496
PARTISAN REVIEW
with the children if one wishes to produce new conditions has re–
mained principally the monopoly of revolutionary movements of
tyrannical cast which, when they came to power, took the children
away from their parents and simply indoctrinated them. Education
can play no part in politics, because in politics we always have to
deal with those who are already educated. Whoever wants to educate
adults really wants to act as their guardian and prevent them from
political activity. Since one cannot educate adults, the word education
has an evil sound in politics; there is a pretense of education when
the real purpose is coercion without the use of force. He who seri–
ously wants to create a new political order through education, that
is, neither through force and constraint nor through persuasion, must
draw the dreadful Platonic conclusion: the banishment of all older
people from the state that is to be founded. But even the children
one wishes to educate to be citizens of a utopian morrow are actually
denied their own future role in the body politic. By preparing them
for something new one actually strikes from the newcomers' hands
their own chance at the new.
All this is · by no means the case in America, and it
is
exactly
this fact that makes it so hard to judge these questions correctly there.
The political role that education actually plays in a land of immi–
grants, the fact that the schools not only serve to Americanize the
children but affect their parents as well, that here in fact one sheds
an old world and enters into a new one, encourages the illusion that
a new world is being built through the education of the children.
Of course the true situation is not this at all. The world into which
children are introduced, even in America, is an old world, that is,
a pre-existing world, constructed by the living and the dead, and
it is only new for those who have newly entered it either by birth or
immigration. But here illusion
is
stronger than reality because it
springs directly from a basic American experience, the experience
that a new world can be founded, and what is more, founded with
full consciousness of a historical continuum, for the phrase "New
World" gains its meaning from the old world which however admir–
able on other scores was rejected because it could find no solution
for poverty and slavery.
How disastrously the consequences of this illusion can make
themselves felt in the field of politics was demonstrated quite recently
