The History of Education Part 43

QUESTIONS ON THE READINGS

1. Show that Rabelais was in close sympathy with the best of the new humanists of his age.

2. Would Milton's definition of the purpose of education be true, still?

3. Show from Milton's program of studies that he represents a transition type, and also that his program contains the nucleus of the more modern studies of the secondary school.

4. Explain the discontent of the n.o.bility with the existing Church schools.

5. a.s.suming Montaigne's description of the education of his time to be true, explain why this might naturally be the case.

6. Just what kind of an education does Montaigne outline, and how great a reaction was this from existing conditions?

7. In how far would Locke's ideas still apply to the education of a boy of the leisure cla.s.s?

8. Show that Locke's plan for work-house schools was in thorough accord with English post-Reformation ideas as to the duty of the State in matters of education, and also that it contained the beginnings of the pauper- school idea of education which we later had to combat.

9. From the t.i.tle-page and the table of contents (219) of Comenius' _Great Didactic_, point out the originality and novelty of his ideas.

10. Compare Comenius' plan for the Saros-Patak _Gymnasium_ with such schools as Sturm's, the college of Guyenne, the college of Calvin, and the Jesuits.

11. Compare Comenius' plan (220) with the instruction in an American high school of seventy-five years ago.

12. Compare the Alphabet page of Comenius' _Orbis Pictus_ with the same page in the New England Primer.

13. When so many educational reforms were inaugurated so early by Comenius, explain their neglect, and our having to work them out anew in the nineteenth century.

14. What does the need for _Realschulen_ indicate as to the evolution of German society and the recuperation from the ravages of war?

15. Compare the beginnings of scientific study at Cambridge with beginnings of new subjects to-day in our schools.

16. Just what does the Cambridge Scheme of Study indicate as being taught there?

SUPPLEMENTARY REFERENCES

* Adamson, J. W. _Pioneers of Modern Education, 1600-1700_.

Barnard, Henry. _German Teachers and Educators_.

* Butler, N. M. "The Place of Comenius in the History of Education": in _Proc. N. E. A._, 1892, pp. 723-28.

Browning, Oscar, Editor. _Milton's Tractate on Education_.

* Comenius, J. A. _Orbis Pictus_ (Bardeen; Syracuse).

Ha.n.u.s, Paul H. "The Permanent Influence of Comenius"; in _Educational Review_, vol. 3, pp. 226-36 (March, 1892).

Laurie, S. S. _History of Educational Opinion since the Renaissance_.

* Laurie, S. S. _John Amos Comenius_.

Quick, R. H., Editor. _Locke's Thoughts on Education_.

* Quick, R. H. _Essays on Educational Reformers_.

* Vostrovsky, Clara. "A European School of the Time of Comenius (Prague, 1609)"; in _Education_, vol. 17, pp. 356-60 (February, 1897.) Wordsworth, Christopher. _Scholae Academicae; Studies at the English Universities in the Eighteenth Century_.

CHAPTER XVIII

THEORY AND PRACTICE BY THE MIDDLE OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

We have now reached, in our history of the transition age which began with the Revival of Learning--the great events of which were the recovery of the ancient learning, the rediscovery of the historic past, the reawakening of scholarship, and the rise of religious and scientific inquiry--the end of the transition period, and we are now ready to pa.s.s to a study of the development and progress of education in modern times.

Before doing so, however, we desire to gather up and state the progress in both educational theory and practice which had been attained by the end of this transition period, and to present, as it were, a cross-section of education at about the middle of the eighteenth century. To do this, then, before pa.s.sing to a consideration of educational development in modern times, will be the purpose of this chapter. We shall first review the progress made in evolving a theory as to the educational purpose, and then present a cross-section view of the schools of the time under consideration.

I. PRE-EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY EDUCATIONAL THEORIES

THE STATE PURPOSE OF THE GREEKS AND ROMANS. As we saw, early in our study of the rise and progress of the education of peoples, the City-States of Greece were the first consciously to evolve a systematic plan of schooling and a prolonged course of training for those who were to guide and direct the State. In Sparta the training was almost wholly for military efficiency and tribal safety, but in Athens we found a people using a well-worked-out system of training to develop individual initiative, advance civilization, and promote the welfare of the State. The education provided was for but a cla.s.s, to be sure, and a small ruling cla.s.s at that, but it was the first evidence of the new western, individualistic, and democratic spirit expressing itself in the education of the young.

There also we found, for the first time, the thinkers of the State deeply concerned with the education of the youth of the State, and viewing education as a necessity to make life worth living and to secure the State from dangers, both without and within. The training there given produced wonderful results, and for two centuries the men educated by it ably guided the destinies of Athens.

The essentials of this Greek training were later embodied in the private- adventure school system that arose in Rome, which was adapted to conditions and needs there, and which was used for the training of a few Roman youths of the wealthier families for a political career. Schooling at Rome, though, never attained the importance or rendered the service that characterized education at Athens, and never became an instrument of the State used consciously for State ends. One Roman writer, Quintilian, as we have seen (R. 25), worked out a careful statement of the whole process of educating a youth for a public career, and this, the first practical treatise on education, was for long highly prized as the best- written statement of the educational art.

THE FUTURE-LIFE CONCEPTION OF THE CHRISTIANS. With the decline of Roman power and influence, and the victory of Christianity throughout the Roman world, the State conception of education was entirely lost to western Europe, and more than a thousand years elapsed before it again arose in the western world. The Church now became the State, and the need for any education for secular life almost entirely pa.s.sed away. For centuries the aim was almost entirely a preparation for life in the world to come.

Throughout all the early Middle Ages this att.i.tude continued, supplemented only by the meager education of a few to carry on the work of the Church here below.

After the tenth century we noted the rise of some more or less independent study in some of the monastery and cathedral schools, and after the twelfth century the rise of _studia generalia_ marked the congregation into groups of the few interested in a studious life. These in turn gave rise to the university foundations, and to the beginning of independent and secular study once more in the western world. The Revival of Learning, the recovery of the ancient ma.n.u.scripts, the revival of the study of Greek in the West, the founding of libraries, the invention of paper and printing, and the revival of trade and commerce--all were new forces tending to give a new direction to scholarly study, and as a result a new race of scholars, more or less independent of the Church, now arose in western Europe. They were, however, a cla.s.s, and a very small cla.s.s at that, and though the result of their work was the creation of a new humanistic secondary school, this still ministered to the needs of but a few. This few was intended either for the service of the Church, for the governmental service of the towns which had by this time attained their independence, or for the governments of the rising princ.i.p.alities or states.

For the great ma.s.s of the people, whose purpose in life was to work and believe and obey, agriculture, warfare, the rising trades with their guilds (p. 209), and the services of the Church const.i.tuted almost all in the way of education which they ever received. To be useful to his overlord and master here and to be saved hereafter were the chief life- purposes of the common man. The former he must himself undertake in order to be able to live at all; the latter the Church undertook to supply to those who followed her teachings.

THE RISE OF THE VERNACULAR RELIGIOUS SCHOOL. For the first time in history, if we except the schools of the early Christian period, the Protestant Revolts created a demand for some form of an elementary religious school for all. The Protestant theory as to personal _versus_ collective salvation involved as a consequence the idea of the education of all in the essentials of the Christian faith and doctrine. The aim was the same as before--personal salvation--but the method was now changed from that of the Church as intermediary to personal knowledge and faith and effort. To be saved, one must know something of the Word of G.o.d, and this necessitated instruction. To this end, in theory at least, schools had to be established to educate the young for membership in the new type of Church relationship. Reading the vernacular, a little counting and writing, in Teutonic countries a little music, and careful instruction in a religious Primer (R. 202), the Catechism, and the Bible, now came to const.i.tute the subject matter of a new vernacular school for the children of Protestants, and to a certain extent in time for the children of Catholics as well. As we pointed out earlier (p. 353), between this new type of school for religious ends and the older Latin grammar school for scholarly purposes there was almost no relationship, and the two developed wholly independently of one another. In the Latin grammar schools one studied to become a scholar and a leader in the political or ecclesiastical world; in the vernacular religious school one learned to read that he might be able to read the Catechism and the Bible, and to know the will of the Heavenly Father. There was scarcely any other purpose to the maintenance of the elementary vernacular schools. This condition continued until well into the eighteenth century.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 129. A FRENCH SCHOOL BEFORE THE REVOLUTION (After an etching by Boisseau, 1730-1809)]

EARLY UNSUCCESSFUL EDUCATIONAL REFORMERS. Back in the seventeenth century, as we have pointed out in the preceding chapter, a very earnest effort was made by Ratke and Comenius to introduce a larger conception of the educational process into the elementary vernacular school, to eliminate the gloomy religious material from the textbooks, to subst.i.tute a human- welfare purpose for the exclusively life-beyond view, and to transform the school into an inst.i.tution for imparting both learning and religion.

Comenius in particular hoped to make of the new elementary religious school a potent instrument for human progress by introducing new subject- matter, and by formulating laws and developing methods for its work which would be in harmony with the new scientific procedure so well stated by Francis Bacon. Comenius stands as the commanding figure in seventeenth- century pedagogical thought. He reasoned out and introduced us to the whole modern conception of the educational process and purpose, and gave to the school of the people a solid theoretical and practical basis.

Living, though, at an unfortunate period in human history, he was able to awaken little interest either in rational teaching-method or in reforms looking to the advancement of the welfare of mankind. Instead he roused suspicion and distrust by the innovations and progressive reforms he proposed; his now-celebrated book on teaching method (Rs. 218, 219) was not at the time understood and was for long forgotten, while the fundamentally sound ideas and pedagogical reforms which he proposed and introduced were lost amid the hatreds of his time, and had to be worked out again and reestablished in a later and a more tolerant age.

Another unsuccessful reformer of some importance, and one whose work antedated that of both Ratke and Comenius, was the London schoolmaster, Richard Mulcaster (1531-1611), for twenty-five years headmaster of the famous Merchant Taylors' School, and later Master of Saint Paul's School.

In 1581 he issued his _Positions_, a pedagogical work so far in advance of his time, and written in such a heavy and affected style, that it pa.s.sed almost unnoticed in England, and did not become known at all in other lands. Yet the things he stood for became the fundamental ideas of nineteenth-century educational thought. These were:

1. That the end and aim of education is to develop the body and the faculties of the mind, and to help nature to perfection.

2. That all teaching processes should be adapted to the pupil taught.

3. That the first stage in learning is of large importance, and requires high skill on the part of the teacher.

4. That the thing to be learned is of less importance than the pupil learning.

5. That proper brain development demands that pressure and one-sided education alike be avoided.

6. That the mother tongue should be taught first and well, and should be the language of the school from six to twelve.