Page:Addresses to the German nation.djvu/45

 some part of man, so the new must train man himself, and must make the training given, not, as hitherto, the pupil’s possession, but an integral part of himself.

9. Moreover, education, restricted in this way, has been brought to bear hitherto only on the very small minority of classes which are for this reason called educated, whereas the great majority on whom in very truth the commonwealth rests, the people, have been almost entirely neglected by this system and abandoned to blind chance. By means of the new education we want to mould the Germans into a corporate body, which shall be stimulated and animated in all its individual members by the same interest. If by this means we wanted, indeed, to mark off an educated class, which might perhaps be animated by the newly developed motive of moral approval, from an uneducated one, then the latter would desert us and be lost to us; because the motives of hope and fear, by which alone influence might be exercised over it, would work no longer with us but against us. So there is nothing left for us but just to apply the new system to every German without exception, so that it is not the education of a single class, but the education of the nation, simply as such and without excepting any of its individual members. In this, that is to say in the training of man to take real pleasure in what is right, all distinction of classes, which may in the future find a place in other branches of development, will be completely removed and vanish. In this way there will grow up among us, not popular education, but real German national education.

10. I shall prove to you that a system of education such as we desire has actually been discovered and is already being practised, so that we have nothing to do but to accept what is offered us. As I promised you concerning the means of salvation that I should propose,