Education worthy of the name is essentially education of
character. For the genuine educator does not merely consider
individual functions of his pupil, as one intending to teach him
only to know or be capable of certain definite things; but his
concern is always the person as a whole, both in the actuality in
which he lives before you now and in his possibilities, what he
can become. But in this way, as a whole in reality and potential-
ity, a man can be conceived either as personality, that is, as a
unique spiritual-physical form with all the forces dormant in it,
or as character, that is, as the link between what this individual is
and the sequence of his actions and attitudes. Between these two
modes of conceiving the pupil in his wholeness there is a fun-
damental difference. Personality is something which in its
growth remains essentially outside the influence of the educator;
but to assist in the moulding of character is his greatest task.

Personality is a completion, only character is a task. One may
cultivate and enhance personality, but in education one can and
one must aim at character.

However—as I would like to point out straightaway—it is
advisable not to over-estimate what the educator can even at best
do to develop character. In this more than in any other branch of
the science of teaching it is important to realize, at the very
beginning of the discussion, the fundamental limits to conscious
influence, even before asking what character is and how it is to
be brought about.

If I have to teach algebra I can expect to succeed in giving my
pupils an idea of quadratic equations with two unknown quan-
tities. Even the slowest-witted child will understand it so well
that he will amuse himself by solving equations at night when
he cannot fall asleep. And even one with the most sluggish
memory will not forget, in his old age, how to play with x and y.
But if I am concerned with the education of character, every-
thing becomes problematic. I try to explain to my pupils that
envy is despicable, and at once I feel the secret resistance of those
who are poorer than their comrades. I try to explain that it is
wicked to bully the weak, and at once I see a suppressed smile on
the lips of the strong. I try to explain that lying destroys life, and
something frightful happens: the worst habitual liar of the class
produces a brilliant essay on the destructive power of lying. I
have made the fatal mistake of giving instruction in ethics, and what
I said is accepted as current coin of knowledge; nothing of it is
transformed into character-building substance.

But the difficulty lies still deeper. In all teaching of a subject I
can announce my intention of teaching as openly as I please, and
this does not interfere with the results. After all, pupils do want,
for the most part, to learn something, even if not overmuch, so
that a tacit agreement becomes possible. But as soon as my pupils
notice that I want to educate their characters I am resisted pre-
cisely by those who show most signs of genuine independent

character: they will not let themselves be educated, or rather,
they do not like the idea that somebody wants to educate them.
And those, too, who are seriously labouring over the question of
good and evil, rebel when one dictates to them, as though it
were some long established truth, what is good and what is bad;
and they rebel just because they have experienced over and over
again how hard it is to find the right way. Does it follow that one
should keep silent about one’s intention of educating character,
and act by ruse and subterfuge? No; I have just said that the
difficulty lies deeper. It is not enough to see that education of
character is not introduced into a lesson in class; neither may
one conceal it in cleverly arranged intervals. Education cannot
tolerate such politic action. Even if the pupil does not notice the
hidden motive it will have its negative effect on the actions of the
teacher himself by depriving him of the directness which is his
strength. Only in his whole being, in all his spontaneity can the
educator truly affect the whole being of his pupil. For educating
characters you do not need a moral genius, but you do need
a man who is wholly alive and able to communicate himself
directly to his fellow beings. His aliveness streams out to them
and affects them most strongly and purely when he has no
thought of affecting them.

The Greek word character means impression. The special link
between man’s being and his appearance, the special connexion
between the unity of what he is and the sequence of his actions
and attitudes is impressed on his still plastic substance. Who
does the impressing? Everything does: nature and the social con-
text, the house and the street, language and custom, the world of
history and the world of daily news in the form of rumour, of
broadcast and newspaper, music and technical science, play and
dream—everything together. Many of these factors exert their
influence by stimulating agreement, imitation, desire, effort;
others by arousing questions, doubts, dislike, resistance. Char-
acter is formed by the interpenetration of all those multifarious,

opposing influences. And yet, among this infinity of form-
giving forces the educator is only one element among innumer-
able others, but distinct from them all by his will to take part in
the stamping of character and by his consciousness that he repre-
sents in the eyes of the growing person a certain selection of what
is, the selection of what is “right”, of what should be. It is in this
will and this consciousness that his vocation as an educator finds
its fundamental expression. From this the genuine educator
gains two things: first, humility, the feeling of being only one
element amidst the fullness of life, only one single existence in
the midst of all the tremendous inrush of reality on the pupil;
but secondly, self-awareness, the feeling of being therein the
only existence that wants to affect the whole person, and thus the
feeling of responsibility for the selection of reality which he
represents to the pupil. And a third thing emerges from all this,
the recognition that in this realm of the education of character,
of wholeness, there is only one access to the pupil: his confidence.
For the adolescent who is frightened and disappointed by an
unreliable world, confidence means the liberating insight that
there is human truth, the truth of human existence. When the
pupil’s confidence has been won, his resistance against being
educated gives way to a singular happening: he accepts the edu-
cator as a person. He feels he may trust this man, that this man is
not making a business out of him, but is taking part in his life,
accepting him before desiring to influence him. And so he learns
to ask.

The teacher who is for the first time approached by a boy with
somewhat defiant bearing, but with trembling hands, visibly
opened-up and fired by a daring hope, who asks him what is the
right thing in a certain situation—for instance, whether in learn-
ing that a friend has betrayed a secret entrusted to him one
should call him to account or be content with entrusting no
more secrets to him—the teacher to whom this happens realizes
that this is the moment to make the first conscious step towards

education of character; he has to answer, to answer under a
responsibility, to give an answer which will probably lead
beyond the alternatives of the question by showing a third pos-
sibility which is the right one. To dictate what is good and evil in
general is not his business. His business is to answer a concrete
question, to answer what is right and wrong in a given situation.
This, as I have said, can only happen in an atmosphere of con-
fidence. Confidence, of course, is not won by the strenuous
endeavour to win it, but by direct and ingenuous participation in
the life of the people one is dealing with—in this case in the life
of one’s pupils—and by assuming the responsibility which
arises from such participation. It is not the educational intention
but it is the meeting which is educationally fruitful. A soul suf-
fering from the contradictions of the world of human society,
and of its own physical existence, approaches me with a
question. By trying to answer it to the best of my knowledge
and conscience I help it to become a character that actively
overcomes the contradictions.

If this is the teacher’s standpoint towards his pupil, taking part
in his life and conscious of responsibility, then everything that
passes between them can, without any deliberate or politic
intention, open a way to the education of character: lessons and
games, a conversation about quarrels in the class, or about the
problems of a world-war. Only, the teacher must not forget the
limits of education; even when he enjoys confidence he cannot
always expect agreement. Confidence implies a break-through
from reserve, the bursting of the bonds which imprison an
unquiet heart. But it does not imply unconditional agreement.
The teacher must never forget that conflicts too, if only they are
decided in a healthy atmosphere, have an educational value. A
conflict with a pupil is the supreme test for the educator. He
must use his own insight wholeheartedly; he must not blunt the
piercing impact of his knowledge, but he must at the same time
have in readiness the healing ointment for the heart pierced by

it. Not for a moment may he conduct a dialectical manœuvre
instead of the real battle for truth. But if he is the victor he has to
help the vanquished to endure defeat; and if he cannot conquer
the self-willed soul that faces him (for victories over souls are
not so easily won), then he has to find the word of love which
alone can help to overcome so difficult a situation.
 

So far I have referred to those personal difficulties in the educa-
tion of character which arise from the relation between educator
and pupil, while for the moment treating character itself, the
object of education, as a simple concept of fixed content. But it is
by no means that. In order to penetrate to the real difficulties in
the education of character we have to examine critically the
concept of character itself.

Kerschensteiner in his well-known essay on The Concept and
Education of Character distinguished between “character in the most
general sense”, by which he means “a man’s attitude to his
human surroundings, which is constant and is expressed in his
actions”, and real “ethical character”, which he defines as “a
special attitude, and one which in action gives the preference
before all others to absolute values”. If we begin by accepting
this distinction unreservedly—and undeniably there is some
truth in it—we are faced with such heavy odds in all education
of character in our time that the very possibility of it seems
doubtful.

The “absolute values” which Kerschensteiner refers to cannot,
of course, be meant to have only subjective validity for the per-
son concerned. Don Juan finds absolute and subjective value in
seducing the greatest possible number of women, and the dic-
tator sees it in the greatest possible accumulation of power.
“Absolute validity” can only relate to universal values and
norms, the existence of which the person concerned recognizes

and acknowledges. But to deny the presence of universal values
and norms of absolute validity—that is the conspicuous ten-
dency of our age. This tendency is not, as is sometimes sup-
posed, directed merely against the sanctioning of the norms by
religion, but against their universal character and absolute valid-
ity, against their claim to be of a higher order than man and to
govern the whole of mankind. In our age values and norms are
not permitted to be anything but expressions of the life of a
group which translates its own needs into the language of
objective claims, until at last the group itself, for example a
nation, is raised to an absolute value—and moreover to the only
value. Then this splitting up into groups so pervades the whole
of life that it is no longer possible to re-establish a sphere of
values common to mankind, and a commandment to mankind is
no longer observed. As this tendency grows the basis for the
development of what Kerschensteiner means by moral character
steadily diminishes. How, under these circumstances, can the
task of educating character be completed?

At the time of the Arab terror in Palestine, when there were
single Jewish acts of reprisal, there must have been many discus-
sions between teacher and pupils on the question: Can there be
any suspension of the Ten Commandments, i.e. can murder
become a good deed if committed in the interest of one’s own
group? One such discussion was once repeated to me. The
teacher asked: “When the commandment tells you ‘Thou shalt
not bear false witness against thy neighbour’, are we to interpret
it with the condition, ‘provided that it does not profit you’?”
Thereupon one of the pupils said, “But it is not a question of my
profit, but of the profit of my people.” The teacher: “And how
would you like it, then, if we put our condition this way: ‘Pro-
vided that it does not profit your family’?” The pupil: “But
family—that is still something more or less like myself; but the
people—that is something quite different; there all question of I
disappears.” The teacher: “Then if you are thinking, ‘we want

victory’, don’t you feel at the same time, ‘I want victory’?” The
pupil: “But the people, that is something infinitely more than
just the people of to-day. It includes all past and future genera-
tions.” At this point the teacher felt the moment had come to
leave the narrow compass of the present and to invoke historical
destiny. He said: “Yes; all past generations. But what was it that
made those past generations of the Exile live? What made them
outlive and overcome all their trials? Wasn’t it that the cry ‘Thou
shalt not’ never faded from their hearts and ears?” The pupil
grew very pale. He was silent for a while, but it was the silence of
one whose words threatened to stifle him. Then he burst out:
“And what have we achieved that way? This!” And he banged his
fist on the newspaper before him, which contained the report on
the British White Paper. And again he burst out with “Live?
Outlive? Do you call that life? We want to live!”

I have already said that the test of the educator lies in conflict
with his pupil. He has to face this conflict and, whatever turn it
may take, he has to find the way through it into life, into a life, I
must add, where confidence continues unshaken—more, is even
mysteriously strengthened. But the example I have just given
shows the extreme difficulty of this task, which seems at times to
have reached an impassable frontier. This is no longer merely a
conflict between two generations, but between a world which
for several millennia has believed in a truth superior to man, and
an age which does not believe in it any longer—will not or
cannot believe in it any longer.

But if we now ask, “How in this situation can there be any
education of character?”, something negative is immediately
obvious: it is senseless to want to prove by any kind of argument
that nevertheless the denied absoluteness of norms exists. That
would be to assume that the denial is the result of reflection, and
is open to argument, that is, to material for renewed reflection.
But the denial is due to the disposition of a dominant human
type of our age. We are justified in regarding this disposition as a

sickness of the human race. But we must not deceive ourselves
by believing that the disease can be cured by formulæ which
assert that nothing is really as the sick person imagines. It is an
idle undertaking to call out, to a mankind that has grown blind
to eternity: “Look! the eternal values!” To-day host upon host of
men have everywhere sunk into the slavery of collectives, and
each collective is the supreme authority for its own slaves; there
is no longer, superior to the collectives, any universal sover-
eignty in idea, faith, or spirit. Against the values, decrees and
decisions of the collective no appeal is possible. This is true, not
only for the totalitarian countries, but also for the parties and
party-like groups in the so-called democracies. Men who have so
lost themselves to the collective Moloch cannot be rescued from
it by any reference, however eloquent, to the absolute whose
kingdom the Moloch has usurped. One has to begin by pointing
to that sphere where man himself, in the hours of utter solitude,
occasionally becomes aware of the disease through sudden pain:
by pointing to the relation of the individual to his own self. In
order to enter into a personal relation with the absolute, it is first
necessary to be a person again, to rescue one’s real personal self
from the fiery jaws of collectivism which devours all selfhood.
The desire to do this is latent in the pain the individual suffers
through his distorted relation to his own self. Again and again he
dulls the pain with a subtle poison and thus suppresses the desire
as well. To keep the pain awake, to waken the desire—that is the
first task of everyone who regrets the obscuring of eternity. It is
also the first task of the genuine educator in our time.

The man for whom absolute values in a universal sense do not
exist cannot be made to adopt “an attitude which in action gives
the preference over all others to absolute values”. But what one
can inculcate in him is the desire to attain once more to a real
attitude, and that is, the desire to become a person following the
only way that leads to this goal to-day.

But with this the concept of character formulated by

Kerschensteiner and deriving, as we know, from Kant is recog-
nized to be useless for the specifically modern task of the educa-
tion of character. Another concept has to be found if this task is
to be more precisely defined.

We cannot conceal from ourselves that we stand to-day on the
ruins of the edifice whose towers were raised by Kant. It is not
given to us living to-day to sketch the plan for a new building.
But we can perhaps begin by laying the first foundations without
a plan, with only a dawning image before our mind’s eye.
 

According to Kerschensteiner’s final definition character is
“fundamentally nothing but voluntary obedience to the maxims
which have been moulded in the individual by experience,
teaching, and self-reflection, whether they have been adopted
and then completely assimilated or have originated in the con-
sciousness through self-legislation”. This voluntary obedience
“is, however, only a form of self-control”. At first, love or fear of
other people must have produced in man “the habit of self-
conquest”. Then, gradually, “this outer obedience must be
transformed into inner obedience”.

The concept of habit was then enlarged, especially by John
Dewey in his book, Human Nature and Conduct. According to him
character is “the interpenetration of habits”. Without “the con-
tinued operation of all habits in every act” there would be no
unified character, but only “a juxtaposition of disconnected
reactions to separated situations”.

With this concept of character as an organization of self-
control by means of the accumulation of maxims, or as a system
of interpenetrating habits, it is very easy to understand how
powerless modern educational science is when faced by the
sickness of man. But even apart from the special problems of the
age, this concept can be no adequate basis for the construction of

a genuine education of character. Not that the educator could
dispense with employing useful maxims or furthering good
habits. But in moments that come perhaps only seldom, a feeling
of blessed achievement links him to the explorer, the inventor,
the artist, a feeling of sharing in the revelation of what is hidden.
In such moments he finds himself in a sphere very different
from that of maxims and habits. Only on this, the highest plane
of his activity, can he fix his real goal, the real concept of
character which is his concern, even though he might not often
reach it.

For the first time a young teacher enters a class independently,
no longer sent by the training college to prove his efficiency. The
class before him is like a mirror of mankind, so multiform, so
full of contradictions, so inaccessible. He feels “These boys—I
have not sought them out; I have been put here and have to
accept them as they are—but not as they now are in this
moment, no, as they really are, as they can become. But how can I
find out what is in them and what can I do to make it take
shape?” And the boys do not make things easy for him. They are
noisy, they cause trouble, they stare at him with impudent curi-
osity. He is at once tempted to check this or that trouble-maker,
to issue orders, to make compulsory the rules of decent
behaviour, to say No, to say No to everything rising against him
from beneath: he is at once tempted to start from beneath. And if
one starts from beneath one perhaps never arrives above, but
everything comes down. But then his eyes meet a face which
strikes him. It is not a beautiful face nor particularly intelligent;
but it is a real face, or rather, the chaos preceding the cosmos of a
real face. On it he reads a question which is something different
from the general curiosity: “Who are you? Do you know some-
thing that concerns me? Do you bring me something? What do
you bring?”

In some such way he reads the question. And he, the young
teacher, addresses this face. He says nothing very ponderous or

important, he puts an ordinary introductory question: “What
did you talk about last in geography? The Dead Sea? Well, what
about the Dead Sea?” But there was obviously something not
quite usual in the question, for the answer he gets is not the
ordinary schoolboy answer; the boy begins to tell a story. Some
months earlier he had stayed for a few hours on the shores of the
Dead Sea and it is of this he tells. He adds: “And everything
looked to me as if it had been created a day before the rest of
creation.” Quite unmistakably he had only in this moment made
up his mind to talk about it. In the meantime his face has
changed. It is no longer quite as chaotic as before. And the class
has fallen silent. They all listen. The class, too, is no longer a
chaos. Something has happened. The young teacher has started
from above.

The educator’s task can certainly not consist in educating
great characters. He cannot select his pupils, but year by year the
world, such as it is, is sent in the form of a school class to meet
him on his life’s way as his destiny; and in this destiny lies the
very meaning of his life’s work. He has to introduce discipline
and order, he has to establish a law, and he can only strive and
hope for the result that discipline and order will become more
and more inward and autonomous, and that at last the law will
be written in the heart of his pupils. But his real goal which,
once he has well recognized it and well remembers it, will
influence all his work, is the great character.

The great character can be conceived neither as a system of
maxims nor as a system of habits. It is peculiar to him to act from
the whole of his substance. That is, it is peculiar to him to react
in accordance with the uniqueness of every situation which chal-
lenges him as an active person. Of course there are all sorts of
similarities in different situations; one can construct types of
situations, one can always find to what section the particular
situation belongs, and draw what is appropriate from the hoard
of established maxims and habits, apply the appropriate maxim,

bring into operation the appropriate habit. But what is untypical
in the particular situation remains unnoticed and unanswered.
To me that seems the same as if, having ascertained the sex of a
new-born child, one were immediately to establish its type as
well, and put all the children of one type into a common cradle
on which not the individual name but the name of the type was
inscribed. In spite of all similarities every living situation has,
like a newborn child, a new face, that has never been before and
will never come again. It demands of you a reaction which can-
not be prepared beforehand. It demands nothing of what is past.
It demands presence, responsibility; it demands you. I call a great
character one who by his actions and attitudes satisfies the claim
of situations out of deep readiness to respond with his whole
life, and in such a way that the sum of his actions and attitudes
expresses at the same time the unity of his being in its willing-
ness to accept responsibility. As his being is unity, the unity of
accepted responsibility, his active life, too, coheres into unity.
And one might perhaps say that for him there rises a unity out
of the situations he has responded to in responsibility, the
indefinable unity of a moral destiny.

All this does not mean that the great character is beyond the
acceptance of norms. No responsible person remains a stranger
to norms. But the command inherent in a genuine norm never
becomes a maxim and the fulfilment of it never a habit. Any
command that a great character takes to himself in the course of
his development does not act in him as part of his consciousness
or as material for building up his exercises, but remains latent in
a basic layer of his substance until it reveals itself to him in a
concrete way. What it has to tell him is revealed whenever a
situation arises which demands of him a solution of which till
then he had perhaps no idea. Even the most universal norm will
at times be recognized only in a very special situation. I know of
a man whose heart was struck by the lightning flash of “Thou
shalt not steal” in the very moment when he was moved by a

very different desire from that of stealing, and whose heart was
so struck by it that he not only abandoned doing what he
wanted to do, but with the whole force of his passion did the
very opposite. Good and evil are not each other’s opposites like
right and left. The evil approaches us as a whirlwind, the good as
a direction. There is a direction, a “yes”, a command, hidden
even in a prohibition, which is revealed to us in moments like
these. In moments like these the command addresses us really in
the second person, and the Thou in it is no one else but one’s
own self. Maxims command only the third person, the each and
the none.

One can say that it is the unconditioned nature of the address
which distinguishes the command from the maxim. In an age
which has become deaf to unconditioned address we cannot
overcome the dilemma of the education of character from that
angle. But insight into the structure of great character can help
us to overcome it.

Of course, it may be asked whether the educator should really
start “from above”, whether, in fixing his goal, the hope of
finding a great character, who is bound to be the exception,
should be his starting-point; for in his methods of educating
character he will always have to take into consideration the
others, the many. To this I reply that the educator would not have
the right to do so if a method inapplicable to these others were
to result. In fact, however, his very insight into the structure of a
great character helps him to find the way by which alone (as I
have indicated) he can begin to influence also the victims of the
collective Moloch, pointing out to them the sphere in which
they themselves suffer—namely, their relation to their own
selves. From this sphere he must elicit the values which he can
make credible and desirable to his pupils. That is what insight
into the structure of a great character helps him to do.

A section of the young is beginning to feel today that, because
of their absorption by the collective, something important and

irreplaceable is lost to them—personal responsibility for life and
the world. These young people, it is true, do not yet realize that
their blind devotion to the collective, e.g. to a party, was not a
genuine act of their personal life; they do not realize that it
sprang, rather, from the fear of being left, in this age of confu-
sion, to rely on themselves, on a self which no longer receives its
direction from eternal values. Thus they do not yet realize that
their devotion was fed on the unconscious desire to have
responsibility removed from them by an authority in which they
believe or want to believe. They do not yet realize that this devo-
tion was an escape. I repeat, the young people I am speaking of
do not yet realize this. But they are beginning to notice that he
who no longer, with his whole being, decides what he does or
does not, and assumes responsibility for it, becomes sterile in
soul. And a sterile soul soon ceases to be a soul.

This is where the educator can begin and should begin. He
can help the feeling that something is lacking to grow into the
clarity of consciousness and into the force of desire. He can
awaken in young people the courage to shoulder life again. He
can bring before his pupils the image of a great character who
denies no answer to life and the world, but accepts responsibility
for everything essential that he meets. He can show his pupils
this image without the fear that those among them who most of
all need discipline and order will drift into a craving for aimless
freedom: on the contrary, he can teach them in this way to
recognize that discipline and order too are starting-points on the
way towards self-responsibility. He can show that even the great
character is not born perfect, that the unity of his being has first
to mature before expressing itself in the sequence of his actions
and attitudes. But unity itself, unity of the person, unity of the
lived life, has to be emphasized again and again. The confusing
contradictions cannot be remedied by the collectives, not one of
which knows the taste of genuine unity and which if left to
themselves would end up, like the scorpions imprisoned in a

box, in the witty fable, by devouring one another. This mass of
contradictions can be met and conquered only by the rebirth of
personal unity, unity of being, unity of life, unity of action—
unity of being, life and action together. This does not mean a
static unity of the uniform, but the great dynamic unity of the
multiform in which multiformity is formed into unity of char-
acter. Today the great characters are still “enemies of the people”,
they who love their society, yet wish not only to preserve it but
to raise it to a higher level. To-morrow they will be the architects
of a new unity of mankind. It is the longing for personal unity,
from which must be born a unity of mankind, which the educa-
tor should lay hold of and strengthen in his pupils. Faith in this
unity and the will to achieve it is not a “return” to individual-
ism, but a step beyond all the dividedness of individualism and
collectivism. A great and full relation between man and man can
only exist between unified and responsible persons. That is why
it is much more rarely found in the totalitarian collective than in
any historically earlier form of society; much more rarely also
in the authoritarian party than in any earlier form of free ass-
ociation. Genuine education of character is genuine education
for community.

In a generation which has had this kind of upbringing the
desire will also be kindled to behold again the eternal values, to
hear again the language of the eternal norm. He who knows
inner unity, the innermost life of which is mystery, learns to
honour the mystery in all its forms. In an understandable reac-
tion against the former domination of a false, fictitious mystery,
the present generations are obsessed with the desire to rob life of
all its mystery. The fictitious mystery will disappear, the genuine
one will rise again. A generation which honours the mystery in
all its forms will no longer be deserted by eternity. Its light
seems darkened only because the eye suffers from a cataract; the
receiver has been turned off, but the resounding ether has not
ceased to vibrate. To-day, indeed, in the hour of upheaval, the

eternal is sifted from the pseudo-eternal. That which flashed into
the primal radiance and blurred the primal sound will be extin-
guished and silenced, for it has failed before the horror of the
new confusion and the questioning soul has unmasked its futil-
ity. Nothing remains but what rises above the abyss of to-day’s
monstrous problems, as above every abyss of every time: the
wing-beat of the spirit and the creative word. But he who can see
and hear out of unity will also behold and discern again what
can be beheld and discerned eternally. The educator who helps
to bring man back to his own unity will help to put him again
face to face with God.