[473] meaningless, statement. But let me say in one [word]: In a public school, or in a school in which all types of religions--and humanisms, more than religions, probably are together, you cannot of course, in the situation in which you live here in this country, in which there is no official connection between state and church--you cannot teach a special symbolic content. So the only way--and I think this was the wisdom of the early church--was that they said: We ARE concrete [?]. In this event (which they called Jesus, whom they called the Christ) something has happened which gives us the criterion transcending our whole situation and makes us universal. But not universal in the sense of being better than the others--Christianity has never, in its theol- ogical affirmations, affirmed that it is better than the others, as Christianity, but they only said we have a . . . . . ? . . . . . The school, in this case, is not the place where these symbols are taught.

For this reason I didn't mention it even. I spoke about home, society and church, but I didn't mention the school. The school is quite different in other countries. When I was in the public school in Germany, the Lutheran^a background was a self-understood thing, and the whole instruction, the whole education, in this public school was connected with the life of the church, the ONE church--there is only one church building in a smaller place, in Germany, and one church;

there are no sects, no different denominations at all. And in this one church, which dominates, the life of the school ALSO was concentrated. But that was a quite different situation, . . . . . but there was also the Gymnasium, a combination of high school and college: there it was done only in the RELIGIOUS instruction hours--which belonged officially to it--but not in the others.