Page:Addresses to the German nation.djvu/192

 be finished very soon and the child again set to work must not be breathed any longer, but given up right at the beginning of the consideration of this matter. In my opinion, indeed, this education will not be expensive, the institutions will be able to maintain themselves to a great extent, and work will not suffer. I shall state my thoughts about this in due course; but even if it were not so, the pupil must unconditionally, and at any cost, remain until education is and can be finished. That half-education is not a bit better than none at all; it leaves matters as they were; and if anyone desires this, he had better dispense also with the half and declare plainly at the very beginning that he does not want mankind to be helped. Now, assuming that the pupil is to remain until education is finished, reading and writing can be of no use in the purely national education, so long as this education continues. But it can, indeed, be very harmful; because, as it has hitherto so often done, it may easily lead the pupil astray from direct perception to mere signs, and from attention, which knows that it grasps nothing if it does not grasp it now and here, to distraction, which consoles itself by writing things down and wants to learn some day from paper what it will probably never learn, and, in general, to the dreaming which so often accompanies dealings with the letters of the alphabet. Not until the very end of education, and as its last gift for the journey, should these arts be imparted and the pupil led by analysis of the language, of which he has been completely master for a long time, to discover and use the letters. After the rest of the training he has already acquired, this would be play.

137. So much for the purely universal national education. It is a different matter with the future scholar. Some day he shall not only express his feelings about what is