Hegel and the Philosophy of Education

Nigel Tubbs
King Alfred's College, Winchester

Hegel's contribution to education has been largely overlooked by those in philosophy and
in educational theorising. This is astonishing because Hegel's philosophy, of all Western
philosophical systematic and non- systematic critiques, is arguably the one which is most
clear about its educational foundations. Before Hegel became a university lecturer he was
for eight years (1808-1816) the Headteacher of the Nuremburg Gymnasium or grammar
school. In that time not only did he write his Science of Logic (1812, 1816) he thought
through issues of pedagogy and of learning and teaching in many of his letters which are
still current nearly 200 years later. These letters written between 1808 and 1816 contained
reflections on discipline, on the problems and advantages of student centred learning, on
the contradictions of independent learning, on the bad practice of 'spoon feeding', on the
part that the classics can play and many other aspects of educational theory and practice. I
cannot, in what follows, rehearse all of these and the interested reader should consult
Butler, C. and Seiler, C. (1984).
I will however, give a brief overview of his educational theory and practice in the
Gymnasium before looking at the ways in which education plays a wider and much more
significant role in his philosophy overall.
As a teacher Hegel combined an interesting mixture of what we would call traditional and
progressive ideas. He discouraged duelling, fighting and smoking as well as political
activity. In his school address of a 1810 he stated that 'for those attend our school we
expect quiet behaviour, the habit of continuous attention, respect and obedience to the
teachers and a proper and seemly conduct both towards these and their fellow pupils'
(Mackenzie, (1909) p. 163). He also introduced military drill into the school day, arguing
that it helped students to learn quickly and 'to have the presence of mind to carry out a
command on the spot without previous reflection' (1909: 165). He was impressed by the
discipline held in the classroom of Pythagoras who demanded that his pupils keep silent
for the first four years of their studies. Surely says Hegel, 'the philosopher at least has the
right to ask of the reader to keep his own thoughts quiet until he has gone through the
whole' (1984: 293). Such comments give us today the impression of an authoritarian and
didactic teacher, one who did not encourage his pupils to think for themselves or to
express their own opinions. Progressive teachers today would see such an approach as at
best fearful of losing control in the classroom and at worst as a dogmatic reproduction of
the status quo and a suppression of voice and difference. Post modern thinkers might add
that it is no longer credible to believe that a teacher can claim to be offering 'a whole'.
Hegel's response to such thinking even in 1816 was that 'it has become the prejudice not
only of philosophical study but also - and indeed even more extensively - of pedagogy
that thinking for oneself is to be developed and practised in the first place as if the subject

matter of no importance' (1984: 340). Four years earlier Hegel also expressed the view
that 'the unfortunate urge to educate the individual in thinking for himself and being selfproductive has cast a shadow over truth' (1984: 279).
Yet and on the other hand and a much more liberal side to his views on students can also
be found. Mackenzie notes that he was much liked by his students and that his 'genuine
the enthusiasm for knowledge' (1909: 32) was infectious. He could teach most subjects
with ease, he encouraged wide reading and took a personal interest in the students'
reading material. He interviewed all the students before they left the Gymnasium,
whether when they were proceeding to university or not.
His distaste for traditional didactic forms of instruction is clear in his reproach of the
district school councillor, whose 'only concept of educating the young is the misery of
endless inculcating, reprimanding, memorising - not even learning by heart but merely
the misery of endless repetition, pressure and stupefaction, ceaseless spoon feeding and
stuffing. He cannot comprehend that in learning a young mind must in fact behave
independently' (1984: 199). In another school address Hegel made a speech that echoed
the thoughts of many modern educators about respect for the learning and freedom of the
student. Hegel says that teachers should not induce in children a feeling of subjection and
bondage - to make them obey anothers will even in unimportant matters - to demand
absolute obedience for obedience's sake, and by severity to obtain what really belongs
alone to the feeling of love and reverence. A society of students cannot be regarded as an
assemblage of servants nor should they have the appearance or behaviour of such.
Education to independence demands that young people should be accustomed early to
consult their own sense of propriety and their own reason (1909: 175).
Summing up this ambivalence at the heart of Hegel's educational theory and practice he
notes that 'to regard study as mere receptivity and memory work is to have a most
incomplete view of what instruction means. On the other hand, to concentrate attention
on the pupils own original reflections and reasoning is equally one-sided and should be
still more carefully guarded against' (1909: 167). The contradictory nature of Hegel's
reasoning here, and his seemingly holding two irreconcilable views are totally in keeping
with the philosophical system for which he his so infamous. In moving now to look at the
part education plays in the system we can make a smooth transition by looking at one of
the most educationally significant of Hegel's letters. Speaking not only of philosophy in
the Gymnasium but of philosophy as a whole Hegel wrote
Philosophical content has in its method and soul three forms: it is 1. abstract, 2.
dialectical, and 3. speculative. It is abstract insofar as it takes place generally in the
element of thought. Yet as merely abstract it becomes - in contrast to the dialectical and
speculative forms- the so- called understanding which holds determinations fast and
comes to know them in their fixed distinction. The dialectical is the movement and
confusion of such fixed determinateness; it is negative reason. The speculative is positive
reason, the spiritual, and it alone is a really philosophical (1984: 280).

It is this triune system which has made Hegel one of the most difficult and challenging
yet profound and comprehensive thinkers of the modern era. His philosophy is unusually,
but importantly, a theory of what education actually is. Fundamentally Hegel views
education and learning as 'experiential' (see Hegel, 1977: 55). But to have a philosophy of
education or, better, a science or philosophy that is education, experience has somehow to
experience itself, to recognise the educational development which is taking place. The
logic of this 'self-experience' has the triune structure outlined above. An object is thought
(known), then mediated in its being known as a thought thought again or known as notknown and finally known and not-known as both of these. This final stage is therefore not
final at all, and its instability is its being educational or our continued learning from and
about experience.
Hegels system has been and continues to be characterised variously as dogmatic,
totalitarian, closing, oppressive, domesticating, and as the archetypal model of a system
which believes it has grasped the structure and content of knowledge as a whole. But
these interpretations, be they from within Marxism, critical theory, postmodern theory,
feminism, literary theory, philosophy, sociology or cultural studies have not and
continually refuse to read Hegels system educationally. The only thing that grows in
'certainty' in the system is our own comprehension of the necessity of uncertainty in all
that we do, all that we think and all that we learn. When the philosophical and spiritual
education which lies at the heart of Hegels system is interpreted only as an ordinary
abstract education offering abstract knowledge then it is interpreted as if it were an
'empirical whole'. But such thinking is precisely what our philosophical education
undermines and continually protests against.
More sophisticated readings of Hegel, particularly those which place him in relation to
Kant, argue that he is not offering a nave theory of truth nor a philosophy of absolute
closure (see, for example, Rose, 1981). However, unlike Rose most other commentators
who find that they can identify with the circle of misrecogniton in Hegel and sympathise
with the power of its return cannot go the whole way in comprehending this
misrecognition to be science. The charge against Hegel is that his phenomenology of
experience and learning overcomes its own uncertainties by claiming (or desiring) to
have its meaning, structure and truth present to it before those experiences (see, for
example, Beardsworth (1996), p. 59). The circle, in other words, completes only what it
presupposes or what it wants to complete, leaving no room for the different, the
incommensurable and the impossible.
This is a difficult charge to consider in such a brief space but three defences can be made
here (see also Tubbs (1997)). First, to assume that uncertainty and difference have a
significance somewhere other than within the circle of experience is to reify them and to
separate them from the conditions which are there predetermination, even if this
predetermination renders them impossible. Second, such reification is only another
repetition of modern (bourgeois) social and political relations, separating again the
labouring consciousness from its objects and refusing the philosophical and spiritual
import of the logic of their return to each other in and as experience (again). Third, that it
is therefore Hegel (and Nietzsche!) who offer a critique of modern unfreedom without

importing concepts of impossibility, trace or 'differance', concepts which themselves

presuppose negative experience not to be its own education and development. The
Hegelian system stands guard against all such presuppositions of education, positive and
negative, abstract and dialectical, empirical and postmodern.
What, then, do we learn within the circle of experience? Do we overcome our
misrecognitions? Do we learn from our experiences to see the world 'correctly'? Do we
arrive at the truth? The answer for Hegel is both yes and no. We do arrive at a recognition of that which we have misrecognised, but this recognition does not overcome
misecognition and it does not save or mend the world (Fackenheim, 1994). It does give
us a philosophical and spiritual understanding of the world and it is positive in this sense.
But it retains its negativity for it is based on our experience in which our knowledge of
the world is always lost. How, then, would we live within this negation of negation? The
answer is we would live educationally, learning and continually struggling to comprehend
the contradictory and difficult nature of those experiences, to know them as both true and
untrue and to resist all one sided repetitions of modern unfreedom. This philosophical and
spiritual education is far more dramatic than any abstract determination about truth or
identity which resolves the difficulty. In any case, as Hegel made clear in the Introduction
to his Phenomenology of Spirit such resolutions cannot hold against the negative power
and inevitability of further experiences in which the philosophical and the spiritual return
again (and again).
To end, two further things can be said of Hegel and education. First the structure of his
philosophical system, being as it is a science of rational experience, is also a model of
personal, social, spiritual and political development. His Philosophy of Right (1967)
reveals this educational structure showing the movement from 'natural' family education
to the civil education of bourgeois social relations in which the family is replaced as
educator. Finally, within civil society we experience many different ways in which our
civil relations have truths beyond their immediate bourgeois appearance. These are our
experiences of culture which, for Hegel, re-present the relation between persons and the
universal. Bildung is the term used by Hegel to describe this sort of education but it does
not 'end' in culture or in cultural studies. Culture for Hegel is not the 'end of reason'
(1967: 125) for our experience of culture (it could, for example, be religious or aesthetic)
is itself another education for us, one which Hegel describes as 'the absolute transition
from an ethical substantiality which is immediate and natural to the one which is
intellectual and so both infinitely subjective and lofty enough to have attained
universality of form' (1967; 125). Freedom becomes for Hegel an educational issue
characterised by the difficult struggle to make these experiences our own education, our
own spiritual self-development. Rejecting reason and freedom on the grounds of their
difficulty and their tendency to disappoint us, and even to oppose themselves, as recent
postmodernism has done, would be despised by Hegel. The difficulty is precisely what
freedom consists in and demands.
Lastly and perhaps most controversially, Hegel has a philosophy of history. This means
that he sees the same educational development outlined above in the unfolding of human
history. It would seem from his Philosophy of History (1956) that the rationality of the

west marks the highest expression of human development that the world has seen and,
according to Fukuyama (1989), can expect. Late twentieth century western
philosophising has largely rejected such a view, rejecting in particular its racist and
imperialist overtones that west is best and that all other worldviews are underdeveloped,
nave, simple, whatever. (At times Hegels seems equally derogatory to women) In
response, at the very least one is obliged to read the Philosophy of History in the light of
the system and therefore educationally. What the Philosophy of History reveals is the
history of human misrecognition of itself and of its knowledge of truth, and the forms in
which that misrecognition have been represented. Nor does the philosophy of history for
Hegel necessarily culminate in the end of history. True, at times, it appears that there is
little left to do, but equally and predominantly our philosophical stage of western
development is that in which our own negativity is still also our own subjectivity. This is
the basis of the modern state but is still characterised by misrecognition and struggle and
not by final resolutions. Those 'final solutions' which have part of the western twentieth
century are not Hegelian in nature, indeed they are expressions of what happens when the
struggle of freedom and of education are refused or are themselves reified. The use of
international law to try and combat the triumph of unfreedom may well be Hegelian, but
international law itself is also another form of misrecognition and necessarily both master
and slave of world spirit. It is by no means the case that Hegels philosophy of history
precludes other world views, e.g. Judaism and Islam, from developing their relationship
between state and religion, or human freedom and divine law, or again between reason
and God, in their own ways. There is evidence that this has always happened, continues
to happen and will happen in the future. Hegels critics are perhaps more imperialist than
their adversary and certainly less open to education and learning in assuming that other
world views are either inside or outside the philosophy of history rather than, as the West
is, in constant negotiation with it and repetition of it.

References
Beardsworth, R. (1996) Derrida and the Political, London: Routledge
Butler, C. and Seiler, C. (1984) Hegel: The Letters, Bloomington: Indiana University
Press
Fackenheim, E. (1994) To Mend the World, Bloomington: Indiana University Press
Fukuyama, F. (1989) The End of History, The National Interest, vol. 16, pp. 3-18.
Hegel, G.W.F. (1956) The Philosophy of History, New York: Dover Publications
Hegel, G.W.F. (1967) Philosophy of Right, Oxford University Press
Hegel, G.W.F. (1969) Science of Logic, London: Humanities Press
Hegel, G.W.F. (1977) Phenomenology of Spirit, Oxford University Press

Mackenzie, M (1909) Hegels Educational Theory and Practice, London: Swan

Sonnenshein, p. 163
Rose, G. (1981) Hegel Contra Sociology, London: Athlone
Tubbs, N. (1996) Hegels Educational Theory and Practice, British Journal of
Educational Studies, vol. 44, no. 2, pp. 181-199.
Tubbs, N. (1997) Contradiction of Enlightenment: Hegel and the Broken Middle,
Aldershot, Ashgate.

Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Education