that we do, by pain or pleasure, lead him into an exercise of a
new activity. But the difference between this and Education consists in
the fact that, though he possessed capacity, yet by no amount of
association with his kind would he ever have acquired this new
development. It is as if we impress upon his plastic nature the imprint
of our loftier nature, which imprint he takes mechanically, and does not
himself recognize it as his own internal nature. We train him for our
recognition, not for his own. But, on the contrary, when we educate a
human being, we only excite him to create for himself, and out of
himself, that for which he would most earnestly strive had he any
appreciation of it beforehand, and in proportion as he does appreciate
it he recognizes it joyfully as a part of himself, as his own
inheritance, which he appropriates with a knowledge that it is his, or,
rather, is a part of his own nature. He who speaks of "raising" human
beings uses language which belongs only to the slave-dealer, to whom
human beings are only cattle for labor, and whose property increases in
value with the number.

Are there no school-rooms where Education has ceased to have any
meaning, and where physical pain is made to produce its only possible
result--a mechanical, external repetition? The school-rooms where the
creative word--the only thing which can influence the mind--has ceased
to be used as the means are only plantations, where human beings are
degraded to the position of lower animals.

Sec. 15. When we speak of the Education of the human race, we mean the
gradual growth of the nations of the earth, as a whole, towards the
realization of self-conscious freedom. Divine Providence is the teacher
here. The means by which the development is effected are the various
circumstances and actions of the different races of men, and the pupils
are the nations. The unfolding of this great Education is generally
treated of under the head of Philosophy of History.

Sec. 16. Education, however, in a more restricted sense, has to do with the
shaping of the individual. Each one of us is to be educated by the laws
of physical nature--by the relations into which we come with the
national life, in its laws, customs, etc., and by the circumstances
which daily surround us. By the force of these we find our arbitrary
will hemmed in, modified, and forced to take new channels and forms. We
are too often unmindful of the power with which these f