CRISIS IN EDUCATION
505
darkness and, however strong its natural tendency to thrust itself into
the light, it nevertheless needs the security of darkness to grow at
all. This may indeed be the reason that children of famous parents
so often turn out badly. Fame penetrates the four walls, invades their
private space, bringing with it, especially in present-day conditions,
the merciless glare of the public realm, which floods everything in
the private lives of those concerned, so that the children no longer
have a place of security where they can grow. But exactly the same
destruction of the real living space occurs wherever the attempt is
made to turn the children themselves into a kind of world. Among
the children there then arises public life of a sort and, quite apart
from the fact that it is not a real one and that the whole attempt is
a sort of fraud, the damaging fact remains that children-that is,
human beings in process of becoming but not yet complete-are
thereby forced to expose themselves to the light of a public existence.
That modern education, insofar as it attempts to establish a
world of children, destroys the necessary conditions for vital develop–
ment and growth seems obvious. But that such harm to the develop–
ing child should be the result of modern education strikes one as
strange indeed, for this education maintained that its exclusive aim
was to serve the child and rebelled against the methods of the past
because these had not sufficiently taken into account the child's in–
ner nature and his needs. "The Century of the Child," as you will
recall, was going to emancipate the child and free him from the
standards derived from the adult world. Then how could it happen
that the most elementary conditions of life necessary for the growth
and development of the child were overlooked or simply not recog–
nized? How could it happen that the child was exposed to what more
than anything else characterized the adult world, its public aspect,
after the decision had just been reached that the mistake in all past
education had been to see the child as nothing but an undersized
grownup?
The reason for this strange state of affairs has nothing directly
to do with education; it is rather to be found in the judgments and
prejudices about the nature of private and public life and their re–
lation to each other which have been characteristic of modern so–
ciety since the beginning of modern times and which educators, when
they finally began, relatively late, to modernize education, accepted
