a Romantic Bible

"...Friedrich Schlegel spoke at times of creating a 'new Bible.' The early Romantics showed little interest in the narratives or stories of the actual Bible, which they rejected on both aesthetic and philosophical grounds. In 'Christianity or Europe?' Novalis expressed an aversion to the Bible 'philology' of contemporary Protestantism, while Schleiermacher described the Bible as a 'mausoleum of religion'. What Friedrich Schlegel had in mind was rather a 'new gospel' that Lessing had invoked two decades earlier in 'The Education of the Human Race' (1780)."

-- The Longing for Myth in Germany: Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche, George S. Williamson, 2004, p. 55.

the K-12 of social and political pedagogics

just as some elementary school student is not expected to be able to act and work maturely in high school, it is naive and unrealistic to imagine that all people in any society are self-responsible enough to eg not passively eat foods making them obese, or be mature enough to vote in some serious way on a referendum or election...
any society is more like a K-12 school than a graduating class

posthumous meaning?

"Carl Becker has pointed out the 'uses of posterity' for the philosophes of the eighteenth century: the judgment of the court of history provided a kind of secular immortality for those who had worked long and earnestly to further the good of the human spirit. Those nineteenth-century intellectuals who theorized about their own role also needed to be remembered, needed to be able to project the approval of their sub-group into the future, and to console themselves with the thought that (however little acclaim they might receive in their generation) they would be remembered as those who had in their day had charge of the light."
posthumous meaning?
-- The Idea of the Clerisy in the Nineteenth Century, Ben Knights, 1978, p. 8.
   

Karamzin, 1790, on the idle British rich

"Anyone who believes that happiness consists in riches and luxuries ought to be shown the many Croesuses here who, surrounded by every means of enjoyment, have lost the taste for all enjoyments, and whose souls die long before they themselves do. The is the English spleen! This moral sickness, which might also be called by a more Russian name -- boredom -- is known in all lands, but it is worse here than anywhere else because of the climate, the heavy food, and excessive quietude, so like sleep.
"What a strange creature man is! When he has cares and anxieties -- he complains; when he has everything, when he is carefree -- he yawns. Out of boredom the rich Englishman travels; out of boredom becomes a hunter, squanders money, marries, shoots himself. He is unhappy from happiness! I am speaking of the idle rich, whose grandfathers amassed fortunes in India, for those who are busy, directing world trade and devising new ways of playing with the imaginary needs of the people, do not know what spleen is."

-- from London, 1790, Letter of a Russian Traveler, 1789-1790, N. M. Karamzin, [Columbia University Press, NY, 1957], p. 333-334.

lower education, 1756

"In New York City, a gentleman complained in the 1750s 'how common it is to see a Shoemaker, Taylor, or Barber, haranguing with a great deal of Warmth on the public Affairs.' Though armed only with 'Knowledge from the News-Papers,' a tradesman would 'condemn a General, Governor, or Province with as much Assurance as if he were of the Privy council.'"

-- Citation from New York Post-Boy, Nov 8, 1756, The Strength of a People: The Idea of an Informed Citizenry in America, 1650-1870, Richard D. Brown, 1996, p. 51.

Maslow's naturalistic, not supernaturalistic, mysticism

"Throughout the book [Religion, Values and Peak-experiences, 1964], Maslow rejected supernaturalism. By this he meant anything that cannot be verified empirically. While still an atheist, he therefore stressed a kind of naturalistic mysticism, denying the traditional trappings of religion such as an afterlife, a personal God, and a divine order. For Maslow, none of these is necessary to be religious, to live the B-values to their fullest."

-- The Right to Be Human: A Biography of Abraham Maslow, Edward Hoffman, 1988, p. 277.
  

Maslow's self-actualization, actually

"He [Abraham Maslow] first sought* to rectify the growing 'misunderstanding of self-actualization as a static, 'perfect' state in which all human problems are transcended, and in which people 'live happily ever after' in a superhuman state of serenity or ecstasy. This is empirically not so.' Rather, he insisted, self-actualization is 'a development of personality which frees the person from the deficiency of growth, and from the neurotic...problems of life, so that he is able to face, endure, and grapple with the 'real,' problems [of] the human condition.'"

-- The Right to Be Human: A Biography of Abraham Maslow, Edward Hoffman, 1988, p. 256-257.

* in "Critique of Self-Actualization. I. Some Dangers of Being-cognition" in Journal of Individual Psychology 15 (1959), 24.
   

folkways, mores, and ethnocentrism, 1906

"Folkways, issued in 1906, brought immense popularity and fame to its author. It was composed of almost seven hundred pages of rich ethnographic detail, culled from the writings and reports of anthropologists, explorers, missionaries, and travelers. Although Folkways eventually passed into intellectual obsolescence, when Maslow read it in the 1920s it was still the definitive work on cultural variability, introducing concepts such as folkways, mores, and ethnocentrism into scientific and even popular language.
[William Graham] Sumner wrote the book partly to clarify his notion that humans have held tremendously variable beliefs and customs over the course of world history and civilization. Each culture's members tend to view its own mores as correct, proper, or even divinely commanded, and to dismiss differing perspectives as wrong, crazy, or evil. To dramatize his thesis, he selected practices abhorrent to modern sensibility, such as infanticide and child sacrifice, incest, cannibalism, slavery, blood revenge, and witchcraft, each of which was deemed normal and indeed moral by its own culture."

-- The Right to Be Human: A Biography of Abraham Maslow, Edward Hoffman, 1988, p. 30.

psychology will save the world

"For one thing, I am not only the disinterested and impersonal seeker for pure cold truth for its own sake. I am also very definitely interested and concerned with man's fate, with his ends and goals and his future. I would like to help improve him and to better his prospects. I hope to help teach him how to be brotherly, cooperative, peaceful, courageous, and just. I think science is the best hope for achieving this, and of all the sciences, I consider psychology most important to this end. Indeed, I sometimes think that the world will either be saved by psychologists -- in the very broadest sense -- or else it will not be saved at all."

-- Abraham Maslow, Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, University of Nebraska, January 1955, cited in The Right to Be Human: A Biography of Abraham Maslow, Edward Hoffman, 1988, p. 207.
   

London, September 1790, Russian vs English

"The English winter is not so cold as ours. On the other hand, we have beautiful days such as are rare here even in summer. How, then, can an Englishman help looking like September?
Secondly, their cold nature I do not find at all pleasing.
'It is a volcano covered with ice', a French émigré told me, laughing.
But I stand, I look, I see no flames, and all the while I am shivering. My Russian heart likes to pour itself out in sincere, animated conversation. It likes the play of eyes, sudden changes of expression, a meaningful gesture of the hand. The Englishman is taciturn, indifferent. He talks as though he were reading, never revealing sudden impulses of the heart which like an electric shock shake our entire physical system." 

Letters of a Russian Traveler, 1789-1790, N. M. Karamzin.