The False Principle of Our Education:
What do we complain about then when we take a look at the shortcomings of our school education of today? About the fact that our schools still stand on the old principle, that of will-less knowledge. The new principle is that of the will as glorification of knowledge. Therefore no “Concordat between school and life,” but rather school is to be life and there, as outside of it, the self-revelation of the individual is to be the task. The universal education of school is to be an education for freedom, not for subservience: to be free, that is true life.
Now if the idea and impulse of modern times is free will, then pedagogy must hover in front as the beginning and the aim of the education of the free personality. Humanists, like realists, still limit themselves to knowledge, and at most, they look to free thought and make us into free thinkers by theoretical liberation. Through knowledge, however, we become only internally free, (a freedom moreover, that is never again to be given up); outwardly, with all freedom of conscience and freedom of thought, we can remain slaves and remain in subjection. And indeed, external freedom is for knowledge just that which the inner and true, the moral freedom, is for the will.
In this universal education, therefore, because the lowest and highest meet together in it, we come upon the true equality of all for the first time, the equality of free people: only freedom is equality.
Is Max saying that it doesn't matter wheter the knowlege is abstract or practical, because both are necessary for a free man?