Humanities, education, and the continuity of culture

I would say, in the light of my own experience, that an understanding heart is everything in a teacher, and cannot be esteemed highly enough. One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.

Because there are, among the other pupils, gifted and highly strung natures which ought not to be hemmed in and stifled, the school curriculum should for that very reason never wander too far from the humanities into over specialized fields. The coming generation should at least be shown the doors that lead to the many different departments of life and the mind. And it seems to me especially important for any broad-based culture to have a regard for history in the widest sense of the word. Important as it is to pay attention to what is practical and useful, and to consider the future, that backward glance at the past is just as important. Culture means continuity, not a tearing up of roots through “progress.” For the gifted child in particular, a balanced education is essential as a measure of psychic hygiene. As I have said, his gift is one-sided and is almost always offset by some childish immaturity in other regions of the psyche. Childhood, however, is a state of the past. Just as the developing embryo re­capitulates, in a sense, our phylogenetic history, so the child-psyche relives “the lesson of earlier humanity,” as Nietzsche called it. The child lives in a pre-rational and above all in a pre-scientific world, the world of the men who existed before us. Our roots lie in that world and every child grows from those roots. Maturity bears him away from his roots and immaturity binds him to them. Knowledge of the universal origins builds the bridge between the lost and abandoned world of the past and the still largely inconceivable world of the future. How should we lay hold of the future, how should we assimilate it, unless we are in possession of the human experience which the past has bequeathed to us? Dispossessed of this, we are without root and without perspective, defenceless dupes of whatever novelties the future may bring. A purely technical and practical education is no safeguard against delusion and has nothing to oppose to the counterfeit. It lacks the culture whose innermost law is the continuity of history, the long procession of man’s more than individual consciousness.This continuity which reconciles all opposites also heals the conflicts that threaten the gifted child.

C.G. Jung, “The Gifted Child,” in The Development of Personality, trans. R.F.C. Hull

For other posts involving C.G. Jung, see here.