s view an express statement of
the points characteristic of the eighteenth century individualistic
cosmopolitanism. The full development of private personality is
identified with the aims of humanity as a whole and with the idea
of progress. In addition we have an explicit fear of the hampering
influence of a state-conducted and state-regulated education upon the
attainment of these ideas. But in less than two decades after this time,
Kant's philosophic successors, Fichte and Hegel, elaborated the idea
that the chief function of the state is educational; that in particular
the regeneration of Germany is to be accomplished by an education
carried on in the interests of the state, and that the private
individual is of necessity an egoistic, irrational being, enslaved to
his appetites and to circumstances unless he submits voluntarily to the
educative discipline of state institutions and laws. In this spirit,
Germany was the first country to undertake a public, universal, and
compulsory system of education extending from the primary school
through the university, and to submit to jealous state regulation and
supervision all private educational enterprises. Two results should
stand out from this brief historical survey. The first is that such
terms as the individual and the social conceptions of education are
quite meaningless taken at large, or apart from their context. Plato had
the ideal of an education which should equate individual realization and
social coherency and stability. His situation forced his ideal into
the notion of a society organized in stratified classes, losing the
individual in the class. The eighteenth century educational philosophy
was highly individualistic in form, but this form was inspired by a
noble and generous social ideal: that of a society organized to include
humanity, and providing for the indefinite perfectibility of mankind.
The idealistic philosophy of Germany in the early nineteenth century
endeavored again to equate the ideals of a free and complete
development of cultured personality with social discipline and political
subordination. It made the national state an intermediary between the
realization of private personality on one side and of humanity on the
other. Consequently, it is equally possible to state its animating
principle with equal truth either in the classic terms of "harmonious
development of all the powers of personality" or in the more recent
terminology of "social eff