ABSTRACT
The notion that the actually existing school system is the failed approximation of a still-to-be-realised ideal of human development'—is the rational community, full personal development'—is simply another variant of the discourse of critique. The scholarly reasons derive from the imperative that the statements about the school system should be governed by a discipline capable of determining their truth or falsity. The pastoral school was and is the radically autonomous hybrid of a bureaucratic problematisation of social life and a religious problematisation of individual conduct. These twin features of the modern school system are not open to change from a higher ethical perspective because they represent the meeting of two unsurpassable—yet historically contingent—spheres of life. Prussia already had a 'governmental' school system that was in fact a hybrid of bureaucratic social training and Christian spiritual discipline. Perhaps 200 years of repetition has rendered critique too rigid to negotiate the hybrid pastoral-bureaucatic terrain of the school system.
