The so-called Classical Education.—Alas! we discover that our life is consecrated to knowledge and that we should throw it away, nay, that we should even have to throw it away if this consecration did not protect us from ourselves: we repeat this couplet, and not without deep emotion:

And then, in looking backwards over the course of our lives, we discover that there is one thing that cannot be restored to us: the wasted period of our youth, when our teachers did not utilise these ardent and eager years to lead us to the knowledge of things, but merely to this so-called “classical education”! [pg 195] Only think of this wasted youth, when we were inoculated clumsily and painfully with an imperfect knowledge of the Greeks and Romans as well as of their languages, contrary to the highest principle of all culture, which holds that we should not give food except to those who hunger for it! Think of that period of our lives when we had mathematics and physics forced down our throats, instead of being first of all made acquainted with the despair of ignorance, instead of having our little daily life, our activities, and everything occurring in our houses, our workshops, in the sky, and in nature, split up into thousands of problems, painful, humiliating and irritating problems—and thus having our curiosity made acquainted with the fact that we first of all require a mathematical and mechanical knowledge before we can be allowed to rejoice in the absolute logic of this knowledge! If we had only been imbued with reverence for those branches of science, if we had only been made to tremble with emotion—were it only for once—at the struggles, the defeats, and the renewed combats of those great men, of the martyrdom which is the history of pure science! But, on the contrary, we were allowed to develop a certain contempt for those sciences in favour of historical training, formal education4 and “classicism.”

And we allowed ourselves to be so easily deceived! [pg 196] Formal education! Might we not have pointed to the best teachers at our high schools and asked laughingly, “Where then do they keep their formal education? and, if it is wanting in them, how can they teach it?” And classicism! Did we get any of that instruction which the ancients used to impart to their youth? Did we learn to speak or to write like them? Did we ceaselessly exercise ourselves in that duel of speech, dialectic? Did we learn to move as beautifully and proudly as they did, and to excel as they did in wrestling, throwing, and boxing? Did we learn anything of that practical asceticism of all the Greek philosophers? Did we receive any training in a single ancient virtue, and in the way in which the ancients were trained in it? Was not all meditation upon morals wanting in our education?—And how much more the only possible criticism on the subject of morality, those courageous and earnest attempts to live according to this or that morality! Did our teachers ever stir up a feeling in us which the ancients valued more highly than moderns? Did they in the spirit of the ancients indicate to us the divisions of the day and of life, and those aims by which the lives of the ancients were guided? Did we learn the ancient languages as we now learn the modern ones, viz. that we might speak them fluently and well? Nowhere can we find a real proficiency or any new faculty as the result of those toilsome years! only the knowledge of what men had learnt and were able to do in past ages!

And what knowledge! Nothing becomes clearer to me year by year than the fact that the entire [pg 197] Greek and ancient mode of life, however simple and evident it must seem to our eyes, is in truth very difficult to understand, and even scarcely accessible, and that the customary ease with which we babble about the ancients is either giddy levity or the old hereditary conceit of our thoughtlessness. We are deceived by words and ideas which appear to resemble our own, but behind them there is always concealed a feeling which must be strange, incomprehensible, or painful to our modern conceptions. And these are realms in which boys are allowed to roam about! Enough: we roamed about them in our childhood, and there we became seized with an almost ineradicable antipathy for all antiquity, the antipathy arising from an intimacy which was apparently too great! For so great is the conceit of our classical teachers, who would almost make it appear that they had gained full control over the ancients, that they pass on this conceit to their pupils, together with the suspicion that such a possession is of little use for making people happy, but is good enough for honest, foolish old book-worms. “Let them brood over their treasure: it is well worthy of them!”—It is with this unexpressed thought that we completed our classical education. It can't be changed now—for us, at all events! But let us not think of ourselves alone!