; for, as the new gains on the old, generalizations from former observations cease to hold true.
In order to accept the statement that ethics points out the goal of education, we must conceive of ethics in a broad way. At some periods in the history of the world, the development of purely individual, or subjective, character would have been thought a worthy and adequate conception of the final purpose of education. Other-worldliness was the ruling ideal. At present, however, we regard that man as most fit for the world to come who best performs all his functions in the world that now is. Ethics must therefore be conceived to embrace an estimation of the value of a man’s conduct in every department of life. Not only must it estimate the worth of pious feeling, but it must embrace a consideration of every action in its relation to the actor’s social, economic, and political environment. A man having a praiseworthy character must be a good citizen of state, nation, and community; he must be public-spirited, law-abiding, given to honest dealing. Every child should be trained to be a useful member of civilization as it now exists. Piety alone is insufficient; it must be accompanied by honesty, industry, patriotism, public spirit. Non-social, or purely individualistic, conceptions of character as the goal of education must give way to those social ideals through which alone the highest welfare of both individual and community are to be conserved. Without such conceptions an industrial state, such as now exists, becomes a human jungle in which men enter upon a fiercer struggle than do the beasts of the real jungle. Social coÖperation is essential when we wish to transform a struggle of mutual destruction into one of mutual helpfulness.
3. Philosophical systems, involving either fatalism or its opposite, pure caprice of will, are logically shut out from pedagogics, because the notion of plasticity, implying as it does a transition from the indeterminate to the determinate, cannot by such systems be brought in without inconsistency.
Common sense overcomes the logical difficulties of even the worst systems. Herbart’s remark has, therefore, no practical significance. The philosophy of Spinoza might easily be described by an opponent as “fatalistic,” since it leaves no room for special providences in the physical universe; yet Professor Paulsen, who holds substantially to Spinoza’s view, is one of the most eminent promoters of the theory of education in the university of Berlin. Herbart thought Kant’s doctrine of transcendental will one of absolute volitional caprice, yet the followers of Kant have been among the most energetic promoters of mental and moral training. Herbart thinks he sees in this remark a chance to put his philosophical opponents out of court, to the benefit of his own system. If one philosopher develops a system of “fatalism” and another one of “absolute free will,” the one may be charged with making education impossible and the other with making it futile. In either case, since we know that education is neither impossible nor futile, the presumption is that both systems are defective. This paragraph and others like it are mere indirect methods of defending Herbart’s system of philosophy: they have no real significance for the theory of education itself.
4. On the other hand, the assumption of unlimited plasticity is equally inadmissible; it is for psychology to guard against this error. The educability of the child is, to begin with, limited by his individuality. Then, too, the possibility of determining and moulding him at will through education is lessened by time and circumstances. Lastly, the established character of the adult develops by an inner process which in time passes beyond the reach of the educator.
5. Education seems thus to find a barrier, first, in the order of nature, and later in the pupil’s own will. The difficulty is indeed a real one, if the limitations of education are overlooked: hence an apparent confirmation of fatalism as well as of the doctrine of absolute free will.
Modern scientific evolutionary study of anthropology and history tends to confirm the hasty thinker in the idea that the circumstances of the environment completely determine the character and destiny of men, since their debt to the moulding influences of society and physical surroundings becomes more and more apparent; yet however powerful the environment may prove to be in fixing the direction of mental growth in the race, it cannot rightly be conceived as creating the growing forces. All the sunshine and warmth in the world will not cause a pebble to sprout; so no external influences whatever can develop mind where there is none to develop. The exigencies of Herbart’s metaphysics drove him into a crusade against Kant’s doctrine of innate freedom, or transcendental will; all the freedom that Herbart would admit was that psychological freedom which is acquired through instruction and training. The quarrel belongs to eighteenth-century metaphysics, not to modern psychology, nor to education; for however potentially free an infant may be, nobody thinks of making it responsible, except so far as growing experience gives it insight and volitional strength.
Note.—Many thinkers fluctuate constantly between these two erroneous extremes. When looking historically at mankind as a whole, they arrive at fatalism, as does Gumplowicz in his “Outlines of Sociology.” Teacher and pupil alike seem to them to be in the current of a mighty stream, not swimming,—that is, self-active,—which would be the correct view, but carried along without wills of their own. They arrive, on the other hand, at the idea of a perfectly free will, when they contemplate the individual and see him resist external influences, the aims of the teacher very often included. Here they fail to comprehend the nature of will, and sacrifice the concept of natural law for that of will. Young teachers can hardly avoid sharing this uncertainty, favored as it is by the philosophies of the day; much is gained, however, when they are able to observe fluctuations of their own views without falling into either extreme.
6. The power of education must be neither over- nor under-estimated. The educator should, indeed, try to see how much may be done; but he must always expect that the outcome will warn him to confine his attempts within reasonable bounds. In order not to neglect anything essential, he needs to keep in view the practical bearings of the whole theory of ideas; in order to understand and interpret correctly the data furnished by observation of the child, the teacher must make constant use of psychology.
7. In scientific study concepts are separated which in practice must always be kept united. The work of education is continuous. With an eye to every consideration at once, the educator must always endeavor to connect what is to come with what has gone before. Hence a mode of treatment which, following the several periods of school life, simply enumerates the things to be done in sequence, is inadequate in a work on pedagogics. In an appendix this method will serve to facilitate a bird’s-eye view; the discussion of general principles, arranged according to fundamental ideas, must needs precede. But our very first task will necessarily consist in dealing, at least briefly, with the ethical and the psychological basis of pedagogics.
