512
PARTISAN REVIE
day, however, we are no longer in that position; and it makes
sense to act as though we still were and had only, as it were,
dentally strayed from the right path and were free at any
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to find our way back to it. This means that wherever the crisis
occurred in the modem world, one cannot simply go on nor
simply tum back. Such a reversal will never bring us anywhere
cept to the same situation out of which the crisis has just arisen.
return would simply be a repeat performance-though perhaps
ferent in form, since there are no limits to the possibilities of
sense and capricious notions that can be decked out as the last
in science. On the other hand, simple, unreflective
whether it be pressing forward in the crisis or adhering to the
tine that blandly believes the crisis will not engulf its particular
of life, can only, because it surrenders to the course of time, lead
ruin; it can only, to be more precise, increase that estrangement
the world by which we are already threatened on all sides.
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tion of the principles of education must take into account this
of estrangement from the world; it can even admit that we are
presumably confronted by an automatic process, provided only
it does not forget that it lies within the power of human
and action to interrupt and arrest such a process.
The problem of education in the modem world lies in the
that by its very nature it cannot forego either authority or
and yet must proceed in a world that is neither structured by
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nor held together by tradition. That means, however, that not
J
teachers and educators, but all of us, insofar as we live in one
together with our children and with young people, must take
radically different attitude toward them than we do toward
another. We must decisively divorce the realm of education from
others, most of all from the realm of public, political life, in
to derive from it alone a concept of authority and an attitude
the past which are appropriate to it but have no general validity
must not claim a general validity in the world of grownups. In
tice the first consequence of this would be a clear line drawn
tween children and adults; no attempt would be made to
adults or to treat children as though they were adults. Where
line falls in each instance cannot
be
determined by a general
it
changes often, in respect to age, from country to country,
