Facs
Transcript
This is not even true of their own schools, where they are first of all administrators and then sometimes one of them has also some educational ideas. [some laughter] But it is certainly not true, in no way true, of the general situation of education in this country. There are other powers much more important, [just] as in Europe before the totalitarian movements came. And the first is the [home]: the [home] was able to give hidden resistance—hidden; open was impossible—to its own system, even in totalitarian systems. Not open—because the children would go to the next Gauleiter and would accuse their parents, under Nazism; but hidden, by the very existence of the [home], by the reality, which is always reality of introduction, and the introduction into the [home] starts with birth and is therefore the most important one.
Then there are also in this country other powers—of course the churches—and the representatives of the political ideas about which fight is going on. And then very important—and that, all teachers should know—the gang, in the largest sense of the word. I have been educated in very important respects by a Christian fraternity to which I belonged in Germany—for a lifetime, that is, of course, but decisively for four or five years. And there, those students who were a little bit older, one or two years older, were the real authorities—we didn't care very much about the professors in comparison with the older students—and I think you do the same!
Now here you have a very large concept of education, and the title (“educators”) should be applied to all of them. Now a little more about this Thursday.