CRISIS IN
EDUCATION
503
The present crisis in America results from the recognition of the
destructiveness of these basic assumptions and a desperate attempt
to reform the entire educational system, that is, to transform it com–
pletely. In doing this what is actually being attempted-except for
the plans for an immense increase in the facilities for training in the
physical sciences and in technology-is nothing but restoration: teach–
ing will once more be conducted with authority; play is to stop in
school hours and serious work is once more to be done; finally there
is even talk of transforming the present curricula for teachers so
that the teachers themselves will have to learn something before be·
ing turned loose on the children.
These proposed reforms, which are still in the discussion stage
and are of purely American interest, need not concern us here. What
is of importance to our argument is a twofold question. Which as–
pects of the modern world and its crisis have actually revealed them–
selves in the educational crisis, that is, what are the true reasons that
for decades things could be said and done in such glaring contradiction
to sound human reason? And, secondly, what can we learn from this
crisis for the conduct of education- not in the sense that one can
always learn from mistakes what ought not to be done, but rather
by reflecting on the role that education plays in every civilization,
that is on the obligation that the existence of children entails for every
human society. We shall begin with the second question.
III
A crisis in education would at any time give rise to serious con–
cern even if it did not reflect, as in the present instance it does, a
more general crisis and instability in modern society. For education
belongs among the most elementary and necessary activities of hu–
man society, which never remains as it is but continuously renews it–
self through birth, through the arrival of new human beings. These
newcomers, moreover, are not finished but in a state of becoming.
Thus the child, the subject of education, has for the educator a
double aspect: he is new in a world that is strange to him and he
is in process of becoming, he is a new human being and he is a be–
.coming human being. This double aspect is by no means self-evident
and it does not apply to the animal forms of life; it corresponds to
a double relationship, the relationship to the world on the one hand
