crUSIS
IN £OtJcA'rION
511
minimum of conservation and the conserving attitude without which
education is simply not possible is
in
our time extraordinarily hard
to provide. There are very good reasons for this. The crisis of au–
thority in education is most closely connected with the crisis of tra–
dition, that is with the crisis in our attitude toward the realm of the
past. This aspect of the modem crisis is especially hard for the edu–
cator to bear, because it is his task to mediate between the old and
the new and he must therefore possess a clearly defined regard for
the past. Through long centuries, i.e. throughout the combined period
of Roman-Christian civilization, there was no need for him to be–
come aware of this special quality in himself because a clearly defined
regard for the past was an essential part of the Roman frame of
mind, and this was not altered or ended by Christianity, but simply
shifted onto different foundations.
It was of the essence of the Roman attitude (though this was
by
no means true of every civilization or even of the western tra–
dition taken as a whole) to consider the past qua past as a model, an–
cestors, in every instance, as guiding examples for their descendants,
to believe that all greatness lies in what has been, and therefore that
the most fitting human age is old age, the man grown old, who, be–
cause he is already almost an ancestor may serve as a model for the
living. All this stands in contradiction not only to our world and
to the modem age from the Renaissance on, but, for example, to the
Greek attitude toward life as well. When Goethe said that growing
old is "the gradual withdrawal from the world of appearances," his
was a comment made in the spirit of the Greeks, for whom being
and appearing coincide. The Roman attitude would have been that
precisely in growing old and slowly disappearing from the com–
munity of mortals man reaches his most characteristic form of being,
even though, in respect to the world of appearances, he is in the pro–
cess of disappearing; in any case he then approaches for the first
time the existence in which he can begin to be an authority for others.
With the undisturbed background of such a tradition, in which
education has a political function (and this was a unique case) it
i<;
in fact comparatively easy to do the right thing in matters of edu–
cation without even pausing to consider what one is really doing, so
completely is the specific ethos of the educational principle in accord
with the basic ethical and moral convictions of society at large. To-
