ABSTRACT
Both in his prize essay and in other later works, Kerschensteiner attached importance to the fact that it was not possible to consider properly the aims of education, without first considering the type of State and civilization in which the education was to be carried out; for the aims of education and their realization greatly depended both on the attitude of the State towards education, and on the role which it allotted its citizens in the State. The process and ideals of education were determined, to a large extent, by the social, political, and economic circumstances of that civilization in which the pupils were being educated, for in its educational system the State would always lay stress on the development of those particular qualities which it saw as being of value to it, at that particular stage of civilization. However great a civilization, its educational ideals would not necessarily be the same as those of a civilization equally as great; for example, both the Greeks and the Romans realized the value of education, yet their educational aims· were different:
'Although the Romans took over almost all the essential elements of education from the Greeks, their aim in education differed fundamentally from that of the Greeks. For the Romans, education was a means to an end, a ladder to the high positions in the state, but for the Greeks, education was valuable for its own sake: it was the honour necessary to the true man. And so, for the truly great Greek thinkers and for her schools as well, the characteristic of the educated man was wisdom, if,[Aoaoif,1a, whereas for the Romans it was eloquence .... All in all, one could perhaps briefly define the aim of education of the Romans as being VIRTUS, proficiency related to the tasks of the states-
man, and that of the Greeks, on the other hand, as being nobility of body and soul.' 1
Kerschensteiner showed how, later on in the Middle Ages, church and state were alienated, and the church took control over all education in Germany, basing the teaching on preparation for the after-life. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries this spiritualism gave way to humanism, which emphasized the study of the ancient classics. Since the wars of liberation the element of nationalism had become stronger. From these examples Kerschensteiner intended to show that: 'An educational aim grows out of all the beliefs of a people and thus cannot be prescribed to any other people nor be taken over by another people.' 2
He pointed out how the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century humanists in the age of enthusiasm and idealism had demanded the introduction of elementary schools, and how the ideas of HerbartJ and Pestalozzi had subsequently found wide acceptance. By the close of the nineteenth century, when Kerschensteiner took up his new post in Munich, the elementary schools had become firmly established in Germany, attended by children aged between six to thirteen or fourteen years, but, 1mfortunately, these schools were bent on training the pupil in purely academic subjects and, in Kerschensteiner's view, the curriculum had become so crammed with material that none of it could be studied satisfactorily.
