Modern Education
by Otto Rank
Translated from the German by Mabel E. Moxon
(Alfred A. Knopf, 1932)
(Agathorn Press, 1968)
Happiness and success seldom go hand in hand and mostly they arrive when unsought for.
Page 5.
The individual has at least two characters, the one formed and shaped by the mother, whereas the other is the self-created character formed from it.
Page 6.
Education has no power over this early influence of the mother, yet the mother’s influence is necessarily the first instrument of education.
Page 8.
Education cannot alter the impulse-disposition, but can only influence its development or inhibition, and this in two ways thought What and the How offered to the child, that is, through the content and also dynamically, through the emotional force with which the content is presented.
Page 9.
Up to puberty the child belongs to the mother and mixes with the women, then follows an “education” compressed into a relatively short period of time to adulthood.
Page 9.
The actual ideology of education emanates from the community with the expressed purpose of making the child a valuable member of society.
Page 11.
In case of difficulties it was assumed that the child and not the education was to blame and therefore force was used, from which developed the educational concept of punishment.
Page 11.
Only when Rousseau’s educational idea of the equality and equal inheritance of all men had been forcibly materialized in the French citizenship, only then did modern pedagogy emerge with the aim of creating citizens who would be placed on an equal footing one with another.
Page 12.
Rousseau created the ideal of equality from his own personal experiences and suffering.
Page 12.
Rousseau’s idea that all men are equally free-born gave modern pedagogy the scientific presupposition implicit in every system of education; namely, that also the psychical aptitude of all men is the same and hence any individual can be made a representative of any ideology that the community likes.
Page 13.
Rousseau, presumably from personal motives, was not able to see that every human being is also equally unfree, that is, we are born in need of authority and we even create out of freedom, a prison.
Page 13.
In going back to the training of the instincts, Psychoanalysis at the same time questions the content and methods of the prevailing educational indeology.
Page 16.
Genius and insanity dwell side by side, at least, extreme talent and neurosis seem to be inseparably bound together although they appear in the most varied and mixed relationship.
Page 19.
We must ask ourselves the question if in the prevention of neurosis there may not also be a danger of preventing genius, perhaps even the proximate danger of preventing the development of men.
Page 20.
If we could prevent neurosis in the adult by correct education in childhood, the next question would be, of what does a right education of the child consist?
Page 21.
Is there not a possibility that the claim to produce high quality, a claim present in every system of education, might also be the cause for a relatively high percentage of failure?
Page 22.
Real education, in the sense of the prevailing ideal of type, is a community affair and as such it is far less problematical in primitive groups as well as in rigid state organizations, than in middle-class democracies where everyone carries a marshal`s staff in his satchel.
Page 22.
Rousseau’s idea, that appears in practice grotesque, of an individual teacher for every single pupil, has been materialized by the naughty child who obstinately keeps his individuality.
Page 23.
Love respects, protects, and wants individuality; the state on the other hand wants none of it, and hence it must necessarily have a system (or several systems)of compulsory education.
Page 24.
The education and development of individualities is like a game of chance, uncontrollable through the cooperation of disposition and milieu (education) as is the occasional departure into neurosis, and the State risks deviation from the norm above as below, in the educational endeavour to attain as many as possible average values..
Pages 27-28.
The suppression of individuality by a strong community ideal may also lead to the formation of neurosis.
Page 28.
The formation of individualities can never be the program of education, the very nature and system of which is to form types.
Page 28.
Pages 29-30.
For the development and unfolding of individuality, we need love.
Page 30.
The fundamental new content of psychological education is sexuality.
Page 31.
At a given period in individual development the role of educator is transferred from one person (mother) to the community; more precisely expressed, that in place of a human being as a pattern of education, a collective ideology appears as the educational ideal.
Page 33.
There is no doubt that the intellectual part in education has continually increased in the course of time, yet it is also evident that there can be no effective education at all without strong emotional influences.
Page 34.
By increasingly intellectualizing education and making it more technical, new and stronger emotional forces had to be mobilized for its achievement, and also to give it balance.
Page 34.
Psychoanalysis shifts the beginning of sexual education from puberty to childhood and makes the incision between family and community approximately there where it had already been made by the state (compulsory education). Secondly, Psychoanalysis raises this sexual education from the purely emotional sphere to the intellectual level of our community ideology, n that it proclaims sexuality … note only a means of education, but - in the form of sexual enlightenment - also the subject of education.
Page 35.
We may perhaps have to be resigned to an earlier maturing of our children since they have to achieve a greater development to reach our present-day level of civilization.
Page 35.
The concept of maturity corresponds to a natural process of development which, when artificially produced or influenced, would be out of place in any kind of educational ideology.
Page 39.
The whole movement of sexual enlightenment is doubtless praiseworthy in its tendency to consider sexuality as something harmless and not as something sinful and forbidden, an attitude which can only poison the entire later life of the individual. But this inoffensiveness tacitly comprises the release of sexual activity, for it cannot be comprehended - especially by the child - why one should not do something when it is not “bad.”
Page 41.
What is apparently manifest in the conflict between school and church is that sex education is on the point of replacing the religious training, and it is now also psychologically evident that the religious education has been a legitimate precursor of the psychological education and not merely a hindrance to it. This is clearly shown in the different answers given to the famous question of the child as to where we come from; the religious training answers it by pointing to God as the creator f mankind, modern education answers it by giving a biological explanation.
Page 43.
The sexual instruction of children, that is, putting them on an equality with adults in this matter, does not help much if the parents’ valuation of the sexual problem excludes their religious belief, or in other words, if the parental knowledge of sexual matters has the appearance of being a knowledge of all the mysteries of life, a knowledge which the child does not and never will possess even as the adults do not possess it.
Page 45.
The child like primitive man tends more to the unreal, he does not want logical, causal explanations, but emotional consolation and he denies reality in favour of consoling illusions which therefore seem to him to be “truer.”
Page 47.
Whatever one’s attitude to sex is, it cannot be denied that a great part of its attraction arises from curiosity, from its being kept secret and forbidden.
Pages 48-49.
Sexual education signifies a radical attack on the fundamentals of al pedagogy and this, not prudery, explains the resistance against it.
Page 51.
The idea of sexual education gives the appearance of emancipating the individual and his impulse life from the chains of a religious and conventional morality; whereas its practical application in educational reforms is in fact not at all radical but conservative because it is not individual but collective. In that sexuality is first consciously and then officially made the subject of education, the idea of sexual enlightenment loses its individual-revolutionary character and necessarily becomes - like every educational ideology - a representative of the collective community will.
Page 52.
Sexuality is a collective phenomenon which the individual at all stages of civilization wants to individualize, that is, control.
Page 52.
We see the community at all times and under all circumstances endeavouring to deprive the individual as far as possible thr9ugh convention, law, and custom, of the arbitrary practice of sexuality.
Pages 52-53.
The sexual problem which contains in it the two irreconcilable antitheses of individual and species.
Page 53.
One cannot correctly estimate the value of sexuality.
Page 53.
The modern sexual education which seems to be so individualistic is really aspiring to exploit this collective character of sexuality in order to combat increasing individualization of it Sex teaching as a subject of education with the admitted purpose of introducing sexual enlightenment into the curriculum of the schools would thus prove to be a grave interference with the individual’s personal freedom.
Page 54.
I believe that the individual’s stronger inclination for sexual freedom manifested in the increase of divorce, promiscuity, and perversions, is nothing but an individual reaction against the threatening invasion of the uprising sexual socialization which is implied in the modern ideology of education
Pages 55-56.
The individual’s struggle against het collective fore of sexuality is as old as humanity and is repeated in every child in the well known sexual conflicts which can be avoided by no kind of education or explanation because they are inherent in the dualistic nature of the sexual impulse and of man himself as an ego and as part of the species. And the more parents and educators advocate from their collective attitude the sexual enlightenment of their children, the more (so experience has taught us) will the children themselves oppose this interference of society in their private lives.
Page 57.
All education is fundamentally a training of the will.
Page 58.
All education is, in effect, a matter of somehow moulding the individual (whose most natural self-expression is the will) into a social and collective being.
Page 58.
Broadly speaking the training of the will takes place in the home, and the education of the intellect for which this home-training lays the foundation, takes place in the school.
Page 59.
One might say that the parents are the natural educators of the child’s emotional life, and that the teacher is the educator ordained by the community for the systematic training of the child’s understanding and intelligence.
Page 61.
If we are to have a systematic and consciously directed education of the child’s impulses, we must first know and understand the child’s impulse life.
Page 63.
Psychoanalysis has postulated the sexual impulse as the nucleus of the infantile impulse life, and hence declares sexual education to be the chief task of pedagogy in early childhood.
Page 64.
All educational difficulties seem to be traceable to a will conflict between child and educator.
Page 69.
The emotions are the medium, through which another human being is able to influence us. That means that the essential factor in education if the emotional life.
Page 71.
Feeling reacts most of all to feeing, and is influenced by it.
Page 71.
As long as the child’s emotional expressions are felt by adults as disturbances (of their own emotional life) or in so far as they are provoked in the child only for the gratification of adults, there can be no free unfolding or development of emotion in the child.
Page 73.
The emotions cannot be educated, they can, however, be formed and influenced, but only by the model emotional life of the parents.
Pages 73-74.
A free natural expression of emotion in the educator will also most easily stimulate such emotions in the child.
Page 74.
We cannot beget only god, beautiful, noble and moderate emotions in the child; if the child is to have a human emotional life, then it will always be capable also of the ugly, ignoble and immoderate affects, and even these will always be more valuable from a human standpoint, then complete suppression of the affect, which would then find some outlet in other, not always beautiful ways.
Page 74.
If parents and educators are themselves as much as possible in general, and also towards the child, then this will better enable the child to accept , develop, and express its own self as it sees the parents also doing.
Page 75.
The child very soon identifies the manifestations of impulse and the suppression of impulse with manifestations of the will and suppression of the will.
Pages 76-77.
The suppression of feeling begins with the suppression of bad feelings, or such as are felt to be bad, and then encroaches upon the whole life of the emotions.
Page 77.
The education of the emotions is not education in the real sense of the word, as for example is the training of the impulses and the will, which consists mainly of guiding and forming given forces. The child brings into the world relatively strong impulses and develops them in the course of its natural growth; these fundamentally need only to be tamed and domesticated.
Page 78.
The child brings into the world a relatively rudimentary emotional life, which it cannot further develop alone, out of itself, but only in relation to the person near it.
Pages 78-79.
The primitive impulse life itself, according to its very nature, tends to motor discharge, which results in the feeling of gratification.
Page 81.
Education will always remain training of the will, that is, restriction of the personal and individual in favour of the race with its unchanging collectivity and its changing ideals - irrespective of what community ideology is at the moment in power.
Page 91.
The prevailing ideology must influence education, the very nature of which consists of inculcating the individual with collective ideas and values.
Page 94.
It would then seem that religion, the educational means of primitive civilization, is almost an entirely collective ideology, whereas the essential educational means of our time, psychology, is a fundamentally individual ideology.
Page 94.
Religion … was not only the means of education but at the same time it supplied its most essential content.
Page 98.
Christianity for the first time materialized this hyper-collective character of the religious, in that it created a world religion which embraced many nationalities without demanding the renunciation of their characteristics. … A world religion such as Christianity, is, however, not permanently able to fulfil the national ideal of religion, as shown in the religious wars of the Middle Ages, as well as in the World War also, where those professing the same creed fought against each other for their national preservation.
Page 101.
The religious ideology … cannot be expanded beyond a certain limit, because then the abstraction becomes incomprehensible for individuals and hence insignificant. At this juncture, humanist springs up to replace the super-ideology of a world religion no longer equal to its task.
Page 102.
Sexual education is now … an attack of the community on the individual in the sense of utilizing the collective forces lying in sexuality, as against the individual forces.
Pages 103-104.
The child for thousands of years has been the last refuge of the individually shattered belief in immortality.
Pages 108-109.
The educator might believe in giving sexual freedom as he conceives it to the child, he does this in communizing sexuality, in making it a subject for enlightenment, and precisely in this way he makes it unfree. The adult needs a collective sexual ideology for the maintenance of the biological ego continuity, whereas the growing child rightly insists on an individualistic sexual ideology.
Page 111.
One might say only that the creative artist unites in his work both spheres, the individual and the collective, thereby producing something beyond the two which in its turn influences the formation of new collective ideologies in individuals.
Page 113.
The little we know about primitive forms of society indicates that in the original community the collective ideology had the leadership and not a single outstanding personality or a group of such personalities.
Page 117.
The leading group does not consist of the strongest - of which there may be only a few or actually only one - but of the oldest, most experienced, the wise in ideologies, who are teachers rather than leaders.
Page 117.
The earliest form of religion was no ideology of God but a soul-belief, that is, an ideology of immortality that touched the collectivity interest and not the individual who did not exist as such in primitive communities. Indeed the development of the individual himself proved to be a turning towards another kind of soul solace become necessary through the collapse of the collective ideology of immortality represented in the belief in the soul. … leadership became a possibility only with the development of the individual, and this is reflected religiously in the gradual change of the collective soul-belief into the belief in immortality with the characteristics of the personal god-concept.
Page 120.
The history of the leader thus psychologically begins with the creation of God, or more correctly, the emergence of the individualistic ideology of the leader is first reflected in and with the emergence and development of the idea of God.
Page 121.
Freud explained the concept of God as an exalted father image which he actually identified with the concept of leader-father.
Page 121.
It is first individuality, and later on, personality - as opposed to the community - which is personified in the idea of God, in the hero ideal and finally in the form of the leader.
Page 122.
All psychological, including psychoanalytic, biographies of creative personalities have made intelligible much in the individual as such, only not that which is specific to the personality.
Page 124.
One becomes a father by chance often as one becomes a leader, without having the corresponding father psychology which one either acquires or not. One becomes a leader also, first through the masses, as one becomes a father through the child; only the leader is in far greater degree the representative of the masses, of the collective whole and their ideology and this is precisely his very psychology though not individualistic.
Page 125-126.
God is the prototype of the leader crated by the group, an ideal prototype whose materialization in reality is determined through the individual psychology of the personality of the leader apart from the cultural and social influences of the time.
Page 126.
The concept of God has proved sociologically to be the symbol of the individual representing the masses, and psychologically the expression of the will representing this individuality.
Page 126.
We have found two characteristics that qualify the individual for the role of leader, although they do not necessarily lead to it. The first is a preponderance of the collective ideology, which seems, as it were, to be something beyond or above the individual; the second is a purely individual characteristic, namely, a strong will that is appropriate for the acceptance of the godlike role of leader.
Page 127.
The leader always personifies a strong will, just as God does, and in times when the [people are looking for a leader the common ideology is concentrated in the desire for a strong will which precisely the leader has and by means of which he is able to personify the requisite collective ideology prevailing at the time.
Page 128.
A strong individual will with a correspondingly strong individual ideology for which the personality alone is responsible, are characteristics that typify the artist. Finally a strong collective ideology that subjects the individual will to that of the community which carries the responsibility for it, as the characteristic that typifies the pedagogue or educator.
Page 129.
Although the educator creates in the name of the community, the artist autocratically in his own name.
Page 130.
The roles of helper and ruler that are united in the God-concept are divided in his earthly representatives among different individuals who are then crystallized into types and are differentiated into occupations.
Page 130.
Ethnologically, chief and priest, king and teacher, leader and therapeutist, belong together as complements; the first pair correspond to the collective stage of the belief in the soul, the second to the social stage of the sex age (the patriarchy), the third to the individual stage of the psychological ideology.
Page 131.
The Middle Ages and early Renaissance yet cling to the ideal of imitation, for even in it the creative force could manifest itself.
Page 136.
The manifest neurotic age in which we live today is only the consistent result of this thousands of years’ long development beginning with the religious concept of God, passing through stages where it gradually became humanized, concrete and democratic in early representatives, up to its absolute counterpart in the neurotic type.
Page 140.
The neurotic type who is also more or less aware of his inner deficiencies, is a living example of the disintegration of the genius and God concept which with the cessation of constructive collective ideology is reduced to the natural feeling of human insufficiency The neurotic is, so say, the first human type who lacks the support of an ideology of God of whatever kind, and is thrown entirely on his human qualities on which he tries to live and cannot.
Page 141.
Only by living in close union with a god-ideal that has been erected outside one’s own ego is one able to live at all.
Pahe 141-142.
A positive, constructive ideology must be brought into education from an austere collective tradition and cannot be developed as a result of education.
Page 143.
The energetic and creative individuals on earth have always lived in one way or another on this primal source of personified force of will, and only through participation in this collective will, have been capable and efficient.
Page 144.
Christianity, as the first religion of the individual, introduced the worship of the Son as God, whereas the preceding hero-age of the ancients persecuted the son, because the father resisted giving up his individual immortality.
Pages 145-146.
Only in recent times can one speak of idolizing the child, since the child has become not only the centre of the family but also education is beginning to be focussed on the child.
Pages 146-147.
The idolization of the child does not go much further back than to Christianity, in which we have to recognize the commencement of the individualization of the son.
Page 147.
The child came from God, now the child is God.
Page 147.
The child in the age of the belief in the Soul and in a still narrower sense in the patriarchal sex-age, was important as the one who continues our life, now he is the leader to a better life.
Page 157-148.
The paternal struggle for the child within the family seems to be projected into and magnified in the social strife for the pedagogic ideology of the future.
Page 150.
To deny that the parents have the capacity to bring up their children as most pedagogues do today, can only be understood either as a weapon used in the struggle for the child’s soul, or - in so far as it holds good - it must be considered a symptom of a degenerate type of human being whose natural instinct has been spoilt by psychological ideologies.
Page 152.
Every mother and every father is at the same time the naturally born educator of the children who is his or her turn moulds the child by example and trains him by instruction.
Page 153.
It might be remarked that originally the women (mother) represented the individual educational ideology and the men, the collective ideology.
Page 154.
Democracy in principle opens up all possibilities for anybody.
Page 159.
The individual has to vindicate his separate existence in the community through achievement, super-achievement, or special achievement, according to whether the individual is different from the other, feels himself to be so and accepts it or not.
Page 167.
The search for, and the cultivation of, a special talent in the child by parents and educators may be accepted by the child as a means to individualization but it may just as often be felt as an obstacle to the same, like anything imposed on the child from without.
Page 168.
In general the present-day occupations are too widely differentiated for the individual t determine beforehand his choice; on the other hand, they are again so specialized that one must begin in them early in order to master them. Hence, the ever increasing tendency of the schools, even the higher ones, to prepare for everything only in a general and more theoretic way.
Page 169.
The woman thus naturally fulfils two professions as well as wife and mother, namely, that of the educator (of her children) and that of the helper (therapeutist) of her husband.
Page 172.
The transition from the primate group-family (kinsfolk) to our present-day small family is characterized by the acceptance of the father’s individual role of begetter of his children; this role was formerly denied form religious reasons of the belief in immortality. This turn of development changed the child from a collective being into a personal representative of the patriarchal individual-ideology.
Page 184.
Today with the enfeeblement of the patrias potestas and the strengthening of the individualistic tendency, the child is n individual for himself although he is lawfully the father’s successor and is claimed as a collective being by the State. Thus the three chief stages in the ideological development of the child are: a collective being (mother), heir (of the father), private being (Self).
Pages 184-185.
From the history of the family we know that earlier forms of kinship survive even when the actually existing family organization no longer shows this, indeed even when their origin is no longer understood.
Page 185.
The actual school education springs up from the original child-community not to replace “the family” but to preserve the old group community (clan) in process of disappearing.
Page 185.
Today the child is made not only a social but also an individual vindication of marriage, whereas formerly as long as he was a collective being, he made marriage unnecessary.
Page 187.
The child has always been used for something, at times by the community, at times by the parents, or one of the parents.
Page 187.
We today psychically misuse and exploit the children under the mask of individualistic education. Indeed, perhaps the acceptance of children as independent individuals, which completely contradicts the whole parental ideology, is a kind of guilt reaction on the part of the parents towards exploiting the child on the other hand.
Page 187.
In the strife between Christianity and ancient Rome, it has clearly become a conflict between two ideological principles, the patriarchal and the filial. This conflict continues through the whole of the Middle Ages in the strife between the worldly and the spiritual spheres (Emperor and Pope) apparently as a strife for authority, but in truth as a battle for the soul.
Page 191.
It would seem then, that the incest motive had originally served the purpose of an attempt to achieve one’s own immortality in the sense of the sexual ideology and indeed in the transitional period from the collective belief in the soul to belief in immortality in the children.
Page 200.
The incest desire is a symbol of individual immortality to which the ego clings in order to escape the compulsion of the racial immortality in sex.
Page 202.
The girl often leans to the father in order to withdraw from the mother’s influence, for whom she is only daughter, that is, a continuation of the ego.
Page 204.
Although the constructive kind of self-education is the ideal aim of pedagogy, yet one ought not to forget that the child is occupied first with the building up of his will-ego, which the artist can already place in the service of his self-control, and which the neurotic misuses for self-inhibition. On the other hand, the child cannot yet accept himself as can the normal average person, because he is in a process of continual development and still does not possess any formed or polished attitudes, much less a complete personality which he could accept or reject.
Page 211.
The most important question for the individual’s destiny, a problem in which alone education should be interested, is how the individual Self reacts to his inner needs.
Page 213.
In whatever way the educator may gain the child’s confidence and give him moral support yet the fundamental attitude in the “transference situation” always remains, namely to lead the child himself to recognize the motives for his actin or faulty action.
Page 217.
What we can learn from Psychoanalysis that is positive and constructive for education is to be found neither in the personal analysis of the educator nor in the analysis of the child, but simply by using the understanding gained from the analysis of the analytic situation as such.
Pages 220-221.
From the analytic situation once can gain a deeper understanding of every educational, indeed of every human, relationship, if one rightly understands it and does not narrow it down simply to a “transference situation” in the Freudian sense.
Page 221.
If the parents could put their demands ot the child less personally and more generally, and if their educators and teachers could allow the personal element to appear by the side of the general in relation to the pupil, then not only the tension - which today exists between the school and the home - would be essentially reduced, but the whole pedagogic situation would be improved!
Page 226.
Just as the child eats because he is hungry and does not take his meals t please the parents, so he will instinctively grasp the collective ideologies offered him, because he needs them as props, for the infolding and justification of his individual ego.
Page 227.
We have arrived at the present-day therapeutic-ideology of education (the prevention of neuroses) from the neurotic type, which certainly is a product determined by present civilization.
Page 231.
The most general therapeutic idea of education derived from the psychological ideology of the neurotic can be summed up as follows: the general result should be that the individual is able to accept himself as such that is, as being different from others, in other words can affirm himself constructively.
Page 231.
Wher4eas the child’s psychology is built up on the impulse life and should aim rather at an acceptance of it, the adult life as a rule - the more so, the more successful he is socially - must be built up on the vocational life.
Pages 234-235.
The real acceptance of one’s own Self, includes also the acceptance of one’s lacks, imperfections and limitations.
Page 237.
It has been falsely assumed that with the cessation of the educational condemnation of sex, the child will have no conflict with sexuality, but will accept it as something natural. But sexuality is not natural to the child, it might rather be conceived of as the individual’s natural enemy, against which he defends himself from the beginning and with his whole personality.
Page 240.
Marriage signifies a public admission of sexual dependence and of the moral completion brought about through the other.
Page 241.
The parents themselves are decisively influenced and changed by the child in their personality and in their relationship one to another. They themselves, as it were, experience with the growth of the child, a new orientation and a new education which in turn works itself out in the kind of education they give to their child.
Page 242.
All education is ultimately post festum approbation or reprimand or understanding of what has already happened and indeed of something that perhaps never appears a second time in the same way.
Page 243.