50..
PARTISAN REVIEW
and to life on the other. The child shares the state of becoming with
all living things; in respect to life and its development, the child
is
a human being in process of becoming just as a kitten is a cat in
process of becoming. But the child is new only in relation to a world
that was there before him, that will continue after his death and in
which he is to spend his life.
If
the child were not a newcomer in
this human world but simply a not yet finished living creature, educa–
tion would be just a function of life and would need to consist in
nothing save that concern for the sustenance of life and that training
and practice in living that all animals assume in respect to their
young.
Human parents, however, have not only summoned their chil–
dren into life through conception and birth, they have simultaneously
introduced them into a world. In education they assume responsibility
for both, for the life and development of the child and for the con–
tinuance of the w'orld. These two responsibilities do not by any means
coincide, they may indeed come into conflict with each other.
The
responsibility for the development of the child is in a certain sense a
responsibility against the world: the child requires special protection
and care so that nothing destructive may happen to him from the
world. But the world, too, needs protection to keep it from being
overrun and destroyed by the onslaught of the new that bursts upon
it with each new generation.
Because the child must be protected against the world, his
tra–
ditional place is in the family which daily welcomes him back from
the outside world into the security of private life within four walls.
These four walls, within which people's private family life is lived,
constitute a shield against the world and specifically against the public
aspect of the world. They enclose a secure place, without which no
living thing can thrive. This holds good not only for the life of child–
hood but for human life in general. Wherever the latter is consistently
exposed to the world without the protection of privacy and security
its vital quality is destroyed. In the public world, common to
all,
persons count and so does work, that is, the work of our hands that
each of us contributes to our common world; but life qua life does
not matter there. The world cannot be regardful of it, and it has
to be hidden and protected from the world.
Everything that lives, not vegetative life alone, emerges from
