CRISIS IN EDUCATION
513
one civilization to another, and also from individual to individual.
Moreover, in our civilization we must be aware that professional
training in universities or technical schools, though it always has
something to do with education, is nevertheless in itself a kind of
specialization. It no longer aims to introduce the young person to
the world as a whole, but rather to a particular, limited segment of
it. One cannot educate without at the same time teaching; an edu–
cation without learning
is
empty and therefore degenerates with great
ease into moral-emotional rhetoric. But one can quite easily teach
without educating, and one can go on learning to the end of one's
days without for that reason becoming educated. All these are par–
ticulars, however, that must really be left to the experts and the
pedagogues.
What concerns us all and cannot therefore be turned over to
the special science of pedagogy
is
the relation between grownups and
children in general or, putting it in even more general and exact
terms, our attitude toward the fact of nativity: the fact that we have
all come into the world by being born and that this world
is
con–
stantly renewed through birth. Education is the point at which we
decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility
for it and by the same token save it from that ruin which, except for
renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be in–
evitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love
our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave
them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance
of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to
prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.
