Stephen Hicks, Ph.D.

Obedience in education in 1700s Germany

In Britain and America in the 1700s, the most influential philosopher of education was John Locke, with his Some Thoughts Concerning Education. In France, it was Jean-Jacques Rousseau with his Emile.

But in the German states, it was Johann Georg Sulzer, with his 1748 An Essay on the Education and Instruction of Children. Sulzer’s fundamental thesis:

“Obedience is so important that all education is actually nothing other than learning how to obey.”

He elaborates: “It is not very easy, however, to implant obedience in children. It is quite natural for the child’s soul to want to have a will of its own, and things that are not done correctly in the first two years will be difficult to rectify thereafter. One of the advantages of these early years is that then force and compulsion can be used. Over the years, children forget everything that happened to them in early childhood. If their wills can be broken at this time, they will never remember afterwards that they had a will, and for this very reason the severity that is required will not have any serious consequences.”[1]

Horrifying: they will never remember afterwards that they had a will.

To which I add from Immanuel Kant’s lectures on education, first delivered in 1776/77: “Above all things, obedience is an essential feature in the character of a child, especially of a school boy or girl.”[2] Much of Kant on education reads like a gloss on Sulzer, with its emphasis on obedience, duty, discipline, and punishment.

When we think of ethnic stereotypes — the English gentleman, the French romantic, the ramrod-straight Prussian — to what extent are those stereotypes grounded in explicit educational philosophies generated by a culture’s most influential philosophers?

Sources:
[1] Johann Georg Sulzer, Versuch von der Erziehung und Unterweisung der Kinder (An Essay on the Education and Instruction of Children), 1748. Quoted in Alice Miller, For Your Own Good.
[2] Immanuel Kant, On Education. Translated by Annette Churton. University of Michigan Press, 1960. In Ozmon and Craver’s Philosophical Foundations of Education, 7th ed.

Related:
Education: Locke versus Kant on motivation and discipline.
My video lecture on Kant’s educational views.
My video lecture on Locke’s educational views.

Update: A colleague reminds me that Kant mentions Sulzer in a footnote in Chapter Two of The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals.

Joanne Lowery, “Brush”

Brush
Joanne Lowery

On the beach behind a cheap motel in Florida
a lanky fifteen-year-old decided to test the waters.
This was years ago, on the Atlantic side,

and no one else enjoyed the sand, no lifeguard
kept watch over nothing. The boy
took a stroll straight out to see how far
he could keep going, feet bobbing to the bottom.

Most of us have done the same,
though most of us would not have walked
so far from shore, arms cresting the waves,
our soft hair thrown back and floating.
When the reef dropped off when his long legs dangled
and the cross-tide took him a foot or two
on its way to England, the young swimmer
was not really surprised.

It was as logical for him to be swept away
as anyone else. If only he had stayed
back home in the middle of the USA
where blue meant delphiniums
and water was only rain.

He had not yet touched a girl
and already he was in over his head,
most of life’s books unread, places unseen,
the terrible negative undone all around
perversely carrying him out

into the current of possibility
that finally let him stroke, lungs brimming,
back where once he came from –

the sand felt just the same to all ten toes,
the vacancy sign rose above the tile roof
of the room his family was renting,
the room where he returned
and dried off without word of his escape.

The next day they left and drove part of the way
to the rest of his life. Everything all around
was edged with a sharp black line.
When years later he told the story
to answer a question about fear

he talked about the expanse of ripples,
salt burning his throat,
how impossible that he could have ended there.

* * *

[Source: I do not know where this poem originally appeared, and any information would be appreciated so I can give appropriate attribution.]

Nietzsche’s poem “From High Mountains”

Friedrich Nietzsche
“From High Mountains: Aftersong”

O noon of life! O time to celebrate!
O summer garden!
Restlessly happy and expectant, standing,
Watching all day and night, for friends I wait: Where are you, friends? Come! It is time! It’s late!

The glacier’s gray adorned itself for you
Today with roses,
The brook seeks you, and full of longing rises
The wind, the cloud, into the vaulting blue
To look for you from dizzy bird’s-eye view.

Higher than mine no table has been set:
Who lives so near
The stars or dread abysses half as sheer?
My realm, like none, is almost infinite,
And my sweet honey—who has tasted it?—

—There you are, friends! —Alas, the man you sought
You do not find here?
You hesitate, amazed? Anger were kinder!
I—changed so much? A different face and gait?
And what I am—for you, friends, I am not?

Am I another? Self-estranged? From me—
Did I elude?
A wrestler who too oft himself subdued?
Straining against his strength too frequently,
Wounded and stopped by his own victory?

I sought where cutting winds are at their worst?
I learned to dwell
Where no one lives, in bleakest polar hell,
Unlearned mankind and god, prayer and curse?
Became a ghost that wanders over glaciers?

—My ancient friends! Alas! You show the shock
Of love and fear!
No, leave! Do not be wroth! You—can’t live here—
Here, among distant fields of ice and rock—
Here one must be a hunter, chamois-like.

A wicked archer I’ve become. —The ends
Of my bow kiss;
Only the strongest bends his bow like this.
No arrow strikes like that which my bow sends:
Away from here—for your own good, my friends!—

You leave?—My heart: no heart has borne worse hunger,-
Your hope stayed strong:
Don’t shut your gates; new friends may come along.
Let old ones go. Don’t be a memory-monger!
Once you were young—now you are even younger.

What once tied us together, one hope’s bond—
Who reads the signs
Love once inscribed on it, the pallid lines?
To parchment I compare it that the hand
Is loath to touch—discolored, dark, and burnt.

No longer friends—there is no word for those
It is a wraith
That knocks at night and tries to rouse my faith,
And looks at me and says: “Once friendship was—”
—O wilted word, once fragrant as the rose.
Youth’s longing misconceived inconstancy.

Those whom I deemed
Changed to my kin, the friends of whom I dreamed,
Have aged and lost our old affinity:
One has to change to stay akin to me.
O noon of life! Our second youthful state!

O summer garden!
Restlessly happy and expectant, standing,

Looking all day and night, for friends I wait:
For new friends! Come! It’s time! It’s late!

* *

This song is over-longing’s dulcet cry
Died in my mouth:
A wizard did it, friend in time of drought,
The friend of noon—no, do not ask me who—
At noon it was that one turned into two—

Sure of our victory, we celebrate
The least of feasts:
Friend Zarathustra came, the guest of guests!
The world now laughs, rent are the drapes of fright,
The wedding is at hand of dark and light—

* * *

[More of Nietzsche's poetry here.]

The worst love poem ever?

Our Love is Like a Bowling Ball

Our love is like a bowling ball
Like a brand new Brunswick Red Zone,
It rolls and rolls down the alley of desire
And rolls and rolls and rolls.

I will keep you out of the gutters, my love
And put my fingers in your holes
Every kiss a strike or at least a spare,
Our future a perfect game.

Our love is like a bowling ball,
Our scores will rise and rise
I shall never step beyond the foul line,
And I will rent your shoes.

* * *

[Source: Slate's Bad Poetry Contest, 2007.]

Come to the edge

Come to the edge he said.
They said: we are afraid.
Come to the edge he said.
They came. He pushed them
… and they flew.

(Guillaume Apollinaire)

“Wean Yourself” by Rumi

Wean Yourself

By Mevlâna Jalâluddîn Rumi

Little by little, wean yourself.
This is the gist of what I have to say.

From an embryo, whose nourishment comes in the blood,
move to an infant drinking milk,
to a child on solid food,
to a searcher after wisdom,
to a hunter of more invisible game.

Think how it is to have a conversation with an embryo.
You might say, “The world outside is vast and intricate.
There are wheat fields and mountain passes,
and orchards in bloom.

At night there are millions of galaxies, and in sunlight
the beauty of friends dancing at a wedding.”

You ask the embryo why he, or she, stays cooped up
in the dark with eyes closed.

Listen to the answer.

There is no “other world.”
I only know what I’ve experienced.
You must be hallucinating.

* * *

Translated by Coleman Barks. Thanks to Russell Roberts for the pointer.

A 3 a.m. poem, toward the end of autumn

In a Japanese mood, on a still, moonlit night, near the end of autumn.

Not for nothing
Did the red leaf fall.

A 3 a.m. poem, listening to a coming storm

The wind has that tone
Between whistle and moan.