The Reform of Education PDF
Preview The Reform of Education
THL RLFORM OF EDUCATION BY GIOVANNI GENTILE AUTHORIZED TRANSLATION BY DINO BIGONGIARI With an Introduction by BENEDETTO CROCE NEW YORK HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY 1922 COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC, PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.BY THE QUINN a BODEN COMPANY RAHWAY, N. . CONTENTS PAGE INTRODUCTION .... vii CHAPTER I EDUCATION AND NATIONALITY 3 II EDUCATION AND PERSONALITY . . . . 18 III THE FUNDAMENTAL ANTINOMY OF EDUCATION 40 IV REALISM AND IDEALISM IN THE CONCEPT OF CULTURE ... 63 V THE SPIRITUALITY OF CULTURE 85 .no VI THE ATTRIBUTES OF CULTURE . . . VII THE BIAS OF REALISM 139 VIII THE UNITY OF EDUCATION .166 . . . IX CHARACTER AND PHYSICAL EDUCATION .192 . X THE IDEAL OF EDUCATION . . . . . 219 XI CONCLUSION 246 NOTE SHORTLY after Trieste fell into Italian hands, a series of lectures was arranged for the school teachers of the city, in order to welcome them to their new duties as citizens and officials of Italy. The task of opening the series was assigned to Giovanni Gentile, Professor of Philosophy in the Uni versity of Rome, who delivered the lectures which constitute the present volume. At my request Signer Gentile has re written the first chapter, eliminating some of the more local of the allusions which the nature of the original occasion called forth,and Senatore Crocehas very generously contrib uted his illuminating Introduction. The volume as it stands is more than a treatise on education: it is at one and the same time an introduction to the thought of one of the greatest of living philosophers, and an introduction to the studyof all philosophy. If the teachersof Trieste were able to understand and to enjoy a philosophic discussion of their chosen work, why should not the teachers of America? J. E. S. INTRODUCTION THE author of this book has been working in the same field with me for over a quarter of a century, ever since the time when we undertook he a very young man, and I somewhat his senior to shake Italy out of the doze of naturalism and positivism back to ideal istic philosophy; or, as it would be better to say, to philosophy pure and simple, if indeed philosophy is always idealism. Together we founded a review, the Critica, and kept it going by our contributions; together we edited col lections of classical authors; and together we engaged in many lively controversies. And it seems indeed as though we really succeeded in laying hold of and again firmly re-establishing in Italy the tradition of philo sophical studies, thus welding a chain which evidently has withstood the strain and destructive fury of the war and its afterclaps. By this I do not mean to imply that our gradual achievements were the result of a definite preconcerted plan. Our work was the spontaneous consequence of our spontaneous mental development and of the spon taneous agreement of our minds. And therefore this common task, too, gradually becoming differentiated INTRODUCTION viii in accordance with the peculiarities of our tempera ments, our tendencies, and our attitudes, resulted in a kind of division of labour between us. So that whereas I by preference have devoted my attention to the history of literature, Gentile has dedicated him self more particularly to the history of philosophy and especially of Italian philosophy, not only as a thinker but as a scholar too, and as a philologist. He may be said to have covered the entire field from the Middle Ages to the present time by his works on Scholasticism in Italy, on Bruno, on Telesio, on Renaissance philos ophy, on Neapolitan philosophy from Genovesi to Gal- luppi, on Rosmini, on Gioberti, and on the philosophical writers from 1850 to 1900. And though his com prehensive History of Italian Philosophy, published in parts, is far from being finished, the several sections of it have been elaborated and cast in the various mon ographs which I have just mentioned. In addition to this, Gentile has been devoting special attention to religious problems. He took a very im portant part in the inquiry intpjind criticism of ^mod ernism," the hybndjaLture_jof which he laid bare, exposing both the inner contradictions and thescanty sincerity of the movement. His handling of this ques tion was shown to be effective by the fact, among others, that the authors of the encyclical Pascendi, which brought upon Modernism the condemnation of the Church, availed themselves of the sharp edge of INTRODUCTION ix .Gentile's logical arguments, prompted by scientific loyalty and dictated by moral righteousness. Finally, and in a more close connection with the present work, it will be remembered that Gentile has done away with the chaotic pedagogy of the positiv- istic school, and has also definitely criticised the edu cational theory of Herbart. As far back as 1900 he published a monograph of capital importance, in which he showed that pedagogy in so far as it is philosophical resolves itself without residuum into the philosophy of the spirit; for the science of the spirit's education can not but be the science of the spirit's development, of its dialectics, of its necessity. Indeed, we owe it to Gentile that Italian pedagogy has attained in the presentday a simplicity and a depth of concepts unknown elsewhere. In Italy, not educa tional science alone, but the practice of it and its political aspectshavebeen thoroughly recast and amply developed. And this, too, is due pre-eminently to the work of Gentile. His authority therefore is power fully felt in schools of all grades, for he has lived in tensely the life of the school and loves it dearly. In addition to these differences arising from our division oi labour, others may of course be noticed, and they are to be found in the form that philosophical doctrines have taken on in each of us. Identity is impossible in this field, for philosophy, like art, is closely bound up with the personality of the thinker, x INTRODUCTION with his spiritual interests, and with his experiences of life. There is never true identity except in the so- called "philosophical school," which indicates the death of a philosophy, in the same way that the poetical school proclaims death in poetry. And so it has come about that our general conception of philosophy as simple philosophy of the spirit ^of the subject, and never of nature, or of the object has developed apeculiar stress in Gentile, for whom philos ophy is above all that point in which every abstraction is overcome and submerged in the concreteness of the act of Thought; whereas for me philosophy is essen tially methodology of the one real and concrete Think ing of historical Thinking. So that while he strongly emphasises unity, I no less energetically insist on the distinction and dialectics of the forms of the spirit as a necessary formation of the methodology of historical judgment. But of this enough, especially since the reader can only become interested in these differences after he has acquired a more advanced knowledge of contemporary Italian philosophy. I am convinced that the translation and popularisa tion of Gentile's work will contribute to the toilsome formation of that consciousness, of that system of convictions, of that moral and mental faith which is the profound need of our times. For our age, eager and anxious for Faith, is perhaps not yet completely resigned to look for the new creed of humanity there INTRODUCTION xi where alone it may be found, where by firm resolve it may be secured in pure Thought. Clear-sighted ob servers have perhaps not failed to notice that the World War, in addition to every thing else, has been a strife o/ religions, a clash of conflicting conceptions of life, a struggle of opposed philosophies. It is surely not the duty of thinkers to settle economic and political contentions by ineffective appeals to the universal brotherhood of man; but it is rather their duty to com pose mental differences and antagonisms, and thus form the new faith of humanity a new Christianity or a new Humanism, as we may wish to call it. Such a faith will certainly not be spared the conflicts from which ancient Christianity itself was not free; but it may reasonably be hoped that it will rescue us from intellectual anarchy, from unbridled individualism, from sensualism, from scepticism, frompessimism, from every aberration which for a century and a half has been harassing the soul of man and the society of man kind under the name of Romanticism. BENEDETTO CROCE. ROME, April, 1921.
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