11 - On whom the execution of this plan of education will devolve

Summary

The plan of the new German national education has been set forth in sufficient detail for our purposes. The next question that arises is this: who should lead the way in executing this plan, whom can we count on to do so, and on whom have we counted in the past?

We have established this education as the highest and, at the present time, single most urgent concern for German love of fatherland, and wish through it to usher into the world the improvement and regeneration of the entire human race. To begin with, however, that love of fatherland should inspire the state in every German territory, preside over it, and be the driving force behind all its decisions. It ought to be the state, therefore, on which we first fix our expectant gaze.

Will the state realise our hopes? What can the foregoing lead us to expect of it – always, it goes without saying, looking not to one particular state but to Germany as a whole?

In modern Europe education did not actually proceed from the state, but from that power from which states for the most part derived their own: from the celestial spiritual realm of the Church. The Church saw itself not so much as a constituent of the earthly commonwealth as a colony of heaven quite alien to it, sent to enlist citizens for this foreign state wherever it could take root; its education aimed at nothing save that men would not be damned in the other world but blessed.