Children are in themselves free, and their life is the immediate existence solely of this freedom; they do not, therefore, belong to others, nor to their parents, as things. Their upbringing has, with respect to the family relationship, the positive determination that the ethical be brought, within them, to an immediate feeling still free of opposition, and that their disposition, as the ground of ethical life, may have lived its first life therein, in love, trust, and obedience; and then, with respect to the same relationship, the negative determination of raising the children out of the natural immediacy in which they originally find themselves, up to self-subsistence and free personality, and thereby to the capacity to step out of the natural unity of the family.

The slave-relationship of Roman children is one of the institutions that most stains that legislation, and this violation of the ethical, in its innermost and most tender life, is one of the most important moments for understanding the world-historical character of the Romans and their orientation toward legal formalism. — The necessity of being brought up is present, in children, as their own feeling of being, in themselves, as they are, unsatisfied — as the drive to belong to the world of adults, whom they sense to be something higher, the wish to grow up. A playful pedagogy takes the childish itself already as something valid in itself, presents it thus to children, and debases what is serious, and itself, into a childish form, one held in low regard by the children themselves. In thus striving to represent them, rather, as already finished, within the unfinishedness in which they feel themselves to be, and to make them satisfied therein, it disturbs and contaminates their true, better need of their own, and brings about, in part, indifference and dullness toward the substantial relationships of the spiritual world, and, in part, contempt for human beings, since these have represented themselves to the children, as children, as themselves childish and contemptible — and then a vanity and self-conceit that feeds on its own excellence.