CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND GIVEN IN 1 89 1 BY HENRY WILLIAMS SAGE LA 91.W72T896'""""'*^'-"'"'^ ^''*.n!!!?:.>f.,°l;!!°?e''" education; an accou i 3 1924 013 017 763 RETURN TO ALBERT R. MANN LIBRARY ITHACA, N. Y. The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013017763 HOGEE ASCHAM AND LADY JAKE GREY H HISTORY OF IDEM EDUCATION AN ACCOUNT OF THE COURSE OP EDUCATIONAL OPIKION ANU PRACTICE PROM THE REVIVAL OP LEARNING TO THE PRESENT DECADE BY SAMUEL G. ^A^ILLIAMS, Ph.D. PROFBSSOB OF THE SCIENCE AND ART OF TEACHING IN CORNELL UNIVERSITY Second Edition, Revised and Enlarged SYRACUSE, N. Y. C. W. BARDEEN, PUBLISHER 1896 CoPTBISHT, 1892, 1896, BY C, W, Babdeen PREFACE This book has grown out of the lectures given by the author in Cornell University during the past six- years, and it comprises the last half of his course on the history of education. There should be a place, not only amongst teachers, but also in a very consid- erable class of enlightened friends of education, for a work depicting in a moderate compass the rise and development of modern methods of instruction, the growth of educational systems and organizations, and the course of modern ideas of education as revealed in the works of representative men. Though much that may be given in such a work naturally has its important forerunners in far earlier ages, still the course of educational events since the revival of learning in the 15th centurj^, has in itself such a degree of self-dependence as adapts it for separate treatment. Besides, it is probable that many per- sons who would be eager to know the more recent precursors of the present condition of education, would be less interested in ancient and mediaeval methods and means of instruction, or in the ideas of education expressed by ancient sages ; at least until a knowledge of later educational history should have excited in them the desire for an acquaintance with the fathers of educational efforts and thought. With this view this book is offered to the public. (iii) IV THE HISTORY OF MODERN EDUCATION The chief difficulty in its preparation has arisen from tlie abundance and complexity of the materials that have been presented. An attempt has been made, by a careful selection of truly representative facts and personages, by a rigid exclusion of all other matters however intrinsically interesting, and by treating the several centuries from the standpoint of what in them seemed most characteristic, to con- struct a narrative which should be truthful and perspicuous without being unduly bulky. The reader will judge how far this attempt has been successful. The works to which the author has been specially indebted have been so frequently mentioned in the following pages that it seems needless to enumerate them here. A question by a judicious friend with regard to the statement on page 107 of the amount of Mul- caster's salary, called attention to the need of a re- mark on the relative purchase power of money in the 16th century and at present, when it was too late to introduce it in the proper place. Mr. Thorold Rogers, who is a good authority in such matters, gives the ratio of about 12 to 1 as holding good between 1480 and the last third of the present cen- tury. Hence, as some decrease of purchase power had occurred before Mulcaster's time, the ratio 10 to 1 has been assumed as approximately correct. Ithaca, July, 1892. PREFACE TO THE HEVISED EDITION The author has taken advantage of the call for a new edition of this book, not only to eliminate as far as possible typographic errors, but also to make some changes called for by changes of circum- stances and a number of additions of new matter. Much the most important of these additions is that of an introductory chapter giving a concise view of the valuable contributions to pedagogy made by the ancient world, and the analysis of the entire work which appears as an appendix, and which will prob- ably be found helpful by students. The matter of chapter xv of the first edition has been broken up into seven chapters with consider- able additions. Especially the several allusions to Froebel which appeared in that edition, have been supplemented by a chapter devoted to him, to his work, and to his fundamental ideas. It is earnestly hoped that the book in its new dress will more completely justify the kindly recep- tion with which it was greeted on its first appearance. Ithaca, Oct. 6, 1896. (V) TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER PAGES Valuable Contributions to Pedagogy prom Ancient Days , ; ix-xxv CHAPTER I Preliminaries of Modern Education. — Sketch of An- cient Education — Mediaeval Moslem learning — Mediae- val culture of the Byzantines — Mediteval universities of Europe, their studies and methods — Precursors of the Renaissance 9-23 CHAPTER II The Renaissance and Some Interesting Phases of Education in the 16th Century. — Effect of Geo- graphic discoveries and the growth of modern lan- guages — Effects of the revival of learning north and south of the Alps — The Renaissance has the charac- ter of a classic revival — Great extension of middle- class education in England and Germany — School training regarded somewhat as a preparation for life — Origin of idea of universal and compulsory educa- tion 23-48 CHAPTER III Educational Opinions op the 16th Century. — Martin Luther — Erasmus — Vives — Ramus — Rabelais — Mon- taigne 49-90 CHAPTER IV Distinguished Teachers op the 16th Century. — Mel- anchthon — Sturm — Trotzendorf — Nean 3 er — Ascham — Mulcaster — The Jesuits 91-117 CHAPTER V Some Characteristics op Education in the 17th Cen- tury. — Predominance of Latin for utilitarian ends — Influence of ecclesiasticism in education — Influence of the philosophers in education — Bacon — Descartes — Fleury — ^Efforts of educational reformers 118-137 (vi) TABLE OP CONTENTS Vll PAGES CHAPTER VI PitisrciPLES OF TUB EDUCATIONAL REFORMERS — Ob- stacles to their rapid acceptance 139-15? CHAPTER VII The 17th Century Reformers — "Wolfgang Ratich- Jolin Amos Comenius and bis works — The Port Royal- ists—Milton—Locke 154-219 CHAPTER VIII Female Education and Fenelon. — St. Jerome and con- ventual education — Port Royalists — Mme. de Jlaio- tenon — Fenelon — Pedagogic works and opinions of Fenelon 230-241 CHAPTER IX The Oratory of Jesus, and Beginning of American Education. — The Oratory in Prance — Bernard Lamy — Thomassin — Early American efforts — Founding of William and Mary college — New York — New Eng- land — ^Early Harvard — First school laws of Massa- chusetts — State of education in England, France, Germany, and Scotland > 242-256 CHAPTER X Characteristics of Education in the 18th Century — Pietistic movement and Prancke — Real school movement — Professional training of teachers — Rise of modern university spirit — Rise of new Humanism. 357-280 CHAPTER XI Important Educational Treatises of the 18th Cen- tury. — Rollin's Traite des Etudes — Rousseau's fimile —Kant 281-317 CHAPTER XII Basedow and the Philanthhopinic Experiment 318-329 CHAPTER XIII Pestalozzi and His Work. — Neuhof — Leonard and Gertrude — Stanz — Burgdorf — Yverdun and his Insti- tution — Fundamental principles 330-349 CHAPTER XIV General Review of Education in the 18th Cen- tury. — England — France — Austria — Felbiger — Kin- Vm THE HISTORY OP MODERN EDUCATION PAGES dermann — Germany — Prussia — von Rochow — New England— Early" text-books— New York — Colleges of the 18th century — University of the State of New York 350-365 CHARTER XV Educational Chakactekistics of the 19th Century. — Great activity in literature, etc. — ^Herbart — Her- bert Spencer's ' ' Education " 366-387 CHAPTER XVI Extension op Popular Education. — Belongs to 19th Century — Illustrated by New York — Compulsory at- tendance 388-395 CHAPTER XVII Froebel and the Kindergarten. — Sketch of his life — His pedagogic principles—The Kindergarten 396-405 CHAPTER XVIII Professional Preparation of Teachers and School Supervision. — Spread of Teachers' Seminaries in Europe — Training classes — Teachers' Institutes — Normal schools and'Horace Mann — Supervision 406-416 CHAPTER XIX Manual and Industrial Training. — Sketch of growth of the idea — Comenius — Petty — Locke and Rousseau — Kindermann — ^Pestalozzi— Froebel — France 417-433 CHAPTER XX Improvements in Methods of Instruction. — Causes of rapid spread in 19th Century— Vernacular — Labora- tory methods — Language methods — Jacotot — Froe- bel 424^^3 CHAPTER XXI Discussion of Relative Value of Studies. — Oppos- ing views — Change in point of view — Sir Wm. Ham- ilton — German struggles for Real Schools — Paulsen's prophecy of future of studies— An Index of the Humanitarian idea — General view 435-443 Analytic Appendix 445-463 Syllabus on History of Education 455-468 Index 469-481 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER VALUABLE CONTKIBUTIONS TO PEDAGOGY FROM ANCIENT DAYS The student of modern education will naturally inquire what valuable pedagogic legacies have been bequeathed to us by the ancient culture nations, in methods or in means, in forms of organization or in theories of education. The answer to this question will do much to orient us aright for the study of the more recent past, by giving us a birds-eye view of the more important facts in the historj' of ancient education. It will be seen that ancient nations had their ideals of what life meant to them, and strove to realize these by the training given to their chil- dren ; that they cultivated with success several branches of learning that we still value ; that they devised methods of seeking and imparting truth that are still in constant use ; that one ancient nation developed the idea of liberal culture to an university extent, whilst another devised a complete and progressive scheme of organization ; and that not a few of the most famous men of ancient days have left for us educational ideas of perennial inter- est and value. (ix) X THE HISTORY OF MODERN EDUCATION I. And first of all, it hardly admits of doubt that the ideas of life, of duty, and of destiny from which schemes of education unconsciously spring, have a supreme importance in educational -history. These ideas have but two possible centres, the individual and the state ; and we are at once confronted by the fact that no ancient people ever got beyond the con- ception of the state as the matter of chief concern, and the useful citizen as the highest product of edu- cation. It is true that Aristotle sees that "the virtue of the good citizen and good governor is the same as that of a good man ; " yet he thinks it " evident that education should be one and the same in all states," and praises the Spartan system in which the individual was completely merged in the state. Even the Hebrew theocracy will hardly form a valid exception to the dominance of the national ideal amongst the ancient states, so promi- nent and exclusive was the national feeling in all periods of its history. Hence it is interesting to note that antiquity has exhibited for our instruction the working and the results of all conceivable forms of national aims that can inspire states in the education of their youth. Of that type which Rosenkranz — so well known through his " Philosophy of Education " — calls the Passive National type, three forms still exist that have come down to us from a remote antiquitj'. PEDAGOGY IN ANCIENT DAYS xi amongst the Chinese, the Hindoos, and the Bud- dhists. In China this type has a family or ancestral form, and is inspired by the idea of a worship of ancestors and a reverence for antiquity, by which, like flies in amber, the nation has been preserved unchanged and unprogressive for untold centuries, mowing its preservation quite as much to its un- wavering adherence to one fixed idea, as to its iso- lation and to the great rewards offered by a paternal government to high attainments in the kind of learning dictated by its ideal. That the caste sys- tem of India and the monastic tendency of unal- loyed Buddhism both lead to quietism and to the extinction of all manly endeavor, is a fact which is of interest merely because of the unnumbered mil- lions that have been influenced thereby. Of all the forms of national education inspired by active ideals, the lowest doubtless was the Phoe- nician, industrial in character, and training for the restless enterprises of a tricky and conscienceless commerce ; whilst far the most respectable was the Egyptian effort, prompted by the belief in a right- eous retribution after death, to train for the blame- less immortality typified by embalment. The former, by the vices which it generated, led to the total destruction of the race, as was foretold by the prophet Ezekiel,* — its cities became desolate, its very lan- guage was forgotten, and its memory has been * Chapters 26th, arth and 28th. Xn THE HISTORY OP MODERN EDUCATION j^reserved chiefly bj' the arts that it casually dis- seminated in its trading expeditions ; whilst the Egyptian ideal, disfigured though it was in the popular apprehension by many gross superstitions, raised a great nation through a career of more than thirty centuries to a high state of civilization, and left it finally to slow decay only when it had ceased to be a vital influence in the national life. The national education which looked chiefly to a preparation for external conquest, like that of Persia and Sparta, though inspired in the former by an elevated religious idea of life as a struggle of good with evil, long ago taught Aristotle the lesson which is valid for all ages, of the folly of those nations which in training for war lose siglrt of tlie ability to enjoy peace and leisure with dignity. The Athenian idea of the ofllce of education was akktotle, .384-322, b.c. doubtless the noblest that the ancient world has trans- mitted to us. It was to form a perfect body, and to insure that its spiritual tenant should be a soul completely fitted for the duties and enjoyments of citizenship in Athens,— ready, in the sonorous lan- guage of Milton, " to perform justly, skilfullv, and magnanimously all the ofiices both private and pub- I'EDACiOGY IN AXCIEXT DAYS Xlll lie of peace and war." It bore quick fruits, which, though short-hved for national elevation, were yet brilliant and enduring for literature and art. That its meteordike culmination should Ikivc been suc- ceeded by ages of dreary and unbroken spiritual barrenness, forcibly suggests the insufficiency of even the highest type of national ideal to assure the steady progress wliich is the real life of nations as of men. It needed for its perfection something which could be su[iplied only by the modern Chris- tian conception of the independent worth and im- mortal destiny of the human personality. Education in Rome, during all periods of her history, was governed by the idea of mere practical utility in the state. Hence disinterested studies never struck deep roots in her soil. Even with Cicero and Seneca, philoso- phy was little better than a superficial imitation of a Greek examjile. All was intensely utilitarian. Ge- ometry, for example, was \?f merely an art useful for land measurement and for military purposes. Rheto- ric was the art of the sbneca, 3 b.c.-os, a.d. orator by whicli he might gain influence in public affairs. The results of such a materialistic concep- tion of education on national life in Rome, afford XIV THE HISTORY OP MODERN EDUCATION US a striking lesson, of which every age experiences the need — since selfish interests lie so near to the surface in every age — of the greatest heights to which such an education can hope to attain, and of the base depths to which it is likely ultimately to tend. The Theocratic idea held by the Hebrews, of a nation governed by the revealed will of God, incul- cated by a correspondent education and emphasized by striking symbols and recurring national festivals, has for us a two-fold interest, since it was a prepara- tive for the Christian conception of individual worth, and also since it affords an interesting exam- ple of the power of an ideal firmly held, to preserve national traits unchanged, even through ages of oppression and dispersion. The experimental test which the ancient world has furnished us of the various possible forms of national ideal, is of special value to the modern educator. So many national fates are finger-posts, as it were, to warn him against dangerous routes which weak and errant human nature is but too apt to take. Ks supreme benefit, however, will be gained only when by contrast it makes clear the excellence of the indimdiml ideal, which sees the aim of educa- tion in the perfection of the human personality, on the moral even more than on the intellectual side ; which sees in this effort for individual perfection the only sure means for social and political eleva- PEDAGOGY IN ANCIENT DAYS XV tion ; and which, to this end, is prompting to the careful study of the individual child that is so prominent a feature of modern pedagogy. II. The ancient world has bequeathed to modern pedagogy, in a more or less complete form, many of the branches of learning which it uses as means of education. Not to speak of the important device of a phonic alphabet with all which it implies : — it has demonstrated in Athens the efficacy in educa- tion of familiarity with a vernacular literature, — a lesson that modern peoples have been slow to learn ; kas developed a science of Grammar ; has pushed to a good degree of completeness Rhetoric, formal Logic, and Geometry ; has devised the elementary operations with numbers, yet, — save in the case of the Hindoos — without inventing any convenient system of notation ; has emphasized the importance of Music and done something for its theory ; has given us at least the beginnings of Geography and Astronomy ; and has left works of acknowledged value in Philosophy, in Medicine, and in Jurispru- dence. Besides this, two of its peoples have left to us a very rich and valuable literature, which, during a large part of the last five centuries, has been well- nigh the sole means for training the young, which is still very widely used for this purpose, and which seems destined long to be so used by enlightened nations, though possibly in somewhat smaller measure, XVI THE HISTORY OF MODERN EDUCATION III. Furthermore, we have received from some of the ancient nations vahiable suggestions of expedi- ents for presenting subjects to immature minds, as well as exemplifications of methods of a higher and more scientific character. Tlius botli China and Egypt earl}' invented the abacus to facilitate oi)era- tions in numbers. Plato, in the " Laws," commends the Egj'ptian use of objective methods in certain suljjects, and Quiutilian strongly urges such meth- ods and illustrates their use in teacliing reading and writing. The name and fame of iSocrates are imperi shably associated with an inductive and de- veloping method which, in one of its phases, is of sin- gular pedagogic excellence. Aristotle's method of assur- ing the formal validity of deductive reasoning has profoundly influenced the n • f. 11 1 , 1 SOCRATES, 470-399, B.C. logic of all later ages ; and it is well also to remember that his method of oljserving and interpreting nature, however incom- plete it may have been, preceded by many cen- turies Bacon's exposition and enforcement of the inductive process. Quintilian's mode of presenting rhetoric in its practical a.'^pects has never been greatly excelled ; and tlie teachings of Jesus, though linked with our deepest and most sacred PEDAGOGY IN ANCIENT DAYS XVli associations, as those of the Saviour of the world, may profitably be made a pedagogic study, as un- equalled models for the illustration of the most pro- found truths by the most familiar facts. IV. Though Greece, beginning with the sophists and the philosophers, may claim to have given to the world the germinal idea of higher training, and to have wrought it out in a university of long continued celebrity, under the name of " The Schools of Athens," yet we owe to the Roman instinct of organization, as one might expect, the only good ancient example of a consistent school system, ad- vancing by successive steps from the elements to specialties. This system was a spontaneous out- growth of popular needs rather than an organiza- tion devised of set purpose by the ruling powers ; and it received its first governmental recognition only when it had already grown into a somewhat definite system consisting of lower and higher ele- mentary schools, succeeded by schools of Rhetoric, and crowned by schools of Philosophy, of Law, and possibly also of Medicine. Its resemblance to good modern systems is very interesting, as is also the direction of the imperial encouragement which was always confined to the schools of Rhetoric, a member of the system that answers nearly to the American college. The growth of modern systems, which have eventually assumed the general form of the Roman, has been from above downward, first XVill THE HISTORY OF MODEEN EDUCATION the universities and secondary schools, succeeded, — usually much later, — by an expansion of the ele- mentary schools, which have had their most rapid growth during the current century, as will be shown in the sixteenth chapter of this book. V. Athens has left us an example hitherto un- equalled of what -may be accomplished in the physical and aesthetic training of an entire nation, that is of very considerable importance. One mod- ern nation, Germany, has already accomplished much in general physical culture by systematic in- struction, while others, — whether wisely or not — have remitted this to the sportive efforts of youth ; but of general success in aesthetic culture little of encouraging character can be said. Some portion of the Athenian superiority in matters of taste was undoubtedly due to the special endowment of the race, but much more to the possibility of a far more exclusive preoccupation with such things than is permitted by the demands of our more complicated modern forms of life. Yet in any case, the value of the Athenian example is great as showing what may be attained in aesthetic culture under favorable circumstances and by the use of proper means ; and the influence of this example is likely to increase rather than to grow less, as advancing civilization brings with it the opportunity and the need of widening the circle of refinement. VI. Finally let us take account of the educational PEDAGOGY IN ANCIEXT DAYS XIX ideas expressed l)y men oftlic ;incieiit world, wliicli, whether from their iiiti-iusic wortli thuugli only individually eniphasi/.cd, or fniiii a general agree- ment amongst theorists, are important to he ele- vated here into distinct view as valualjle ancient contributions to pedagogic theory. (1) Plato and Aristotle, influenced probably by Spartan example, agree that, contrary to j\tlieuian practice, education shoidd be made an all'air of the state, and should be established and encouraged by the state as essential to the M'ell-being and per- petuity of the state ; and Plato even projiosed that it should be made compul- sory for all youth of botli sexes between the ages of ten and sixteen. In our days, when natioirs are but recently assuming these duties, it is well to remem- ber that the two greatest philosophers of antiquity distinctly affirmed the right and duty of the state to educate ; and that one of them did not hesitate to declare that the educa- tion of the yomig should not be left to depend ou the ignorance or neglect of parents, nor on the un- reasoning caj}rice of children. (2) The idea that there is a progressive order of development to which all human beings conform in PLATO, 429-247, B.C. XX THE HISTORY OF MODERN EDUCATION their advance from infancy to maturity, is affirmed by Aristotle, the order that he gives being first the body and the feelings, and next the intelligence ; and he declares that the body and the feelings need the earliest training and habituation, — ^the body for the sake of the soul as a whole, and the feelings for the sake of the intelligence.* How important this study of the order of development of capabilities is becoming in the modern science of education, how ingenious are the attempts that are made to correlate it with the order of development of our race, and with what admirable minuteness of re- search it is coming to be prosecuted in the study of the early years of childhood, are facts well known to all well-instructed educators. It is interesting therefore to see that this important idea was appre- hended, even though dimly, and expressed, even though with vague generality, by the father of logic. (3) The ancient authors agree in emphasizing the importance in early training of songs and narra- tions of heroic actions, and of familiarizing youth with the best stores of their country's literature. This idea was wise, not merely for ancient times when the subjects for study were few, but is coming to be recognized as equally wise to-day, when many subjects are clamoring for recognition in our schools ; and, in the most influential quarters, we hear it de- clared that our vernacular literatures should be the •Politics, Bis, VII., Chap. XV, PEDAGOGY IN ANCIENT DAYS xxi last things to be neglected in the education of the young, even if a diminished share of attention to ancient literature be thereby made imperative. (4) There is a consensus of opinion among the ancient theorists, as regards the permanency of the impressions early made upon the minds of children, and the consequent importance of controlling such early impressions. Hence they concur in urging extreme care in the choice of nurses, attendants, and companions, that the language as well as the morals of the young may be moulded into desirable forms by early habituation, and that no evil sug- gestions may contaminate their souls nor evil ac- tions become familiar to their experience. Hence also the emphasis that is laid, especially by Plato, on the careful selection of the examples with which the charms of poetry enchant the young in heroic songs and poetic narrations : Plato even proposes in the " Republic " to expurgate the poems of Homer for educational use. The vital importance of the impressions made on the plastic minds of the young has long since become an educational commoh.- place ; yet it is by no means sure that greater care is exercised to-day in controlling such impressions than was urged by Plato and Quintilian. If not, then one of the most valuable lessons that the ancient sages have emphasized, has not yet been sufficiently heeded. (6) The dignity and importance of the teacher's Xxii THE HISTORY OP MODERN EDUCATION vocation was pretty generally conceded by the ancient peoples. The Chinese and the Hebrews em- phatically affirmed it. The Hindoos and the Egyp- tians tacitly assumed it by committing its duties, the one to their highest caste, the other to the sacred order of the priesthood. In Athens, though the lower teachers were lightly esteemed, as being men of small attainments, the higher and more learned were held in honor ; Plato deemed the direction of education the highest of the chief offices of the state, and thought with Socrates that the services of the teacher were too precious to be repaid by money, and were degraded by such a payment; and the wisest philosophers undertook the instruction of young men. In Rome as in Greece, many of the inferior teachers were held in a low esteem, which they' seem to have deserved by their character and the meanness of their learning, — as we may judge by the account of them given by Plutarch. Indeed not a few of them were slaves and thus added to the low repute of the vocation. The really able and worthy teachers, however, were respected, were often richly compensated, and received special hon- ors, privileges, and exemptions from the state. No one has surpassed Quintiliau, himself an honored teacher, in his high estimate of the qualifications of the teacher and of the nobility of his work ; while Seneca draws an attractive picture of the relations that should exist between teachers and their pupils. PEDAGOGY IN ANCIENT DAYS xxiii It appears therefore that among the ancient culture peoples a just estimate of teachers and their voca- tion prevailed, based on the character and attain- ments of teachers themselves. (6) It is interesting to observe that in China and Egypt, as well as in Athens and Rome, it was tacitly and perhaps unconsciously assumed that the higher education needed chief encouragement, and deserved to be fostered even where elementary education had no direct recognition. Thus in China and Egypt the high places in the state were filled only by the learned ; in Athens the greatest philosophers devoted their talents and their fortunes to founding and per- petuating the higher learning ; and in Rome the most enlightened emperors erected buildings, granted salaries, and conferred special privileges to encour- age liberal culture. Nor does it seem that through this exclusive encouragement to higher learning elementary schools deteriorated, but rather that they were improved. Thus the example of the ancient world seems to warrant the assumption that higher education deserves the fostering care that enlight- ened communities have during the present century accorded to it, despite the opposition that has been expressed on mistaken grounds of principle and economy. The result of this policy has shown un- mistakably that elementary education must look for its improvement to an impulse proceeding from higher seats of learning ; and this opinion has been XXIV THE HISTORY OF MODERN EDUCATION acted upon very recently in two weighty reports from high educational authorities. (7) The unanimity of opinion among the ancient theorists on the subject of school discipline is some- thing worthy of note. In ages during which the rudest punishments were prevalent in the schools as well as in the state, theorists concur in denouncing corporal inflictions as slavish in character, debasing in tendency, and usually futile for purposes of refor- mation. Indeed an English writer aptly says that the unanimity of the theorists in condemning flog- ging has been parallelled only by the persistency of the schoolmaster in continuing to use it. The results of the marked changes in this respect within a few decades have strikingly evinced the wisdom of the ancient theorists ; and the judicious sugges- tion which, so far as I have observed, Plutarch alone makes, that parents and teachers should gradually relax the discipline exercised over well-grown youth, that they may be prepared for the self-direction of maturity, has been tested with gratifying results in several influential quarters. (8) Finally, the idea which in our days is more commonly urged as a theory than generally ob- served in the practice of the schools, that all tasks set for the young should be carefully adapted to their powers of apprehension, — apperception is now the accepted name for this fact, — was not wholly unknown to ancient theorists. Thus Seneca advises MOAGOGY IN ANCIENT DAYS XXV that the burdens laid on youths should be adjusted to their powers, and that no greater ones should ever be imposed than they can easily bear ; Quin- tilian says that judicious teachers will not overtask the weakness of pupils, but will adapt all tasks to their abilities ; and Plutarch, in order that youth may taste the pleasures of success, recommends that their powers be not put to too severe tests. These then are what seem to be the most signifi- cant contributions made by the ancient world to the theory and practice of education. It is hoped that this brief presentation of the results of ancient ex- perience may be found useful to students of later educational history, by pointing them to the origin of many esteemed pedagogic ideas and appliances, and by impressing the wholesome lesson of the in- debtedness of the present to ages that have long ago sunk into comparative forgetfulness. THE HISTORY OF MODERN EDUCATION CHAPTER I PRELIMINARIES OP MODERN EDUCATION The history of modem education has for its field the period which extends from the revival of learn- ing in the 15th and 16th centuries, called the Renaissance, down to the times in which we our- selves- are actors. But the Renaissance had its inciting causes and its favoring circumstances in the times by which it was preceded ; and a highly important cause, the preservation of the ancient Greek learning, was due to events which occurred several centuries earlier than the period of which we are to treat. Likewise much that is of quite vital interest to the right understanding of modern education had its origin in the past, and often in a remote antiquity. Educational arrangements anal- ogous to those now existing, educational ideas of perennial influence among educators, and means of education that are still used in schools, are an inheritance from ancient times, and link the present closely with a distant past. Hence a brief survey of some significant facts in earlier history is an essen- tial preliminary to our undertaking. (9) 10 THE HISTORY OF MODERN EDUCATlOil First let it be recalled that many of the Eastern nations, notably the Chinese, the Hindoos, the Israel- ites, and the Egyptians, had educational ariange- ments well adapted to the ideas that prevailed among them, and from them important elements of culture have descended to us. The Hindoos are believed to have originated the decimal system of arithmetical notation which has been transmitted to us through Arabian channels. The important de- vice of a phonic alphabet, long credited to the PhcBnicians, has recently been ascribed to the Egyp- tians ; and the history of ancient Egyptian culture assumes a growing importance to modem educa- tion as investigation penetrates deeper into its dark places. The Athenians gave an admirable education to their boys, and Athens and several of the Greek colonies, some centuries before the Christian era, had arrangements for the higher training of youth which are the prototypes of our modern university idea. In Rome, during the reign of the earlier emperors, there had grown up by private initiative a series of schools which presents striking analogies with some modern systems. The developing method of Socrates and the illus- trative method of Christ are models after which the teachers of to-day might well pattern ; and educa- tional ideas first expressed by Plato and Aristotle, by Seneca and Quintilian, and by the Greco-Roman PRELIMINAMES OF MODERN EDUCATION 11 Plutarch, are still current on the lips of educators, often with little thought of their ancient origin. None will need to be reminded that Greece and Rome had, before the Christian era, developed an art and a literature, which were the immediate sources of inspiration to the Renaissance, which were long the predominant means of culture in the schools of the modern period, and which still hold deservedly a high place in most institutions for higher education. After Greecian literature and philosophy had ceased to be productive, a science of grammar was originated from the anatomical study of language, and had attained a good degree of completeness in the first century A. D. Aristotle gave to Deductive Logic the form which it has retained until the present century. Rhetoric, in the hands of Quintilian, took the form of a singu- larly complete science, and Euclid wrought his own work and that of his predecessors into a treatise on Geometry which has never been wholly superseded. In all these subjects of school instruction the modern period is deeply indebted to the ancient world ; in the mathematics aside from Geometry, and in the sciences of nature, however, it owes com- paratively Jittle to the ancients ; although treatises on Geog:^aphy, Astronomy, and Natural History, which foir many centuries were authoritative, were written by men like Strabo, Ptolemy, Aristotle and Pliny. 12 THE HISTORY OF MODERN EDUCATION To the downfall of the Roman empire succeeded in Western Europe six centuries of social confusion, lawless violence, and consequent dense ignorance. Learning had little encouragement save among the clergy, many of whom, however, were grossly ignor- ant ; books, which could be multiplied only by the slow process of copying on expensive materials, were scarce and enormously dear ; the Latin lan- guage in which books were written, became pro- gressively unintelligible to the various nationalities which slowly segregated themselves from the seeth- ing mass of barbarian invaders ; and during this peiriod of darkness, the means of culture found their chief refuge in the monasteries. During this deplorable period, however, learning elsewhere than in Western Europe was not left vhoUy without witness ; otherwise our present con- dition would in all human probability be much less favorable than it is. In the Eastern Empire and amongst the followers of Mohammed learning flour- ished whilst Christian Europe was sunk in ignorance. Both drew their inspiration from the old Greek cul- ture, the former directly, the latter through trans- lations. The Moslem learning which sprang' into prom- inence early in the 8th century, spi'ead rapidly through Northern Africa and penetrated into Spain, where a brilliant Moslem empire existed until the 15th century. The arts and industries flourished ; PEELIMINAEIES OF MODERN EDUCATION 13 a rich imaginative literature took on such propor- tions that the hbrary of one of the caliphs is said to have had 400,000 volumes ; schools abounded, and the elements of knowledge reached every household ; universities were founded of such note that in the 10th and 11th centuries ambitious youth from Italy and Gaul resorted thither, undeterred by the tales of necromancy and devil's lore which ignorant Europe believed of the arts cultivated by Moslem Spain ; and influences thence derived not only aided to stimulate the growth of universities in Europe in the 12th century, but also seem to have impressed themselves in some degree on the form of the instruction there given. The Byzantine Greeks whose literary centre was Constantinople, were the inheritors of the old Greek culture. This culture suffered an eclipse during the 7tli and 8th centuries in consequence of fierce dynastic and theological struggles, but in the 9th century it revived afresh, and for more than six centuries, under the fostering care of the emperors, it displayed that kind of vigor which consists rather in marking time than in advancing. In other words, the Byzantines showed no capacity for original production; but they industriously collected the precious monuments of their ancestral philosophy and literature, multiplied them by transcription, and finally, in the 14th and 15th centuries, fur- nished them unchanged to Italy where they became 14 THE HISTORY OF MODERN EDUCATION the inspiring cause of the Renaissance and of the beginnings of modern education. It may be said that Sir Walter Scott in his Count Robert of Paris gives a hvely picture of the splendors of Constanti- nople and of its literary dilettantism at the time of the crusades. The Mediaeval Universities of Europe, some knowl- edge of which is essential for our purpose, were the unique product of an intellectual uprising which began near the close of the 11th century, and which had several causal antecedents of which one has been mentioned above. The earliest of them, those of Bologna, Paris, and Oxford, sprang from obscure beginnings, so obscure indeed that it is impossible to assign any exact date to their origin ; they were not founded but grew out of the intellectual wants of the times. Those founded later by popes and princes, including all the earlier universities of Ger- many, generally modeled themselves on the Univer- sity of Paris which was considered the " mother of universities." We have no present need to consider the structure and the privileges of these venerable republics of letters. What alone concerns us is their studies and their methods of instruction. The studies of the universities were usually classed as the Sciences, and the Arts : at the head of the first stood Theology including the Scholastic Philos- ophy, followed by Jurisprudonce and Medicine : by the term Arts, was intended the seven liberal arts of PRELIMINARIES OP MODERN EDUCATION 15 the Middle Ages, but chiefly the Trivium, i. e., Grammar, Rhetoric, and Logic, all three of which were presented in their most formal and barren aspects, and illustrated by passages from some of the classical Roman authors. The Sciences were pursued in treatises which in medicine had come from the Greeks or Moors, in Law, from the Romans or the papal decisions, and in Theology-Philosophy, from the earlier Schoolmen. These were treated as authoritative : they were studied, and might be illus- trated, explained, and commented on, but not criti- cised nor doubted. In considering the methods of the universities it must be remembered that printing was not yet invented, and that hence books were very scarce and very dear. Hence the method of teaching was of necessity oral. The professor read, i. e., dictated his author with his own comments and explanations if he chose to make them, and the students copied verbatim. Hence progress was necessarily slow. A more peculiar and characteristic feature of their method was the practice of disputation which, bor- rowed from the Moorish schools, and applied to the deSnitions and subtle distinctions of the scholastic philosophy and theology, soon invaded every depart- ment of study in universities, and spread to what- ever lower schools existed. It grew to be counted as of the very essence of teaching : students and teachers prided themselves on their ability to sus- 16 THE HISTORY OP MODERN EDUCATION tain with equal ease either side of any question, always within the limits of their authorities : and these verbal duels were conducted with such heat, that the opposing sides were apt to come to blows unless separated by barriers. This practice of dis- putation doubtless trained men to skill in reasoning, confirmed their grasp of subjects, and made them acute and dextrous in subtle verbal distinctions, rather than profound ; but it must have tended powerfully to unsettle men's convictions that there can be any absolute truth, since all might be ex- plained and refined away. In these methods and studies, both schools and universities were confirmed and fixed by four cen- turies of undisputed use. Entrenched thus in un- alterable prepossessions, they naturally became the most formidable opponents of the Renaissance, and were long the most serious obstacles to the spread of the New Learning ; for this reason it has been need- ful that they should here be thus briefly described. Guizot in his History of Civilization in Europe,* in stating the causes which produced the rapid advances in European civilization during the cen- turies succeeding the 15th, has also most clearly stated the immediate precursors of the educational Eenaissance. These were, — (1) the strengthening of the powers of the central governments in all European states, thus assuring a greater measure- of * Lecture XI, PRELIMINARIES OF MODERN EDUCATION 17 order and legal security for persons and property : (2) the vain attempts at ecclesiastical reform through church councils, and the equally abortive efforts for popular religious reform, which, through the sup- pression of outward signs of discontent consequent on their failure, possibly made the outbreak that ensued more violent : (3) the use in the official inter- course among nations of the arts of diplomacy, which now came into vogue, and which, by demand- ing a knowledge of other nationalities as to their history, their resources, and their modes of living and thinking, prompted men to a kind of culture heretofore unknown and thus became a powerful means of enlightenment : (4) the important inven- tions which came into active use in the 15th cen- tury, of which the most interesting to us is the art of printing : and (5) the revival of interest in the study of the Greek classics which, beginning in Italy, spread thence to other European countries, recalling the minds of men to a communion with the past intellectual achievements of their race, and inciting them to a freedom of thought and an ac- tivity of personal investigation that was fraught with the most vital consequences to the future of learning. The first two of these facts are of interest to the student of educational history chiefly because they afforded conditions favorable to the spread of learn- ing, — ^the first because it assured a degree of social 18 THE HISTORY OP MODERN EDUCATION order without which learning must languish, and the second because religious unrest tended to free men's minds from the bonds of mere authority by which all real progress in science had hitherto been prevented. The needs created by the growth of diplomacy have an interest of a different kind, since thus was promoted a cultivation of branches hitherto greatly neglected, prominent among which were history, geography, and international ethics. It would be diflBcult for us to conceive how great a change in the fortunes of education was wrought by the invention of printing, and by the introduc- tion of linen paper into common use which occurred at nearly the same time.* Heretofore, not only had transcription been slow and costly, but the fabric on which to write had also been costly, both causes preventing a rapid multiplication of books. Hence- forth all this was changed ; and ready access to books affected education in all classes of schools in many ways. It made necessary a radical change in the method of teaching, since dictation was no longer necessary : it released the students from copying, changed their use of memory to an exercise of un- derstanding, and greatly lessened the time needed for acquiring knowledge : it demanded from profes- sors more originality of work, since through print their thoughts might readily be compared with those of others : finally, it rendered the clientage of * Hallam, Middle Ages, C. IX, part 2d. ~ PRELIMINARIES OF MODERN EDUCATION J. 9 universities more largely local, by making it un- necessary for students to travel far to hear the words of some famous professor. How rapidly the new invention came into use is shown by the fact, vouched for by Mr. Green,* that by the beginning of the 16th century 10,000 editions of books and pamphlets had been issued, including the chief Latin authors, and that in the two succeed- ing decades all the notable Greek authors had also been printed. It needs but a brief consideration to see the bearing of this fact upon the multiphcation of readers, and the great stimulus it must have given to education and to efforts to remove all need- less hindrances from the path of knowledge by the improvement of methods of instruction. But while the invention of printing in many ways removed a tremefldous hindrance to the ad- vancement of learning, there can be no doubt that the last fact stated by Guizot was the immediate cause of the remarkable intellectual movement which ushered in the Renaissance and the dawn of modern education. The renewal of acquaintance with the ancient masterpieces of literary art first gave to the new invention a worthy employment, while it stirred the souls of men by nobler objects than mere scholastic rubbish. We have seen in a recent paragraph that during the Middle Ages the Eastern Empire played the *Sbort History of the English People, C. VI., Sec, IV, 20 THE HISTORY OP MODERN EDUCATION humble but useful part of a conservator of the old Greek language and literature ; and that it became a kind of enchanted castle in which great authors slept for long centuries, awaiting the touch of some magician's wand to summon them to renewed life, activity, and influence. The time for awakening came about the middle of the 14th century ; and it was permitted to Petrarch and Boccacio first to reverse the wand, and to read backwards the en- thralling spell. A learned but dirty, hideous, and withal fickle Greek scholar, Leo Pilatus by name, taught Greek to Boccacio and read Homer with him, thus inspir- ing him with a Ipve for Greek literature. Some years earlier, another Greek scholar had undertaken the same office for Petrarch, but his sudden death had brought his lessons to an untimely end, so that later, in thanking a friend for a copy of Homer as an invaluable present, Petrarch said bitterly, " But alas ! what shall I do now ? To me Homer is dumb, or rather I am deaf to him." But though shut out from enjoying the great Greek authors, Petrarch realized their value ; and moreover in his own field of learning, he did a great service in bringing to renewed notice the forgotten works of the great Eomans. In this last work, Dante likewise gave efficient aid. Thus this triad of famous Italians gave the first impulse to a better learning. The enduring enthusiasm for Greek literature PRELlMliSTARIES OF MODERN EDUCATION 21 which made Italy the mother land of the Renais- sance, dates, however, from the coming into Italy of Manuel Chrysoloras, a noble and learned .Greek statesman, who was also versed in Latin. He lec- tured on Greek literature, at first in Florence, and then in Pavia, Venice, and Rome, arousing every- where the deepest interest. He was followed later by many Greek emigrants who sought refuge in Italy from the terror of the conquering Turks, and who brought with them valuable manuscripts, spreading "the sense but not the spirit of the Greek classics."* A taste for the collection of Greek manuscripts now sprang up, and the search for them was pros- ecuted with ardor, not only by scholars, but also and at great expense by the Medici and by some of the popes. The enthusiasm for Greek literature centered especially in Florence, which became for Europe a seminary for Greek and Latin learning whence it spread to other countries, — Greek being introduced at Oxford near the close of the 15th cen- tury by Linacer and Groceyne.f During the 15th century, however, despite the growing enthusiasm, the sole work was merely pre- parative, to collect the new-found 'treasures, to com- ment on them, to imitate them, — in short to pave the way for really productive effort by thoroughly imbibing the antique spirit. A picture not more • See Gibbon's Rome, C. LXVI for an account of the classical revival, t See Lyte's University of Oxford, C. XIV. 22 HISTORY Oli' MODERN EDUCATION vivid than truthful, of the nature and direction of the intellectual life which animated Florence in this century, may be found in George Eliot's " Romola." It was a time of passage from the old to the new, lingering still in the old by its lack of intellectual freedom and initiative, yet looking forward ardently to the new era for which it was making the needful preparation. The five facts that have just been presented to- gether with their implications, may be regarded as the forerunners of that extraordinary intellectual revolution which is called the Renaissance, and which may approximately be dated from the be- ginning of the 16th century. These were either its inciting causes or afforded to it favorable conditions ; while the existence, the favorite studies, and the methods of the older schools and universities reveal to us its most formidable future obstacles. With these facts clearly apprehended, we have gained the standpoint necessary for the consideration of tlie course and fortunes of modern education. CHAPTER II THE RENAISSANCE, AND SOME INTERESTING PHASES OE EDUCATION IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY We have stated in the preceding chapter the most important antecedents of the Renaissance. Two other facts, however, claim our attention here, of which one coincided with the beginning of the Renaissance, and the other gained importance at about the same period. These are the grea't geo- graphical discoveries which occurred at the end of the 15th century, and the literary growth of moderj? languages. It can hardly be doubted that the discovery of a sea route to the East Indies around the Cape of Good Hope, and of that hitherto unknown continent, America, across the Atlantic, must have given a great new impulse to the minds of men, already predisposed by other causes to novel forms of activ- ity. It not only enlarged their ideas of the globe which they inhabited, but also, by putting them in an attitude of eager expectancy as to the results of so great revelations, it must have been most unfav- orable to submission to mere authoritative dicta. For geographic discovery is so closely allied to physi- cal research, that it could hardly fail to incite men (23) 24 HISTORY OF MODERN EDUCATION to a free investigation of the phenomena of nature, undeterred by the authority even of such names as Aristotle and PUny, Strabo and Ptolemy. Of even greater moment, both as a precursor and as an attendant of the great revival of learning, was the growing literary use and consequent settlement of form of the several great national languages of Europe. By the end of the 15th century the forms of these languages had become so settled, that the writings of the 16th century present no considerable difficulties to students of the several tongues at the present day. The significance of this fact for the educational history of the Renaissance, lies in this, that however great may be the culture derived from the study of literature and science embodied in tongues like the Greek and Latin which are strange to the speech of the people, it can never penetrate to any considerable depth, nor exert any! very percep- tible influence on the vast masses of tlie people, un- til they have access to its sources in the familiar forms of their own vernacular. It is true that at the beginning of the 16th cen- tury Latin was still almost exclusively used among the learned, and that creditable efforts were made to free it from mediaeval corruptions ; but parallel with this fact were works like those of Luther, of Rabelais, of Montaigne, of Thomas More, and many other authors, with vernacular translations of the Scrip- tures, which reached a vastly larger class of readers THE RENAISSANCE 25 than the very learned, — a class, too, which as time passed was ever on the increase, and which has made its demands for the use of the vernacular in instruction ever more widely influential, until to-day the easy use of Latin is confined to a meagre num- ber of scholars, and the attempt to convey informa- tion by its means would be counted an anomaly, even in the Universities. To the literary growth of modern languages and their wide use in schools of all classes may, without doubt, be ascribed the enormously greater, more per- vasive, and more permanent effects which have fol- lowed in the train of the Great Renaissance, than any which were achieved by the springing up of the mediaeval universities and schools, great though their significance was in the times when they ap- peared. Such were the inciting and favoring causes of the revival of learning. At the outset it seemed destined to be only a classic revival, whose chief purposes were to be to restore the Latin tongue to somewhat of its early purity, and to bring again to the knowl- edge of the learned the literary treasures of an- tiquity. But deeper influences were at work, in the profound religious unrest which pervaded northern Europe, — an unrest which sprang in part from the often irreligious and even scandalous lives of the clergy, in part from the loosening of the hold on the consciences of men of ancient dogmas and supersti- 26 HISTORY Oi" MODEKN EDUCATlOfJ tions. From tMs unrest, it came to pass that the intellectual uprising presently took a wider range than a mere acquaintance with classic authors and imitation of their excellences ; and was correlated with a religious revolution, which gave an intense bitterness to its earlier struggles, but which ended in approximating its later efforts to that great Humanitarian ideal which had been enunciated by our Savior, but which had been wholly lost from view for more than ten centuries, the conception of the infinite worth and perfectibility of the human personality, the natural correlative of which is the need of education. It is interesting to observe the different effects which the educational movement produced north and south of the Alps. In Italy, which was the cradle of the Renaissance, the religious ideas of the learned, both clergy and laity, reverted to infidelity and even to heathenism. Creeds and dogmas had so lost their hold upon the minds even of the clergy, that Luther tells us that on a visit to Rome, he heard some of the clergy boast that in celebrating the most sacred mystery of the Christian church, the consecration of the elements in the Eucharist, they secretly used words of most impious character. It is reported that Leo X. said to Cardinal Bembo, " Thou knowest how profitable to us has been this fable of Christ ; " and it is unfortunate that the life of this enlightened prelate gives no contradiction to tilE RENAISSANCE 27 these words, which degraded the faith of which he was the head to the level of a heathen myth. Wheu such was the tone of the clergy, what won- der is it that among the laity, the rankest forms of irreligion prevailed. Vice and crime were never more prevalent. Savonarola in Florence thundered against the tendencies of the times, but his eloquent voice was soon silenced by the hands of the execu- tioner. In the decades immediately preceding the Reformation, several men succeeded each other on the papal throne, who were fair exponents of the character of the times. One of them was the father of a numerous brood of children ; another was the father of the infamous Borgias, of one of whom, Csesar Borgia, it was said that he was " a connois- seur in Crime ; " still another connived at murders if he did not himself commit them ; of the most respectable of them, Leo X. in whose reign the religious outbreak began, and who was a man of elegant culture and a favorer of learning, Fra Paolo said that " he would have been a model pope had he had a more thorough knowledge of religious sub- jects, and more inclination to piety, but he had little of either." To his court therefore resorted a flock of vices and shames which were welcomed if only they were amusing.* "While such were the attendants in Italy of the revival of classic learning, north of the Alps, and * Von Raumer-Gesohiohte der PMagogik. Vol 1, p. 47. 28 iaisTOEY OF modern education especially among the nations of Germanic origin, a widely different tone of feeling prevailed. In Eng- land, John Colet, first as professor at Oxford, and later as dean of St. Paul's, strove to make the knowl- edge of Greek a key to the New Testament, a basis for a "rational and practical religion," freed from old superstitions and corruptions, and embodied in " simple forms of doctrine and confessions of faith." In his efforts at reform within the church, he was supported by the most learned of the English pre- lates with the Primate, "Warham, at their head. The learned and brilliant Erasmus in the Nether- lands, — if indeed he can be called a citizen of any particular country, — prepared an edition of the New Testament in which the " method of interpretation was based, not on received dogmas, but on the literal meaning of the text," and "the actual teaching of Christ was made to supersede the mysterious dogmas of the older ecclesiastical teachings." " As though Christ taught such subtleties," says Erasmus, "sub- tleties that can scarcely be understood even by a few theologians, — or as though the strength of the Christian religion consists in man's ignorance of it ! " This edition of the New Testament, however, in which Erasmus boldly expressed the wish, hereto- fore considered well-nigh heretical, that the gospels and epistles " were translated into all languages, so as to be read and understood not only by Scots and Irishmen, but even by Saracens and Turks," was THE RENAISSANCE 29 approved by Archbishop Warham and sent "to bishop after bishop." In Germany the learned Hebraist, Johann Reuch- lin, strove by his labors on a Hebrew Grammar and Lexicon, to make the Hebrew scriptures accessible in their original sources ; and by his opposition to the burning of Jewish books save those that directly attacked Christianity, he gave the occasion for the bitter contest with the Dominicans of Cologne and one PfeflFerkorn, a converted Jew, in which appeared the famous " Epistles of Obscure Men." In these epistles, the monks and the scholastics with their barbarous Latin were treated with biting irony, and their ignorance and their scandalous lives were cruely revealed to the public gaze, and made sub- jects of ridicule. I omit to speak, even in this brief way, of the ser- vices of Rodolph Agricola in Germany, and Alex. Hegius of Deventer, — the latter a teacher of Eras- mus, — who by the sobriety of their" minds, and the practical direction of their efforts, in the last part of the 15th century, showed what should be the character that the Renaissance would assume in Germany. It should be Dorne in mind that all this precedes the great religious revolution in Germany and Eng- land, and that all these men were faithful sons of the church, anxious chiefly for reform within the church, and for placing her doctrines and her prac- 30 THE HISTORY OP MODERN EDUCATION tice, on a more scholarly as well as a more religious basis. Of all these men, we shall have future occa- sion to meet again Erasmus only, when we shall consider more at large his eminent services to the cause of better education. From what has now been said, it will be seen how different was the early course of the Renaissance in Italy and in northern Europe. I have adopted this course also, that I might without undue prolixity, indicate its history and its tendencies, before it became merged in the great religious uprising in which Luther became the central figure. Naturally we are here concerned with the religious reformation only in so far as it related to the course and history of education. I think it may promote clearness of comprehen- sion with regard to the history of education in the 16th century to state distinctly at the outset what seem to me its most marked characteristics. These were, — 1, the determination of educational practice, and range of studies to the Latin classics, to which Greek was added and to some extent Hebrew ; 2, the great extension of middle-class education, by the establishment of new Grammar schools in England, by the origin in Germany of many Protestant high schools, and by the rise and spread of the Jesuit schools ; 3, that education begins to be considered as a preparation for real life, and hence some efforts are made to economize the time of pupils by the THE RENAISSANCE 31 use of better methods of instruction and of more intelligible text-books; 4, that in more than one quarter we find expressed the idea of free, universal, and compulsory education as the proper corollary of Christian freedom of thought ; 5, that for the first time in many centuries, we have great educa- tional theories announced, and reforms proposed ; and 6, that we see springing up great practical teachers from whose example we may learn some- thing worth noting. We will discuss these several topics in their order. I. We have said that the Renaissance had at the outset the character of a classic revival. In full harmony with this character was the almost exclusive determination of the studies in the schools and uni- versities to the Greek and Latin classics, so soon as they came under the influence of the new spirit. This direction of the activity of the schools long remained the dominant one. The Latin classics and elegance in the use of the Latin tongue, natur- ally received the larger share of attention ; but Greek likewise gradually assumed a good degree of prominence in many schools, Hebrew also receiving some attention. We have already seen that the study of Greek and Hebrew was urged by men like Erasmus and Reuchlin as a means for gaining a reliable knowledge of Holy Writ and so of freeing religion from errors and superstitions. It may readily be judged that the adherents of the Reform- 32 THE HISTORY OF MODERN EDUCATION ation would be little likely to overlook this object in the schools which they founded. It should not be supposed however that so great a change in the subject-matter of studies as the sub- stitution of the Latin and Greek classics for the mediaeval authorities and for empty scholastic dis- putations, was effected without a bitter struggle. In point of fact the struggle was both protracted and virulent in the ancient universities and second- ary schools ; and this was particularly true of those of Germany. There the Catholic clergy in charge of many of the schools, with the Dominicans who were partisans of scholasticism at their head, and even not a few Protestants who clung to the authority of Aristotle, made long and vigorous opposition to any innovation in that to which they were accustomed. It was in the early days of this contest that the "Epistles of Obscure Men", to which allusion has before been made, were written by the Humanists ; yet as late as 1570 we read in the life of Pierre Ramus that this famous scholar was refused temjjorary admission into the teaching force of the Protestant gymnasium of Strasburg because he was known to be opposed to Aristotle's logic; and that, on this same account, the University of Heidelberg strongly opposed his temporary appoint- ment as professor of ethics in that institution, when made by the elector palatine. In spite of all opposition however. Humanistic THE RENAISSANCE 33 studies steadily made their way into the old strong- holds of Scholasticism ; the new established Protes- tant schools and universities were in a modified sense humanistic from the outset ; and, following upon the success of this revolution in studies, the Burse system in the German universities died out, the lower degrees B. A. and A. M. fell into disuse ; and the preparatory schools of the liberal arts were separated from the universities as gymnasien.* In English Oxford as well as on the continent, we are told by Green, that the Renaissance met with a fierce, though short-lived opposition. " The contest took the form of boyish frays, in which the young partisans and opponents of the New Learning took sides as Greeks and Trojans." One of the college preachers who had made furious tirades from the pulpit against the new studies, was summoned before the king, Henry VIII, where he alleged that he was carried away by the spirit. " Yes ", retorted the king, " by the spirit not of wisdom but of folly." The bluff king was favorable to the New Learning, and was not disposed to permit any nonsense to hinder it ; his minister Wolsey founded a splendid college as its nursery ; and Oxford soon became, what it has since remained, a stronghold of Human- istic learning. * See Schmidt II. 377-9 for-aooount of the opposition of old universities to Humanism, £ind -the changes in them which resulted from its success. Also Paulsen, Gesoh. des Gelehrteu Unterrichts for a view more favorable to the universities, and less favorable to the tact of Humanists. 34 THE HISTORY OF MODERN EDUCATION Elsewhere, the struggle lasted fully a century— so tenacious of life are old ways— but when it ended, the New Learning was everywhere in possession of the schools, though in not a few, disputations con- tinued to hold their place. II. A second characteristic of the 16th century was the great extension of middle-class education in England and elsewhere. And truly this extension is something remarkable if it bears any due propor- tion to the multiplication of grammar schools during this century. Thirty of these schools existed in England before 1500, and in the half century which followed, the number was nearly trebled, fifty-four new ones being added. .Harrison, an Englishman, in 1577 writes thus of them : " Besides these uni- versities, also there are a great number of Gram- mer Schooles, throughout the realme, and those verie liberallie endued for the better relief of pore scholers, so that there are not manie corporate townes, now under the queene's dominion that have not one Gramer Scheie at the least, with a sufficient living for a master and usher appointed to the same. There are in like manner, divers coUegiat churches, as Windsor, Wincester, Eaton, Westmin- ster ; and in those a great number of pore scholers, dailie maintained by the liberality of the founders, with meat, bookes, and apparell ; from whence, after they have been well entered in the knowledge of the Latine and Greek tongs, and rules of versifying, the THE RENAISSANCE 35 triall whereof is made by certain apposers, yearlie appointed to examine them, they are sent to certain especiall houses in each universitie &c." This quo- tation from a contemporary writer is the more interesting, because, while showing the great exten- sion of secondary schools, it indicates also how ■ thoroughly the New Learning had taken possession of them. A letter written to Dean Colet about the begin- ning of the century, by one of his friends, is sup- posed to indicate tolerably well the feelings of the gentry about learning at that time. It represents a gentleman at a dinner where learning was spoken of with some favor, as bursting out in this fashion : " Why do you talk nonsense, friend ? A curse on those stupid letters 1 all learned men are beggars : even Erasmus, the most learned of all, is a beggar as I hear. — I swear I'd rather that my son should hang than study letters. For it becomes the sons of gentlemen to blow the horn nicely, to hunt skilfully, and elegantly to carry and train a hawk. But the study of letters should be left to the sons of rustics." A great change was evidently wrought in the opinions of this class during this century ; and this change was doubtless due to the better adapta- tion of studies to fit men to make a decent figure in the kind of life which they were destined to lead. We should not fail to observe that amongst the grammar schools founded in England in the first 36 THE HISTORY OP MODERN EDUCATION half of the century, was the one founded by Dean Colet in connection with St. Paul's, of which Lily, long famous among English schoolmasters, was the head, and which had over its gate a figure of the child Christ, with the legend " Hear ye him," so indicative of the pious spirit of its founder. He died in 1519, but not before he had strongly urged in a sermon preached before the clerical convocation, that a re- form in the church should begin with the chief clergy.* Even more marked than the growth of the middle- class schools in England, was the growth of schools of a like kind in Germany. Such for example were the "Particular" schools and Kloster schools of Wirtemberg and Saxony, the latter of which were founded with the estates and revenues of defunct monasteries, and both organized in six progressive classes. Such were the Princes' schools (Fursten- schulen) of Saxony with their courses of six years, beginning with the end of the third year of the other two schools. Such was the widely celebrated school of Sturm at Strasburg, and those somewhat less known of Trotzendorf, Michael Neander, and Hier- onymus Wolf Such also were the justly celebrated schools of the Jesuits, which sprang up and rapidly multiplied in France as well as Germany, in the last half of the 1 6th century. ♦Burnet, Hist, of Ret. HI. p 39. The quotations are from " Edacation in Early England," a publication of the Early English Text Soo. THE RENAISSANCE 37 In all of these secondary schools there was much which had a common character. In all, Latin pre- dominated with some Greek ; little or no attention was given to mathematics ; and save a few not very conspicuous instances, there was an apparent neglect of history, geography, and natural history. Von Raumer warns us, however, not too hastily to sup- pose that geography and history were entirely neg- lected because they are not mentioned in the list of studies, since very possibly they may have been used as incidental to the explanation of classical authors, in which way we know that they were used in the schools of the Jesuits. During this century, the idea of providing free board and tuition for poor but talented youth, was widely acted upon in German secondary schools and also in the universities. The free places needed for this purpose, were endowed from the confiscated wealth of the monasteries ; and many cloisters were converted into schools which were endowed from their possessions. A policy of this kind had early been hinted at by Luther, and the state now under- took to use the property of the monasteries for the advancement of learning, which had nominally, at least, been their most useful purpose.* What has been said will suffice to show how wide an extension was given during this century to secondary education in some of the states of Europe. "See Paulsen .Gesohiohte des Gelehrten Unterriohts, p. 160, etc. 38 THE HiSTOfeY OF MobEKN EDtfcATlOJf It may not be out of place to remark in this con- nection that provision for popular elementary edu- cation was not wholly neglected, at least in Ger- many. The school ordinance of Wirtemberg dating from 1559, provides for the instruction of boys and girls in separate schools, in reading, writing, religion, and church song. The similar school laws of Saxony which date from 1580 provide among other things for " Deutschen schulen " in which reading, writing, and religion are the subjects of instruction. Con- siderably earlier in the century, similar provisions for a like limited instruction, were made in many of the cities and small states of northern Germany, and in some of them separate schools for girls are men- tioned.* III. We have now discussed two of the marked characteristics of educational history in the 16th cen- tury, viz. the determination of educational practice and range of studies to the Latin and Greek classics, with the resistance offered by the older universities and secondary schools to this Humanistic revolution ; and the great extension of secondary education in England and Germany, and to some extent, through the Jesuits, in France. Let us now consider the third fact which seems to me to place a somewhat distinctive mark upon this century, and this is that school training seems to have been regarded more fully as a preparation for successful pursuit of the * Dittes-Gesohichte der Erziehung und des Unterriohta § 87. fSE RENAISSANCE 39 interests of this present life, than had ever been the case since the fall of the Roman Empire ; and that hence some intelligent efforts become apparent to economize the time of the pupils, and to make a proper use of their intellectual activity. Even if we put entirely out of view those hin- drances to economy of time and effort, that we have heretofore considered as existing in the Middle Ages ; — it is evident that the view of life and its purposes which prevailed in those ages, a view which made of ascetic observances the greatest merit, and of an utter renunciation of this world with all its inter- ests and enjoyments the surest passport to eternal blessedness, was very little fitted to encourage any possible saving of time which was considered of little worth, and of energies which men were taught to think wasted unless directed to a contemplation of the great hereafter. It is true that the church by its eager grasping after worldly power and emolu- ments, and that many of the clergy in later ages by their greedy pursuit of earthly possessions and sensual pleasures, tacitly denied as men the doctrines which as churchmen they taught ; but the mass of men are slow in their logical processes, and so for a time the relations of the objective examples to the subjective dogmas passed unchallenged, or were speciously explained away. But with this new intellectual awakening, men began to reason justly that what both church and 40 THE HISTORY OF MODERN EDUCATION churchmen found so interesting in this present world, must certainly be worthy of some attention ; — that this life, though it be but a period of probation for a far more glorious hereafter, is capable of being so wisely used and so rationally enjoyed as to become helpful for those who are heirs of immortality ; and that hence youthful years and youthful energies are too precious to be wasted and frittered away unneces- sarily. Hence we hear from more than one quar- ter, complaints of the loss of pupils' time. Erasmus inveighs against the time that is wasted in teaching children to read and write, which he says ordinary masters spend three years and more in doing ; and he sets himself, as Quintilian had done more than fourteen centuries earlier, to devising means for utilizing youthful curiosity, memory, and readiness to observe. Luther bitterly denounces the old system by which he says, " we have seen young people study twenty years by the antique methods, and come with difficulty to stammer a little Latin without knowing besides anything of their mother tongue." The enormous waste of time in the educa- tion of children is one of the things that Rabelais most bitingly satirizes in his grotesque account of the early education of Gargantua and in contrasting it with the training of Eudemon. It is needless to go farther in illustration of the awakening conscious- ness that the years of childhood have been hitherto terribly wasted, and that it is needful henceforth THE EENAISSAXCE 41 that they be used to better purpose in a better prepa- ration for the business of this present world. Should it be thought strange that with this lively and newly-aroused interest in the preparation of youth for careers of future usefulness, such well- nigh exclusive attention should have been given to the ancient languages in all save the most elemen- tary schools, we shall do well to consider that at that time these were by far the fittest and most perfect means available for youthful training ; that Latin was still, not only the universal language of the learned, but also was, and long continued to be, the sole medium through which desirable knowledge could be gained ; that those sciences on which so much stress is now wont to be laid as a preparation for practical life, were then in so infantile a state as to be rather a source of misinformation than of reliable knowledge ; and that furthermore, it is a question not yet definitely settled among some most enlightened nations, appealing to facts in their own history, whether such study of languages and their polite literature, is not after all the most effective training for practical life. Aside from this matter of the choice of the best literary means available for the training of youth, the expedients that were in this age proposed by thoughtful men to economize the time and powers of the young, were chiefly these three, viz., a larger use and more thorough cultivation of the vernacu- 42 THE HISTORY OF MODERN EDUCATION lar tongues, the employment of better and more intelligent methods in instruction, and the prepara- tion and use of more systematic and intelligibly- worded text-books. It will readily be recognized that all these means were suitable for the end pro- posed, and were likely to be efficient thereto if wise- ly and skillfully used. We shall be able to examine them all in some detail, when we come to consider the theories of education to which this century gave rise, under the fifth topic which we have proposed to ourselves. We may content ourselves with remarking here, that the need of more suitable school-books was felt to be so imperative, to obviate the waste of time, that in Germany the greatest geniuses like Reuchlin and Melanchthon, thought it not beneath them to comjiose elementary treatises for schools ; that the art of printing was there used most of all to mul- tiply better school-books ; and that the greatest prodigy of learning, as well as the keenest intellect of the sixteenth century, Erasmus, composed gram- mars to supersede books like Priscian and the bar- barous Doctrinale, and prepared editions of classic authors, as well as selections, which were more suit- able for school use, as will be shown hereafter. IV. In this century the idea of universal, and even compulsory state education, which had been forcibly expressed by Plato, had been practiced by the Spartans and probably by the Jews, and possibly THE RENAISSANCE 43 had been conceived as desirable by Theodulf iu the days of Charlemagne, — we find expressed in at least three widely different quarters, by Luther in 1524 and 1530, by Sadolet, archbishop of Carpentras in 1533, and by the nobility in the States General at Orleans in 1560. In his celebrated letter to the " Magistrates of All Cities of Germany," * Luther insists that the care of education should be an affair of state, and not be left solely to parents, of whom some are careless and " like ostriches which abandon their eggs, give life to children and leave their nurture to chance," still more are ignorant of anjd^hing save care for daily bread, and finally, others who would gladly care for their children have neither time nor place for it. Yet the children when grown up, he says, will be our fellow citizens for weal or wo. If for weal, the state must care for their education, for "to it is the welfare of the state entrusted ; " and this welfare does not depend alone on its treasures, its beautiful buildings, and its military equipment, but upon its having many learned, reasonable, and honorable citizens who know how to make good use of such things. It is Satan, he declares, who suggests to men the neglect of the education of children. And then, enumerating various public purposes for which governments freely expend money, as armaments, roads, and bridges, he exclaims, " Why should we • Luther als PSdagog, pp. 86-106. 44 THE HISTORY OP MODERN EDUCATION not with better reason spend at least as much for the poor needy youth, to employ a skillful man or two as schoolmasters ? " More than once he asks in substance the bitter question, — do we Germans then wish always to remain boobies and beasts, as our neighbors call us, and with good reason? — ^that he may sting the national pride, and rouse to effective action in found- ing schools to remove the reproach of ignorance and stupidity. " I demand," he says, "that the child go to school at least an hour or two per day ; and it is expedient to select the most capable among them as masters of schools. Long enough we have wallowed in ignorance and corruption. Long enough and too long, we have been the stupid Germans ; it is time that we go to work." So much on the right and duty of the state to give universal education to its people, I extract from Luther's vigorous plea and much more is equally pertinent. As to its nature, while making a strong plea for the ancient languages, he says, " You understand it ; we need in all places schools for our daughters and our sons, that the man may become fitted to exercise his calling properly, and the woman, to direct her household aright and bring up her children like Christians." Let us now see on what he bases his argument for compulsory education. He says "my opinion is, the authorities are bound io force their subjects to send THE RENAISSANCE 45 their children to school. If they can oblige their subjects to carry spears and guns, to mount ramparts, and to do all military duties, with better reason can and ought they to force them to send their children to school, since here the question is of a much more terrible war against the demon Satan."* You will observe that he rests the right of the state to compel school attendance on the same basis as the conceded right of governments to compel their subjects to do military duty, and on the fact that the moral wel- fare of many children is imperilled by the ignorance or carelessness of parents. Luther certainly leaves us in no doubt of his opinion in the matter which we are considering. Archbishop Sadolet, a friend of Erasmus, and founder of several schools for children in his diocese, wrote a "treatise concerning the right instruction of free-born children " in which, besides some excellent counsels in other respects, he recommends that states should copy the Greeks in not leaving the training of children to parental caprice or ignorance, and says "as the fathers are usually blind, the laws should interpose to enlighten them, to direct their good-will, or in case of resistance to constrain them." We need not look too closely to the good prelate's Grecian example, unless he refers to Sparta. His opinion is plain in respect to the right and duty of * Sermon to Pastors in 1530. 46 THE HISTORY OF MODERN EDUCATION the state to establish schools and enforce attendance on them. At the meeting of the States General of Orleans in 1560, the memorial of the nobility to the King con- tains the following remarkable proposal : " May it please the King to levy a contribution on ecclesias- tical benefices for the payment of a reasonable salary to schoolmasters and men of learning in all cities and villages, for the instruction of poor youth of the rural parts ; and to order that the fathers and mothers be bound to send the said children to school on penalty of a fine, and that they be obliged to do this by the lords and the ordinary judges." There is no question that this is a proposition for general and compulsory education, and that it provides what seem likely to be adequate mep.ns for the enforcement of compulsion. It is also obvious that the nobles point out an adequate source for the revenues needed to support such schools, — ^from the property of oliier people, with which men are wont to be somewhat more generous than with their own. Prof. Compayre explains the disposition of the nobility to petition for popular instruction as Luther had done, and their readiness to levy contributions on the ecclesias- tical benefices for that purpose, as Luther had also suggested, by saying that a majority of the French aristocracy in the 16th century were imbued with THE RENAISSANCE- 47 the spirit of the reformation and favorable to the Protestant cause.* It is quite possible that what may seem to us a proposition for an unwarranted spoliation for an object worthy in itself, would have been excused by those who participated in it, by pointing to the vast wealth accumulated in the ecclesiastical benefices, a wealth needless for the legitimate objects of the church and liable to be squandered in luxury ; and by recalling the objects which had given color to at least a portion of these accumulations, viz., aid to the poor, and gratuitous education as it had been given in most of the early monasteries. It might have been urged plausibly that the nobility purposed only to restore a portion of this wealth to its original uses. We have then three distinct proposals in this cen- tury for universal education, under direction of the state, and compulsory in its character. One of these proposals comes from the leading figure of the Reformation, a second from a prelate of the Roman church, and a third from a body of the French nobility. Evidently therefore, thus early in the Renaissance period, a perception of these great edu- cational principles, which the present age is coming to regard as well-nigh axiomatic, had already gained a degree of acceptance in theory which seems more *Hist. Crit. des Doo. de I'Edn. en France, vol. I, p. 157. 48 THE HISTORY OF MODERN EDUCATION remarkable when we consider how slowly they have been accepted in practice. In concluding this part of our subjeet, it is inter- esting also to remark, that the arguments with which Luther especially in general, and Sadolet in part, enforce their ideas, are the same that are urged in our own days for like purposes : viz., the need of " universal enlightenment as the logical correlative of that universal freedom of thought which is the essence of the Humanitarian revolution ; and the right and duty of the state to supervise it, enforce it, and insure it against the chances of parental poverty, ignorance, and caprice, in the interest of the entire body of citizens. CHAPTER III EDUCATIONAL OPINIONS OP THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY V. The appearance in the sixteenth century of a number of distinguished men who have expressed noteworthy opinions on the means and method of education, is one of its most interesting characteris- tics ; not only because these men furnish valuable contributions to the history of educational thought, but also because they indicate how thoroughly the human mind has been awakened, and how com- pletely it has freed itself from the shackles of author- ity in the realm of thought. For nearly twelve centuries, from the days of Quintilian and Plutarch, of St. Jerome * and St. Augustine, little or nothing bearing the stamp of original thought on the sub- ject of education is known to us. Here, as else- where during the Middle Ages, authority reigned supreme, an authority too, which barren and ascetic in its nature, brought barrenness into education so long as it prevailed. But from the beginning of the 16th century all this is changed. From this time forward we shall * St. Jerome's letter to Laeta. wi-itten in the fourth century, in which he gave advice to a Christian mother for the education of her daughter, a descendant of the Scipios and Gracchi, and which was long influential in female education, may be found in Barnard's American Journal of Educa- tion, vol. 5, p. 549, (49) 50 THE HISTORY OP MODERN EDUCATION find no lack of men of the brightest genius, who bestow on educational topics some of the choicest efforts of their thought. Nor will these men be confined, by any means to the adherents of the Reformation. Indeed four of the six men whose opinions we shall have occasion to discuss in this century were Catholics, and one of them, Rabelais, was a monk, though not very ascetic in either life or writings. Thus it will appear that freedom of thought has penetrated everywhere in the track of the Renaissance, and displays itself, as in other ways, so also in zeal for the improvement of edu- cation. It will be well for us to carry with us as a kind of guiding thought in examining the ideas of the writers of this age, the fact that both the funda- mental principles of right education, were now almost everywhere violated, as an inheritance from the past ; to wit, the principle of Conformity to Cul- ture in selecting the best available means, and the principle of Conformity to Nature in the adaptation of methods and instrumentalities in instruction to the end to be gained in the development of the young. The theories of this and the succeeding ages, may be regarded as efforts to rehabilitate both these principles in educational practice. Against scholasticism, which violated the first, sanctified as it was by tradition and entrenched in the inertia of men, a sharp but decisive battle was EDUCATIONAL OPINIONS 51 waged which continued most of this century. We shall see this in the denunciations of Luther, in the keen and polished invective of Erasmus, in the gro- tesque delineations of Rabelais, and in the efforts of all to give classic literature its due preponderance in the courses of the schools ; whilst the efforts of Ramus in behalf of Mathematics, and of Montaigne in favor of History, are parts of the same struggle to secure a proper conformity of studies to the best available means of culture. The efforts which are made by all the theorists to secure conformity to nature in the methods of im- parting instruction to the young, are of the highest interest, because they are the efforts of pioneers in an almost untrodden field. They will be seen, not only in the proposal of methods seemingly better adapted to the ways in which the youthful intelli- gence works its way to clearness of view, but also in the preparation of school-books better suited to the capacity of young minds. And should some of the expedients that are proposed seem to us like the half-blind gropings of men after better things, yet measurably uncertain as to how they may best be attained, we shall do well to remember, that at that time the laws of mental evolution had been very little studied, and that with the experience of nearly four centuries of theories to aid in their mastery, we of the 19th century cannot boast that we have gotten wholly back to nature in our school practice. 52 HISTORY OF MODERN EDUCATION Martin Luther, 1483-1516 Luther is so well known to all of us as to need no personal introduction, and we have already seen his testimonj' as to the ineffi- ciency of studies in causing waste of time, and his ap- peals for universal and com- pulsory education. He ex- presses his opinion of the merits of the existing luther, i483-im6 schools with his usual frankness, in calling them " these stables of two-footed asses, and these diaboli- cal schools " which he would wish razed to the ground or else by a pious metamorphosis trans- formed into Christian schools. The masters he depicts as men who themselves ignorant, were un- able to teach others either truth or piety, and much more incai^able of instructing themselves or others in life and the principles of reason ; and he asks " Whence then comes the evil? From this, — that they had for all books only those of ignorant monks and barbarous sophists. They were therefore forced to become what the books were whence they had learned, that is perfect ignoramuses. A daw does not hatch a dove, nor does a dullard train a pru- dent man. ' ' It will be seen that he is perfectly frank, in denouncing the lack of conformity to culture. EDUCATIONAL OPINIONS 53 Let us see what means he proposes to remedj^ the evils that he exposes. These were first the classic languages and some other studies which he shall presently name himself, and second, great libraries in centres of population. (1) As to the first he says, the first thing we have to do is to cultivate the lan- guages, Latin, Greek and Hebrew ; " for the tongues are the sheaths which contain the spirit, the vases which hold religious verities ; " and again in another place, " If I had children and the means to rear them (this was said before his marriage to the nun, Catharine von Bora), I should wish them to learn, not only languages and History, but also Music and Mathematics." We see that in this, Luther would make an important addition to the studies to which that age predominantly turned, since he would add mathematics, history, and music to their curriculum. Still farther, in his letters and sermons, he lays the strongest emphasis on Religion as a subject of youth- ful study, and he shows himself friendly to physical education through a training that may fit boys for military duties. Hence his curriculum of school studies will come to include religion, the learned languages, history, mathematics, singing, and physi- cal training. In one of his sermons he also presses parents not to be easily satisfied with small advancement of their children. "Let thy son study boldly," he says, " even though he should sometimes want bread ; so 64 THE HISTORY OF MODERN EDUCATION wilt thou give to our Lord God a fine bit of wood out of which He may carve a master. And think not within thyself that now the common love of bread and butter so greatly despises the professions, and so say — 'Ha, if my son can read and write German, and can reckon, he knows quite enough, I will make him a tradesman.' They shall soon become so eager that they will willingly dig a learned man out of the earth with their fingers, if he lay ten ells deep." We should not think however that Luther pushes his dislike to the old scholastic ways so far as to despise Dialectics and Ehetoric. On the contrary, he values them both truly, for what they are really fit. He says in his table talks, " Dialectics is a use- ful and needful art, which one should study and learn rightly, as he would arithmetic and reckoning. Dialectics reasons, but gives not the ability to him who has already learned it, to reason about every- thing : it is an implement and tool, by whose use we can reason elegantly, correctly and systematically about what we know and understand." So also of Ehetoric, he says, " Fine speaking is not a strained and high- colored gloss of words, but is rather an elegantly adorned speech, which presents a matter or a sub- ject with charming skill, clearly and nobly, like a beautiful painting." Both these arts are, it will be seen, treated fairly and with just discrimination, as EDUCATIONAL OPINIONS 55 would appear even more plainly could we carry quotation farther. (2) Besides studies which we have considered, Luther would extend farther the means of culture, by the estabhshment in all cities of extensive libraries, in which he says, "the first place should be for Annals, Chronicles, and Histories of all kinds which perpetuate the remembrance of past times. For these are wonderfully useful for learning and regu- lating the course of the world, yea even to behold the wonders and the works of God." I choose this pas- sage from his wise advice as to the contents of such libraries, because it shows that his mention of history among the subjects he would have taught to child- ren, was one of his settled convictions in regard to school subjects, at a time when history was still little thought of. His list of books that should be ex- cluded, which he classes as eselsmist, is at least amus- ing, as showing his disgust for scholastic theology. In regard to home and school discipline he speaks much and wisely, recommending a gentle firmness which shall assure obedience, yet win love. The life of the school should be social as opposed to monastic restrictions and severity. He recommends also that languages should so far as possible be learned concretely rather than by abstract grammar rules as heretofore. Hence we may see that Luther enters little upon conformity to nature. His effort, aside from religion, was for conformity to culture. 56 THE IIISTOKY OF ^ror)EKX EDIT'ATION ERASMUS, 1467-1530 Both his parents dying Erasmus, 1467-153G Erasmus, the most famntaigne, born of a noble familv in MONTAIGNE, loa-J-lSOS 1533 ; so trained up Ijy an eccentric father that Latin Avas to him as a vernacular; learned, as well in all tlie wisdom of the ancients, as in whatever in his own age was most elegant and refined ; and author of a famous series of essay's on various social and philosophical cpicstions, in which he has so judiciously used tlje stores of his vast erudition as to give a new value to what he has borrowed. He died in l')f)2. His educational views are presented chiefly in the Essays on " Pedantry " and un " Tlie In.-truetion of EDUCATIONAL OPINIONS 81 Children," * the latter of which is addressed to Mme. Diane de la Foix, one of his friends, and was intended to guide her in bringing up her children. Something of interest in this regard may also be gleaned from the essay on " The Affection of Fathers to their Children." f His essays are so discursive and withal so brilliant, so much seems worthy to be quoted because of its combination of weighty ideas with felicitous expression, that I find it es- pecially difficult to bring the matter within due compass, and to give it that particular form which for the sake of clearness I have adopted in. the other writers of the age. In respect to conformity to culture, his polemic is against Pedantry, glancing only indirectly at scholas- ticism. Montaigne inveighs eloquently and wittily against the mere bookishness of his times, a spirit which was satisfied with saying " Cicero said this," or "these are the very words of Aristotle," and so was content to have no thoughts of its own. " I love not, he cries, this borrowed and mendicant sufficiency : Even if we could be learned with the wisdom of others, we can at least be wise only with our own wisdom. I hate the sage who is not wise for himself." He compares pedants to birds who go seeking grain which they bear to their broods with- out tasting it themselves ; to one who goes to his neighbor's to warm himself but neglects to carry * Book I, No's, 34 and 25, t No. 8, Bk 2. 82 THE HISTORY OF MODERN EDUCATION any fire home with him ; and to a rich but ignor rant Roman who kept several learned men by him to express on various subjects opinions which were his because he had bought them. Of the pupil trained in this bookish way, he says, "His Latin and Greek have rendered him sillier and more presumptuous than before he left home. He ought to bring back & full soul whereas it is only puffed up; and he has merely stuffed in place of enlarging it." " What a harm if we are taught neither to think well nor to act well." Speaking of reason, he thus happily defines the function of edu- cation : " For she is not to give light to the soul which has it not, nor to make a blind man see : her duty is not to furnish one with eyes but to train eyes, — ^to regulate one's gait, provided he has sound and serviceable knees and feet." It would appear that the Ciceronians whom Erasmus had_ belabored, had, in the last part of the century, been trans- formed into pedants, with like results to culture ; since neither took the trouble to have any thoughts of their own. Montaigne, because he esteems education "the greatest and most important task of the human understanding," would make polite letters not the end to be sought, but the means whereby faculties may be developed, and the man fitted for usefulness in his life-work. Hence he lays great stress on action as the expression of real knowledge. " These EDUCATIONAL OPINIONS 83 are my lessons," he says; "he has profited more by them who does them, than he who only knows them. — He will not so much say his lesson as he will do it : he will repeat it in his actions : we shall see whether there is prudence in his undertakings, kindness and justice in his manners, judgment and grace in his speech, .. .moderation in his sports, tem- perance in his pleasures, and order in his economy. The true mirror of our instruction is the course and tenor of our lives." It would be difficult to con- struct a better and more complete description of the results of a well-ordered and effective education, training judgment by its use, and encouraging inde- pendent thought, that its sharers may become men able and prudent, efficient and virtuous. As regards the discipline of schools, ne would have the course of instruction characterized by " austere mildness," as far removed on the one hand from weakness and effeminacy, as on the other from that violence and force which debases and dulls a well-conditioned nature. " If you desire a boy to fear shame and chastisement, he says, do not harden him to them." He denounces with vigor the severi- ties of the schools of his time, and says that when you draw near to them, you hear only cries both of children begging for mercy, and of masters drunken with rage. He would rather make the path of learning for boys a flowery one, that " where their ' profit is, there may also be their pleasure." 84 THE HISTORY OF MODERN EDUCATION Of the means of training, he gives a generous assortment, lacking some things which Rabelais recommends, whilst emphasizing some which he omits. He sets high value on bodily training and fine' manners, in which Locke follows him. " I desire," he says, " that outward decorum and tact and good personal habits be fashioned at the same time with the soul. It is not a soul, it is not a body that we train ; it is a man, and it is not fit that we should separate them." The last sentence we shall recognize as an old acquaintance, when we meet it a little changed in Rousseau's Emile. He would have Latin learned, not in the gram- matical way, but by- conversation and use as he himself learned it. We shall see that Locke also falls in with this idea. Foreign tongues in like manner should be gained by means of the inter- course of travel among the important nations who use them. Good books he would have read and thoroughly digested, to form the judgment while informing the mind, — an act which he aptly illus- trates by bees which plunder flowers of their sweets, but make of them honey which is all their own. He lays much stress on History, " the anatomy of philosophy, by which the most secret parts of our nature are penetrated ; " but he would have it so studied that the boy may gain from it, not mere facts, but the power to judge of facts, and thereby to attain worldly wisdom. Science should be so far EDUCATIONAL OPINIONS 85 studied, as to give that general view of nature and of our place in nature which befits the well-informed man who is no specialist. Indeed, being chiefly intent on the well-trained gentleman and man of affairs, he lays his chief emphasis on Travel, on Con- verse with men and things, and most of all on Philosophy. He would have a juaicious tutor to attend the boy on his travels and to regulate his intercourse with men ; and he expects from travel these advantages ; viz.: removal from paternal petting and injudicious fondness, with the concomitant strengthening of the body and steadying of the nerves ; knowledge of men of various nationalities and stations, their man- ners, characters, and language, that the boy may learn to value what is good, and to contemn what is bad ; and finally that the lad " may rub and polish his brains against those of others," and by this wide knowledge of the world, may early correct a tend- ency to narrow views of things and to provincialism in judgment. " This great world," he says, " is the mirror in which we must see ourselves, in order to know ourselves aright. So I wish that this be the book of my scholar. So many national characters, sects, judgments, opinions, laws, and customs, teach us to have a healthy judgment of our own, and train our reason to recognize our own imperfection and native weakness, which is no mean schooling." Philosophy he defines as having " virtue for her 86 THE HISTORY OF MODERN EDUCATION aim Her fit and proper ofiice is to know how to enjoy good things temperately, and to lose them with fortitude It seems to me that the first teachings with which we should nourish the soul, should be those which regulate its manners and its feelings, which teach it to know itself, to know both how to live well and how to die well." What Montaigne means by philosophy in education is evidently what we should term a proper training of the feelings and morals, and this philosophy, he justly says, " A child as soon as he leaves his nurse is nauch more capable of learning, then he is to learn to read or write. Philosophy has its lessons for the infancy of man as well as for his decline." The likeness of this to Herbart's demand for educative instruction is suffi- ciently striking. Such seem to us to be the most important points in Montaigne's essays which concern the theory of education, its spirit, its purposes, and its means. Much of it we shall meet again in Locke, but pre- sented in a loftier spirit. As for the boy who shows himself incurably disinclined to this elegant nurture, Montaigne bluntly says, " I know no other resource than to make him a pastry cook in some good city, even were he the son of a duke." So far as concerns any tentatives of Montaigne looking to conformity to nature, it promises well for him that at the outset he clearly recognizes the great difficulty, as well as the importance of right nurture. EDUCATIONAL OPINIONS 87 This difficulty, he sees, arises from the obscurity of the signs of infant inclinations, and the consequent uncertainty of the judgments based on the " slight guesses which we form from the movements of this period of life." Hence it happens, he says, that "for lack of having chosen their course aright, one often labors to no purpose, and wastes much time in training children for that in which they can never excel." To obviate this difficulty, he proposes to limit early efforts " to guiding them only to those things which are [universally] best and most profit- able." This idea is probably the germ which the paradoxical Rousseau expanded into his fancy of losing time to gain time. Still farther, he would choose a tutor with a mind strong and well-balanced rather than very full ; and, while he would like both, he would prefer good manners and a sound understanding, to mere knowl- edge. This tutor he would then have guide his charge in " a new way." This new way implies the most complete self-activity of the child in the free exercise of all his powers, in personal application of what he knows, and especially in the use of judg- ment on all that comes before him. He says of the tutor, " According to the nature of the spirit that he has in hand, let him begin by putting him to the test, permitting him to taste of things, to choose them, to discern by himself, — sometimes opening the door for him, sometimes leaving him to open it 88 THE HISTORY OF MODERN EDUCATION himself." The tutor should accommodate himself to the abihty of his pupil, a task which Montaigne acknowledges to be not easy, but rather " a mark of a lofty .and very strong spirit to know how to con- descend to those childish steps and to guide them." Futhermore he insists abundantly on observation and experience of things, rather than mere books, in instruction. To this end is intended the foreign travel and the converse with men, on which he lays much stress. In ridiculing mere word-splitting and the quibbles of logicians, he says " let us leave them to misuse their leisure ; we have other busi- ness. Let our disciple be provided with things : the words will follow but too abundantly I wish that things predominate, and that they so fill the fancy of the listener, that he shall have no recollection of the words." And of those who say they know, but cannot express what they know, he says, " In my opinion these are mere shadows of formless concep- tions, which they are unable to unravel and make clear within, and so cannot express outwardly." This can hardly fail to recall Gate's famous saying " Get a firm grip on the matter, and words will fol- low fast enough." His final word is this : " There is nothing Hke satisfying an appetite aud desire for knowledge: otherwise we become mere asses loaded with books : we give to boys with blows of a whip, a pocket-full of science to keep, whereas to do well, it is not EDtTf'ATIONAL OPINIONS 89 enough to merely lodge it with them ; they sliould espouse it," The key notes to liis pedagogic meth. )d then are these, — Self activity of the pupil in the use of all his powers and capabilities ; things before words; judgment and understanding before mem- ory ; adaptation of instruction to the pupil's present abilities. Let us now briefly summarize the educational ser- vices of the sixteenth century, and take account of the more or less novel pedagogical ideas which dur- ing its course, were expressed by distinguished men. The battle has been fought and won against mere ancient authority in 'the realm of thought, and, in that of letters, against scholasticism and pedantry, whether masquerading under the garb of Cicero or in a parti-colored coat made up of a patch-work of other men's ideas. As incidents of this victory, the new Humanistic learnilig has won its way largely into the old universities and secondary schools ; a thorough reform and reorganization of the venerable university of Paris has been proposed by Ramus ; and the human mind has very widely begun to assert its right to think freely, as it will, and on whatever it will. Proposals have been made to widen the range of studies, — ^through the introduction of history by Luther, Rabelais, and Montaigne, — of natural his- tory by Rabelais, — and of mathematics by Ramus, who emphasized his recommendation by the endow- 90 THE HISTORY OF MODERN EDUCATION ment of a chair of mathematics. A demand for the better education of women has been made by Eras- mus, by Luther, and by Vives. A thorough physi- cal training has been insisted upon by Erasmus and Luther, by Kabelais and Montaigne. The need of careful attention to morals and manners has been emphasized by all save Ramus ; and religion has been declared to be the needful basis of moral train- ing by all save Montaigne, whose philosophy bears the stamp rather of the teachings of such enlightened heathen as Seneca and Plutarch than of Christ. Much therefore has been done to conform education to the best means of culture available in that age, or to show where such conformity was still needful. Again, the chief source of difficulty in securing conformity to nature in instruction has been clearly indicated by Montaigne ; the great pedagogical prin- ciples, of assuring the intellectual co-operation of pupils, of adapting instruction to their ability to grasp, at all times and in all subjects, and of the need to use objective methods and to present subjects inductively — first the thing anid thto about the thing, have been proposed to sdcceeding ages to be by them adapted to the use of schools : and Vives has also made clear the difference between the logi- cal order of subjects and the order in which they should be presented to the youthful intelligence. CHAPTER R' DISTINGUISHED TEA(JJIJ.:i;s OF THK SIXTEENTH CKSTVSiY Philip Meliiiiclitho!!, Iin7-1.)(>0 A^I. Foremost ainoii,<;- tlio practical cdiicatoi-s of tliiscentiuy ]nustbeiia.iii('(l riiilip Molanclitlion, tho companion and judicious adviser of Luther in the religious reformation. He was born son of a pious and respectable armorer named Scliwarzerd, iu 1497, and died I06O in Wittenberg where he had been move than forty years professor. His early education was carried on undercharge of his matei'- nal grandfather, who thrashed him soundly Avhen he made mistakes in grammar, " in whicli ^\-iHe," says ]\Ielanchthon, " he made a grammarian of me." His early promise attractcfl the notic(.' of his uncle, the famous Reuchlin, who translated liis name Schwarzerd into its Greek e(|uivalent Melanclitlmn, after the scholarly fasliion of the age. He received the bachelor's degree in Heidelberg at the early age CJl) jrELAXellTIION, 14!)T-15C0 92 THE HISTORY OP MODERN EDUCATION of fourteen, and then went to Tubingen where he caught the enthusiasm of the New Learning, received his master's degree at seventeen, and when barely nineteen pubhshed an edition of Terence, whom he recommended " especially to youth as a teacher of life and of language." He mastered Greek ; read Aristotle in the original that he might know his dialectics and philosophy, unmixed with scholastic corruptions ; studied mathematics, and even law and medicine ; and in his twenty-first year pub- lished his Greek grammar. At the age of twenty- one, on recommendation of his uncle, Reuchlin, he was made professor of Greek at Wittenberg where he remained till the close of his active and useful life. His educational services here were three-fold, as professor, as school organizer, and as author of grammars, editions of classics, and several other text-books for school use. As professor, his activity was extraordinary, and the range of his instruction astonishing. He lec- tured, says von Raumer, on the Old and New Tes- tament, on dogmatics, ethics, logic, and physics ; and " besides, interpreted a crowd of Greek and Latin authors." His lectures treated subjects so funda- mentally and clearly, and withal with such elo- quence, as to attract to them a crowd of students, which reached at times 2000 in number. His influ- ence over his students was seldom equalled; an DISTINGUISHED TEACHERS 93 influence which was due, not merely to his merited reputation, as an instructor, but also to his uniform kindly care for their interests, his wise counsels in their difficulties, and his frequent extra-professorial help in their undertakings. " I can truthfully declare," he says himself in an academic discourse, "that I embrace all students with a paternal care and interest, and am deeply concerned in all that may bring them into danger," a declaration which his entire career as a teacher confirms. From his instructions went forth several men animated by his spirit, to become famous directors of schools, amongst whom were Trotzendorf and Michael Neander, pres- ently to be mentioned. Through this, as well as other services rendered to the Renaissance in its early years, he won the title of " Preceptor of Ger- many," as Rabanus Maurus had seven centuries earlier been called " First Preceptor of Germany." The text-books which he prepared for schools, were a farther means of extending his influence in promoting the new learning. His Greek and Latin Grammars were written for the use of his pupils. In a later edition of the latter, in which he enters upon the praise of grammar, he says significantly, " In my first edition some things were missed. It should be added that too many rules ought not to be given lest boys be frightened away by prolixity." In his texl^book of logic, which, like the two preced- ing ones, was pubUshed in his early manhood, he 94 thp: history of modern education says " The earlier (i. e. scholastic) dialect has fallen into contempt, because it was no art, but only the shadow of an art, and led into endless labyrinths. But I present the true, unadulterated dialectic, as ^Ye have received it from Aristotle and some of his discreet expounders. Instead of denouncing Aris- totle, like Eamns, because of the absurdities which had been attached to his system during ignorant ages, Melanchthon undertakes to present the real logic of Aristotle. His text-book of rhetoric pulj- lished when he was only twenty-two, was intended as an elementary introduction to the rhetorical works of Cicero and Q,uintilian. He wrote also text-books of physics and etlhcs, the latter in the form of a commentary on Aristotle's Ethics. All these text-books were characterized by clearness of definition, orderliness of arrangement, and simple elegance of language. They were long and widely used, passed through several editions, and had great influence in Germany. jMelanchthon also heartil}' interested himself in scliool organization, through which he exerted a vast influence in Germany, as well by wise and timely advice given to those who purposed establish- ing schools, as by his plan for organizing the schools of Saxony, which grew out of his visitation of the Saxon schools and cliurches in 1527. In this'iilau ho says that " parents sliould send tlieir children to school in (iod's luinic, and 1i-aiii I hern foi- tlio Lord DISTINGUISHKD TEACHERS 95 God, that He may use them for. the good of others " in both church and state. In his schools he would have " Latin only, not German, Greek, or Hebrew studied," that the children might not be overloaded with either subjects or books, to the end that they might learn something well. The schools should be organized in three separate troops or grades, in the first of which the cliildren should be taught, reading, writing, and a good stock of Latin words, together with the Lord's Prayer, the Creed, and a few prayers ; in the second, were to be pursued grammar and Latin reading of the simpler kind, also music, and portions of the scrip- tures to be well learned, with easy explanations of Christian doctrines and duties. The third grade was to be composed of the elite youth, who besides music, were to read the Latin authors of the higher sort, and to be held to speak Latin and write Latin letters and verses. The boys in this and in the second grade were to be thoroughly drilled in gram- mar ; for Melauchthon believed that " no greater harm can be done to all arts, than when the youth is not well practised in grammar," which, as we have seen, had been thoroughly beaten into him. "^ Such were Melanchthon's somewhat artless ideas of a proper school-system, marked possibly by the crudity of a first effort at organization, but more probably controlled in form by the fewness of teach- ers in the schools of his time. We shall find this 96 THE nisTDj'.Y OF jror)i':i;x KDncATinx ettbrt greatly imprnvr(l in tlio work of Sturm, the p-ivat sclinol oriranizcr of tlie l^tli century, wLosu plan was adapted for schools well eiiuippod with teachers. Johauii Sturm, 1 507-1 5S9 AVe shall do well to rcvii.'W next the services of the most renowned teachi a of the ag'e, one whose school organization has left ifs impress on the secondary school system of all north- ern Eni'o})e since his day, Joljann Sturm, of Stras- hnrp;. Born in l")*)!, of resfiectalde parents whose mcmoi-y lie always held in grateful esteem, he received his earliest schooling with the sons of tlie nohleman whom his father served as treasurer. In his early yre lie studied medicine, logic, and the Creek and Latin elas,-ies. wliei'c also he married, and liad a lai'ge nuniljiT of lioarding students of se\-ei';d Oat i oi i;d i I i es. A I the age of tiiirty, his gi'iiwing )'e}iu(alion eauseij Inm to Ijc calL.'d to Stras- STrP.M. 1.50;-lrj89 DISTINGUISHED TEACHERS 97 burg, whose schools were iu a wretched condition, to organize there the gymnasium whose success was to give him a lasting fame. He remained at its head for forty-seven years, when he was displaced as the result of a bitter church quarrel, and died five years after in 1589, at the age of eighty-two. The fame of his school drew to it students from far and near, so that it is said of it that in 1578 its pupils numbered several thousand, drawn from no less than eight nations and from all social ranks, from princes to the sons of peasants ; and, as has just been said, it became a model for a great num- ber of other schools, amongst which were those of England. Its reputation was due to its clearly defined aim, its thoroughly systematic organization with due gradation of studies, and the thorough scholarship which was gained in all that was taught. Its aim was to train pious, learned, and eloquent men, and this it pursued faithfully and exclusively. The means that were used to secure this end, were exclusively literary ; for religion, an acquaintance with the New Testament in Greek, much of which was to be memorized, together with the Catechism ; for learning, a thorough acquaintance with the classic authors of Greece and Rome ; for eloquence, an elementary study of rhetoric and dialectics, illus- trated and practised upon during the last three years in the ancient orators and poets. From the examinations which were to be given 98 THE HISTORY OF MODERN EDUCATION in the last year of the gymnasial course, it would seem also that some very rudimentary acquaintance with mathematics and astronomy was given. Of other branches there was no mention. His aim therefore was perfectly simple and definite, and equally definite and simple were the means by which he strove to attain it. Likewise both aim and means were in complete accord with the ideal of his age. This ideal was the attainment of eloquence in the Latin tongue by means of the imitation of the ancient authors, who were supposed to have ex- hausted all the possibilities of knowledge. Indeed, according to Paulsen, there had arisen in this age a pedagogy which represented " the lack of eloquence as the source of all evils in the culture and morals of the clergy, and which believed that with eloquence would enter also wisdom and virtue which are in- separably united with it." Sturm's method of teaching both Latin and Greek, aside from the thorough drill in grammar which was always to be given, was that of double transla- tion from Latin into German and vice versa, from Greek into Latin and then back into Greek. A recommendation occurs in his directions to the teacher of the fifth class which is so similar to one of Roger Ascham's expedients that it deserves to be quoted. " It is a good practice to cause some pas- sage from the Latin orators to be translated into German, and then to give it in the school to be DISTINGUISHED TEACHERS 99 translated back into Latin extempore; since the Eoman orator himself plays the part of corrector instead of the teacher." Besides this reciprocal translation, there was much composition and verse- making, and a constant use of Latin as a means of communication. In the later years of instruction, the boys also took part in Greek and Latin comedies. The pedagogic ideas which controlled Sturm's methods, and which have been reserved for this place because they likewise gave color to his plan of organization, were briefly these : — all subjects are to be kept carefully within the range of the present abilities of the pupils : all teaching is to be made perfectly clear and definite : little is to be demanded at a time, but that little is to be thoroughly mastered and frequently reviewed ; religion is to be taught by interpretation of the New Testament, and by mem- orizing considerable passages thereof With regard to Sturm's plan of organization, it should be borne in mind that it is the very earliest scheme that we have, looking to an extended, syste- matic, well-articulated course of studies for a school of several teachers, in which is assigned to each class such portions of the subject-matter of the course of instruction as is suited to the age and stage of advancement of its pupils. The schools of the Greeks and Romans, as we have already seen, bore no such systematic character. The autobiographic acpount of Walafried Strabo in the ninth century, 100 THE HISTORY OF MODEEN EDUCATION gives no indications of such a plan in one of the best monasteries in this most enlightened century of the Dark Ages. The simple plan of Melanchthon which has recently been mentioned, and the somewhat earlier three-class plan of Agricola, bear no compar- ison with the elaborate and thoroughly progressive scheme of Sturm. This program, which seems to have had its sug- gestions in what he saw among the Brethren of Deventer, contemplated a gymnasial course of nine years, which later was extended to ten. It began at the age of seven years and ended at sixteen or seventeen. To this course succeeded an academic course of five years, in which the instruction was given by lectures. The school training was thus to end at the age of twenty-one or twenty-two. The first seven years were to be devoted to gaining a pure and fluent use of the Latin ; the next two or three, to acquiring ornate and logical speech ; the last five, to gaining the ability to speak aptly and to the point. The details of this plan are much too lengthy to be given here even in outline ; but they may be found in full in Barnard's American Journal of Education, Vol. 4th, pp. 167 and 401, translated from the first volume of von Raumer's History. It will be found interesting and instructive to peruse the careful instructions given to his associates ; and the intelligent school manager will be likely to rise DISTINGUISHED TEACHERS 101 from its perusal filled with admiration for the peda- gogic genius of him who devised it. For, as the head -master of Harrow has very recently said, "it is the time-table which is the test of the modern schoolmaster ; it is there that he may win his main success. Yet it is only he who has been called on to essay it that knows where the difficulty lies, and how great it is." Valentine Trotzendorf and Michael Neander Let us now briefly sketch the pedagogic career of two of Melanchthon's pupils, who became famous in their day for some special features of their method of teaching and management, which seem to me curious and instructive. These men were Valentine Trotzendorf and Michael Neander. The early edu- cation of Trotzendorf, who was born of a peasant family in 1490, in a village whose name he adopted as his own, was somewhat interrupted and neglected. When twenty-two years old, he sold his small inher- itance, and went for two years to Leipsic, where he gained a knowledge of Latin and some acquaintance with Greek ; when twenty-six he became teacher of a school near his home ; and it was not until he was twenty-eight years old that he threw up his place and went to Wittenberg where for five years he was under the strong influence of Melanchthon and be- came an excellent scholar. Then he went to Gold- berg, first as assistant and later as rector of the 102 THE HISTORY OP MODERIS" EDUCATIOK school, and there he spent the remainder of his life, save an interval of four years, so earnestly devoted to his duties as never to marry. He died in 1556. The end that he proposed to himself was " that the boys should be fitted hereafter to study in the higher faculties " of the universities. To this end, " first of all grammar must be pursued with special care as the mother and nurse of the other arts ; " to be followed by readings out of good authors, first prose writers, " that the boys in both ways, both by rule and example, might be so guided to the Latin tongue as to learn to speak and write it skilfully, and next poets, that they might understand metrics and learn to make verses." The school laws direct that in their exercises, the boys " shall use no phrase until they have accurately inquired in what author that phrase occurs, and whether it is suifi- cieutly elegant and suitable ; " also that they shall never use their mother tongue. " Besides Latin, Greek grammar and the reading of Greek authors was prescribed ; " " Dialectics Trotzendorf taught continually ; and, through the speeches of Cicero and those in Livy, he prepared his pupils for rhetoric." Music and arithmetic are mentioned as studies in the Goldberg school, and " religion, he taught himself with pious earnestness," calling it the soul of his school and the soul of all instruction. Hence there is little in the subjects taught to dis- tinguish it from the other good schools of the time DISTINGUISHED TEACHERS 103 ip CT'ermaiiy. To show the effect of the instruction, however, it is well to note that it was said that in Goldberg, during Trotzendorfs time, even the ser- vants and the maids spoke Latin. What specially characterized this school, however, was Trotzendorfs scheme of government, a scheme whereby the pupils shared in the management, and were to a large extent made responsible for special features of the school life. His school was in fact a genuine republic in which noble and simple were alike amenable to laws administered largely by themselves. He created various offices designated by Greek or Latin names, all filled by students, and having each its distinctive duties. One set of officers looked after the house order, the tidiness of clothing, and the times at which pupils rose in the morning and retired at night ; others supervised the table order and the table manners of students ; still others were charged with seeing that Latin was spoken, and that pupils studied diligently. There was also a school judiciary to take cognizance of offences, before which supposed culprits were tried, with some days allowed for preparing a good Latin defence, on the excellence of which largely depended how easily they were let off. Over all this student machinery of officers, stood Trotzendorf as -'per- petual dictator," with functions partly executive, partly appellate. This scheme worked admirably in the skilful hands of its originator; and some- 104 THE HISTORY OF MODERK EDUCATIOK thing analogous to it, has occasionally been tried since his day with varying success. He also used the more advanced boys to teach the younger, a kind of monitorial system. Michael Neander,* born 1525, was the son of a shop-keeper who wished to make of hina a merchant, but was disgusted at his lack of skill in managing a horse, and hence declared he was fit for nothing in the world but to be a monk. Many years later the old man rectified his opinion, when his good-for- nothing son had become one of the most famous teachers in Germany. The boy was sent to school, and at seventeen went to the University of Wit- tenberg, where, under Melanchton's guidance, his studies took a wide range which later showed itself in his school. At the age of twenty-two, he became assistant in a school at Nordhausen, with a wise old rector, and he tells most amusingly how his conceit was taken down, and how effectually he learned that " school work is quite a different thing from what young fellows think it." Finally at the age of twenty-five he was made rector of a cloister school at Ilfeld am Harz where he remained till his death in 1595, and made of it what Melanchthon pro- nounced one of the very best schools in Germany. His career deserves mention here, not from the great size of his school, M-hicli was never very large, but from the tilings in M-liicli liis practice differed * Originally Neumann— Freshman chaiijied to its Greek equivalent. DISTINGUISHED TEACHERS 105 from that of his contemporaries. An important point in which he diverged from other teachers was in his " sharp separation of the elementary from the scientific, of the indispensable and wide-reaching principles from the less needful or anomalous," i. e., of the m.atters which really belong to secondary- instruction and which should therefore be thoroughly mastered, from those which properly pertain to the higher professional training. Hence resulted, that by giving exclusive attention to that part of instruc- tion which properly belonged to him, " his pupils when they left him were so well-grounded in lan- guages and arts, as immediately to fill positions in school or church," as was said by one of his con- temporaries ; or as one of his pupils said, " Mean- der's boys, when they went to the university, were at once ahead of most others." He wrote many brief text-books of languages and of several sciences, which embodied this principle, and some of which came into wide use. A second point in which he diverged from his contemporaries, was in the emphasis which he alone gave to history, to geography, and to physics, or more properly natural history. For all of these he wrote manuals for instruction, and for the first two, also compends. His manual for geography is a very curious book, the names of places being accompanied by biographical accounts of persons, and in some cases Dy rambling autobiographical details. An 106 THE HISTORY OF MOIJEKN EDUCATION ample account of Meander and his books will be found in von Raumer Vol. I. p. 180, a good abstract of which, is given in Barnard's American Journal of Education, V. p. 599. Eoger Ascham, 1516-1568 Roger Ascham,. whose life extended from 1516 to 1568, and who was tutor to several distinguished persons, including Queen Elizabeth, deserves a brief mention in this place, if for no other reason, at least for this, that he is much the best known English teacher of this century, and that he has embodied his practice and his opinions in a work entitled " The Schoolmaster " which has become an English classic. This book is chiefly occupied with a presen- tation of the author's method of teaching Latin, with frequent charming digressions on important pedagogic topics, several of which have already been cited. His method with Latin was by double trans- lation of Latin authors, accompanied by careful comparison of re-translations with originals, and by frequent repetition to assure thoroughness. Like Sturm, he would set as exercises for the pupil trans- lations from unfamiliar Latin works to be translated back into Latin, and then compared and corrected by the original. He would have the teaching of gram- mar limited to the essentials, and would have these learned only by their use ; for he beheved that gram- mar forms and rules are " sooner and surer learned blSTlNaUISHED TEACHERS 107 by examples of good authors than by the naked rules of grammarians." Through recent re-publica- tions, this interesting work is now placed within easy reach of all who care for educational literature. Eichard Mulcaster, 1530-1611 The name of another worthy English schoolmaster and educational author of this century, has recently been rescued from the oblivion into which it had sunk, partly through the labors of the Early English Text Society, but more especially through the repub- lication by Mr. R. H. Quick of his most important work. This man was Richard Mulcaster, who was born of a good but reduced English family about 1530. His early education was received at Eton, and in 1556 he graduated at Oxford with high repute for scholarship, especially in Hebrew. He then became a schoolmaster in London, and in 1561 was made the first head-master of Merchant Taylors' school, at the munificent salary of- 10 £ a year, the hours of school being four in the forenoon and four in the afternoon. During a portion of his period of service, an officer of the company of Merchant Tay- lors' paid to Mulcaster an additional 10 £ a year, making his emoluments at the utmost the equiva- lent of not quite a thousand dollars a year of our present money, the purchase power of money at that time being ten or possibly twelve times as great as at present. 108 THE HISTORY OB" MODERN EDUCATION In this position he remained twenty-six years, during which, in 1581, he published " Positions ", a work of great pedagogic interest, and not long after, " The Elementarie." Some disagreements with his employers had marked his experience in the school, due probably to the fact that he could not forget that he was of gentle birth, and hence thought himself superior to the tradesmen who employed him ; and these disagreements finally caused a sev- erance of his relations with the school. Some years later he became High Master of St. Paul's School where he remained twelve years, holding for much of the time a valuable living to which he had been presented by Queen Elizabeth, who seems to have had a high regard for the sturdy schoolmaster. The last few years of his long life were spent in his living, where he proved but an indifferent preacher. He died in 1611. At the outset of the " Positions ", which is the work recently edited by Mr. Quick, Mulcaster mani- fests a rare good sense in stating the principles by which he proposes to be guided in his use of the opinions of authors. He proposes to test them by right reason and by their probable adaptation to the uses, circumstances, and modes of thinking of his own time and country ; and to adopt nothing, who- ever may be its author, save as it has "nature to lead it, reason to back it, custom to commend it, experience to allow it, and profit to prefer it." DISTINGUISHED TEACHERS 109 He declines to fix any definite age at which chil- dren shall begin their schooling, " because ripeness in children is not tied to one time, no more than all corn is ripe for one reaping." " If," he says, "the child have a weak body though never so strong a wit, let him grow on the longer till the strength of his body do answer to his wit." A little later, he emphasizes the careful regard that he thinks should be had, not less to the pupil's physical development than to his intellectual progress, by devoting no less than thirty chapters of his work to physical education considered solely from the schoolmaster's point of view. " The soul and body," he says, " being co- partners in good and ill, in sweet and sour, in mirth and mourning, and having generally a common sympathy and a mutual feeling in all passions ; how can they be, or rather why should they be severed in training ? the one made strong and well qualified, the other left feeble and a prey to infirm- ity ? Will ye have the mind to obtain those things which be most proper unto her and most profitable unto you when they be obtained ? Then must ye also have a special care that the body be well appointed, for fear it shrink while ye be either in course to get them, or in case to use them." Nor would he have this care, so needful for physi- cal efficiency, ' left at random to liberty, but brought into form of ordinary discipline generally in all men, because all men need help for necessary health and 110 THE HISTORY OF MODERN EDUCATION ready execution of their natural actions, but parti- cularly those men whose life is in leisure, whose brains be most busied and their wits most wearied, in which kind students be no one small part but the greatest of all, which so use their minds as if they cared not for their bodies, and yet so need their bodies as without the strength and soundness where- of they be good for nothing but to moan themselves, and to make others marvel why they take no more heed how to do that long which they do so well." When we consider that the chapters on physical training by gymnastic exercises and games, to which these wise words are the prelude, were written more than three centuries ago, and how comparatively recent are all efforts at proper bodily education, it will easily be seen that this old English schoolmaster was wise far beyond his age. With regard to intellectual education also, Mulcas- ter has some ideas which were far from being common in his day. He would have elementary instruction include reading and writing, drawing and singing, and the ability to play on some musical instrument. The first two of these he thinks should be the com- mon right of all ; and, differing from the custom of his time, he would have the mother-tongue made the language in which the child should be first taught. He testifies his regard for the vernacular by writing his book in it, that it may be accessible, as he says, as well to the unlearned as to the learned ; DISTINGUISHED TEACHERS HI for " He that understands no Latin can understand English, and he that understands Latin very well, can understand English far better if he will confess the truth." In his Elementarie pubHshed in 1582, he emphasizes the importance of a careful school study of English. Before proceeding to give seven precepts for the correct writing of English he says, " For our natural tongue being as beneficial unto us for our own needful use as any other is to the people which use it, and having as pretty and as fair observations in it as any other hath, and being as ready to yield to any rule of art as any other is, why should I not take some pains to find out the right writing of ours, as other countrymen have done to find the like in theirs ? " Why not indeed ? every well-instructed educator of to-day is ready to echo ; yet such a question was by no means a com- mon one among the learned men of the sixteenth century ; and honest Richard, in the care that he enjoins for the literary study of English, was well- nigh three centuries in advance of any definite study of the mother-tongue in English schools. While he considers the ability to read and write, the common right of all, he by no means favors the idea of Erasmus of giving a high education to as large a number as possible ; for he fears that a large class of learned men without intellectual employ- ment may be uneasy and seditious, a fear that is coming to be expressed in more than one high 112 THE HISTORY OF MODERN EDUCATION quarter to-day. Yet he thinks that endowments for the encouragement of higher learning, should go chiefly to poor boys who manifest marked ability, whilst they should be open on equal terms to the rich who will study, that such benefactions may not be degraded in general estimation to a badge of charity. One of the most remarkable things in " Posi- tions", is the plea for a careful training of teachers in a special 'College parallel with the schools for other learned professions. " Is the framing of young minds," he says, " and the training of their bodies so mean a point of cunning ? be schoolmasters in this realm such a paucity, as they are not even in good sadness to be soundly thought on ? " He concludes therefore " that this trade requireth a particular col- lege for these four causes : first for the subject, being the mean to make or mar the whole fry of our state ; secondly for the number, whether of them that are to learn, or of them that are to teach ; thirdly for the necessity of the profession which may not be spared ; fourthly for the matter of their study which is comparable to the greatest professions, for lan- guage, for judgment, for skill how to train, etc." It needs hardly be said that in this, as in many re- spects, Mulcaster was far in advance of his age. Mulcaster likewise makes an earnest plea for the right education of girls, basing it on these four grounds : (1) " the custom of the country which alloweth them to learn," (2) "the duty which we DISTINGUISHED TEACHERS 113 owe unto them whereby we are charged in conscience not to leave them lame in that which is for them," (3) "their own towardness which God by nature would never have given them to remain idle or to small purpose," and (4) " the excellent effects in that sex when they have had the help of good bringing up." What he thinks this correct female education should include would be, " reading well, writing fair, singing sweet, and playing fine," to which he seems inclined to add drawing and the ability "to understand and speak the learned lan- guages and those tongues also which the time most embraceth, with some logical help to chop, and some rhetoric to brave," i. e. adorn. It is hardly neces- sary to add that in his scheme of female education, Mulcaster was far in advance of the age in which he lived. It is earnestly to be hoped that his chief work which is now placed in easy reach of educa- tors may be widely read. The Jesuit Schools The famous schools of the Jesuits which began in the middle of this century, and spread rapidly until they covered all western Europe, deserve a more extended notice than is consistent with our plan. Their organization in five classes the last of which was of two years, was probably suggested by that of Sturm, though the age of admission to their schools was fourteen. The exclusively literary character of their studies^ pursued for style in selections from 114 THE HISTORY OF' TtfODERN EDUCATION classic authors, with the vernacular tabooed, and geography and history used merely for purposes of exposition, was very similar to that of the other good schools of the sixteenth century. Their aim how- ever was seemingly more limited than that of the other schools which we have described : it was to develop the power to acquire and reproduce. Origin- ality or independence of thought was no part of their object, nor was it encouraged. From this narrowness of aim, and from the alleged lack of deep morality based on principle which their system inculcated, sprang the faults with which the educa- tion they gave is charged. It is hardly just to blame them for religious prose- lytism, as though they were the only sinners in this respect. During this and the succeeding century the Jesuits were far from having a monopoly of religious exclusiveness. In most great schools re- ligion was inculcated, and of a type which was acceptable to the ruling powers. This the Jesuits likewise did, theirs being of the Romish type. Their success in this propaganda was due to the admirable skill they showed in gaining influence over their pupils, a skill not always displayed by those who opposed them. The care which they exercised to preserve the health of their pupils, by proper diet, ventilation, and exercise, and the attention that they gave to the cultivation of good and even elegant manners, were wholly admirable. DISTINGUISHED TEACHERS 115 Their methods were skilfully adapted to the end which they proposed. They were uniform in char- acter, kind and agreeable in tone, and adapted to win the love of the pupils. The work which they set and which was rigidly exacted, was carefully graded to the capacity of pupils, never excessive, and never too difficult. Difficulties of grammar were taught only when they occurred in the due course of reading. Daily and weekly repetitions were re- quired to assure mastery. The oral and written examinations which were given yearly, were care- fully prepared for as to manner and form. The teaching which was mostly oral, was given methodi- cally with frequent questions by the teacher, and with written notes, exercises, themes, and verses on the part of the pupils. The teachers, who were mostly novices of the order, with a much smaller number of the fully professed brothers, received a careful previous prefpar- ation for their important duties, in which they were usually engaged for from four to six years. A care- ful previous preparation of their lessons, according to a prescribed form was also rigidly exacted ; and their work was thoroughly supervised, at least once in two weeks, by the Prefect of studies. The principle of Emulation, a motive so active among boys, was appealed to by the Jesuits in all possible ways. Places in class, badges for excellence, prizes for superiority, were freely and effectively 116 THE HISTORY OF MODERN EDUCATION used. The boys were arranged in pairs called rivals, to catch each other in any errors that might occur, or in opposing bands to challenge each other to scholarly combats by questions. Many teachers at present do not like the method, but it must be owned that it was used thoroughly and skilfully. The schools of the Jesuits became so famous for the thoroughness and effectiveness of the work which they did, and for the mildness of their methods in an age when school discipline was of the heroic type, that they grew to be very largely frequented, it is said, even by Protestants. If the educational aim of the Jesuits seems to us narrow, it must in common fairness be confessed that it was well-nigh indistinguishable save in form of statement from that of Sturm. They as well as Sturm aimed at eloquence, and consid- ered it synonymous with a facile and correct mastery of the Latin tongue. Like Sturm they emphasized piety, each side having its own defini- tion of what was pious. The Jesuits also agreed with Sturm, and indeed with the current idea of the 16th century, in considering the wisdom of past ages as a kind of closed circle enclosing all that man needed to know, and hence strove only for the power of acquisition. Whatever difference there was lies in the fact that while the successors of Sturm slowly outgrew their narrowness of view, the Jesuits have shown little disposition to modify their educational DISTINGUISHED TEACHERS 117 opinions, though by the admission of new studies, they have adapted their curriculum to the intellect- ual demands of the age. It is but just for us to remember that, whatever vices their system may later have made manifest, and which in the 18th century led to their tempor- ary suppression in some European states, they were nevertheless skilful schoolmasters, and showed great practical sagacity ; that they gave admirable care to physical education and to training in good manners ; and that they were pioneers in the important mat- ters of carefully training their teachers for their duties, and of a systematic supervision of their work while -in progress. The motive to which they so largely and skilfully appealed for securing good scholar- ship, although now reprehended in many influen- tial quarters, is still far from extinct, as is testified by our prize systems, our marking systems, and our practice of assigning relative rank in classes. More detailed information about the Jesuit schools may be found in Barnard's American Journal of Education Vol's. V., VI. and XXVII., derived chiefly from the partisan account of von Raumer. A fairer view of these remarkable schools is presented by Mr. Quick in his " Educational Reformers ; " whilst the Rev. Thos. Hughes in his " Loyola," a work pub- lished in the Great Educators series, presents the educational system of the Jesuits from their own standpoint. CHAPTER V SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF EDUCATION IN THE SEVEN- TEENTH CENTURY During the 17th century we are not to look for any material change in the subject-matter of educa- tion. The struggle of the preceding age had, as we have seen, secured, in the schools and universities, a reasonable degree of conformity to the best naeans of culture then available. The ancient classical literature, with the correlated grammar and rhetoric, and with logic in an improved form applied to the study of the ancient orators and philosophers, had gained firm foothold in the schools. Mathematical studies, confined mostly to the universities, were more largely used in this century than in the pre- ceding one, though arithmetic and algebra had not yet by any means attained their complete form. Vieta had but recently taken the decisive step of using letters as representatives of known quantities ; and Descartes, during this age, introduced the use of exponents, explained negative roots, and showed the number of positive and negative roots in equations, besides enlarging geometry by devising analytics : moreover, Newton and Leibnitz invented the cal- culus only in the latter half of the 17th century. (118) SOME CHARACTERISTICS 119 Hence, aside from the Euclidean geometry, and the elements of arithmetic, it may be seen that the mathematics were hardly in a condition to admit of profitable study. History and the sciences of nature, though, as we have seen, their study was suggested by some of the preceding theorists, were, and during this age re- mained, in a state which made them proper subjects for professorial research, rather than for the study of young men. Sir Francis Bacon, during this cen- tury, showed how this research should be conducted in the sciences ; but not until the following century- did RoUin attempt a work of this kind for history. Hence we should feel no surprise that the chief subjects of study during the 17th century were lan- guages and their immediate accessories ; nor are we warranted in concluding on this account that there was any marked lack of conformity to the existing means of culture. The aim of education in this, as in the preceed- ing century, in both universities and secondary schools, was wholly a practical one, utilitarian rather than disciplinary in its purpose, viz., the attainment of eloquence in the Latin tongue ; and the imitation of the ancient authors was considered the essential means for attaining this end. To gain "verba et res," words and matter, was hence the care of teach- ers for their pupils. Authors were read, nominally at least, for both words and matter, though it is to 120 THE HISTORY OP MODERN EDUCATION be presumed that the words gained the lion's share of attention. Why this purpose of instruction should at that time prevail, grew out of two facts, as Paulsen has shown for Germany, and these facts were equally true for the rest of the learned world. 1st. Since medicine was then held in low esteem, and teaching was far from having become an independent voca- tion, there were then but two learned careers open to young men, the church and the service of the state, i. e., theology and jurisprudence, to both of which skill in the use of language was essential. 2d. The learned world was possessed by an idea similar to that which was held by the mediaeval Byzantines, that the ancient Greeks had exhausted all the pos- sibilities of science ; and that consequently the work of learned education was to recover what the ancients knew, and to use it dextrously in the tongue so long consecrated to learned use. Hence the methods of all learned schools, dictated by this fact and this idea, were directed to the mastery of Latin, both spoken and written, for eloquence and matter, and to knowledge of the Greek authors for ideas and graces. The crown of all learning in this age was poetry, i. e., the art of making Latin verses, to some pro- ficiency in which it was thought that all might attain by due painstaking. To aid in this, collec- tions were made, either by the students themselves SOME CHARACTERISTICS 121 or by others, of nice words, pretty phrases, and fine sentences. 'Dramas were represented to make the use of Latin more familiar ; and Latin exercises were composed for all kinds of public occasions, real or imaginary, to make obvious the use to which the acquisitions of pupils might be put. In all this, the practical and utilitarian purpose is sufficiently apparent. The men of those times were, however, under no delusion as to the difficulty of the undertaking which they proposed to students. They saw that it post- poned to a late period of youth the attainment of the wisdom which they craved, through the necessity of mastering its medium in two dead languages. They recognized this necessity as a fearful grind, and they freely expressed their envy of the Greeks who learned no language but their own. It would seem strange that this did not turn their attention to the propriety of improving and using their own vernac- ular languages, did we not take into account the idea with which they were possessed that everything worth knowing was embodied in the Greek and Latin tongues, that science was in truth a circuit already closed. Much influence must also doubtless be attributed to the force of ancient usage, and to the natural pride of a learned guild. The idea of spending time and effort on these languages as a fine mental gymnastic had evidently not occurred to this age. This idea 122 THE HISTORY OP MODERN EDUCATION was reserved to a much later period, when the true humanitarian spirit which considers man himself as more important than any of his uses, had adopted humanistic studies as a fit instrument for its pur- poses. With these remarks, which seem to me to be warranted by the facts of the case as regards the means of education which continued to be used, let us proceed to observe what were the chief distin- guishing features in the pedagogy of the 17th century. These were, I think, the following, which we will proceed to examine in the order in which they are here given. 1. The marked ecclesiastical character and tone given to education ; 2. the influence which begins to be observed in education of philosophers like Bacon, Descartes, and Fleury ; 3. the practical efforts of noted pedagogues and theorists to reform the methods, the spirit, and to some extent, the sub- jects of education, in which category we shall have occasion to include Ratich, Comenius, the Port Royalists, Milton, and Locke ; 4. the efforts that were made to promote the education of girls by Port Royal, by Penelon, and by Mme. de Maintenon ; 5. the rise in France of the great teaching congrega- tion, the Oratory of Jesus, as a rival of the Jesuits ; and 6. the beginnings of education in America. I. The influence of ecclesiasticism in education was in the 17th century hardly less than in thc«o SOME CHAEACTERISTICS 123 that preceded it. The ancient church had certainly not changed its position of the absolute authority of the church in all that concerns the education of youth, and had with great sagacity met the demands for a better and more wide-spread instruction, by the establishment of the order of Jesuits, one of whose chief functions was to teach, whose teachers were all clerics and devoted to the interests of the papal see, and whose schools during this century spread rapidly over Europe, bearing wherever they went the dom- inance of an ecclesiastical influence. The Port Royalists and the Oratorians to be considered later, were other Catholic teaching bodies, of different and even antagonistic type, but equally controlled by ecclesiastics. Amongst the adherents to the Reformation, the influence of the clerical element in the schools was hardly less marked. The most prominent teachers were clergymen, nominally if not really : the super- vision of schools was in the hands of the clergy : creeds and confessions, catechisms and church dog- mas, had a prominent place in instruction : and the purpose that was declared in the foundation of schools was usually the promotion of church inter- ests, under whatever form of words it was veiled. Thus the early German school ordinances — for ex- ample that of the Palatinate — which became models for this century and the next, premising that the schools exist " not only to instruct the youth in all 124 THE HISTORY OF MODERN EDUCATION kinds of good arts, discipline and wisdom," but that " they may provide wholesome and pions uses for the church and tlie common fatherland," ordain that " by each and every pupil of the schools, the fear of God shall first of all be had in observance, and in accordance with the same shall they live in all their industry and conversation To this end shall all and every pupil be bound to no other than our princely (Kurfiirstlichen) reformed catechism used in the city of Heidelberg," in which it is directed that every class be "most industriously taught memoriter." The rod is prescribed for those who go to sleep during morning and evening pray- ers or who absent themselves therefrom, as well as for those who curse or connive at cursing. In the words of K. Schmidt : * " They can look upon the school only as a dependent of the ecclesiastical class, as a daughter of the church ; and are not yet able to distinguish school and church as two independ- ent moral organisms, having each its own sphere and living its own life." It may be remarked that the emancipation of the schools from ecclesiastical dominance made little progress until the 19th century. Unfortunately the tendency of the ecclesiastical spirit in this, as in other ages, under whatever name it was known, was to put upon its dogmas and con- fessions the stamp of authority, and then so to extend * Qesohichte der padagogik. Vol. in., p. 130. SOME CHARACTERISTICS 125 the domains of authority as to encroach more and more upon the legitimate realms of human specula- tion and investigation, thus forging new fetters for thought and striving to limit its freedom in ex- ploring the still-undiscovered regions of mind and matter. It was the ever-recurring fear lest new dis- coveries which clash with received opinions and demand their modification, may in some way under- mine the very foundations of eternal truth, — a fear which, proved groundless in one age, is sure to recur in a new form in succeeding ages. II. To this hampering tendency of the ecclesiasti- cal spirit, which was strong in educational institu- tions, and which threatened to neutralize the results of the Humanitarian revolution, a wholesome cor- rective was presented by the rising influence of the great 17th century philosophers, Sir Francis Bacon and Descartes, and to a less degree, of men like Fleury. Prof Compayre in his " Critical History of the Doctrines of Education in France," forcibly remarks in substance that every weighty philosophic system has in it the germs of a special influence upon pedagogy, and hence is of the greatest interest in the history of education. Nowhere is this more true than of the systems of Bacon and Descartes, though neither philosopher had education immedi- ately in view. Bacon, 1561-1626, by recalling the minds of men from barren scholastic speculations^ and from cxclu- 126 THE HISTORY OF MODERN EDUCATION sive humanistic study, to the relief of man's estate through the investigation of nature by exact observa- tion and rigorous experi- ment leading to induction of her laws, — not only in- s}iired tlie reformatory efforts of Comenius, the greatest schoolman of any age ; but enlarged the re- sources of pedagogy by a bacon, isci-iese whole new realm of profitable study, and by a method which has proved itself powerful in instruction as well as in investigation. Both the subject and the method had indeed been vaguely discerned as im- portant and suggested as desirable, in the 16th cen- tury by men like Rabelais and Vives : it was left to Bacon to show how only, the knowledge of the one miglit be brought to the rer^uisite degree of certainty, and the use of the other could lead to reliable results. Our own age is a witness to the great gain that has thus accrued to pedagogy. The century in which he died witnessed the rise of that brilliant galaxy of English scientists and thinkers of Avliich Sir Isaac Newton and .Jeremy Taylor are the bright- est stars, who built on the foundations which he had laid. Had Descartes, l-">!)6-16.")0, contributed to educa- tion nothing more tlinn the fundamental maxim of SOME CHARACTERISTICS 127 his method, he would have deserved long remem- brance in its history. This maxim, which was as far-reaching in the domain of speculation as was Bacon's method in the realm of nature, is this, "never to receive for true anything that is not known to be such upon reliable evidence : and to comprise no more in our judgments than what is so clearly presented to our minds that we have no occasion to call it in question." The first part of this maxim deals a death-blow at the claims of unsupported authority which too often contravene sound human reason, and asserts for the human mind its supreme right to think undisturbed by aught save the demands of thought itself : the last part formulates the proper law of thought, that it may avoid the danger of vague and unwarranted generalizations, and reach results worthy of respect. In the application of his maxim, he demands that the subject of thought be exactly analyzed, that this analysis be carried as far as possible before any con- clusion is drawn, and that then, from the parts thus clearly revealed, a definite whole of thought shall be formed by a right use of judgment, a procedure which is as valuable in pedagogy as in philosophy. The affirmation which Descartes makes of the natural equality in human beings of latent power, or prepotency, to distinguish clearly and to reason justly, which, however, needs education that a good use may be made of it, would have as its natural 128 THE HISTORY OF MODERN EDUCATION corollary the doctrine that human inequality is due entirely to the kind of education that is received, and that hence the best instruction is the right of all, and not merely the privilege of a few. Probably few educators of the present day, however they might be willing to accept the deduction from Des- cartes' idea, would be willing to concede the native equal prepotency of minds, or to claim for education an omnipotent power in making men. Nor would many agree with his opinion, quoted bj'^ Sir William Hamilton in a slashing attack on mathematics as a means of mental discipline, that the mathematics are positively pernicious as discipline, since they disaccustom. men to use reason in the mode which the conduct of life demands.* Doubtless Descartes had earned the right to express a weighty opinion on such a point, by his eminent services in promot- ing mathematical science ; yet we may be permitted to think that the speculative philosopher had incau- tiously pushed too far an objection which would be valid only when urged against a too exclusive pre- occupation with mathematical studies. Finally Descartes like Bacon, insisted on the need of making ample provision of facts and real knowl- edge before striving to formulate opinions or to construct theories. In this regard, Bacon says in substance, that if one who has not duly informed himself, undertakes despite his ignorance to shape •Edinburgh Review, Jan., 1836. SOME CHARACTERISTICS 129 reasonings and to write elegant phrases, it is "as if he wished to weigh and measure or adorn the wind." There is, however, a marked difference in that for which the two philosophers chiefly value facts ; for while Bacon regards them as materials by whose right use we may attain wide-reaching general prin- ciples, Descartes looks upon them rather as means for strengthening the mind by the active exertion of its powers in their acquisition, that when thus strengthened it may become capable of discovering truth, a distinct approach, it may be observed, to a disciplinary view of studies. It resulted from their different estimate of the use of facts, that Bacon has become the father of modern science, which by the use of his method is gaining an ever-increasing power to use the forces of the universe for the amelioration of man's condition ; whilst Descartes, illustrious as a speculative philoso- pher and still more illustrious as a mathematician, did little of permanent worth when he applied himself to the study of nature. The influence on pedagogy of their principles and methods has been very weighty, and in that point of view alone, are we concerned here to regard them. The Abbe Fleury, 1640-1723, whose fame as an impartial church historian has quite eclipsed his reputation as a philosopher, is yet regarded by- his countryman, Prof. Compayr^, as worthy of treat- ment in the latter respect ; and from his interesting 130 THE HISTORY OF MODERN EDUCATION analysis of Fleury's treatise on the " Choice and Methods of Studies," I give here in condensed form what seem to me his most important educational opinions. His pedagogic experience, it may be re- marked, had been gained as tutor to some of the French princes. Hence he disclaims any purpose to express anj' views on public education, which he says he had not examined sufficiently to warrant him in doing. It will readily be seen that the good abbe is rather a pedagogic theorist than a philoso- pher in his ideas. We may easily omit his censures of the scholastics and the pedants, whom the. previous age had sufficiently and effectively belabored. What is most interesting in his opinions, is the aim that he proposes for education, and the classification of studies that he makes. 1. Expressing a profound dissatisfaction with the education current in his time (1686), and consider- ing it solely on its intellectual side, he makes its aim a two-fold one, first to make honest men, and then to make skilful ones. In other words intel- lectual culture should be so pursued as to attain completeness of manhood, while serving as "an apprenticeship for life," — an aim considerably more elevated than was usual in that age, though it may be doubted whether he considered it in its fullest sense as I have expressed it. He recognizes inatten- tion as the most formidable obstacle to the attain- ment of his aim, and of this he had had a striking SOME CHARACTERISTICS 131 example in one of the princely pupils he had known, who was, says Compayre, " inattention personified." He traces the cause of this inattention to the fact that abstract truths and general formulas are pre- sented to the child at an age when he can under- stand only the concrete and individual; and he proposes the true remedy for this, by presenting to the pupil, wherever possible, sensible objects, pic- tures and diagrams, and by striving in all ways to make instruction attractive. We shall see later the ingenious expedients resorted to by Fenelon, the contemporary of Fleury, to render instruction both intelligible and attractive. 2. In his classification of the subjects of instruc- tion, he makes two great divisions, one of which includes the knowledge that is needful for all, and the other the studies which belong only to the privileged class. Every one, he thinks, should have his part of instruction, but " the poor have no need to know how to read and write." The knowledge needful for all, in his view, is hygiene, morals, and logic; by which he means the ability to pre- serve bodily health, to recognize and practise one's duties, and to reason correctly on what may meet one in daily life. In regard to the last, great emphasis is laid on clear and distinct ideas, and on a right understanding of the language that is used. All this Fleury seems to think the poor can gain so as to be honest and capable in their stations, by 132 THE HISTORY OF MODERN EDUCATION examples and practice, without literary knowledge, without preparatory discipline, and with only the vaguest suggestion of any definite teachers. Such a scheme would be obviously impracticable when applied to the masses of mankind, although, doubt- less, life furnishes us a few remarkable exceptions ; and, were skilled teachers supplied, they would soon find that the quickest way to reach the purpose of elementary physical, moral, and intellectual educa- tion would include a fair share of the literary culture which Fleury designedly omits. The studies which belong only to the richer classes are separated into three great groups, viz., necessary studies, useful studies, and studies which are mere objects of enlightened curiosity, — a classification which can hardly fail to suggest Herbert Spencer's more elaborate scheme. What Fleury deems neces- sary studies are grammar, — ^by which I judge that he means the mastery of the vernacular, on which he lays great emphasis, — arithmetic, economy, or a knowledge of things needful for life and how to procure and use them, and curiously enough, law, a first suggestion of that civic instruction, on which just now so much emphasis is beginning to be laid. Useful but not strictly necessary studies, are history, logic, geometry, physics in which are included an- atomy and cosmography, and languages like Latin which are to be used as means. As merely Ourious studies, Fleury counts Greek, the modern languages, SOME CHARACTERISTICS 133 the ancient poets, mathematics save the elements of arithmetic and geometry, astronomy, the fine arts and designing. In regard to the' useful studies, he considers Latin useful only in so far as it is a means of gaining what knowledge is embodied in it, and as a medium of communication with learned foreigners. He ascribes to it no disciplinary value, and contrary to the prac- tice of his age, he would have in its study but a small amount of prose composition, and no making of verses save sufficient to learn the rules of quantity, and he doubts whether these are worth the trouble of learning them. On the other hand, as necessary, he would have the pupil make a careful study of his native language ; and he sharply criticizes those who neglect their vernacular to devote themselves to Latin, "not considering," he says, "that the Romans wrote in their own language and not in Greek." He recommends that the pupil be practised in French composition, writing " first narrations, then letters and other easy pieces, next biographic accounts of great men, and commonplaces of morals ; avoiding nonsense and false thoughts, let him ex- press with gravity his real sentiments." It is interesting to observe that what European writers on education are apt to call the Americaniza- tion of studies, meaning doubtless the emphasis laid on what is Hkely to be useful in a man's future career, was first proposed as a definite scheme more 134 THE HISTORY 01? MODERN GCUCATION than two centuries ago by this eminent French his- torian and philosopher ; and that he possibly goes farther in this direction than Americans would be willing to follow him at present. As respects the arrangement of studies, Fleury would defer formal grammar to the age of ten years on account of its abstract character ; would intro- duce logic at the age of twelve, which is much too early ; and would have several lines of study carried on together, in order to develop the faculties simul- taneously, and to guard against ennui by letting one study afford relief from another. Above all, he insists on the training of the judgment, while neglecting in his treatment of education, the culti- vation of the sensibilities and the will, a curious oversight in a French ecclesiastic who was one of the most morally upright men of his age. III. I have named as a third characteristic of the 17th century, that we have in it the beginning of a struggle to introduce practical reforms into the methods and spirit of education, and to widen the range of school subjects beyond the narrow and too exclusively humanistic limits of Sturm and the Jesuits, whom we may here consider as types. This struggle on the same lines has been continued to the present day. Under whatever name carried on, it has been an effort, not always well-judged, to adjust the school subjects in conformity with the demands of an advancing culture, and to conform the methods SOME CHARACTERISTICS 135 and spirit of instruction to the real or supposed nature of the developing mind of the child, which too often was very imperfectly understood. The leaders in this contest, whom Von Raumer terms Innovators (Neuerer) without intending to imply either praise or blame in the name he gives them, were naturally enthusiasts, and hence liable to be unmeasured iu their criticism of what they would reform, and disinclined to consider duly, in the changes which they propose, the limits of the practicable. Thus reactions were sure to succeed to untimely and hence unsuccessful efforts at advance- ment ; and we shall be likely to see considerable oscillations in educational opinions and practice in the course of this struggle, whilst on the whole a sensible progress may be observed towards the adop- tion of whatever in the purposes of the Innovators experience has proved to be judicious. We have seen already in the most sagacious spirits of the 16th century, in men like Erasmus and Vives, Rabelais and Montaigne, obvious indications of an opinion that classical studies and efforts for classic purity of expression, were occupying too exclusive attention, and that very considerable changes were needed in the modes in which subjects were presented. They have demanded a larger place in instruction for history, mathematics, and the sciences of nature. They have shown that instruction may be made more profitable to the pupils by being invested with 136 THE HISTORY OP MODERN EDUCATION a living interest, and have in general terms sug- gested objective methods as a means for assuring such an interest. Under the impulse of such previously-expressed theories, and inspired by the rising philosophic spirit of the 17th century, of which Bacon and Descartes were the most eminent representatives, the educa- tional Reformers of this age began a gallant crusade, destined to be of long duration, against exclusive- ness in the choice of studies, and against antiquated, ineffective, and time-wasting methods in the prac- tice of the schools. In the efforts of the Reformers, we shall be able to distinguish, I think, certain great fundamental points of general agreement amid many minor individual variations in opinion or in application of the same principle. In the second volume of his " Geschichte der Padagogik " pp. 5-8, Von Raumer formulates as fundamentals, eighteen principles of the Innovators, in what seems to me a probably- unconscious spirit of hostile criticism.* From what Von Raumer has given, containing some proposi- tions held by but few of the Reformers, I have selected nine in which there is, I think, a pretty substantial agreement among them. These we will consider in the next chapter ; and they will furnish * These will be found translated in Barnard's Journal Vol. YI. p. 459, in which is also given some account of .Tesuit intrigues for the subversion of rival schools, as well Catholic as Protestant. SOME CHARACTERISTICS 137 an appropriate introduction to an account of some of the most famous Reforihers, while saving us the trouble of much wearisome repetition. They will, indeed, serve as a standard with which we may readily compare the efforts and the practice of many individuals. CHAPTER VI PKINCIPLES OF THE EDUCATIONAL REFORMERS In the last chapter, after observing what were the general facts in virtue of which the educational history of the 17th century has a somewhat special character which differentiates it from the ages that preceded it, we entered upon a closer consideration of the extent to which ecclesiastical influence dom- inated the education that was given, and of the counteraction to this influence which began to mani- fest itself as a consequence of the acceptance of the Baconian and Cartesian philosophic doctrines. At the close of that chapter, I gave a general view of the purposes that the race of Reformers which then arose, strove to attain. Let us now consider in some detail the fundamental educational principles in regard to which there is substantial agreement among them. These were accompanied in individ- ual instances, it may be remarked, with erratic and unreasonable views, which will be best considered when the occasions arise. Omitting such cases, and in some instances putting into a single statement what would seem to be only difl'erent phases of the same principle, I will state Von Raumer's eighteen propositions, under the form of nine principles. (1) The Reformers insist on conformity to nature (139) 140 THE HISTORY OF MODERN EDUCATION' in the processes of education, yet frequently without distinct ideas of what such conformity implies. For example, we shall find Comenius, the greatest of them all, drawing abundant strained analogies with the course of external nature in support of some of his propositions ; not distinguishing the nature of the youthful mind which is to be reckoned with, from the phenomena of the material universe, which, however striking may be their analogies with parts of the educative process, have really nothing to do with it. (2) They oppose as a dead cram of memory the practice hitherto prevailing, especially among the philologists, of requiring much to be committed to memory which was not at all understood. " They desire to enliven instruction, since they take into account the understanding of children, in just the same measure that they postpone the exertion of memory." Hence they insist that nothing be mem- orized until it is understood, thus appealing to the memory through the understanding, and thereby fostering the intellectual activity of the child. (3) Insisting with apparent justice that hitherto mere mechanical processes have held the place of methods, they offer a method of proceeding from the simplest, most obvious, and easiest elements of every subject, gradually unfolding its complex parts, and so advancing to the completed science by steps nicely graduated to the growing powers of the child. PRINCIPLES OP THE REPORMERS 141 In this way they have sanguine hopes that the acquisition of knowledge will be made rapid as well as delightful, and that the necessity of punishment will thereby be obviated. Some of them, like Come- nius, prepared text-books to illustrate this method which were long in use, presumably with more satisfactory results than heretofore had attended instruction, and which we shall have occasion to notice hereafter. (4) They emphasize the importance of the ver- nacular as the common study of all pupils, without . which, as has before been said, anything like uni- versal education is obviously impossible. At the outset, the reformers contented themselves with insisting that the native tongue should be taught before the Latin or parallel with it, and that the learning of Latin should be made easier by its aid ; and the school books of Comenius, as we shall see, were intended to facilitate the acquisition of Latin together with all useful knowledge, by the aid of the vernacular. But the literary growth of modern languages, as well as the efforts of the Keformers, has tended constantly to push the Latin more and more into the background ; until from being supreme in the realm of learning, and the consecrated vehicle of all that is worth knowing, it has been reduced to play the wholly subordinate, yet still very useful part, of disciplining some of the noblest powers of 142 THE HISTORY OF MODERN EDUCATION youth, — an ofl&ce which was little thought of at the time which we are considering. (5) The Reformers have insisted from the outset, and since that time with constantly increasing em- phasis, upon the claims in instruction of those great groups of studies which the Germans designate as Real studies, i. e., those in which sTsill in the use of language serves only as a convenient instrument for the expression of ideas. Thus Comenius and Milton and Locke would have Latin mastered as a means of " conveying to us things useful to be known ; " whilst Basedow and Pestalozzi, Bain and Herbert Spencer, would remit it to Fleury's class of studies merely curious, and would strive after Real knowl- edge by the aid of the vernacular, with modern languages as possible convenient auxiliaries. In close alliance with this insistence on Real studies, has been the emphasis laid on proper care of the body and cultivation of its powers. This we shall see abundantly in the treatises of Milton and Locke, of Rousseau and the German Reformers, and in the widely influential treatise on Education by Herbert Spencer. (6) A leading article of faith amongst the Reform- ers has always been a belief in the primary impor- tance of cultivating the powers of observation through which we gain our introduction to the object world, and without whose accurate use they have believed that all our intellectual operations would be likely to PRINCIPLES OF THE REFORMERS 143 be clouded with doubt or vitiated by error. The training of the senses had already been . suggested by the preceding theorists : with the Reformers, it has become a principle. No doubt there has been a remarkable lack of skill in many of the efforts to give a systematic training to observation ; yet despite all failures, the present age is more than ever con- vinced of its value and its necessity, as is witnessed by the establishment, in our higher institutions, of laboratories for all sciences. An integrant part of this principle, is a conviction of the necessity of utilizing in instruction the child's previous experiences, that he may become conscious of their relations to the various subjects he pursues ; and also of the expediency of requiring application of what has been learned, that it may be exposed to no risk of becoming mere dead knowledge lodged in the mind, but may promote faculty or the ability to act in accordance with what is known. (7) The Reformers have, it seems to me, been, criticized with undue severity by Von Raumer, for the emphasis that has been laid by all the later ones,, on the need that pupils should embody ideas as soon as thej' are clearly grasped in proper words and cor- rect forms of expression. If indeed in some cases this principle has been so unskilfully applied as " to unduly hasten the natural course of development of children," or " to promote an unnatural and un- child-like introspection and self-observation," it can 144 THE HISTORY OF MODERN EDUCATION hardly invalidate the proposition that even as a body without the spirit is dead, so a spirit without embodiment is likely to be evanescent, and that hence the stock of really useful ideas cannot greatly tran- scend thfc powers of definite expression. Recall to mind in this connection, Montaigne's pregnant ex- pression about clear ideas and the ability to clothef them in language. (8) There has been an undoubted disposition amongst all the Reformers to magnify the useful as means of education,"and to prefer such a training as may assure worldly success. We have already seen that this has been termed with somewhat oppro- brious meaning, the Americanization of education, yet it is very far from being an idea of American origin, as we have recently seen in the scheme of the Abbe Fleury, and as we shall have abundant occasion to observe hereafter. This idea is wont to be stilL farther stigmatized as devotion to "bread and butter studies." A not wholly unfair answer to such appeals to prejudice would be to demand the converse, i. e., the employment of studies obviously useless, merely as a mental gymnastic. A fair state- ment of the question would possibly be this, that chief emphasis in education should be laid on the development of the powers and capabilities of youth ; that studies should be selected and arranged with chief reference to this purpose ; but that, as between studies equally adapted to this end, either singly or PRINCIPLES OF THE REFORMEKS 145 in combination, the choice should always fall upon those which will best subserve the uses of life : and an additional reason for such choice is found in the natural utilitarianism of the young, who are always most readily interested in that of which they can see the use. Without interest there is apt to be little self-activity, and so, little real development of powers and capabilities. (9) The greatest fault of the Reformers, I am inclined to think, is and has been, that in fact rather than in theorj'', they neglect the educational use and hence the cultivation of the imagination. In this Yon Raumer's indictment is possibly just though somewhat sweeping. He says " There is with them no thought of the Beautiful. Music, drawing, etc., they teach in a rationalistic and anti-artistic fashion : all poetry is thrust into the back-ground, or else treated with loveless and joyless coldness : we kill pogms by analyzing and interpreting them." Severe words, yet useful, if they serve to direct our atten- tion to a fault that it may be amended. For it admits of little doubt that not only in the relish for poetry and the fine arts is there a legiti- mate work for all schools, but also that in the ordin- ary duties of instruction there is a wide sphere of usefulness for the realizing and picturing imagination, and that without it, very many studies like geog- raphy, history, literature of all kinds, and even 146 THE HISTORY OF MODERN EDUCATION ordinary lessons in reading, lose a large part of their value. These then are what seem to me to be in general the fundamental ideas and tendencies of the educa- tional Reformers, nearly all of which will, I suppose, commend themselves to our acceptance as worthj"^ to be incorporated in educational practice, and likely in most cases to make the results of instruction bet- ter and more acceptable than they have yet become. It will now be useful to inquire, to what is due the latent and open opposition which such ideas have met, and the tardiness with which they are becom- ing effective in education ; for we must bear in mind that it is nearly three centuries since this reforma- tory movement began. Doubtless the most formidable obstacle which the innovations proposed by the Reformers have had to encounter, has been the intellectual conservatism of mankind. In virtue of this, men preoccupied with old ideas, and accustomed to old methods, are indis- posed to listen to novelties, and still less disposed to accept them. Outside of the schools and the circle of schoolmen, too few people are inclined to trouble themselves with school questions, of the nature and reasons of which they have no definite idea, while they have still less comprehension of the results which are likely to flow from proposed changes. They leave all these to the experts, to the school- men. But the older, more experienced, and more PRINCIPLES OF THE REFORMERS 147 influential among these, already habituated to other ideas and modes of work which they feel unable readily to change, are likely to oppose to novelties, not merely inertia, but active hostility, not less weighty because blinded by prejudice. It demands more than ordinary pedagogic genius to keep the mind always open, at all periods of life, to the access of new ideas, and to retain an always unbiassed judgment in the examination of such ideas. It is therefore chiefly among the younger teachers, who are not yet fixed in an immovable routine, that new educational ideas and methods must look for their first converts, and work their slow and painful way towards a more general acceptance. Where seminaries for the training of teachers exist, and are in the hands of zealous and progressive men, ideas of approved merit are more rapidly disseminated and utilized in the schools ; but such seminaries were unknown in the 17th century, and but little known in the 18th. Hence, when we consider the first obstacle only, there is small reason to wonder that the principles of the Innovators made but slow progress. The second obstacle that was to be overcome existed in the very nature of the changes that Avere proposed. They were novel in the very highe.st degree ; and as A^on Raumer aptly remarks, they widened the pedagogic horizon so excessively that the unaccustomed sight could not compass it. They 148 THE HISTORY OF MODERN EDUCATION ran counter in nearly every respect to the current ideas and the current practice of the age. The set of school studies, as we have already seen, was almost exclusively in the direction of Greek and Latin authors : the Reformers demanded that the curriculum should be enlarged by the addition of many new studies, for which in many cases books suitable for school use were lacking, and for all wliich no teachers were at hand, learned in the subjects and trained to present them properly. Latin was the common language of the schools, and was con- secrated there by an immemorial use : the Reformers ask that it shall abdicate its exclusive empire in favor of vernacular tongues. The usage of the schools appealed almost solely to the memory through the agency of persistent drill, without any too curious inquiry as to the adaptation of subjects to the student's capacity, in the blind confidence that at some future period what was memorized might come to be understood : the Re- formers demand that henceforth subjects shall be graded to the abilities of pupils, and that nothing shall go into the memory which has not previously passed through the crucible of the judgment and understanding, — thus asking of teachers that they shall exchange an easy and mechanical customary routine for a method which would require of them an activity of spirit as incessant as should be the efforts expected from the pupils. PRINCIPLES OF THE REFOKlfERS 149 The power of acute and accurate observation had become well-nigli atrophied in both teachers and pupils by ancestral disuse : tlie Reformers ask that this dormant power shall at once be called into active use, in the interest of the understanding, and for the purposes of instruction. Hitherto the body had been left to care for itself, with the usual result of devastating epidemics ; and school-rooms had from mediteval times been dark, gloomy, and full of evil smells : the Reformers demand now that the body shall be duly cared for by the observance of the ordinary conditions of healthy living ; and that communities shall at once be at the expense of sup- plying as suitable accommodations for the nurture of their children, at least as they do for the keeping of their horses. We need go no farther in this contrast of what had so far been, and what is now demanded in the way of change. It will readily be seen that however reasonable all these demands may seem to us, they would naturally appear excessive to the men of the 1 7th and 1 8th centuries ; that they would be likely to appear to them, not a series of needful changes, but a complete revolution ; and that so vast a widening of the pedagogic horizon would require generations to prepare the unaccustomed vision to compass it, in its full extent. This consideration may possibly prepare us not to judge too harshly of the tardiness in reforms of the two centuries preceding our own ; 150 THE HISTORY OP MODERN EDUCATIOIf especially if we reflect that we have not yet fully reached the measure of what ought to be expected from us. We have seen that two obstacles to the ready acceptance of proposals for educational reforms grew respectively out of the inertia of human nature, and out of the novelty of the proposed changes. A third obstacle sprang from a source that would hardly be anticipated, and that was from the Reformers them- selves. Enthusiastic as they were, and deeply pene- trated with a conviction of the value and necessity of what they proposed, they yet had not grown to the full measure of their own ideals. Astonished as they doubtless were, at the inertness of their contem- poraries, like them, they had themselves great need of growth in the full appreciation of what was implied in the reforms which they advocated. Hence they were not always completely in harmony with their own fundamental principles : nor were they usually wholly successful in exemplifying them in practice. To them the ancient sarcasm "physi- cian, heal thyself," might often have been justly directed. Reformers are not more likely to be perfect than other men ; and sometimes the personal characteris- tics of the educational reformers were not such as to win favor to the doctrines that they preached. Thus their first representative, Ratich, made a dis- mal failure of all his efforts, due even more to his PRINCIPLES OF THE REEORMERS 151 hateful traits of character than to his lacli of prac- tical skill in exemplifying his principles ; and the ill success of Basedow in the 18th century was due, at least in part, to personal causes, wliilst his public was in an expectant and receptive mood. The really great Comenius often shows his lack of thorough comprehension of liis fundamental ideas, by violating them again and again in the school- books that he wrote ; and both his text-books, and his darling pansophic scheme, reveal how greatly he overrated the powers of mental assimilation in youth, and how fearful a load he imposed on rnrm- ory : his Janua, for example, in which he treats all knowledge in a fragmentary way, expects a youth in mastering this to master 8,000 Latin words. The brilliant Rousseau pushes sound principles to whim- sical extremes, and so mingles them with paradoxi- cal expedients, as to leave one uncertain where to find the boundary line which separates principle from paradox, — thus becoming rather the inspirer than the leader of reformatory efforts. Even the venerated Pestalozzi, who now stands as the repre- sentative of the triumphing reform, was distin- guished rather by flashes of pedagogic insight than by any firm grasp of principles, which he constantly violated ; and he owes his enduring fame to his peculiar personality rather than to any thorough exemphfication of pedagogic principles. It is pos- sible that the critical spirit which \^on Raumer dis- 152 THE HISTORY OP MODERN EDUCATION plays in presenting the principles of the Reform, is aimed largely at the embodiment of them which he had for some time observed in Pestalozzi's often inconsistent practice. Besides errors arising from the imperfect appre- hension by the leading reformers of the demands of their own fundamental ideas, and which delayed the changes that they desired ; certain individual vagaries of opinion may possibly have caused judi- cious persons to distrust the entire scheme which they represented. Thus Comenius was inclined greatly to overrate the shaping power of school-edu- cation, and almost seemed to fancy that it can make of a child what it will : others overrated the results likely to flow from the methods which they advo- cated, like Ratich and Basedow ; or joined with this a disposition to underrate the influence of the teach- er's personality, as did Pestalozzi, who dreamed that methods of instruction might be so mechanized that their results should depend, not on the skill of the teacher, but on the nature of the processes that he used. The opportunities for hostile criticism which such extreme opinions in prominent persons would afford, can readily be imagined ; and also how easily they could be made to cloud with doubt the validity of au entire body of pedagogical doctrine, their connection with which was a mere unessential personal accident. Such then were the formidable obstacles which the PRiISfCIPLfiS OP THE RKPOR.\rERS 153 struggle initiated in tiae 17th century for the enlarge- ment of the circle of studies, and for the improve- ment of the methods of instruction, has had to meet and slowly to overcome. They were such as every beneficial attempt to reform existing usages has been obliged to surmount ; and, moreover, they were in their very nature such as to demand for their removal, generations of educational progress, and the slow growth of better and more enlightened opinions. Hence it should afford no just occasion for surprise that educational principles which are mostly so obviously just, have met with an accept- ance so tardy, and that we ourselves are called upon to be actors in the final stages of a crusade which was begun nearly three hundred years ago. May we, by learning wisdom from the past, prepare our- selves to act wisely our part, as inheritors of its experience. CHAPTER VII THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY KEPORMBRS Wolfgang Ratich, 1571-1635 Wolfgang Ratich or Rathke, was the first of the Innovators who attempted to give a practical form to theories of education. He was bom in Holstein in 1571, received a good education at a gymnasium and at the University of Rostock, and afterwards spent a number of years in England and in Amsterdam, engaged in various studies, amongst which were Hebrew and Arabic. When about forty years old, he began an agitation for a reform of the methods of education. In 1612 he offered a memo- rial to the German Empire at the diet in Frankfort, in which he proposed with the help of God to show how various languages may be taught easily and learned more thoroughly and quickly than hereto- fore ; how schools may be established in which all arts and sciences may be thoroughly learned ; and " how in the whole kingdom one and the same speech, one and the same government, and finally one and the same religion, may be commodiously and peacefully maintained." This memorial attracted favorable attention from some of the German princes who supplied him with (154) SEVENTEENTH CENTURY REFORMERS 155 money for his enterprise and appointed two learned commissions to examine his scheme. Both of these commissions made favorable reports. Near the close of his life another commission likewise reported favorably upon his ideas. From this it would appear that his propositions for reform were met at first, not with prejudiced opposition, as might have been expected, but rather with favor. Hence the utter failure of all his efforts was due, not to either of the first two obstacles mentioned in the preceding chapter, but to the remarkable defects of his own character. Von Raumer gives a long account of Ratich, which has been translated in Barnard V., p. 229 ; to which Dr. Dittes has added much of value that has recently come to light in some of the letters of Ratich. * Both these, and especially the latter, reveal his personal traits of character in a most unlovely light. These we will consider later as showing what one should not be to succeed as a reformer. For several years after his Frankfort memorial, he made unsuccessful attempts to found schools in various cities, all of which failed "because he would neither give a specimen of his method nor impart a plan," fearing lest his secret might be filched from him and enure to the advantage of education through some one else. Indeed " he had declared that he would only sell his discoveries to a prince at a dear rate, and « Sohule der Padagogik, Part IV., § 28th. 156 THE HISTORY OF MODERN EDUCATION upon the consideration that the men of learning to whom he should communicate them should promise to conceal them." One of his contemporaries perti- nently asks " Would Christ, the apostles, and the prophets have done so ? " These were the acts of a chariatan peddling some secret quack nostrum, and as a charlatan he was discredited in South Germany. Yet in 1618, he found two princes who were influenced to aid him, the Duke of Weimar, and his relative, Ludwig of Anhalt-Kothen. Under their patronage he went to Kothen, where learned men were engaged as his assistants, and a printing house established to prepare text-books embodying his method in six languages. After more than a year spent in preparation, the long-expected school opened in June, 1619, with about 430 boys and girls divided into two divisions, a lower and an upper one, each of these having two or three grades. In the lower were taught in German the usual elementary branches, the upper division advanced to Latin and then to Greek. Soon complaints from the inspectors, then quarrels of Ratich with every one around, began ; he first complained to the prince, his patron, then slandered and insulted him ; and in little more than four months from the opening of the school, we find the Didactiker, as he was called, in prison with only a Bible for his companion which he was advised to read and profit by. After several months in prison SEVENTEENTH CENTURY REFORMERS 157 he was released after signing a humble retraction of his slanders, and acknowledging that he had pro- fessed what he could not perform. Then he went to Magdeburg, where at first all was favorable to him ; but here too was repeated the same story as at Kothen with spme variations. He quarrelled with the magistrates ; he intermeddled with church matters, and quarrelled with the pas- tor ; his secretive and jaunty ways offended others ; news of his conduct at Kothen came to add to his disfavor ; and in 1622 he was again without a place. For some years afterward he went from place to place supported by certain princely personages, al- ways just about to do great things, but always pre- vented by wicked and envious persons who wanted to steal his precious discoveries ; he was sought out by Oxenstiern, the great Swedish chancellor, whom he treated somewhat cavalierly ; was solicited for counsel by Comenius whose letter he never answered ; and finally ended his unhappy life in 1635 at Erfurt, dogged always by evil spirits of his own raising. Aside from the fact that he was the first of the Innovators, the career of Ratich seems to me chiefly useful in the history of education as an example of what a successful school reformer should not be: He had no practical ability as a teacher or manager. At Kothen he did not pretend to teach himself, but only to impart his secret methods confidentially to 158 THE HISTORY OP MODERN EDUCATION his subordinates. Any practical experience in teach- ing might have guarded him from pretending to teach to old or young the mastery of any language in six months by three or four hours' study a day, — a pretension so absurd that it might justly dis- credit with judicious persons any merits that he possessed. He utterly lacked the worldly wisdom and pru- dence which anj'^ successful teacher should possess, and especially if he adopts the role of a reformer. This lack is markedly shown in his treatment of all his benevolent patrons, and was amusingly exempli- fied in the case ot Oxenstiern, who told Comenius that after he had taken great trouble to see Ratich, the latter, instead of granting him an interview, sent him a thick quarto to read. " I surmounted the tedious work," says the Swedish chancellor, "and after running through the whole book, I saw that he depicts the faults of the schools not badly, but the remedy which he proposes for them, seemed to me insufficient." His faults of character, as they are depicted in his letters, as well as in his career, were such as to unfit him for any influence among men. He was conceited and boastful to an astonishing degree, ready always to vaunt what he could do to an extent that only the greatest performance could justify, and that his failures made ridiculous. Without ability to direct^ he was arrogant and tyrannical to all who SEVENTEENTH CENTURY REFORMERS 159 were about him ; he had a violent and slanderous tongue which he did not restrain from blaming and speaking ill of his benefactors as well as of his coadjutors ; he was quarrelsome, as we have seen ; his suspicious temper disposed him continually to conjure up phantom enemies who were laying traps to surprise his secrets ; and withal, he had no real love for the profession that he pretended to reform, no deep and abiding interest in its well-being, but merely a petty self-seeking desire to reap profit and credit from his discoveries, accompanied b}'' a haunt- ing fear that some one might forestall him in this. Dr. Dittes thus sums up the lesson of his life : " Moreover his career is an eloquent proof of this truth, that theory alone is no security for practical success in teaching : that this rather presupposes skill, patience, worldly prudence, unbiassed sense, before all, })ure devotion to the idea of human cul- ture free from vanity and personal ambition." But it may reasonably be asked, had then Ratich's ideas no merit ? Undoubtedly. His great merit, in my opinion, is that he first conceived the need and importance of a systematic art of teaching, and gave thereto some helpful precepts which he himself could not successfullj' exemplify in practice, and the efficiency of which he as grossly overestimated as he seems to have undervalued the personal agency of the expert teacher, — the latter being an error into which unpractical methodikers are pecuharly liable to fall. 160 THE HISTORY OF MODERN EDUCATION The commission of Giessen professors who early reported favorably on his scheme, after detailing some of its prominent ideas, conclude that his method " has its sure foundations and its definite rules which are derived from the nature of the entire man, senses, memory, and reason, as well as from the peculiarities of the arts, sciences, and languages." They emphasize his art of teaching as enabling one "to do his work much more safely, surely, and per- fectly," and say " Therefore it is necessary that there be an especial art, in accordance with which every one who desires to teach may direct and guide him- self, that he may pursue his calling, not in accord- ance with his mere unaided judgment and guess, nor also only according to his inborn discretion, but in accordance with the art of teaching; just as he who wishes to slug correctly must be guided by the art of singing." Of the maxims which make up Ratich's Art of teaching. Von Raumer gives nine, and Schmidt thirteen. I will give them briefl}', combining some with others to which they are allied, and premising that of those which I shall state, the last four and the first do not appear in Von Raumer's list. 1. Learning, so far at least as reading and writing are concerned, is an universal right from which no one should be debarred. 2. Everything should bo learned first in the vernacular, and pupils should proceed to other languages, only when they have become ready SEVENTEENTH CENTUKY EEEORMERS 161 iu their own. 3. The order and course of nature should be followed, proceeding from the low and simple to the great and high. -4. Teach but one thing, one language or art, one book at a time, and pass to no other till that is mastered ; an idea which would bore instead of interesting pupils, if followed. 5. Often repeat the same thing, repetition assuring memory — a maxim which Ratich applied in a most tiresome method of teaching languages, and which in this century has been the basis of the once famous but now exploded systems of Hamilton and Jacotot. 6. Let nothing be learned by rote, that the under- standing may not be weakened. 7. Let there be uniformity in all things, in books as well as methods, that languages and every art may be presented by the same method and on the same plan. This ignores the capital fact that every group of studies has. its own peculiar subject-matter, and its own special method, e. g., mathematics, and natural science. 8. Matter should be given first, and then rules and principles, e. g., language first, and then the grammar of the language. 9. Let all be taught by experience and piece-meal investigation, and verify every rule by examples. 10. Let no pupil be beaten on account of his learning, but only for obstinacy and evil ways. 11. Let separate schools be estab- hshed for different languages. 12. Let each school have its special tea,cher, who shall at stated times give reports to the higher school authorities. No.'s 162 THE HISTORY OP MODERN EDUCATION 11 and 12, it may be seen, are merely corollaries of No. 4. 13. Girls should be instructed by proper and skilful women.- Of these thirteen maxims, six are expressly or by implication, common to Ratich with the succeeding Reformers. His method so far as he developed it, was applied only to languages, though Helvicus, one of the Giessen professors, had early drawn at- tention to its applicability to science teaching. Ratich, however, seems never to have proposed science teaching, and to have considered logic and rhetoric as Real studies. Some of his maxims if applied would lead to absurdities, especially the 4th with its correlated 11th and 12th. The 5th which is good in its proper place, he made the basis of an extremely tiresome method. The 7th might be so used, within due limits, as to be useful ; yet as he states it, it is incompatible at present with good teaching. The first and last maxims, which belong not to the art of teaching but to school statesman- ship, are now generally accepted ; but Ratich bor- rowed them from Luther. His career is of interest solely as being that of the first of the Innovators, and in any other country than Germany it would have remained in the oblivion to which failures are consigned, and from which it has been exhumed only by painstaking research. SEVENTEENTH CENTURY REFORMERS 163 COMENIUS, 15'JJ IG71 As Prof. Laurie says, John Amos Comenius, 1592-1671 This great educator, organizer, and reformer was born in an obscure town in Moravia in 1592. His jjarents dying when lie was still very young, his early education was great- ly neglected by his guar- dians, so that he had only the barest elements of knowledge up to his seven- teenth year, when first he was sent to a Latin school, this belating of his education was probably an advantage to pedagogy, since from the relative maturity at which he entered on the study of Latin, he was made more keenly aware of the exceeding badness of the mode in which it was taught, and hence was prompted to efforts to improve it. Of the schools of his boyhood he feelingly says, " they are the terror of boys, and the slaughter- houses of minds,.. ..jjlaces wdiere a hatred of books and literature is contracted, where ten or more years are spent in learning what might be acquired in one, where what ought to be poured in gently is violently forced in, and beaten in, where what ought to be put clearly and j^ersjiicuously is presented in a confused and intricate way, as if it were a collection 164 THE HISTORY OP MODERN EDUCATION of puzzles,. ...places where minds are fed on words ; " and again he says, " Boyhood is distracted for years with precepts of grammar, infinitely prolix, per- plexed, and obscure, and for the most part useless. Boys are stufPed with vocabularies without associat- ing words with things, or indeed with one another syntactically." I quote here these words of his from his biographer, Prof Laurie, both to show the nature of the processes against which he fought, and the impression that they made on the young scholar. At the age of twenty we find Comenius studying at the University of Herborn and later at Heidelberg ; at twenty-two he was teaching a village school in Moravia, and striving to better methods by simpli- fying Latin grammar ; and at twenty-four he was ordained to the ministry of the Moravian Brethren and soon after married. The breaking out of the Thirty Years' War in 1618 disturbed his peaceful pursuits ; early in its course, all his property was destroyed including his library and manuscripts ; for some years, his life was spent in hiding places ; and in 1627, he was banished from his native land never more to return. In his exile, his improved and simplified school-books and other pedagogic labors made him famous. He was summoned to England, to Sweden, and to Hungary for aid in the bettering of learning and improvement of schools ; and in 1654 he was offered and declined the presi- seventeenth: centuhy reformers 165 dency of Harvard college, his fame having reached even far distant America. His long and useful career was brought to a close in Holland in 1671. In skill in teaching and organizing, in freedom from jealousy and readiness to cooperate with others, in gentleness under detraction, in readiness to adapt himself to the men with whom he was brought in contact and to the circumstances in which he was placed, and in simplicity and modesty of nature, — his entire career and character were in marked contrast with those of the unhappy Ratich. He lived for others rather than for himself ; fame sought him rather than was sought by him ; and he has no need now like Ratich of an industrious historian to rescue his name and efforts from oblivion. Amer- ica has united with Germany in celebrating with ap- propriate ceremonies the third centenary of his birth. To this brief sketch of his life, in which I have confined myself to what might give insight into his pedagogic career, must be added this remark which will reveal the cause of the intense " Sense-Realism " and the grasping after universal knowledge, which appears in all his school books. He was profoundly impressed with the views of Bacon ; and through the hold that Bacon gained upon him, the philoso- phic spirit of that age gained its most-enduring influence upon pedagogy. But he was troubled because "the noble Verulam, while giving the true key of nature, did not unlock her secrets, but only 166 THE HISTORY OF MODERN EDUCATION showed by a few examples how they should be unlocked." He dreamed of being one of those who should further this great work by " the issuing of a complete body of science as then understood," that investigators might clearly know the point from which they should start in its advancement. " This complete statement of the entire circle of knowledge he called Pansophia." This he desired to make his chief work in life. For this he made great collec- tions of materials which he called his Silva of Pan- sophy, and which were burned with his library in Poland in 1654. His pedagogic labors were always with him mere incidents in a career which he intended chiefly to devote to pansophy ; and thus, like many another man, his incidental services were of vastly greater moment than the work which he really intended. His pansophic work was never realized, and would have been of no great service had it been completed ; but his pansophic ideas were ever with him, and color all his educational opinions and works. The services of Comenius to pedagogy were of a threefold character, in each of which his merit was very great. 1st. He was the true originator of the principles and methods of the Innovators ; 2d. he was a great educational systematist ; and 3d. he was the author of improved text-books which were long and widely famous. Let us consider him in each of these aspects. SEVENTEENTH CENTURY REFORMERS 167 (1) There is little need to enter into detail upon the pedagogic principles which lie at the foundation of the whole method of Comenius. They are those which have already been described as common to all the reformers, with their utilitarianism and sense- realism strongly emphasized, and their neglect of imagination easily observable. Indeed he may rightfully be called their originator ; for, although E-atich had preceded him by a few years in the formulation of a portion of these principles, mingled however with vitiating errors, he had forfeited all just claims to priority by his jealous secretiveness, by his treatment of his ideas as a secret nostrum for all educational ills, and by his utter failure to apply them to any practical use. Hence the honors of paternity passed from him to Comenius, who re-dis- covered them when discredited by failure, who sagaciously discerned their real value and applica- bility to school uses, and who unselfishly revealed them to the whole world embodied in a practical working scheme. If to Ratich is due the merit of discerning the necessity and value of an Art of Education, when as yet there was none, to Comenius belongs the honor of reducing this art to somewhat systematic form ; of illustrating its principles, with not a few errors in details, such as are incident to first essays, and which later he acknowledged to be such errors ; and of presenting these principles in a form in 168 THE HISTORY OP MODERN EDUCATION which they have since been widely accepted. He freely acknowledges his indebtedness to Bacon, to Vives, and to less known men ; bnt what he drew from others, he made his own by the way in which he used their hints. His aim was knowledge, graced by virtue, and sanctified by piety. For the attainment of this aim in school training he believed in a good method as something absolute, and in a certain sense mechani- cal in its character, as leading to surely preconceived results, and one might almost say, as capable of manfacturing men according to a desired pattern. It is easy for us to see that this was to ascribe far too great potency to method and to the art of teach- ing, and too laj' too great a responsibility for results upon teachers ; but it was the error of a great origin- ator in the primal enthusiasm of entering on a hitherto untrodden way. His root idea was to teach all things first in their simplest elements, and to proceed thence in ever- widening circles ; to teach /rom things and not about them ; to proceed from the relatively simple to the more complex, from particulars to the general, from the concrete to the abstract, from the vaguely known to the definitely apprehended, advancing ever step by step and by insensible degrees. He would have all things presented to the senses, and to as many senses as possible. This is his Sense-Realism. He insists on the immediate use of all things that are SEVENTEENTH CENTURY EEPORMERS 169 learned, and upon their repeated use, till they shape themselves into mental habits and develop into faculty. These are the best features of what we of the present day know as Pestalozzianism. A pronounced utilitarian in education, always however in accordance with his aim as before stated, he declares himself emphatically opposed to teach- ing what is useless or too special, a declaration of which there was but too much need in his day, and which may possibly deserve to be borne in mind in all ages He required that all explanations should be made clear as light, and that they should be proved to have been clear by the pupil's ability to use what had been explained. Finally, he demands that all subjects should be proportioned to the age and capacity of pupils. To prove the conformity of his principles of method to nature, he is over-fond of appealing to analogies from external nature, and too frequently these analogies are whimsical even to absurdity, especially in the consequences sought to be derived from them. For these, if any one is curious enough to note the vagaries of a great mind, misapprehend- ing the true meaning of conformity to nature and of the sort of nature to which we should conform, it will be easy to refer to Prof. Laurie's Life and Edu- cational Works of Comenius, pp. 84-98, where they will be found in abundance, as examples of his syncretic method. 170 THE History of MobERN education In what has here been said, I think has been pre- sented a brief but fair sketch of the great merits of his method. His plan of organization, and his famous books, we will now consider. (2) We have already seen that Sturm had pro- posed a comprehensive and systematic organization for a secondary school with a graded series of studies extending over ten years ; and that several of the German states had in the 16th century, placed below their six-class Latin schools, also German schools in which should be taught the necessary elements of knowledge in the mother-tongue. It remained that some one should prepare a general scheme of organ- ization, comprehending all the years of instruction, setting to each its limits, and assigning to each its appropriate functions. This Comenius undertook with such success that his scheme corresponds re- markably in general features with our modern school organizations. He proposed to divide the years of pupilage from birth to the age of twenty- four, into four equal periods, each of six years, and stated distinctly the part which each should perform in the work of developing progressively the powers of the child and youth. Up to the age of six, he would have all children trained at home or in maternal schools, in which the easy beginnings of all knowledge were to be imparted, and the precious germs of correct personal and moral habits were to be implanted, by lessons SEVENTEENTH CENTURY REFORMERS 171 on objects and pictures, and by direction in the observation of common phenomena. The amount of time which Gomenius assigned to this early train- ing is now adopted, as is also the general subject- matter, which has been ingeniously wrought up into systematic form during the present century by Froebel and his followers ; but the idea which Gom- enius entertained, of expecting this instruction from the mothers of families, and in which he was seconded by Pestalozzi one hundred and fifty years later, has been found wholly impracticable, as might have been anticipated by any one who knew the condition of the vast majority of mothers, especially among the poorer working classes, and the various distracting demands that are made upon their attention, even in more favored families. Hence this highly important training is now being assigned during its last three years to regular schools called kindergartens, or Infant schools, with results which wholly justify the emphasis that Gomenius laid , on the right direction of infant efforts and activities. From the age of six to twelve, Gomenius proposed national schools for all children, girls as well as boys. These were to be schools wholly devoted to the mother-tongue, for which he gives weighty reasons, though he would permit some modern language to be taught and learned by its use in the later years. He doubtless saw that this permission was little 172 THE HISTORY OP MODERN EDUCATION likely to be used save in the border lands where two different languages were in close proximity. The studies in these national schools were to be, reading, writing, and reckoning, drawing, measuring, and some handicrafts, geography, history, Bible history, and singing. Comenius proposed that each class should have a lesson-book containing all that it was to learn in these subjects, as well as in morals and religion, — an expedient which has not commended itself to the experience of succeeding times. The worthy purpose which it may have had in view, of avoiding the expense of many books, is now attained in German elementary schools by the use of inexpen- sive outlines on which is based a large amount of oral instruction and practice.* Thus the spirit, though not the form of the recommendation of Comenius, has been preserved. The intellectual aim proposed for the national schools, was to train the senses and the memory, the tongue and the hand of all children, that they might learn all those things which have to do with the usual affairs of life, and which hence would always be useful for all, whatever might be their future calling. The training of the hand in mechanical dexterities he desires, not only "that boys may understand the affairs of ordinary life," but " that opportunities may thus be given to them to find out * For example a set of these outlines now before me (Leitfaden) for the grammar instraotion during five years of the citizen sohoola, cost all together twenty-four cents. SEVENTEENTH CENTURY REFORMERS 173 their special aptitudes." The bearing of this on recent efforts for manual training will be obvious, showing Comenius as a pioneer in this effort. The school hours for the national schools, Comenius would make, two hours in the morning for the understand- ing and the memory, and two in the afternoon for the hand and the voice, and for repetitions, transcrip- tions, and competitions in the various school exer- cises, an, allotment of time which has usually been vei considerably exceeded save in the lowest grades. The Latin school or gymnasium which was to receive boys of ages from twelve to eighteen, Come- nius proposed to have established in every province or considerable town ; and its aim should be, besides moral and religious instruction which are always to be prominent objects, to train the understanding and the judgment of those who are destined to something higher than commercial and manual pursuits. In this the course is to be encyclopsedic, including four languages, viz., the vernacular, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and besides these, the cycle of sciences then known, among which history, " the eye of life," was emphasized as to be studied during the entire six years in small text-books. Comenius does not expect that a complete knowl- edge of any subject will be gained in the Latin school, but only that " a sure foundation shall be laid in each for future acquirements.'" The same allotment of school hours is recommended for the 174 THE HISTORY OF MODERN EDUCATION gymnasium as for the national school, and a like assignment of the more difficult subjects to the morning hours, while the afternoons are set apart for history, repetitions, and writing. The gymna- sium was to be divided into six classes, and these were to be so named as to indicate the order in which subjects should be begun ; the 1st to be called grammar, the 2d physics, the 3d mathematics — physics to precede mathematics as being less abstract — ^the 4th ethics, the 5th dialectics or logic, and the 6th rhetoric. The reasons for this order of arrange- ment on pedagogic grounds Comenius gives in his Magna Didactica. For the period from the age of eighteen to that of twenty-four, Comenius proposed that there should be established an academia, i. e., university in every country or large province, to which should be sent only the elite youth, selected for their talent through a public examination by the rectors of the schools, and in which should be retained only those who approved themselves both capable and industrious. The aim of the university should be to train the future teachers, and the leaders of nations in thought and action. In it, all sciences should be taught, from which students should select as specialties those for which they have the greatest taste ; while at the same time he would have systematized sum- maries prepared, both as introductions to the several specialties, and as enabling those who devote them- SEVENTEENTH CENTURY REFOEMEBS 175 selves to some one specialty to gain some idea of its relations to other departments of human interest, — a useful purpose if properly carried out. He like- wise prescribes afternoon conferences of professors with students, to clear up misunderstandings, doubts, or seeming contradictions ; and he suggests the form of the final examinations, that " no one may be crowned without victory." Finally Comenius suggests that there be some' where a Schola Scholarum for the purpose of original researches that should advance all sciences, make discoveries, and in general "be to the rest of the schools what the stomach is to the body, — the living workshop, supplying sap, life, and strength." It may be said that the German universities as now conducted, perform the important functions of both university and place of research, as conceived by Comenius ; but they leave the weak and indolent students to eliminate themselves by the action of examinations. (3) The text-books of Comenius all reveal his pansophic and utilitarian ideas in their subject- matter, since they grasp after useful knowledge, and strive to give a taste of all useful things. In the selection, gradation, and arrangement of their mat- ter, they are intended to exemplify his principles of method. In this they are not entirely successful, since, as he later confessed, they are too condensed, attempt too much, and as we shall presently see, 176 THE HISTORY OF MODERN EDUCATION expect of the pupil more than can be accompUshed ; as, for example, one of them has somewhat more than 8,000 Latin words which pupils are expected to master. These faults of detail he acknowledges to be due to his neglect of his own principles. These text-books were all intended to aid in the mastery of Latin together with the mastery of things useful to be known. They make the innovation, however, of basing the instruction in Latin on the vernacular and on things. Comenius regards the Latin merely as a means needful to arrive at the knowledge of things useful to be known, and not at all as a discipline of the powers, nor as a preliminary to the classic literature, some of which he considered useless, and some as unfit matter for the education of Christian youth. His text-books were hence intended to supersede these useless or pernicious works in school instruction, in which object they utterly failed, though their extended and long-con- tinued use in the schools, indicates that they were found to be a great aid in acquiring Latin. These books, named not in the order of their publication, but in that in which they prepare each for the next, are (1) the Orbis Pictus, (2) the Vestibulum, (J\) the ■Janua, and (4) the Atrium : in addition to which the author intended to prepare a Palace of Authors. Of these the Orbis Pictus and the Janua were far the most famous, and of both these I have copies before me : the others I have not seen, and must SEVENTEENTH CENTURY REFORMERS 177 rely on others for the brief mention that I make of them. (1) The Orbis Pictus or World Displayed, is justly famous as the first illustrated school-book that was ever published, and is the most striking example of its author's leading principle, to appeal in all pos- sible cases directly to the senses of the pupil. In- deed, in the preface to it, he says : " Now there is nothing in the understanding which was not before in the sense. And therefore to exercise the senses well in rightly perceiving the differences of things, will be to lay the grounds for all wisdom, and all right discourse, and all discreet action in one's course of life." In harmony with this idea, Comenius presents the child with a series of 151 pictures, rang- ing over the entire circle of the knowable. The parts of -the pictures are numbered to correspond with their names as they occur in brief descriptions, which are given in both Latin and the vernacular placed opposite to each other in columns, that the one may be explained by the other. All these pic- tures are quaint, and some of them in a high degree curious, for example, the attempt to portray the wind in No. 6, the soul in No. 43, God's Providence in No. 149, and the Last Judgment in No. 150. This book, published in 1657, was the next year translated into English by Charles Hoole, a London schoolmaster, with a preface addressed " to all judicious and industrious schoolmasters ; and it is 178 THE HISTORY OF MODERN EDUCATION The Air. VI. Aer. The Soul of Man. XLIII. Anima Hominis. Cuts from the Orbis Pictus. SEVENTEENTH CENTURY REFORMERS 179 God's Province. CJXLIX. Providentia Dei. The Last Judgment. CL. Judicium Extremum. Cuts from the Orbis Pictus. 180 THE HISTORY OP MODERN EDUCATION a reprint of this translation that I have now before me. This book went through many editions, had an enormous sale, and was long in use. It was probably one of the most popular text-books ever written. (2) The Vestibulum or porch to the Latin tongue, contains 1,000 Latin words, embodied in 427 sen- tences, and divided into seven chapters. The Ger- man and Latin are given in parallel columns, the German to be read first and then its Latin equiva- lent. Along with this reading, is required a pro- gressive mastery of the inflected forms from appended tables of declensions and conjugations. This Latin primer was expected to be studied through several times, and then to be committed to memory. The index at the end of the book was intended to test the pupils' memory of the senses in which the words occur. With this as a preparation, the boy might pass on to the Janua. (3) The Janua Aurea Linguarum Reserata, or gold- en door of languages swung open, specimens of two pages of which are here presented from different edi- tions, contains 1,000 sentences, ranging from those somewhat brief and simple at first, to those of con- siderable length and complexity towards the end. These sentences are grouped in 100 sections, treating each some phase of useful knowledge, the whole field of which they are intended to cover. They contain no fewer than 8,000 Latin words. The vernacular The Portal to the Gate ( QDataOr'Evangeliftae,(}uinqae renAiSjfex profelii dies ' Septem peticionesin Oratione Dominica. OSo dies fane feptimana. Ter tria funt novem. Decern precepca Dei< Undecim ApoAoIi, dempio ]adL Diiodeciin Met articuii' Triginta dies Tunc menfis. Centum anni Tunc fcculum. Saranas eft mille fraodum ar- tifex. CAP. 4. TJtubM'mfchoU SChoIaflicus freqentac fcliolam. Q116 in artibus eiudiacur. Iniciumenillitens- Efyllabis voces componuntur E diAionibus fermo: Ex libro legimus tiait. Autrecitamusclare' In«oIvimus sum nnembrana Et ponimus in pulpito. Atramentum eft in acramenta riOjin qno tingimus calamum Scribimui eo in cliarca, in ucraque pagina. Si perperaii), dekmus- Et (ignamus denuo rede , vel in margine. Doftor docer. Difcipulus difcic non Q<&mu fimul, fed per partes. Frzceptor prxcipic laciendai R iftor regit Acaden«am f them. Vom Evtxgeliflt, ^vcfer,fes,fix "Seven pmtimt in the lara'i}?^^: , Itighidejei art a xveii. Ltnd>Siin Thrice thi je are nine. hi» Tresriif Ten Cmmmdmmi ttOed, °*' '*'' S»- i SUvenApofiUsaudM. beihg.x^ f^'^S. cepied. Supper ftvtlvt Articles of the Fnith. n»li it in th'i line^er in the matfcm. vl teacher le ichetb, AfchiUr larmh not altogttbg, but by prtrtt. The Mijier commmd'i tiling's u be dom. (m:(. The Gm-rnyr Tvlefhtht Ac*de- B Ttl *fc^**^»i^»^»^»*— ■>— !■ ■ I i n- ti n I I '■• ICeserata et aC'erta. JJl-j p^fi 1 1 Mainmomu » 1 1 21 Cngle tuaivi 6ii ^u'uH/CNoeg'di^l 19 8 bsr^tlsnc bees ;o« oii fcuse Hommel i»Sto maul) ox con^ turn marie, voulani iaicurus Cf^ebsj in nnptiuv'tlirpicic iiibi nubtleoti an vidtius viduam. quara.ainb»t virginej**"* marJagC, ioohtj nuklmii an viduus "* «^ W"""*?* »eea»^rffl, aauiilfcra m)eni'l» «ua{>ftie,* „,, •;„. i., to? a 8wrt,fi. aa&e. 6ic fs>ho latij f'J CelKf quia ,'-<■-'"""'■•'" ''I J H)Qo oail) fiy cefi» oa, a ham clocavit, fo«t[slt«tt|JS T)aag^tet,p««/aFj&f»V«. SEVENTEENTH OENTCRY REFORMERS l83 translation through whose aid the Latin is to be k'arned, is in parallel columns answering to the Latin, and one copy that I have, published in 1676, is adapt- ed for study in either German, French, or Italian, two pages opposite each other being used as one to ac- commodate the necessary four columns. For each of the languages used there is an alphabetical index of words at the end ; but there is no lexicon, the intention being that the Latin should be learned from its correspondence with the mother-tongue; for Comenius was of the opinion that pupils should make their lexicon for themselves by comparison of Latin usage with their own. It will be needless to more than allude to an edition of this famous work published about 1654, to which its author prefixed a lexicon in Latin with Latin definitions to be first memorized, followed by a grammar, also in Latin, to be mastered before preceding to the Janua itself accompanied by no vernacular. I mention it merely to show how com- pletely a great reformer of method may abandon most of his fundamental principles, when com- pletely possessed with some other idea, like that of treating all kinds of useful knowledge of things, which was the hobby of Comenius. This edition evidently met with little acceptance, for the quad- rilingual edition of 1676, shortly after the death of Comenius, is on the original plan of the Janua. This book had an enormous success. It was 184 THE HISTORY OF MODERN EDUCATION translated into twelve European languages, and some of the Oriental ones. The Elzevir edition of 1642, which I have, makes Greek take the place of the vernacular ; and the quadrilingual edition ac- counts for three of the European tongues. This book like the others that have been described, was intended to be perused ten times, with much writ- ing. No one need therefore to doubt that Comenius believed in repetition as the corner-stone of thorough- ness. (4) Of the Atrium no more need be said than this, that it was a much-expanded Janua, with the same number of chapters, but with the sentences expanded to paragraphs, thus widening the circle of knowledge of the same subjects ; that it contained a Latin grammar written in Latin, introducing the idioms and elegances of the language : and that it was intended to lead up to a Palace of Authors which was never prepared. As a whole, these treatises are progressive in character, in spite of their faults in matters of detail. They serve also as an excellent illustration of the third of the obstacles to the progress of educational reform mentioned in a previous chapter, that, namely, which springs from the impossibility that the reformer himself should so entirely free himself from early prepossessions, as not to permit them some- what to interfere with his settled principles of later date. SEVENTEENTH CENTURY REFORMERS 185 The Magna Didactica is the great work in which Comenius has set forth his principles of education, and his theoretic apphcation of them to methods of instruction and organization. What is needful to our purpose in these regards has already been given. It remains only to speak of his ideas of discipline. This he thought should be wholly mild and kind, and that adherence to his system would render all severity needless. For the child, he reasoned, who was not forced to study but allured to it, by kindly and cheerful treatment, by promotions and prizes, by using and seeing the utility of all he learns, by an easy and orderly procedure from perception of things to ideas and words which he remembers because he first understands them, and by feeling in himself a growth of insight and a development of the power to judge rightly, — would be little likely to need severe discipline. In this idea Comenius was doubtless right, as the best modern school practice abundantly proves. To those who desire a more complete knowledge of the life and works of this greatest and most original of the Innovators, his life by Prof. Laurie, containing an analysis of his works can be confi- dently recommended. American educators owe to Mr. C. W. Bardeen an excellent reprint of the Orbis Pictus. Copies of the Janua are not impossi- ble to be obtained through dealers in German books. For those who read German, a good translation of 186 THE HISTORY OF MODERN EDUCATION the Magna Didactica is published in Leipsic, and to this is prefixed an excellent biography of Comenius and an analytic statement of the pedagogical doc- trines of the work. Its German title is " Comenius, Grosse Unterrichtslehre." In the introduction to this, the editor adduces facts to prove that this work, published first in Bohemian and later in Latin, was Uttle known dur- ing the 17th century The Port Royalists The teaching community of Port Royal, in the opinion of French pedagogic writers, exerted a far more pervasive and lasting infiuence on education in France than would naturally be expected from the smallness of the circle in which it acted, or the brevity of the time during which its schools con- tinued. The little schools as they were called, started into being in 1643, apparently as a protest against the evil moral tendency of the Jesuits ; and they were suppressed through the machinations of the Jesuits in 1660, after an existence of barely seventeen years. To what then is the continuance of their influence to be ascribed ? In part, I think, to the great literary activity of some of the lay brothers, who wrote, besides some pedagogic treatises, several approved text-books, long current under the name of Port Royal books ; in part also because they were the French representatives of some highly impor- SEVENTEENTH CENTURY REFORMERS l87 tant principles of the educational reformers, which through them and their books became known and influential. Thus they numbered among them Nicole who wrote a treatise on the education of a prince, in which he recommends an appeal to the senses in instruction wherever possible, that difficulties, be proportioned to the growing powers of the young, and that in the education of the great, chief stress be laid on the heart and the morals, rather than on acquired knowledge. He recognizes also what is now known as Apperception, describing it as " the inner light of the mind," without whose aid sub- jects cannot be understood. Of this number were also Coustel, who wrote a work entitled, " Rules of Education for Children ; " Lancelot, who wrote the methods of Port Royal for teaching Latin, Greek, Italian, and Spanish, and also a catalogue of the root words of Greek, with the inviting title " Garden of Greek Roots ; " and Arnauld, celebrated for his controversy with the Jesuits, who aided in writing the Elements of Geometry, the Port Royal Logic or art of thinking, and a " General Grammar," in which the universal laws of language are sought in the reason common to human beings, and who wrote also a treatise entitled " Reglement des Etudes." These various works of the Port Royalists became widely known and esteemed, and perpetuated their influence long after their schools were disbanded. 188 THE HISTORY OF MODERN EDUCATION In the line of reform, one of their great merits was the stress which they laid on the vernacular. In that age the mother tongues received little attention, as we have seen ; yet the Port Royalists made French the basis of all instruction. Whereas Latin gram- mar was usually taught in Latin, "the unknown by the unintelligible," as Prof. Compayrc wittily re- marks, they prepared in French not only a Latin grammar, but likewise grammars for the Greek and some modern languages. Pupils were also taught to compose in French at an early age on subjects suited to their powers, and this work in composition was directed to the training of judgment as well as to the attainment of skill. In language study they greatly simplified and abridged definitions and rules ; they impressed the meaning of rules by their immediate use in the read- ing of authors ; they made the most imj^ortant parts prominent by such expedients, not then common, as difference of type ; they protested against the abuse of written themes, demanding that the most time be given to the explication of authors, of which they made rather an exercise of judgment than, like the Jesuits, a study of words ; they made also the trans- lation into Latin more an oral than a written exer- cise, while verse-making was entirely optional ; in- stead of giving colorless extracts from authors, like the Jesuits, they preferred entire works of Latin autliors ; and they tauglit Greek to the pupil through SEVENTEENTH CENTURY REFORMERS 189 the medium of his own language instead of through Latin, as was usual. Compayr6 thinks their un- questionable superiority is as teachers of humanistic studies ; yet humanities with them were not human- ities of mere form as with the Jesuits, but of judg- ment leading to a sound use of reason and to an upright conscience. Their effort, indeed, was rather to improve the old than to introduce the new. Burnier, quoted by Compayr^, thus sums up the pedagogic principles and merits of Port Royal : "It simplified study, without taking from it its whole- some difficulties : it strove to make study interesting, while not converting it into a puerile play : it caused to be committed to memory only that which had first been grasped by the intelligence : it admitted only perfectly clear and distinct ideas, few precepts and many exercises on them, the knowledge of things and not merely that of words ; in short, the real development of thought and of the faculties of the soul by means of study." So far their ideas and methods seem identical with those of the reformers, from whom however they differed widely by the light esteem in which they held positive knowledge ; since, in the words of Nicole, they valued "the sciences only as an instrument to perfect reason." Their discipline was mild and kindly considerate, but with a tone of gravity in it akin to ascetic gloom. They eschewed any resort to praise and emulation as tending to arouse pride and self-satisfaction. 190 THE HISTORY OF MODERN EDUCATION Their motto " to speak little, endure much, and to pray still more," shows how entirely they relied on the aid of God and on the prayers addressed to Him for the success of their work. They had " a deep distrust of human nature," which was shown by the check which they put on the formation of friendships among the boys. " Pious practices they held in honor, yet they subordinated them to the reality of inward sentiment ; hence they advised devotion, but did not impose it." " Above all they manifested the profound and unwearying devotion of Christian souls who give themselves wholly and without reserve to other souls to elevate them, but injured and marred by a shade of rigidity and mysticism." Such was this small and short-lived, yet largely influential teaching congregation ; exemplifying in their own way and coloring with their own spirit, some of the most far-reaching principles of the edu- cational reformers ; and uttering a courageous pro- test, in a gainsaying age, against the spirit, the methods, and the tendencies of the Jesuits, their crafty co-religionists. Suspected, coerced, and finally silenced, their methods and the best features of their spirit survived them, in the next age taking the form of the wise RoUin ; and their protest against the Jesuitic spirit in education, through the letters of Pascal, gathered force ultimately to overthrow temporarily those by whom they had been over- thrown. SEVENTEENTH C'ENTUIiY I!EFO]!ftrEIiS 101 John Milton, KiOS-lGTi We have seen in the Kitli century, how weiglity contributions to pedagogi- cal literature wo owe to English teachers like Ascham and Mulcaster. In the 17tli century Eng- land can point witli j^i'ide, not mere!}' to the j^owerful though indirect influence on education of Sir Fran- cis Bacon, but also to note- ''''''' ^'"''^^^ '""-'''' wortlry thoughts on education from lier greatest poet, and from one of her most renowned philoso- phers, Milton and Locke. John Milton, best known for the past two centuries as a great poet, was chiefly distinguished in his own time for the vastness, variety, and elegance of his scholarship), for his vigor and ferocity in politico- theological controversy, and for the austerity of his republican principles. He is of interest to us here only as a skilful and successful schoolmaster, and as the author of a brief but significant treatise on education. The story of his life belongs to liter- ary history, and has been told by Dr. .Johnson in his "Lives of the Poets," with that bitterness of personal prejudice from whicli that remarkaljle man could never wholly aljstain wlien occa-inu oUcrcd, and for which, to tliis stauncli royalist aud high 192 THE HISTORY OF MODERN EDUCATION churchman, the career of Milton presented abund- ant opportunity. Hence Johnson cannot refrain from "some degree of merriment" on the poet's career as a master of a boys' boarding school, which however, with an air of magnanimity, he conceded that " no wise man will consider as in itself dis- graceful ; " yet he contrasts satirically his ardor in hastening home from his travels when he heard that England was on the verge of a civil war, with the peaceful and humble employment in which he at once engaged. It is not wholly impossible that the poet who penned in one of his sonnets the noble Hne, " He also serves who only stands and waits," may have seen that the most effective way in which he could serve his native land in her trouble was by aiding to train her youth for a better destiny. Johnson writes, " It is said that in the art of edu- cation he performed wonders, and a formidable hst is given of the authors, Greek and Latin, that were read in his school by youth between ten and fifteen or sixteen ; " but he expresses his incredulity in these words : " Those who tell or receive these stories should consider that nobody can be taught faster than he can learn. The speed of the horseman is limited by the power of the horse. Every man that has ever undertaken to instruct others, can tell what slow advances he has been able to make, and how much patience it requires to recall vagrant inatten- SEVENTEENTH CENTURY REFORMERS 193 tion, to stimulate sluggish indifference, and to rectify absurd misai^prehension." The worthy doctor here speaks doubtless from a bitter recollection of his own unhappy experience as a schoolmaster. It was during the years that he devoted to teach- ing and at the age of thirty-six that he wrote the little essay on education with which this sketch has to deal. At a later period of his life, after he had held considerable public employments, and while engaged in writing Paradise Lost, he showed his passion for his former vocation by writing an ele- mentary Latin method, descending, as Johnson pompously says, " from his elevation to rescue chil- dren from the perplexities of grammatical confusion, and the trouble of lessons unnecessarily repeated." In his tractate on education, which is in the form of a letter to Samuel Hartlib, a learned Polish-Prus- sian merchant then residing in England and a friend of Comenius, the great poet declares that he has thought much and long on a reform of educa- tion as a matter of quite vital moment. In his view, the aim of education is "to regain to know God aright." " But because our understanding can- not, in this body, found itself but upon sensible things, nor arrive so clearly to the knowledge of God and things invisible, as by orderly conning on the visible and inferior creature, the same method is necessarily to be followed in all discreet teaching." This sentence condenses in itself a whole chapter 194 THE HISTORY OF MODERN EDUCATION of pedagogic psychology ; and both in this and the entire spirit of his treatise, Milton shows himself in entire accord with the fundamental ideas of Mon- taigne and Comenius, alluding indeed to the Didac- tica and the Janua as books with which he is acquainted. Like them he emphasizes the need of basing the work of education on knowledge of sen- sible things, and insists upon exact and orderly observation of external things as "the method necessarily to be followed in all discreet teaching." Like them, he lays great stress on experience and on immediate application of what has been learned. His ideas, too, like theirs, as to the subject-matter of education, are what many in these days are apt to stigmatize as utilitarian, as though things useful to be known should on that account be regarded with suspicion as pabulum for the youthful intelligence. He differs widely from them in some points ; and wherein they differ, his scheme is doubtless less practicable than that of Comenius ; or, as he says himself, " I believe that this is not a bow for every man to shoot in that counts himself a teacher, but will require sinews almost equal to those which Homer gave Ulysses." Yet these illustrious men, amid their differences in plans for accomplishing their common objects, have still the same great objects in view, viz., so to reform education as to restore sense-activity and experience to their proper and fundamental place in instruction, to cultivate SEVENTEENTH CENTURY REFORMERS 195 the understanding more while cramming memory less, and to confine the subjects of instruction closely to those matters which will best fit the future man to perform well his duties as a citizen and a Christian. Milton's definition of education is justly famous for its force and elegance of expression : "I call therefore a complete and generous education, that which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully, and magnanimously all the ofiices, both private and public, of peace and war." As a prelude to this, he arraigns "the usual method of teaching arts as an old error of the universities, not yet well recovered from the scholastic grossness of barbarous ages, that instead of beginning with arts most easy, — and those be such as are most obvious to the sense, — they present their young novices at first coming with the most intellective abstractions of logic and meta- physics," so that " for the most part they grow into hatred and contempt of learning." To this perverted teaching, Milton attributes the fact that when young men so bred enter on life, some betake themselves " to an ambitious and mer- cenary or ignorantly zealous divinity ; " some are "allured to the trade of law" with no higher aim than " fat contentions and flowing fees ; " others engage in " state affairs with souls so unprincipled in virtue and true generous breeding, that flattery and court shifts, and tyrannous aphorisms appear to them the highest points of wisdom ; " and still 196 THE HISTORY OF MODERN EDUCATION others are content to lead a life of mere luxury and sensuous enjoyment. The scheme of education, then, that he would arrange was intended to rescue youth from careers so mean and inglorious, and to put them upon the attainment of the lofty ends that he proposes in his definition, by a way laborious indeed, yet withal so alluring that he believes there would be more difficulty in driving from it the dullest and most indolent, " than we now have to hale and drag our choicest and hopefuUest wits to that asinine feast of sow thistles and brambles which is commonly set before them." Milton concedes the necessity of learning lan- guages, because the knowledge and experience of individual nations is incomplete, yet he insists that "language is but the instrument conveying to us things useful to be known." Hence he blames the schools for wasting seven or eight years "in scrap- ing together so much miserable Latin and Greek as might be learned easily and delightfully in one year." This loss of time he attributes partly to too frequent vacations, but mostly to a " preposterous exaction, forcing the empty wits of children to com- pose verses, themes, and orations which are the acts of ripest judgment and the final work of a head filled by long reading and observing with elegant maxims and copious invention." The practice which he denounces as preposterous has, however, proved very tenacious of life, continuing far into the SEVENTEENTH CENTURY REFORMERS 197 present century, and being by no means extinct in the native land of Milton. Having therefore no opinion of the value of the ancient languages as a mental gymnastic, he would have them learned by the most compendious means possible, with only the most essential parts of grammar thoroughly practised in some good short book, that they might quickly be used as a medium through which "to learn the substance of good things and arts in due order." Between the ages of twelve and twenty-one, Mil- ton expects boys to master all good authors in Latin and Greek, together with Hebrew for purposes of scripture study, whereto he thinks, " it would be no impossibility to add the Chaldee and the Syrian dialect," with the Italian,.as he naively adds, at any odd hours. This however is only language as a means of conveying to the boys things useful to be known. Through these his boys are to master " the rules of arithmetic, and soon after the elements of geometry even playing as the old manner was ; " likewise geography and astronomy, the easy grounds of religion and scripture history, agriculture from classical authors, " that they may improve the tillage of their country," natural history from the same sources, trigonometry with its applications in en- gineering and navigation, the elements of medicine, the essentials of rhetoric, logic, ethics, and poetry, and also politics that they may " know the begin- ning, end, and reasons of political societies." 198 THE HISTORY OP MODERN EDUCATION After this the boy is to dive into the grounds of law from Moses and Lycurgus and Justinian " down to the Saxon and common laws of England and the statutes." " These," he says, " are the studies wherein our noble and our gentle youth ought to bestow their time in a disciplinary way from twelve to one and twenty," — at convenient times for mem- orj'^'s sake reviewing and systematizing all, " until they have confirmed and solidly united the whole body of their perfected knowledge like the last embattling of a Roman legion." The relationship of this scheme of studies with the pansophic ideas of Comenius, is somewhat striking. We may well pause here to inquire with Milton, " what exercises and recreations may best agree with and become these studies ; " for young fellows fed on so full and sturdy an intellectual diet would be quite sure to need exercise. For an hour and a half before their noontide meal, the recreations are to be of a martial character, a training in the use of all kinds of weapons and in wrestling, " as need may be often in fight to tug or grapple and to close." Then whilst resting before meat, their spirits are to be composed by " the solemn and divine harmonies of music," to which, Hke Plato and Aristotle, he ascribes " a great power over dispositions and man- ners." Then again about two hours before supper, the boys are to be summoned to warlike evolutions, first on foot, then, as age permits, on horseback, and SEVENTEENTH CENTURY REFORMERS 199 finally in "all the helps of ancient and modern stratagems, tactics, and warlike maxims." He expects from this that boys will go from his school fitted to command armies with more than usual credit, as the result of those physical exercises by which their bodies are enabled to endure the Herculean labors which his required studies impose. Besides these regular exercises in the school, he pro- vides for the older boys another recreation, in which, ever thrifty in the use of time, he proposes to com- bine long excursions on horseback in the spring with a pleasant mode of gaining knowledge of their own country and its resources, by "observing all places of strength, all commodities of building and of soil for towns and tillage, harbors and ports of trade," and with these, some idea of naval affairs, " of sailing and of sea fights." Finally when his admirable Crichton shall have gained all knowledge, wisdom, and virtue, as well from observation and experience as from converse through books with all that has been worthily said or done by great men in aiges past, Milton permits him at the age of three or four and twenty to see other countries, " not to learn principles, but to en- large experience, and make wise observations." It will be seen therefore that while Milton agrees with Montaigne in thinking foreign travel beneficial, he differs from him both as to its time, and the pur- pose that it should subserve. Montaigne would have 200 THE HISTORY OF MODERN EDUCATION the boy visit foreign lands while young and with a judicious tutor, that he may learn their languages by use, become acquainted with their manners and modes of life that he may be thus guarded against narrow and provincial ideas and modes of judging, and learn their history on the spot, with what he values more, the ability to judge of histories. As to the methods by which Milton hopes to achieve the large results that he expects, it will already have been seen that they contemplate a thorough use of the senses, a guiding of the youth in all possible cases to personal experience and to immediate appli- cation in right ways of what he has learned, and the combination of all that has been learned, by a right use of the understanding, into such a syste- matized body of doctrine as may justly be termed wisdom. For the motive power that shall prompt boys to undertake and continue such labors, he looks chiefly to the example of teachers, which " might in a short space gain them to an incredible diligence and cour- age, infusing into their young breasts an ingenuous and noble ardor." He expects much also from " such lectures and explanations upon every oppor- tunity as may lead and draw them in willing obedi- ence, inflamed with a study of learning and the admiration of virtue, so stirred up with high hopes of living to be brave men and worthy patriots, dear to God and famous to all ages, that they may SEVENTEENTH CENTURY REPORMEIIS 201 despise and scorn all their childish and ill-taught qualities to delight in manly and liberal exercises." Now as regards the motives on which Milton relies, love of knowledge, and a high-toned ambition to excel, though they are of the most enduring influence when once thoroughly roused, it may be doubted by some teachers whether they are not directed to ends somewhat too remote to be influen- tial with the ordinary run of boys in a considerable school. Doubtless, by good precepts, effectively ex- pressed, given on aptly chosen occasions, not weak- ened by too frequent repetition, and best of all, enforced and illustrated by the consistent example of respected teachers, such high motives may be awakened and kept active in the more finely en- dowed boys, prompting them "to scorn delights and live laborious days ; " and thus a powerful public sentiment may be fostered in a school which will stir even the coarser and ruder natures. Hence if Milton's ideas in this regard bear the same heroic stamp as his scheme of studies, they are none the less worthy of the most attentive consideration of all conscientious teachers who are intent to educate as well as to instruct, and to educate by instructing. It remains only to be said that Milton's so com- prehensive and useful scheme of studies, proposed for so lofty aims, and inspired by such high motives, was intended to be carried out in schools, each for one hundred and thirty boys, who were to be lodged i'()-2 TUE JJISI'i)i;\' Ol' MODIiKN JCDl'CATIOX ill fair liouses (.•iiclosoil in spacious grounds ; and tiiat it was meant to supw-sode Ijotli the English })ahhc schools and the universities, for whose "asinine feast of sow tliistles and brambles" he ex- presses so hearty a contempt. In the great lines on ^\•hich he would carry out the refonns wliicli lie tliinlcs needful in the schools, he is ob\-ious]y in full sympathy with the leading 2>riiiciples of tlie educational Reformers; whilst by the demands tliat lie makes on t]i(i jicrsonalitij oi iiie teacher both as example and as guide in the strenu- ous exertion of every power, he dignifies his calling to a degree wliich has come to be generally admitted oulv in much more recent times. John Locke, 1G32-1704 John Locke, long celeljrated as a philosopher, has an especi;il