CRISIS IN EDUCATION
509
place, following the model of the nursery, it is based on a purely
temporary superiority and therefore becomes self-contradictory if it
is
applied to relations that are not temporary by nature-like the
relations of the rulers and the ruled. Thus it lies in the nature of the
matter-that is, both in the nature of the present crisis in authority
and in the nature of our traditional political thought-that the loss
of authority which began in the political sphere should end in the
private one; and it is naturally no accident that the place where
political authority was first undermined, that is, in America, should
be
the place where the modern crisis in education makes itself most
strongly felt.
The general loss of authority could, in fact, hardly find more
radical expression than by its intrusion into the pre-political sphere,
where authority seemed dictated by nature itself and independent
of all historical changes and political conditions. On the other hand,
modern man could find no clearer expression for his dissatisfaction
with the world, for his disgust with things as they are, than by his
refusal to assume, in respect to his children, responsibility for all this.
It is as though parents daily said: "In this world even we are not
very securely at home; how to move about in it, what to know, what
skills to master, are mysteries to us too. You must try to make out as
best you can; in any case you are not entitled to call us to account.
We are innocent, we wash our hands of you."
This attitude has, of course, nothing to do with that revolutionary
desire for a new order in the
world-novus ordo secloTum-which
once animated America; it is rather a symptom of that modern
estrangement from the world which can be seen everywhere but
which presents itself in especially radical and desperate form under
the conditions of a mass society. It is true that modern educational
experiments, not in America alone, have struck very revolutionary
poses, and this has, to a certain degree, increased the difficulty of
clearly recognizing the situation, and caused a certain degree of con–
fusion in the discussion of the problem; but, in contradiction to all
such behavior stands the unquestionable fact that so long as America
was really animated by that spirit she never dreamed of initiating the
new order with education but, on the contrary, remained conservative
in
educational matters.
To avoid misunderstanding: it seems to me that conservatism,
in
the sense of conservation, is of the essence of the educational pro-
