On Some Untranslatable German and Sanskrit Words Pertaining to Education

It is perhaps wise to turn to Friedrich Schleiermacher (a German theologian and philosopher) occasionally. He is one of the founders of pedagogy as a discipline. Pedagogy, as it is used and understood in common parlance, is merely the “technic” of teaching. The content of these technics is prescribed by some authority with the goal of making them as universal as possible. In that exercise of universalising, the content becomes sterile and soul-less.

Schleiermacher says, “Education is not what happens in school or formal instruction. Seeing education as just a professional and institutional matter is to deny it both its history and universality as a practice. Education is instead a question of the relation of the older, educating generation to the younger.”

While the transmission aspect of education (of information and skills) is visible and hence talked about and studied, the doers of this transmission and their inter-subjective relations do not often come to the fore, at least not in the praxis of education - educational institutions. Education is founded on the relationship between at least two generations. It is perhaps an unfulfilled hope of the continued progression of some lineage. It must be noted that I am referring to the far richer and deeper educational experience of schools and not of impoverished shops of transactional learning that happens in coaching classes, personal tuitions and their ilk. However, as Dewey noted, “even the traditional school could get along without any consistently developed philosophy of education. All it requires is a set of abstract words like culture, discipline, our great cultural heritage, etc., actual guidance being derived not from them but from custom and established routines.”

This intergenerational transfer is something that is visible in the work of Klaus Mollenhauer as well. The older generation must not be limited to teachers in an institution. Rather, parents are perhaps the first (but not the primary) agents of this generational transfer. Ivan Illich said that schools are reproductive organs of the society.

Schleiermacher worked through oscillations - dialectics - in his Outlines of the Art of Education. I shall work through similar, albeit quite poor, oscillations in the understanding of four words (3 German and 1 Sanskrit).

Erziehung

Schleiermacher uses the word Erziehung to mean something more than the phenomena associated with institutions of education such as a school. For him, Erziehung refers to “the process of bringing up a child, with reference to forming character, shaping manners, and behaviour”. In the current context of outcome-based curricula, this broader focus on the “process of bringing up” is almost certainly not possible. Hannah Arendt talks of 'growing up in the world'. This 'in the world' is something that must be brought to 'the growing up' by the older generation - the educators and the parents. This is a heavy burden, since to bring the 'in the world' to the class, which is an abstraction in itself, requires having 'lived in the world'.

Pädagogik

Pädagogik may be translated in English as pedagogy. In common terms, pedagogy could be taken to mean the practical “models of teaching” (e.g., didactic, behaviourism, constructivism, etc.).

The German word refers to ways in which education (i.e., Erziehung) and formation (i.e., Bildung) can be understood, both theoretically and pragmatically, in terms of what it means to educate and to be(come) educated, and what it means for an individual to form and be formed.
-Norm Friesen

Schleiermacher refers to “dignity of practice”, a phrase that does not exist in the other half of the transmitting generation, namely parents, in my context - contemporary India. The total commodification and the communication standards set by social media, leave no room to offer dignity to practising pedagogues.

Bildung

Bildung has no direct translation. It can be translated as culture and formation. Wilhelm von Humboldt's definition of Bildung as “the linking of the self to the world to achieve the most general, most animated, and most unrestrained interplay” is the most poetic.

Mollenhauer says, “An individual's Bildung is at once a process of broadening and enrichment as well as a narrowing and impoverishment - a question of what might have been. Adults are more than mere midwives to the development of a child's mind and spirit: they also act as all-powerful censors of the adult that the child ultimately becomes.”

And this censoring works in a wanton fashion, without any underlying theory to guide anyone.

Samskāra

The Sanskrit word Samskāra could mean a ceremony which purifies the person. But I am not referring to that meaning of the word. I am referring to Samskāra as “subliminal impression”. Also, perhaps an archetype. According to Yoga philosophy, there are five kinds of mental modifications or vrittis. These are:
- Pramāṇa - real or true cognition
- Viparyaya - unreal or false cognition
- Vikalpa - imagination or delusion
- Nidrā - sleep
- Smriti - memory

I believe it is unique to Indian philosophy that, except Cārvāka, all schools of thought have the ultimate goal of Mokṣa, or liberation. And as per Yoga Sutras (which wrongly and sadly is primarily associated only with āsanas) the cessation or restraining of these vrittis is the goal of Yoga (and life).

Every act leaves behind in the mind a memory. Such residual memories lead to habits, and habits lead to new acts. Such habits are known as samskāras. Samskaras are generated from acts, and these acts are themselves partly due to pre-existent samskāras.

Patājali in Yoga Sutras says that, “by the reason of the pains of change, anxiety and habituation, and by reason of the contrariety of the functionings of the 'qualities' (qualities here mean Samskāras), all indeed is pain to the discriminating.”

All is pain.

So what does the older generation do? Should it be the mid-wife of this transfer of pain? May be, one can attempt to understand one's self as much as he may attempt to understand the world.

This world-weariness can lead to liberation.