Robert Ulich
was a professor of the history and philosophy of education
at Harvard University from 1935 until 1960. During those
years, he published ten books whose subjects ranged from
comparative education to the history of educational thought
to his own philosophy of self-transcendence outlined in
his best known book, The Human Career.
Born in Bavaria to a family with a long tradition of religious
and contemplative thinkers, Ulich entered the Humanistisches
Gymnasium at the age of 9. Over the course of the following
decade, he was educated in the Classics as well as English,
French and Hebrew. Ulich’s classical studies provided
him with a long and profound sense of Western history which
proved critical to his academic career.
At the age of 19, Ulich entered the University of Freiberg.
He subsequently studied at the universities of Neuchatel,
Munich, Berlin, and Leipzig before earning his Ph.D. at
the age of 25. Ulich wrote his doctoral dissertation about
Christian Friedrich Scherenberg, a nineteenth century poet.
At this point, although his philosophical interests were
well developed, they had not yet been applied to the field
of education. His broad interests and unending curiosity
made it difficult for him to specialize until he had a brief
but defining experience working in a metal plant. Observing
the misery of his working-class colleagues, he conceived
of an education that must accommodate the basic human desire
for progress and happiness, an education that is commensurate
with the dynamics of the society in transformation.
Ulich’s new commitment to education expressed itself
professionally in his 1917 appointment as assistant director
of Leipzig Public Libraries. In this role, Ulich developed
a new type of library designed to "initiate and guide
serious reading among working class people.” As Francis
Keppel, a colleague of Ulich’s at Harvard, commented,
"His contribution during the dark days after World
War I was to the building of a Germany whose devotion to
freedom and democracy is now becoming a hope of the free
world." In 1921 Ulich became the assistant counselor
in charge of adult education at the Ministry of Education
of Saxony. Two years later, he was made counselor in charge
of Saxon University, a position he would hold for ten years.
Ulich’s professional endeavors as an educational administrator
were informed by his sense of history and sociology, just
as these experiences enriched his later philosophical work.
Between the years 1928-1933, Ulich also taught philosophy
at the Dresden Institute of Technology.
Ulich's
first wife Elsa, who was known in Germany as the Swedish
Angel of Siberia for her work with POWs during World
War I.
Although Ulich’s
works published during the first two decades of his career
are slim in contrast to his later prodigious outpouring,
two works published during this era suggest the direction
of his later research. Dietmar Waterkamp has noted that
these works demonstrate his ability to analyze the social
and political tendencies of the present epoch by comparing
them with similar constellations in history. Neither work
bore any relation to education.
In 1929 he married
Elsa Brandstroem, daughter of the Swedish ambassador to
Russia. As a Swedish Red Cross nurse, she had acted on behalf
of German prisoners of war by visiting heartrendering camp
after camp all over Siberia, and thereafter became known
as the Swedish Angel of Siberia.
In 1933, in response to a group firing of colleagues at
the Dresden Institute of Technology who were described as
"racially and politically undesirable, " Ulich
resigned both his professorship there and his position with
the Ministry of Education of Saxony. He could easily have
been arrested for this act of protest, but his wife’s
high social standing protected him. Soon after his resignation
Ulich was offered a one year position as lecturer in comparative
education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. The
lectureship rescued Ulich from an increasingly dangerous
political climate. In 1934, Ulich, a 44-year old and seasoned
academic scholar and administrator arrived at Harvard. After
one year, Ulich was appointed Professor of the History and
Philosophy of Education and was soon naturalized as a U.S.
citizen.
There is little question that the tragic rise of the Nazi
party in Germany, whose ultimate aims Ulich foresaw with
uncommon clarity, shaped his approach to educational philosophy.
Ulich wrote, "Nothing is more dangerous to mankind
than the divine gift of faith uncontrolled by the equally
divine gift of reason."
Ulich had a powerful sense of the importance of a guiding
philosophy in education. He was not especially concerned
with methods, believing that teachers could be trusted to
develop appropriate methods if goals were clear. Ulich’s
view stood in vivid contrast to that of John Dewey, whose
progressive philosophy was dominant in the American community
at the time. As Harvard colleague Frederick Ellis commented,
the two men were similar because like Dewey, Ulich would
take philosophy out of the academy and into the brisk air
of public human experience. Nevertheless, Ulich insisted
on the connection between education for personal self-determination
and the success of democracy. Ulich perceived the teacher
as not merely the interpreter of the child, but also the
interpreter of the civilization into which the child has
to grow.
Just as he argued for an overarching vision for education
in the U.S., Ulich argued it is the school’s responsibility
to aid an individual in discovering a purpose in life—without
which maturity is impossible. "If our schools fail
to help a person discover his purpose," Ulich cautioned,
"they fail in almost everything that really matters."
His rich historical
knowledge and philosophical training set him apart from
most educational thinkers at work in the United States.
As Dietmar Waterkamp has observed, "Most of Ulich’s
writings treat the history of the mind in Western culture,
inspired by the insight that the long process of intellectual
search in the West had brought about fundamental beliefs
and convictions about the fate and destination of Mankind,
which our century is at risk of losing unless contemplation
and reflection back to these underlying ideals will take
place."
Ulich argued
in favor of inspiring a new feeling for the value system
which underlies Western culture. Ellis noted, "In arguing
for an abiding sense of direction, Ulich has endeavored
to restore to educational thinking the vision of man from
which were derived the magnificent ideal of democracy and
freedom."
Robert
Ulich addressing a Harvard dinner audience, 1942
(Photo
courtesy of Harvard University Archives)
Ulich’s philosophy of self-transcendence was most fully
articulated in his 1955 book, The Human Career. As
Vana E.M. Kim summarizes, "Ulich held that reason is
the supreme human faculty that guides human action according
to the dictate of the self-limiting, normative principle
of morality and also of a more positive and creative force,
namely the principle of self-realization."
Education, wrote Ulich, was a long enduring process of cultural
self-evolution in which we must discover ourselves as part
of a reality that is creative and whose power compels a
cosmic reverence. His thinking reflected a secular religiousness.
As Ulich explained, "The most radical and comprehensive
thinking leads a person beyond the boundaries of the merely
empirical and rational into the sphere of the mysterious."
Waterkamp explains that Ulich's religiousness was a spirituality
and a belief in belonging to a cosmic totality with no specified
contents of belief and an aversion to every dogmatism. This
belief may have been nourished by his friendship with Paul
Tillich, whom he first met at the Dresden Institute of Technology
and knew later when both men were at Harvard University.
His philosophy of self-transcendence conformed with the
Unitarian faith to which he and one of his favorite educational
philosophers, Thomas Jefferson, belonged.
Arts education, suggested Ulich, both in practice and in
appreciation, was one of the best means of achieving self-transcendence.
Indeed Ulich himself, throughout his busy academic career,
found time to become a poet. He published three books of
poetry over the course of his lifetime.
As a scholar
of comparative education, Ulich analyzed the American school
system. In his 1951 book, Crisis and Hope in American
Education, published by the Beacon Press of the American
Unitarian Association, Ulich outlined the weaknesses of
the current system, mentioning as key factors in its failure
"the lack of a coherent curriculum in schools and undergraduate
studies, the rule of the credit-system, the widespread application
of tests, the broad range of choice for the students—which
allowed the avoidance of intellectually demanding courses
and impeded coherent and sequential learning—the lack
of selection in schools and undergraduate studies, and the
clinging to a ‘single-ladder’ school system."
(Waterkamp). His preferred model for the U.S. educational
system has been described as elitist in that it fell in
line with fellow Unitarian Thomas Jefferson’s belief
in a "natural aristocracy among men." Waterkamp
explains that "it set up a typology of talents in relation
to societal needs as a basis for establishing a selective
school system." In such a system, the two social classes
would share a mutual understanding, if unequal educational
opportunities. Social mobility ought to be a slow process,
according to Ulich, in order to prevent "the half-education
of the Hitler type" and "an uprooted and unemployed
academic proletariat of the Goebbels type."
(Photo
courtesy of Harvard University Archives)
In 1954, Ulich’s
prolific contributions to the fields of the history of education,
philosophy of education, and comparative education were
recognized with his appointment to the first James Bryant
Conant Professorship at Harvard University. He retired from
teaching in 1960 and returned to Germany in 1970.
The fact that Ulich’s name and philosophy are not commonly
known in education today may be related to his intellectual
aims for education which resisted concretization. He did
not focus his energies on a dissection of the American system
or on the creation of methodology, but strove instead to
persuade educational leaders to think critically about educational
problems within a historical and philosophical framework.
After his first wife died in 1947, he married a former student,
Mary Ewen Ulich, who described her husband as relentlessly
productive, "He just cannot be idle. There is no day
of vacation when he does not make some notes for an essay
or book and read a scholarly work." On a more profound
note, she observed, "What he calls the supreme characteristic
of man, namely the capacity of self-transcendence or the
desire to widen one’s horizons of insight and experience,
is his own personality interpreted philosophically."
AWARD
TO PROFESSOR ROBERT ULICH
ROBERT
ULICH, German-born philosopher and educator who fled
his native land shortly after the rise of Adolf Hitler,
was honored Oct. 9, 1957, by the Federal Republic
of Germany with the Commander's Cross of Merit at
a ceremony at the Harvard Faculty Club. Dr. Ulich,
the first James Bryant Conant Professor of Education
at Harvard University, was awarded the medal for the
"great and immeasurable services, by person and
work, in the past and the present [he] has rendered
to the German people, German science and the mutual
relations of Germany and the United States.
FROM
A FACULTY MINUTE
Born in Bavaria,
Robert Ulich, the James Bryant Conant Professor of Education
at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, left a distinguished
career in Germany and became a political refugee in the
United States in 1934.
Francis Keppel, who served as Dean of Harvard's Graduate
School of Education at the time of Mr. Ulich's 1960 retirement
from the faculty—and who later served as U.S. Commissioner
of Education, said:
His departure from Germany in 1933 was not caused by
academic ambition. It was rather a magnificent protest
against a way of life he could not approve. It was an
act of personal courage and intellectual honesty.
Once arrived in the United States, he did not take the
easier path for which his academic training had fitted
him. He joined the faculty of a School of Education, well
knowing that it was neither fashionable nor an easy road
for a new citizen. One might have thought then that Robert
Ulich would champion the pure tradition of German intellectualism,
since a perversion of it was itself in part responsible
for some of the tragedies of his own life. Or he might
have reacted, as so many have done, by taking the leadership
in expounding the popular educational philosophy of the
day in America....
Characteristically, he did not. He ever sought the strength
of both traditions, and struggled to rid them of their
weaknesses. He soon found in the America of the 1930s
and 1940s that he walked a lonely road.
Although a lifelong
educator, Professor Ulich was never one to perceive a wall
of scholarship between those who were highly educated and
those who were not. "If humankind consisted only of
potential professors," he wrote in his 1951 book, Crisis
and Hope in American Education, "civilization would
break down before it had begun. Only on the broad base of
a hard-working and practical-minded people can the scholar
and artist work and live. If a culture has grown so old
that man is judged only according to his brain, then exactly
those who have the brain ought to warn their fellow men
that the pyramid of civilization cannot be built upside
down. Unless the base rests on the ground, the whole structure
will collapse."
To Robert Ulich, education was the symbol of the universal
conscience of humanity.
He retired in 1970 and died in his native Germany in 1977.
Harvard Alumni Bulletin, Fall 1977
The following
excerpts are from an article published in The Christian
Register, the December 1956 periodical of the American
Unitarian Association. The author, a member of the First
Church (Unitarian) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, viewed
education as our relation to the totality of creation,
the All-embracing, the Great Life. Jonathan Messerli,
a colleague, said: “In general style and metaphysics,
he was proably as close to Alfred North Whitehead as to
anyone.”
THE MISSION OF A RELIGIOUS LIBERAL
by Robert Ulich
Knowledge,
wisdom of the past, and true mysticism
combine to help us to find answers
(Photo
courtesy of Harvard University Archives)
Because
of a certain exclusiveness of the Judeo-Christian tradition
with its claim to represent the only right way to heaven,
even people with a more universal point of view are inclined
to identify the adherence to a particular religion with
being religious.
According to old tribal lore, to be found also in Islam,
but not in Brahmanism, Buddhism, and the great Chinese worldviews,
Christianity has taught its disciples for almost 2,000 years
that outside its bailiwick there can be no grace, no salvation,
no vision of the Divine, but only "pagans."
In face of the widening of our horizons through international
contacts, science, and comparative disciplines of thought,
this Christian tribalism breaks down. Even the Catholic
Church no longer likes priests who too stubbornly insist
on the doctrine of nulla salus extra ecclesiam—at
least in countries with a religiously mixed population.
All this provides an enormous challenge for a liberal religion.
It must start from the joyful admission that the same divine
soul is diversely incarnate in many souls and nations, a
belief from which there derives the recognition of the dignity
and equality of all people who seriously strive for the
good and the true.
If the basic religious-moral truths are established, we
well may leave it to the individual to develop his answer
to life's eternal mysteries.
On the other hand, the liberal's insistence on a universal
outlook should not prevent each new generation from knowing
about the language and symbols of our ancestors. Rightly
interpreted, they still contain more about the inner concerns
of humanity than science ever will achieve. And though we
said that adherence to a particular religion does not necessarily
make a man religious, it does not follow from that statement
that a religious personality can develop well without a
person's acquaintance with the spiritual tradition of his
culture.
Nor should the liberal’s desire for rationality make
him blind to the fact that the most radical and comprehensive
thinking leads a person beyond the boundaries of the merely
empirical and rational into the sphere of the mysterious.
"Mysticism," in the positive sense of the word,
is not lack of reason but reason which in the process of
self-examination recognizes its limitations and dares engage
in the adventure of vision. Call such vision poetic, if
you wish, but it may be more true, and in a deep sense even
more empirical, than mere description and analysis ever
can be.
The whole appears to the human mind only in specific revelation.
Yet, even the finest instrument, if played alone, can give
but a faint reflection of a symphony. In order to understand
fully the greatest of all symphonies, the life of the cosmos,
we would have to hear all its instruments at once, which
is beyond human power. We even may hear falsely and distort
the voice of the original revealer. The most passionate
disciples often do so. They may be necessary, but they are
also dangerous, for they generally are infinitely smaller
than their master.
The Great Composer and his universe are too large for our
minds. Yet, though aware of our limitations, we must not
permit them to become our prison; rather, we must use all
our mental organs to comprehend as much as we can. Only
thus, however faintly, can the human order lead our eyes
toward the universal order, of which we are a part. And
whatever our beliefs, whether we are naturalists or supernaturalists,
humanists or transcendentalists, we then are religious.
