potentialities, which are already in the child. Now if we look in this light to the Greek and the Christian education, then we must say: the Greek – or as Kierkegaard^b has emphasized, the Socratic education, which he also called the Religion “A” – presupposes that every human being has potentialities which only must be developed; in mythological terms Plato^d called this the historical memory, which we find in every human being. The example he gives in the dialogue Menon is the slave who is entirely uneducated but who can understand, in a very short time, the Pythagorean proposition if it is shown to him; he has insight into it because, in mythological terms, he remembers the mathematical structures and their inner evidence, from his participation in the eternal Ideas. If we take the word “memory” as a mythological [sic] away from this, then we can speak, instead of that, in terms of man's essential nature, and can speak of the classical concept of natural law, which means essential rational structure, which is always and essentially in him and which only needs to be developed. Whatever you give him, he has it already. You know that this meant, in Socratic metaphorism, the maieutic art, the art of the midwifery, of bringing out that which is in the student, and not necessarily in the teacher, by helping him to bring to light what he already has. This is the fundamental principle of all Socratic and, I can add now, of the humanistic form of education.

There are two groups which do not accept this. The one are the empiricists, or positivists, who say that man is tabula rasa, and that experience mediated largely by the teacher, by the history books, by the traditions, must be given to man from outside. Therefore you can form