Saturday, March 22, 2008 Flunking Fichte "Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished." Meet the Professor from hell, Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), Head of Philosophy and Psychology of the Prussian University in Berlin anno 1810.
He blamed all but God for the German defeat against Napoleon Bonaparte: corrupt royals, the nobility, the decadent influence of reason, and a succession of weak governments that undermined religion as a moral force. He confronted the German losers with the burghers of the Middle Ages and they did not compare well: the burghers had made the Holy Roman Empire great because they weren't individuals, but sacrificed to the common good. The emphasis in Fichte's educational system was on compulsion, duty for its own sake, obedience, the crush of free will, prohibition, fear for punishment, elimination of self-interest, religious immersion, pupils must become 'fixed and unchangeable machines' and 'links in the eternal chain of spiritual life in a higher social order.' Fichte applied Kant to education, as generations of continental school children, until well within the last century, may have been aware of, although perhaps not consciously so. "Under proper guidance, the student will find at the end that nothing really exists but life, the spiritual life which lives in thought, and that everything else does not really exist, but only appears to exist." A belated reaction to Fichte's will-crushing - but in full accordance with the extremes of the Hegel dialectic - was provided by Frankfurt School inspired anti-authoritarianism of the seventies of the last century. The Professor from hell has become the guidance counsellor called Bill. As National Socialism differed from Marxism in the national versus the international context, intellecituals of the Counter-Enlightenment movement applied universals, but restricted them to the national settings. In Fichte's case on education: "Only the Germans, the salvation of Europe from the Napoleontic Enlightenment, are capable of true education." In Fichte we have a good example of Left and Right Socialism as mirroring ideologies, not opposing social systems. Like so many of the anti-modernist movement, he was undoubtedly a man of the Right, but pursuing what would today be seen as a Leftist subject: egalitarian public education. He may have inspired Marx to see school as a microcosm of the ideal society. http://newcitizenship.blogspot.com/2008/03/fichte.html
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