programme of studies, Luther introduces a new spirit into methods.
He wishes more liberty and more joy in the school.
“Solomon,” he says, “is a truly royal schoolmaster. He does not,
like the monks, forbid the young to go into the world and be
happy. Even as Anselm said: ‘A young man turned aside from the
world is like a young tree made to grow in a vase.’ The monks have
imprisoned young men like birds in their cage. It is dangerous to
isolate the young. It is necessary, on the contrary, to allow young
people to hear, see, and learn all sorts of things, while all the
time observing the restraints and the rules of honor. Enjoyment
and recreation are as necessary for children as food and drink.
The schools till now were veritable prisons and hells, and the
schoolmaster a tyrant.... A child intimidated by bad treatment is
irresolute in all he does. He who has trembled before his parents
will tremble all his life at the sound of a leaf which rustles in
the wind.”
These quotations will suffice to make appreciated the large and
liberal spirit of Luther, and the range of his thought as an
educator. No one has more extolled the office of the teacher, of
which he said, when comparing it to preaching, it is the work of
all others the noblest, the most useful, and the best; “and yet,”
he added, “I do not know which of these two professions is the
better.”
Do not let ourselves imagine, however, that Luther at once
exercised a decisive influence on the current education of his day.
A few schools were founded, called writing schools; but the Thirty
Years’ War, and other events, interrupted the movement of which
Luther has the honor of having been the originator.
133. THE STATES GENERAL OF ORLEANS (1560).--While in Germany, under
the impulse of Luther, primary schools began to be established,
France remained in the background. Let us note, however, the
desires expressed by the States General of Orleans, in 1560:--
“May it please the king,” it was said in the memorial of the
nobility, “to levy a contribution upon the church revenues for the
reasonable support of teachers and men of learning in every city
and village, for the instruction of the needy youth of the country;
and let all parents be required, under penalty of a fine, to send
their children to school, and let them be constrained to observe
this law by the lords and the ordinary magistrates.”
It was demanded, in addition, that public lectures be given on
the Sacred Scriptures in _intelligible language_, that is, in the
mother tongue. But these demands, so earnest and democratic, of the
Protestant nobility of sixteenth century France, were not regarded.
With the fall of Protestantism, the cause of primary instruction in
France was doomed to a long eclipse. The nobles of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries did not think of petitioning again for
the education of the people, and Diderot could truthfully say of
them: “The nobility complain of the farm laborers who know how to
read. Perhaps the chief grievance of the nobility reduces itself
to this: that a peasant who knows how to read is more difficult to
oppress than another.”
134. RATICH (1571-1635).--In the first half of the seventeenth
century, Ratich, a German, and Comenius, a Slave, were, with very
different degrees of merit, the heirs of the educational thought of
Luther.
With something of the charlatan and the demagogue, Ratich devoted
his life to propagating a novel art of teaching, which he called
_didactics_, and to which he attributed marvels. He pretended, by
his _method of languages_, to teach Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, in
six months. But nevertheless, out of many strange performances and
lofty promises, there issue some thoughts of practical value. The
first merit of Ratich was to give the mother tongue, the German
language, the precedence over the ancient languages. An English
educational writer, Mr. R. H. Quick, in his _Essays on Educational
Reformers_ (1874), has thus summed up the essential principles of
the pedagogy of Ratich: 1. Everything should be taught in its own
time and order, and according to the natural method, in passing
from the more easy to the more difficult. 2. Only one thing should
be learned at a time. “We do not cook at the same time in one
pot, soup, meat, fish, milk, and vegetables.” 3. The same thing
should be repeated several times. 4. By means of these frequent
repetitions, the pupil will have nothing to learn by heart. 5.
All school-books should be written on the same plan. 6. The thing
as a whole should be made known before the thing in its details,
and the sequence should be from the general to the special. 7.
In every case we should proceed by induction and experiment.
Ratich especially means by this that we must make an end of mere
authority, and of the testimony of the ancients, and must appeal to
individual reason. 8. Finally, everything should be learned without
coercion. Coercion and the rod are contrary to nature, and disgust
the young with study. The human understanding learns with pleasure
all that it ought to retain. It does not seem that Ratich knew how
to draw from these principles, which, by the way, are not true save
under certain corrections, all the happy results that are contained
in them. He left to Comenius the glory of applying the new spirit
to actual practice.
135. COMENIUS (1592-1671).--For a long time unknown and
unappreciated, Comenius has finally received from our
contemporaries the admiration that is due him. Michelet speaks of
him with enthusiasm as “that rare genius, that gentle, fertile,
universal scholar”;[98] and he calls him the first evangelist
of modern pedagogy, Pestalozzi being the second. It is easy to
justify this appreciation. The character of Comenius equals his
intelligence. Through a thousand obstacles he devoted his long
life to the work of popular instruction. With a generous ardor he
consecrated himself to infancy. He wrote twenty works and taught
in twenty cities. Moreover, he was the first to form a definite
conception of what the elementary studies should be. He determined,
nearly three hundred years ago, with an exactness that leaves
nothing to be desired, the division of the different grades of
instruction. He exactly defined some of the essential laws of the
art of teaching. He applied to pedagogy, with remarkable insight,
the principles of modern logic. Finally, as Michelet has said,
he was the Galileo, we would rather say, the Bacon, of modern
education.
136. BACONIAN INSPIRATION.--The special aims of pedagogy are
essentially related to the general aims of science. All progress
in science has its corresponding effects on education. When an
innovator has modified the laws for the discovery of truth, other
innovators appear, who modify, in their turn, the rules for
instruction. To a new logic almost necessarily corresponds a new
pedagogy.
Now Bacon, at the opening of the seventeenth century, had opened
unknown routes to scientific investigation. For the abstract
processes of thought, for the barren comparison of propositions
and words, in which the whole art of the syllogism consisted, the
author of the _Novum Organum_ had substituted the concrete study
of reality, the living and fruitful observation of nature. The
mechanism of deductive reasoning was replaced by the slow and
patient interpretation of facts. It no longer answered to analyze
with docile spirit principles that were assumed, right or wrong, as
absolute truths; nor to become expert in handling the syllogism,
which, like a mill running dry, often produced but little flour.
It was now necessary to open the eyes to the contemplation of the
universe, and by sense intuition, by observation, by experiment,
and by induction, to penetrate its secrets, and determine its laws.
It was necessary to ascend, step by step, from the knowledge of the
simplest things to the discovery of the most general laws; and,
finally, to demand of nature herself to reveal all that the human
intelligence, in its solitary meditations, is powerless to discover.
Looking at this subject more closely, this revolution in science,
so important from the point of view of speculative inquiry, and
destined to change the aspect of the sciences, also contained in
itself a revolution in education. For this purpose, all that was
needed was to apply to the development of the intelligence and
to the communication of knowledge the rules proposed by Bacon for
the investigation of truth. The laws of scientific induction might
become the laws for the education of the soul. No more setting
out with abstract principles, imposed by authority; but facts
intuitively apprehended, gathered by observation and verified by
experiment; the order of nature faithfully followed; a cautious
progression from the simplest and most elementary ideas to the most
difficult and most complex truths; the knowledge of things instead
of an analysis of words,--such was to be the character of the new
system of instruction. In other terms, it was possible to make
the child follow, in order to lead him to know and to comprehend
the capitalized truths that constitute the basis of elementary
instruction, the same method that Bacon recommended to scholars for
the discovery of unknown truths.[99]
It is this conversion, or, as we might say, this translation, of
the maxims of the Baconian logic into pedagogical rules, that
Comenius attempted, and this is why he has been called “the father
of the intuitive method.” He was nourished, intellectually, by the
reading of Bacon, whom he resembles, not only in his ideas, but
also in his figurative and often allegorical language. Even the
title of one of his books, _Didactica Magna_, recalls the title of
Bacon’s _Instauratio Magna_.
137. THE LIFE OF COMENIUS.--To know Comenius and the part he played
in the seventeenth century, to appreciate this grand educational
character, it would be necessary to begin by relating his life; his
misfortunes; his journeys to England, where Parliament invoked his
aid; to Sweden, where the Chancellor Oxenstiern employed him to
write manuals of instruction; especially his relentless industry,
his courage through exile, and the long persecutions he suffered as
a member of the sect of dissenters, the Moravian Brethren; and the
schools he founded at Fulneck, in Bohemia, at Lissa and at Patak,
in Poland. But it would require too much of our space to follow in
its incidents and catastrophes that troubled life, which, in its
sudden trials, as in the firmness that supported them, recalls the
life of Pestalozzi.[100]
138. HIS PRINCIPAL WORKS.--Comenius wrote a large number of books
in Latin, in German, and in Czech; but of these only a few are
worthy to engage the attention of the educator. In his other works
he allows himself to go off on philosophic excursions, and to
indulge in mystic reveries, led by his ardor to find what he called
_pansophia_, wisdom or universal knowledge. In this wilderness
of publications destined to oblivion, we shall notice only three
works, which contain the general principles of the pedagogy of
Comenius, and the applications which he has made of his method:--
1. The _Didactica Magna_, the _Great Didactics_ (written in Czech
at about 1630, and rewritten in Latin at about 1640). In this
work Comenius sets forth his principles, his general theories
on education, and also his peculiar views on the practical
organization of schools. It is to be regretted that a French
translation has not yet popularized this important book, that would
be worthy a place beside the _Thoughts_ of Locke and the _Émile_ of
Rousseau.[101]
2. The _Janua linguarum reserata_, the _Gate of Tongues Unlocked_
(1631). In the thought of the author, this was a new method of
learning the languages. Comenius, led astray on this point by his
religious prejudices, wished to banish the Latin authors from
the schools, “for the purpose,” he said, “of reforming studies
in the true spirit of Christianity.” Consequently, in order to
replace the classical authors, which he repudiated for this further
reason, that the reading of them is too difficult, and to make
a child study them “is to wish to push out into the vast ocean
a tiny bark that should be allowed only to sport on a little
lake,” he had formed the idea of composing a collection of phrases
distributed into a hundred chapters. These phrases, to the number
of a thousand, at first very simple, and of a single member, then
longer and more complicated, were formed of two thousand words,
chosen from among the most common and the most useful. Moreover,
the hundred chapters of the Janua taught the child, in succession
and in a methodical order, all the things in the universe,--the
elements, the metals, the stars, the animals, the organs of the
body, the arts and trades, etc., etc. In other terms, the
_Janua linguarum_ is a nomenclature of ideas and words designed to
fix the attention of the child upon everything he ought to know
of the world. Divested of the Latin text that accompanies it, the
_Janua_ is a first reading-book, very defective doubtless, but it
gives proof of a determined effort to adapt to the intelligence of
the child the knowledge that he ought to acquire.
3. The _Orbis sensualium pictus_, the _Illustrated World of
Sensible Objects_, the most popular of the author’s works (1658).
It is the _Janua linguarum_ accompanied with pictures, in lieu
of real objects, representing to the child the things that he
hears spoken of, as fast as he learns their names. The _Orbis
pictus_, the first practical application of the intuitive method,
had an extraordinary success, and has served as a model for the
innumerable illustrated books which for three centuries have
invaded the schools.
[Illustration: Geometria.
Die Erdmesskunst.
(Facsimile of illustration in the _Orbis Pictus_ of Comenius.)]
[Illustration: (Facsimile of page of text of the _Orbis Pictus_.)]
139. THE FOUR GRADES OF INSTRUCTION.--We must not require a man of
the seventeenth century to abjure Latin studies. Comenius prizes
them highly; but at least he is wise enough to put them in their
place, and does not confound them, as Luther did, with elementary
studies.
Nothing could be more exact, more clearly cut, than the scholastic
organization proposed by Comenius. We shall find in it what
the experience of three centuries has finally sanctioned and
established, the distribution of schools into these grades,--infant
schools, primary schools, secondary schools, and higher schools.
The first grade of instruction is the _maternal school_, the school
_by the mother’s knee_, _materni gremii_, as Comenius calls it.
The mother is the first teacher. Up to the age of six the child
is taught by her; he is initiated by her into those branches of
knowledge that he will pursue in the primary school.
The second grade is the _elementary public school_. All the
children, girls and boys, enter here at six, and leave at twelve.
The characteristic of this school is that the instruction there
given is in the mother tongue, and this is why Comenius calls it
the “common” school, _vernacula_, a term given by the Romans to the
language of the people.
The third grade is represented by the _Latin school_ or
_gymnasium_. Thither are sent the children from twelve to
eighteen years of age for whom has been reserved a more complete
instruction, such as we would now call secondary instruction.
Finally, to the fourth grade correspond the _academies_, that
is, institutions of higher instruction, opened to young men from
eighteen to twenty-four years of age.
The child, if he is able, will traverse these four grades in
succession; but, in the thought of Comenius, the studies should be
so arranged in the elementary schools, that in leaving them, the
pupil shall have a general education which makes it unnecessary for
him to go farther, if his condition in life does not destine him to
pursue the courses of the Latin School.
“We pursue,” says Comenius, “a general education, the teaching to
all men of all the subjects of human concern.... The purpose of the
people’s school shall be that all children of both sexes, from the
tenth to the twelfth or the thirteenth year, may be instructed in
that knowledge which is useful during the whole of life.”
This was an admirable definition of the purpose of the primary
school. A thing not less remarkable is that Comenius establishes an
elementary school in each village:--
“There should be a maternal school in each family; an elementary
school in each district; a gymnasium in each city; an academy in
each kingdom, or even in each considerable province.”
140. ELEMENTARY INITIATION INTO ALL THE STUDIES.--One of the most
novel and most original ideas of the great Slavic educator is the
wish that, from the earliest years of his life, the child may
acquire some elementary notions of all the sciences that he is to
study at a later period. From the cradle, the gaze of the infant,
guided by the mother, should be directed to all the objects that
surround him, so that his growing powers of reflection will be
brought into play in working on these sense intuitions. “Thus,
from the moment he begins to speak, the child comes to know
himself, and, by his daily experience, certain general and abstract
expressions; he comes to comprehend the meaning of the words
_something_, _nothing_, _thus_, _otherwise_, _where_, _similar_,
_different_; and what are generalizations and the categories
expressed by these words but the rudiments of metaphysics? In the
domain of physics, the infant can learn to know water, earth,
air, fire, rain, snow, etc., as well as the names and uses of
the parts of his body, or at least of the external members and
organs. He will take his first lesson in optics in learning to
distinguish light, darkness, and the different colors; and in
astronomy, in noticing the sun, the moon, and the stars, and in
observing that these heavenly bodies rise and set every day. In
geography, according to the place where he lives, he will be shown
a mountain, a valley, a plain, a river, a village, a hamlet, a
city, etc. In chronology, he will be taught what an hour is, a
day, a week, a year, summer, winter, yesterday, the day before
yesterday, to-morrow, the day after to-morrow, etc. History, such
as his age will allow him to conceive, will consist in recalling
what has recently passed, in taking account of it, and in noting
the part that this one or that has taken in such or such an affair.
Arithmetic, geometry, statistics, mechanics, will not remain
strangers to him. He will acquire the elements of these sciences in
distinguishing the difference between little and much, in learning
to count up to ten, in observing that three is more than two; that
one added to three makes four; in learning the sense of the words
_great_ and _small_, _long_ and _short_, _wide_ and _narrow_,
_heavy_ and _light_; in drawing lines, curves, circles, etc.; in
seeing goods measured with a yard-stick; in weighing an object in
a balance; in trying to make something or to take it to pieces, as
all children love to do.
“In this impulse to construct and destroy, there is but the effort
of the little intelligence to succeed in making or building
something for himself; so that, instead of opposing the child in
this, he should be encouraged and guided.”
“The grammar of the first period will consist in learning to
pronounce the mother tongue correctly. The child may receive
elementary notions even of politics, in observing that certain
persons assemble at the city hall, and that they are called
councillors; and that among these persons there is one called
mayor, etc.”[102]
141. THE PEOPLE’S SCHOOL.--Divided into six classes, the people’s
school should prepare the child either for active life or for the
higher courses. Comenius sends here not only the sons of peasants
and workmen, but the sons of the middle class or of the nobility,
who will afterwards enter the Latin school. In other terms, the
study of Latin is postponed till the age of twelve; and up to that
period all children must receive a thorough primary education,
which will comprise, with the mother tongue, arithmetic, geometry,
singing, the salient facts of history, the elements of the
natural sciences, and religion. The latest reforms in secondary
instruction, which, only within a very late period, have postponed
the study of Latin till the sixth year,[103] and which till then
keep the pupil upon the subjects of primary instruction,--what are
they but the distant echo of the thought of Comenius? Let it be
noted, too, that the plan of Comenius gave to its primary school a
complete encyclopædic course of instruction, which was sufficient
for its own ends, but which, while remaining elementary, was a
whole, and not a beginning.[104]
Surely, the programme of studies devised by Comenius did not fail
in point of insufficiency; we may be allowed, on the contrary, to
pronounce it too extended, too crowded, conformed rather to the
generous dreams of an innovator than to a prudent appreciation of
what is practically possible; and we need not be astonished that,
to lighten in part the heavy burden that is imposed on the teacher,
Comenius had the notion of dividing the school into sections which
assistants, chosen from among the best pupils, should instruct
under the supervision of the master.
142. SITE OF THE SCHOOL.--One is not a complete educator
save on the condition of providing for the exterior and
material organization of the school, as well as for its moral
administration. In this respect, Comenius is still deserving of our
encomiums. He requires a yard for recreation, and demands that the
school-house have a gay and cheerful aspect. The question had been
discussed before him by Vives (1492-1540).
“There should be chosen,” says the Spanish educator, “a healthful
situation, so that the pupils may not one day have to take
their flight, dispersed by the fear of an epidemic. Firm health
is necessary to those who would heartily and profitably apply
themselves to the study of the sciences. And the place selected
should be isolated from the crowd, and especially at a distance
from occupations that are noisy, such as those of smiths,
stone-masons, machinists, wheelwrights, and weavers. However, I
would not have the situation too cheerful and attractive, lest it
might suggest to the scholars the taking of too frequent walks.”
But these considerations that do honor to Vives and to Comenius,
were scarcely in harmony with the resources then at the disposal of
the friends of instruction. There was scarcely occasion seriously
to consider how school-houses should be constructed and situated,
at a period when the most often there were no school-houses
existing. “In winter,” says Platter, “we slept in the school-room,
and in summer in the open air.”[105]
143. SENSE INTUITIONS.--If Comenius has traced with a master hand
the general organization of the primary school, he has no less
merit in the matter of methods.
When they recommend the observation of sensible things as the first
intellectual exercise, modern educators do but repeat what Comenius
said three centuries ago.
“In the place of dead books, why should we not open the living
book of nature? ... To instruct the young is not to beat into them
by repetition a mass of words, phrases, sentences, and opinions
gathered out of authors; but it is to open their understanding
through things....
“The foundation of all knowledge consists in correctly representing
sensible objects to our senses, so that they can be comprehended
with facility. I hold that this is the basis of all our other
activities, since we could neither act nor speak wisely unless
we adequately comprehended what we were to do and say. Now it
is certain that _there is nothing in the understanding that was
not first in the senses_, and, consequently, it is to lay the
foundation of all wisdom, of all eloquence, and of all good and
prudent conduct, carefully to train the senses to note with
accuracy the differences between natural objects; and as this
point, important as it is, is ordinarily neglected in the schools
of to-day, and as objects are proposed to scholars that they do not
understand because they have not been properly represented to their
senses or to their imagination, it is for this reason, on the one
hand, that the toil of teaching, and on the other, that the pain of
learning, have become so burdensome and so unfruitful....
“We must offer to the young, not the shadows of things, but the
things themselves, which impress the senses and the imagination.
Instruction should commence with a real observation of things, and
not with a verbal description of them.”
We see that Comenius accepts the doctrine of Bacon, even to his
absolute sensationalism. In his pre-occupation with the importance
of instruction through the senses, he goes so far as to ignore that
other source of knowledge and intuitions, the inner consciousness.
144. SIMPLIFICATION OF GRAMMATICAL STUDY.--The first result of the
experimental method applied to instruction, is to simplify grammar
and to relieve it from the abuse of abstract rules. “Children,”
says Comenius, “need examples and things which they can see, and
not abstract rules.”
And in the _Preface_ of the _Janua linguarum_, he dwells upon the
faults of the old method employed for the study of languages.
“It is a thing self-evident, that the true and proper way of
teaching languages has not been recognized in the schools up to the
present time. The most of those who devoted themselves to the study
of letters grew old in the study of words, and upwards of ten years
was spent in the study of Latin alone; indeed, they even spent
their whole life in the study, with a very slow and very trifling
profit, which did not pay for the trouble devoted to it.”[106] It
is by use and by reading that Comenius would abolish the abuse
of rules. Rules ought to intervene only to aid use and give it
surety. The pupil will thus learn language, either in speaking, or
in reading a book like the _Orbis Pictus_, in which he will find
at the same time all the words of which the language itself is
composed, and examples of all the constructions of its syntax.
145. NECESSITY OF DRILL AND PRACTICE.--Another essential point
in the new method, is the importance attributed by Comenius
to practical exercises: “Artisans,” he said, “understand this
matter perfectly well. Not one of them will give an apprentice a
theoretical course on his trade. He is allowed to notice what is
done by his master, and then the tool is put in his hands: it is in
smiting that one becomes a smith.”[107]
It is no longer the thing to repeat mechanically a lesson learned
by heart. There must be a gradual habituation to action, to
productive work, to personal effort.
146. GENERAL BEARING OF THE WORK OF COMENIUS.--How many other new
and judicious ideas we shall have to gather from Comenius! The
methods which we would be tempted to consider as wholly recent, his
imagination had already suggested to him. For example, preceding
the _Orbis Pictus_, we find an alphabet, where to each letter
corresponds the cry of an animal, or else a sound familiar to the
child. Is not this already the very essence of the phononimic
processes[108] brought into fashion in these last years? But what
is of more consequence with Comenius than a few happy discoveries
in practical pedagogy, is the general inspiration of his work. He
gives to education a psychological basis in demanding that the
faculties shall be developed in their natural order: first, the
senses, the memory, the imagination, and lastly the judgment and
the reason. He is mindful of physical exercises, of technical and
practical instruction, without forgetting that in the primary
schools, which he calls the “studios of humanity,” there must be
trained, not only strong and skilful artisans, but virtuous and
religious men, imbued with the principles of order and justice. If
he has stepped from theology to pedagogy, and if he permits himself
sometimes to be borne along by his artless bursts of mysticism, at
least he does not forget the necessities of the real condition,
and of the present life of men. “The child,” he says, “shall learn
only what is to be useful to him in this life or in the other.”
Finally, he does not allow himself to be absorbed in the minute
details of school management. He has higher views,--he is working
for the regeneration of humanity. Like Leibnitz, he would freely
say: “Give me for a few years the direction of education, and I
agree to transform the world!”
[147. ANALYTICAL SUMMARY.--1. Decisive changes in human opinion,
political, religious, or scientific, involve corresponding
changes in the purposes and methods of education.
2. The Reformation was a breaking with authority in matters
of religion, as the Baconian philosophy was a breaking with
authority in matters of science; and their joint effect on
education was to subject matters of opinion, belief, and
knowledge to the individual reason, experience, and observation.
3. In holding each human being responsible for his own salvation,
the Reformation made it necessary for every one to read, and the
logical consequence of this was to make instruction universal;
and as schools were multiplied, the number of teachers must be
increased, and their grade of competence raised.
4. The conception that ignorance is an evil, and a constant
menace to spiritual and temporal safety, led to the idea of
compulsory school-attendance.
5. In the recoil from the intuitions of the intellect sanctioned
by Socrates, to the intuitions of the senses sanctioned by Bacon,
education passed from an extreme dependence on reflection and
reason, to an extreme dependence on sense and observation; so
that inference has been thrown into discredit, and the verdict
of the senses has been made the test of knowledge.
6. In adapting the conception of universal education to the
social conditions of his time, Comenius was led to a gradation of
schools that underlies all modern systems of public instruction.]
FOOTNOTES:
[95] Dittes, _op. cit._ p. 127.
[96] Luther’s argument for compulsion should not be omitted:
“It is my opinion that the authorities are bound to force their
subjects to send their children to school.... If they can oblige
their able-bodied subjects to carry the lance and the arquebuse, to
mount the ramparts, and to do complete military service, for a much
better reason may they, and ought they, to force their subjects to
send their children to school, for here it is the question of a
much more terrible war with the devil.” (P.)
[97] Names for treatises on grammar and philosophy respectively.
Donatus was a celebrated grammarian and rhetorician who taught
at Rome in the middle of the fourth century A.D.; and Alexander,
a celebrated Greek commentator on the writings of Aristotle, who
taught the Peripatetic philosophy at Athens in the end of the
second and the beginning of the third centuries A.D. (P.)
[98] Michelet, _Nos fils_, p. 175 _et seq._
[99] This is, perhaps, the earliest appearance of the conception
that learning should be a process of discovery or of re-discovery.
Condillac (1715-1780) has elaborated this idea in the introduction
to his _Grammaire_, and Spencer (_Education_, p. 122) makes it a
fundamental law of teaching. If this assumed principle were to be
rigorously applied, as, fortunately, it cannot be, progress in
human knowledge would be impossible. Mr. Bain’s comment on this
doctrine (_Education as a Science_, p. 94) is as follows: “This
bold fiction is sometimes put forward as one of the regular arts of
the teacher; but I should prefer to consider it as an extraordinary
device, admissible only on special occasions.” (P.)
[100] It may not be generally known that Comenius was once
solicited to become the President of Harvard College. The following
is a quotation from Vol. II., p. 14, of Cotton Mather’s _Magnalia_:
“That brave old man, Johannes Amos Commenius, the fame of whose
worth hath been _trumpetted_ as far as more than three languages
(whereof every one is indebted unto his _Janua_) could carry it,
was indeed agreed withal, by our Mr. Winthrop in his travels
through the _low countries_, to come over into New England, and
illuminate this Colledge and _country_, in the quality of a
President, which was now become vacant. But the solicitations of
the Swedish Ambassador diverting him another way, that incomparable
Moravian became not an American.” This was on the resignation of
President Dunster, in 1654. (P.)
[101] The most complete account ever written of Comenius and his
writings is, “John Amos Comenius,” by S. S. Laurie (Boston: 1885).
It is an invaluable contribution to the philosophy and the history
of education. (P.)
[102] Buisson’s _Dictionnaire de Pédagogie_, Article COMENIUS.
[103] In the French Lycées and Colleges the grades are named as
follows, beginning with the lowest: “ninth, eighth, seventh, sixth,
fifth, fourth, third, second, rhetoric, philosophy, preparatory
mathematics, elementary mathematics, special mathematics.” Latin
was formerly begun in an earlier grade.
[104] The public school of the European type may be represented by
a series of (3) pyramids, the second higher than the first, and
the third higher than the second, each independent and complete in
itself; while the public school of the American type is represented
by a single pyramid in three sections. While in an English, French,
or German town, public education is administered in three separate
establishments, in an American town there is a single graded school
that fulfills the same functions. (P.)
[105] Platter, a Swiss teacher of the sixteenth century (1499-1582).
[106] For this quotation, as for all those which we borrow from the
preface of the _Janua linguarum_, a French edition of which (in
three languages: Latin, German, and French) appeared in 1643, we
copy from the authentic text.
[107] There is a misleading fallacy in all such illustrations. What
analogy is there between the learning of history or geology and
the learning of a trade like carpentry? Should a physician and a
blacksmith be educated on the same plan? In every case knowledge
should precede practice; and the liberal arts are best learned by
first learning their correlative sciences. (P.)
[108] “A process of instruction which consists in placing beside
the elements of human speech thirty-three onomatopoetic gestures,
which recall to the sight the same ideas that the sounds and the
articulations of the voice recall to the ear.”--GROSSELIN. (P.)
CHAPTER VII.
THE TEACHING CONGREGATIONS.--JESUITS AND JANSENISTS.
THE TEACHING CONGREGATIONS; JESUITS AND JANSENISTS; FOUNDATION
OF THE SOCIETY OF JESUS (1540); DIFFERENT JUDGMENTS ON THE
EDUCATIONAL MERITS OF THE JESUITS; AUTHORITIES TO CONSULT;
PRIMARY INSTRUCTION NEGLECTED; CLASSICAL STUDIES; LATIN AND
THE HUMANITIES; NEGLECT OF HISTORY, OF PHILOSOPHY, AND OF THE
SCIENCES IN GENERAL; DISCIPLINE; EMULATION ENCOURAGED; OFFICIAL
DISCIPLINARIAN; GENERAL SPIRIT OF THE PEDAGOGY OF THE JESUITS;
THE ORATORIANS; THE LITTLE SCHOOLS; STUDY OF THE FRENCH LANGUAGE;
NEW SYSTEM OF SPELLING; THE MASTERS AND THE BOOKS OF PORT
ROYAL; DISCIPLINE IN PERSONAL REFLECTION; GENERAL SPIRIT OF THE
INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION AT PORT ROYAL; NICOLE; MORAL PESSIMISM;
EFFECTS ON DISCIPLINE; FAULTS IN THE DISCIPLINE OF PORT ROYAL;
GENERAL JUDGMENT ON PORT ROYAL; ANALYTICAL SUMMARY.
148. THE TEACHING CONGREGATIONS.[109]--Up to the French Revolution,
up to the day when the conception of a public and national
education was embodied in the legislative acts of our assembled
rulers, education remained almost exclusively an affair of the
Church. The universities themselves were dependent in part on
religious authority. But especially the great congregations assumed
a monopoly of the work of teaching, the direction and control of
which the State had not yet claimed for her right.
Primary instruction, it is true, scarcely entered at first into the
settled plans of the religious orders. The only exception to this
statement that can properly be made, is the congregation of the
_Christian Doctrine_, which a humble priest, Cæsar de Bus, founded
at Avignon in 1592, the avowed purpose of which was the religious
education of the children of the company.[110] But, on the other
hand, secondary instruction provoked the greatest educational event
of the sixteenth century, the founding of the company of Jesus,
and this movement was continued and extended in the seventeenth
century, either in the colleges of the Jesuits, ever growing in
number, or in other rival congregations.
149. JESUITS AND JANSENISTS.--Among the religious orders that have
consecrated their efforts to the work of teaching, the first place
must be assigned to the Jesuits and the Jansenists. Different in
their statutes, their organization, and their destinies, these
two congregations are still more different in their spirit. They
represent, in fact, two opposite, and, as it were, contrary phases
of human nature and of the Christian spirit. For the Jesuits,
education is reduced to a superficial culture of the brilliant
faculties of the intelligence; while the Jansenists, on the
contrary, aspire to develop the solid faculties, the judgment,
and the reason. In the colleges of the Jesuits, rhetoric is held
in honor; while in the Little Schools of Port Royal, it is rather
logic and the exercise of thought. The shrewd disciples of Loyola
adapt themselves to the times, and are full of compassion for human
weakness; the solitaries of Port Royal are exacting of others and
of themselves. In their suppleness and cheerful optimism, the
Jesuits are almost the Epicureans of Christianity; with their
austere and somewhat sombre doctrine, the Jansenists would rather
be the Stoics. The Jesuits and the Jansenists, those great rivals
of the seventeenth century, are still face to face as enemies at
the present moment. While the inspiration of the Jesuits tries to
maintain the old worn-out exercises, like Latin verse, and the
abuse of the memory, the spirit of the Jansenists animates and
inspires the reformers, who, in the teaching of the classics, break
with tradition and routine, to substitute for exercises aimed at
elegance, and for a superficial instruction, studies of a greater
solidity and an education that is more complete.
The merit of institutions ought not always to be measured by
their apparent success. The colleges of the Jesuits, during three
centuries, have had a countless number of pupils; the Little
Schools of Port Royal did not live twenty years, and during their
short existence they enrolled at most only some hundreds of pupils.
And yet the methods of the Jansenists have survived the ruin of
their colleges and the dispersion of the teachers who had applied
them. Although the Jesuits have not ceased to rule in appearance,
it is the Jansenists who triumph in reality, and who to-day control
the secondary instruction of France.
150. FOUNDATION OF THE SOCIETY OF JESUS.--In organizing the Society
of Jesus, Ignatius Loyola, that compound of the mystic and the
man of the world, purposed to establish, not an order devoted to
monastic contemplation, but a real fighting corps, a Catholic army,
whose double purpose was to conquer new provinces to the faith
through missions, and to preserve the old through the control of
education. Solemnly consecrated by the Pope Paul III., in 1540,
the congregation had a rapid growth. As early as the middle of the
sixteenth century, it had several colleges in France, particularly
those of Billom, Mauriac, Rodez, Tournon, and Pamiers. In 1561
it secured a footing in Paris, notwithstanding the resistance of
the Parliament, of the university, and of the bishops themselves.
A hundred years later it counted nearly fourteen thousand pupils
in the province of Paris alone. The college of Clermont, in 1651,
enrolled more than two thousand young men. The middle and higher
classes assured to the colleges of the society an ever-increasing
membership. At the end of the seventeenth century, the Jesuits
could inscribe on the roll of honor of their classes a hundred
illustrious names, among others, those of Condé and Luxembourg,
Fléchier and Bossuet, Lamoignon and Séguier, Descartes, Corneille,
and Molière. In 1710 they controlled six hundred and twelve
colleges and a large number of universities. They were the real
masters of education, and they maintained this educational
supremacy till the end of the eighteenth century.
151. DIFFERENT JUDGMENTS ON THE EDUCATIONAL MERITS OF THE
JESUITS.--Voltaire said of these teachers: “The Fathers taught me
nothing but Latin and nonsense.” But from the seventeenth century,
opinions are divided, and the encomiums of Bacon and Descartes
must be offset by the severe judgment of Leibnitz. “In the matter
of education,” says this great philosopher, “the Jesuits have
remained below mediocrity.”[111] Directly to the contrary, Bacon
had written: “As to whatever relates to the instruction of the
young, we must consult the schools of the Jesuits, for there can be
nothing that is better done.”[112]
152. AUTHORITIES TO CONSULT.--The Jesuits have never written
anything on the principles and objects of education. We must not
demand of them an exposition of general views, or a confession
of their educational faith. But to make amends, they have drawn
up with precision, with almost infinite attention to details,
the rules and regulations of their course of study. Already, in
1559, the _Constitutions_, probably written by Loyola himself,
devoted a whole book to the organization of the colleges of the
society.[113] But in particular, the _Ratio Studiorum_, published
in 1599, contains a complete scholastic programme, which has
remained for three centuries the invariable educational code of
the congregation. Without doubt, the Jesuits, always ready to
make apparent concessions to the spirit of the times, without
sacrificing anything of their own spirit, and without renouncing
their inflexible purpose, have introduced modifications into their
original rules; but the spirit of their educational practice has
remained the same, and, in 1854, Beckx, the actual general of the
order, could still declare that the _Ratio_ is the immutable rule
of Jesuit education.
153. PRIMARY INSTRUCTION NEGLECTED.--A permanent and characteristic
feature of the educational policy of the Jesuits is, that, during
the whole course of their history, they have deliberately neglected
and disdained primary instruction. The earth is covered with their
Latin colleges; and wherever they have been able, they have put
their hands on the institutions for university education; but
in no instance have they founded a primary school. Even in their
establishments for secondary instruction, they entrust the lower
classes to teachers who do not belong to their order, and reserve
to themselves the direction of the higher classes. Must we believe,
as they have declared in order to explain this negligence, that
the only reason for their reserve and their indifference is to be
sought for in the insufficiency of their teaching force? No; the
truth is that the Jesuits neither desire nor love the instruction
of the people. To desire and to love this, there must be faith in
conscience and reason; there must be a belief in human equality.
Now the Jesuits distrust the human intelligence, and administer
only the aristocratic education of the ruling classes, whom they
hope to retain under their own control. They wish to train amiable
gentlemen, accomplished men of the world; they have no conception
of training men. Intellectual culture, in their view, is but a
convenience, imposed on certain classes of the nation by their
rank. It is not a good in itself; it may even become an evil. In
certain hands it is a dangerous weapon. The ignorance of a people
is the best safeguard of its faith, and faith is the supreme end.
So we shall not be astonished to read this in the _Constitutions_:--
“None of those who are employed in domestic service on account
of the society, ought to learn to read and write, or, if they
already know these arts, to learn more of them. They shall not be
instructed without the consent of the General, for it suffices for
them to serve with all simplicity and humility our Master, Jesus
Christ.”
154. CLASSICAL STUDIES: LATIN AND THE HUMANITIES.--It is only in
secondary instruction that the Jesuits have taken position with
marked success. The basis of their teaching is the study of Latin
and Greek. Their purpose is to monopolize classical studies in
order to make them serve for the propagation of the Catholic faith.
To write in Latin is the ideal which they propose to their pupils.
The first consequence of this is the proscription of the mother
tongue. The _Ratio_ forbids the use of French even in conversation;
it permits it only on holidays. Hence, also, the importance
accorded to Latin and Greek composition, to the explication of
authors, and to the study of grammar, rhetoric, and poetry. It is
to be noted, besides, that the Jesuits put scarcely more into the
hands of their pupils than select extracts, expurgated editions.
They wish, in some sort, to efface from the ancient books whatever
marks the epoch and characterizes the time. They detach fine
passages of eloquence and beautiful extracts of poetry; but they
are afraid, it seems, of the authors themselves; they fear lest the
pupil find in them the old human spirit,--the spirit of nature.
Moreover, in the explication of authors, they pay more attention
to words than to things. They direct the pupil’s attention,
not to the thoughts, but to the elegancies of language, to the
elocutionary effect; in a word, to the form, which, at least, has
no religious character, and can in nowise give umbrage to Catholic
orthodoxy. They fear to awaken reflection and individual judgment.
As Macaulay has said, they seem to have found the point up to which
intellectual culture can be pushed without reaching intellectual
emancipation.
155. DISDAIN OF HISTORY, OF PHILOSOPHY, AND OF THE SCIENCES IN
GENERAL.--Preoccupied before all else with purely formal studies,
and exclusively devoted to the exercises which give a training in
the use of elegant language, the Jesuits leave real and concrete
studies in entire neglect. History is almost wholly banished from
their programme. It is only with reference to the Greek and Latin
texts that the teacher should make allusion to the matters of
history which are necessary for the understanding of the passage
under examination. No account is made of modern history, nor of
the history of France. “History,” says a Jesuit Father, “is the
destruction of him who studies it.” This systematic omission of
historical studies suffices to put in its true light the artificial
and superficial pedagogy of the Jesuits, admirably defined by
Beckx, who expresses himself thus:--
“The gymnasia will remain what they are by nature, a gymnastic
for the intellect, which consists far less in the assimilation of
real matter, in the acquisition of different knowledges, than in a
culture of pure form.”
The sciences and philosophy are involved in the same disdain as
history. Scientific studies are entirely proscribed in the lower
classes, and the student enters his year in philosophy,[114]
having studied only the ancient languages. Philosophy itself is
reduced to a barren study of words, to subtile discussions, and to
commentaries on Aristotle. Memory and syllogistic reasoning are the
only faculties called into play; no facts, no real inductions, no
care for the observation of nature. In all things the Jesuits are
the enemies of progress. Intolerant of everything new, they would
arrest the progress of the human mind and make it immovable.
156. DISCIPLINE.--Extravagant statements have been made relative
to the reforms in discipline introduced by the Jesuits into their
educational establishments. The fact is, that they have caused to
prevail in their colleges more of order and of system than there
was in the establishments of the University. On the other hand,
they have attempted to please their pupils, to gild for them, so
to speak, the bars of the prison which confined them. Theatrical
representations, excursions on holidays, practice in swimming,
riding, and fencing,--nothing was neglected that could render their
residence at school endurable.
But, on the other hand, the Jesuits have incurred the grave fault
of detaching the child from the family. They wish to have absolute
control of him. The ideal of the perfect scholar is to forget his
parents. Here is what was said by a pupil of the Jesuits, who
afterwards became a member of the Order, J. B. de Schultaus:--
“His mother paid him a visit at the College of Trent. He refused
to take her hand, and would not even raise his eyes to hers. The
mother, astonished and grieved, asked her son the cause of such
a cold greeting. ‘I refuse to notice you,’ said the pupil, ‘not
because you are my mother, but because you are a woman.’ And
the biographer adds: ‘This was not excessive precaution; woman
preserves to-day the faults she had at the time of our first
father; it is always she who drives man from Paradise.’ When the
mother of Schultaus died, he did not show the least emotion, having
long ago adopted the Holy Virgin for his true mother.”
157. EMULATION ENCOURAGED.--The Jesuits have always considered
emulation as one of the essential elements of discipline. “It is
necessary,” says the _Ratio_, “to encourage an honorable emulation;
it is a great stimulus to study.” Superior on this point, perhaps
on this alone, to the Jansenists, who through mistrust of human
nature feared to excite pride by encouraging emulation, the Jesuits
have always counted upon the self-love of the pupil. The _Ratio_
multiplies rewards,--solemn distributions of prizes, crosses,
ribbons, decorations, titles borrowed from the Roman Republic,
such as _decurions_ and _prætors_; all means, even the most
puerile, were invented to nourish in pupils an ardor for work, and
to incite them to surpass one another. Let us add that the pupil
was rewarded, not only for his own good conduct, but for the bad
conduct of his comrades if he informed against them. The _decurion_
or the _prætor_ was charged with the police care of the class, and,
in the absence of the official disciplinarian, he himself chastised
his comrades; in the hands of his teacher, he became a spy and an
informer. Thus a pupil, liable to punishment for having spoken
French contrary to orders, will be relieved from his punishment if
he can prove by witnesses that one of his comrades has committed
the same fault on the same day.
158. OFFICIAL DISCIPLINARIAN.--The rod is an element, so to speak,
of the ancient pedagogical régime. It holds a privileged place both
in the colleges and in private education. Louis XIV. officially
transmits to the Duke of Montausier the right to correct his son.
Henry IV. wrote to the governor of Louis XIII.: “I complain because
you did not inform me that you had whipped my son; for I desire
and order you to whip him every time that he shall be guilty of
obstinacy or of anything else that is bad; for I well know that
there is nothing in the world that can do him more good than that.
This I know from the lessons of experience, for when I was of his
age, I was soundly flogged.”[115]
The Jesuits, notwithstanding their disposition to make discipline
milder, were careful not to renounce a punishment that was in use
even at court. Only, while the Brethren of the Christian Schools,
according to the regulations of La Salle, chastised the guilty
pupil themselves, the Jesuits did not think it becoming the dignity
of the master to apply the correction himself. They reserved to a
laic the duty of handling the rods. An official disciplinarian,
a domestic, a porter, was charged in all the colleges with the
functions of chief executioner. And while the _Ratio Studiorum_
recommends moderation, certain witnesses prove that the special
disciplinarian did not always carry a discreet hand. Here, for
example, is an account given by Saint Simon:--
“The eldest son of the Marquis of Boufflers was fourteen years old.
He was handsome, well formed, was wonderfully successful, and full
of promise. He was a resident pupil of the Jesuits with the two
sons of d’Argenson. I do not know what indiscretion he and they
were guilty of. The Fathers wished to show that they neither feared
nor stood in awe of any one, and they flogged the boy, because,
in fact, they had nothing to fear of the Marquis of Boufflers;
but they were careful not to treat the two others in this way,
though equally culpable, because every day they had to count with
d’Argenson, who was lieutenant of police. The boy Boufflers was
thrown into such mental agony that he fell sick on the same day,
and within four days was dead.... There was a universal and furious
outcry against the Jesuits, but nothing ever came of it.”[116]
159. GENERAL SPIRIT OF THE PEDAGOGY OF THE JESUITS.--The general
principles of the doctrine of the Jesuits are completely opposed to
our modern ideas. Blind obedience, the suppression of all liberty
and of all spontaneity, such is the basis of their moral education.
“To renounce one’s own wishes is more meritorious than to raise
the dead;” “We must be so attached to the Roman Church as to hold
for black an object which she tells us is black, even when it is
really white;” “Our confidence in God should be strong enough to
force us, in the lack of a boat, to cross the ocean on a single
plank;” “If God should appoint for our master an animal deprived
of reason, you should not hesitate to render it obedience, as to a
master and a guide, for this sole reason, that God has ordered it
thus;” “One must allow himself to be governed by divine Providence
acting through the agency of the superiors of the Order, just as if
he were a dead body that could be put into any position whatever,
and treated according to one’s good pleasure; or as if one were a
bâton in the hands of an old man who uses it as he pleases.”
As to intellectual education, as they understand it, it is wholly
artificial and superficial. To find for the mind occupations that
absorb it, that soothe it like a dream, without wholly awakening
it; to call attention to words, and to niceties of expression, so
as to reduce by so much the opportunity for thinking; to provoke a
certain degree of intellectual activity, prudently arrested at the
place where the reflective reason succeeds an embellished memory;
in a word, to excite the spirit just enough to arouse it from its
inertia and its ignorance, but not enough to endow it with a real
self-activity by a manly display of all its faculties,--such is
the method of the Jesuits. “As to instruction,” says Bersot, “this
is what we find with them: history reduced to facts and tables,
without the lesson derived from them bearing on the knowledge of
the world; even the facts suppressed or altered when they say too
much; philosophy reduced to what is called empirical doctrine,
and what de Maistre called the philosophy of the nothing, without
danger of one’s acquiring a liking for it; physical science reduced
to recreations, without the spirit of research and liberty;
literature reduced to the complaisant explication of the ancient
authors, and ending in innocent witticisms.... With respect to
letters, there are two loves which have nothing in common save
their name; one of them makes men, the other, great boys. It is the
last that we find with the Jesuits; they amuse the soul.”
160. THE ORATORIANS.--Between the Jesuits, their adversaries,
and the Jansenists, their friends, the Oratorians occupy an
intermediate place. They break already with the over-mechanical
education, and with the wholly superficial instruction which
Ignatius Loyola had inaugurated. Through some happy innovations
they approach the more elevated and more profound education of Port
Royal. Founded in 1614, by Bérulle, the Order of the Oratory soon
counted quite a large number of colleges of secondary instruction,
and, in particular, in 1638, the famous college of Juilly. While
with the Jesuits it is rare to meet the names of celebrated
professors, several renowned teachers have made illustrious the
Oratory of the seventeenth century. We note the Père Lamy, author
of _Entretiens sur les Sciences_ (1683); the Père Thomassin,
whom the Oratorians call the “incomparable theologian,” and who
published, from 1681 to 1690, a series of _Methods_ for studying
the languages, philosophy, and letters; Mascaron and Massillon,
who taught rhetoric at the Oratory; the Père Lecointe and the Père
Lelong, who taught history there. All these men unite, in general,
some love of liberty to ardor of religious sentiment; they wish
to introduce more air and more light into the cloister and the
school; they have a taste for the facts of history and the truths
of science; finally, they attempt to found an education at once
liberal and Christian, religious without abuse of devotion, elegant
without refinement, solid without excess of erudition, worthy,
finally, to be counted as one of the first practical tentatives of
modern pedagogy.
The limits of this study forbid our entering into details. Let us
merely note a few essential points. That which distinguishes the
Oratorians, is, first, a sincere and disinterested love of truth.
“We love the truth,” says the Père Lamy; “the days do not suffice
to consult her as long as we would wish; or, rather, we never grow
weary of the pleasure we find in studying her. There has always
been that love for letters in this House: those who have governed
it have tried to nourish it. When there is found among us some
penetrating and liberally endowed spirit who has a rare genius for
the sciences, he is discharged from all other duties.”[117]
Nowhere have ancient letters been more loved than at the Oratory.
“In his leisure hours the Père Thomassin read only the authors of
the humanities;” and yet French was not there sacrificed to Latin.
The use of the Latin language was not obligatory till after the
fourth year, and even then not for the lessons in history, which,
till the end of the courses, had to be given in French. History, so
long neglected even in the colleges of the University, particularly
the history of France, was taught to the pupils of the Oratory.
Geography was not separated from it; and the class-rooms were
furnished with large mural maps. On the other hand, the sciences
had a place in the course of study. A Jesuit father would not have
expressed himself as the Père Lamy has done:--
“It is a pleasure to enter the laboratory of a chemist. In the
places where I have happened to be, I did not miss an opportunity
to attend the anatomical lectures that were given, and to witness
the dissection of the principal parts of the human body.... I know
of nothing of greater use than algebra and arithmetic.”
Finally, philosophy itself,--the Cartesian philosophy, so
mercilessly decried by the Jesuits,--was in vogue at the Oratory.
“If Cartesianism is a pest,” wrote the regents of the College of
Angers, “there are more than two hundred of us who are infected
with it.” ... “They have forbidden the Fathers of the Oratory to
teach the philosophy of Descartes, and, consequently, the blood to
circulate,” wrote Madame de Sévigné, in 1673.
Let us also furnish proof of the progress and amelioration of the
discipline at the Oratory:--
“There are many other ways besides the rod,” says the Père Lamy;
“and, to lead pupils back to their duty, a caress, a threat,
the hope of a reward, or the fear of a humiliation, has greater
efficiency than whips.”
The ferule, it is true, and whips also, were not forbidden, but
made part of the _legitima pœnarum genera_. But it does not appear
that use was often made of them; either through a spirit of
mildness, or through prudence, and through the fear of exasperating
the child.
“There is needed,” says the Père Lamy again, “a sort of politics
to govern this little community,--to lead them through their
inclinations; to foresee the effect of rewards and punishments, and
to employ them according to their proper use. There are times of
stubbornness when a child would sooner be killed than yield.”
What made it easier at the Oratory to maintain the authority of
the master without resorting to violent punishments, is that the
same professor accompanied the pupils through the whole series
of their classes. The Père Thomassin, for example, was, in turn,
professor of grammar, rhetoric, philosophy, mathematics, history,
Italian, and Spanish,--a touching example, it must be allowed, of
an absolute devotion to scholastic labor. But this universality,
somewhat superficial, served neither the real interests of the
masters nor those of their pupils. The great pedagogical law is the
division of labor.
161. FOUNDATION OF THE LITTLE SCHOOLS.--From the very organization
of their society, the Jansenists gave evidences of an ardent
solicitude for the education of youth. Their founder, Saint Cyran,
said: “Education is, in a sense, the _one thing necessary_....
I wish you might read in my heart the affection I feel for
children.... You could not deserve more of God than in working for
the proper bringing up of children.” It was in this disinterested
feeling of charity for the good of the young, in this display of
sincere tenderness for children, that the Jansenists, in 1643,
founded the Little Schools at Port Royal in the Fields, in the
vicinity, and then in Paris.[118] They received into those schools
only a small number of pupils, preoccupied as they were, not with
dominating the world and extending their influence, but with
doing modestly and obscurely the good they could. Persecution did
not long grant them the leisure to continue the work they had
undertaken. By 1660 the enemies of Port Royal had triumphed; the
Jesuits obtained an order from the king closing the schools and
dispersing the teachers. Pursued, imprisoned, expatriated, the
solitaries of Port Royal had but the opportunity to gather up in
memorable documents the results of their educational experience all
too short.[119]
162. THE TEACHERS AND THE BOOKS OF PORT ROYAL.--Singular
destiny,--that of those teachers whom a relentless fate permitted
to exercise their functions for only five years, yet who, through
their works, have remained perhaps the best authorized exponents
of French education! The first of these is Nicole, the moralist
and logician, one of the authors of the Port Royal _Logic_, who
taught philosophy and the humanities in the Little Schools, and who
published in 1670, under the title, _The Education of a Prince_, a
series of reflections on education, applicable, as he himself says,
to children of all classes. Another is Lancelot, the grammarian,
the author of the _Methods_ for learning the Latin, Greek, Italian,
and Spanish languages. Then there is Arnauld, the great Arnauld,
the ardent theologian, who worked on the _Logic_, and the _General
Grammar_, and who finally composed the _Regulation of Studies in
the Humanities_. In connection with these celebrated names, we
must mention other Jansenists not so well known, such as De Sacy
and Guyot, both of whom were the authors of a large number of
translations; Coustel, who published the _Rules for the Education
of Children_ (1687); Varet, the author of _Christian Education_
(1668). Let us add to this list, still incomplete, the _Regimen for
Children_, by Jacqueline Pascal (1657), and we shall have some idea
of the educational activity of Port Royal.
163. THE STUDY OF THE FRENCH LANGUAGE.--As a general rule, we may
have a good opinion of the teachers who recommend the study of the
mother tongue. In this respect, the solitaries of Port Royal are in
advance of their time. “We first teach to read in Latin,” said the
Abbé Fleury, “because, compared with French, we pronounce it more
as it is written.”[120] A curious reason, which did not satisfy
Fleury himself; for he acknowledged the propriety of putting, as
soon as possible, into the hands of children, the French books
that they can understand. This was what was done at Port Royal.
With their love of exactness and clearness, with their disposition,
wholly Cartesian, to make children study only the things they can
comprehend, the Jansenists saw at once the great absurdity of
choosing Latin works as the first reading-books. “To learn Latin
before learning the mother tongue,” said Comenius, wittily, “is
like wishing to mount a horse before knowing how to walk.” And
again, as Sainte-Beuve says, “It is to compel unfortunate children
to deal with the unintelligible in order to proceed towards
the unknown.” For these unintelligible texts, the Jansenists
substituted, not, it is true, original French works, but at least
good translations of Latin authors. For the first time in France,
the French language was made the subject of serious study. Before
being made to write in Latin, pupils were drilled in writing in
French. They were set to compose little narratives, little letters,
the subjects of which were borrowed from their recollections, by
being asked to relate on the spot what they had retained of what
they had read.
164. NEW SYSTEM OF SPELLING.--In their constant preoccupation to
make study easier, the Jansenists reformed the current method of
learning to read. “What makes reading more difficult,” says Arnauld
in Chapter VI. of the _General Grammar_, “is that while each letter
has its own proper name, it is given a different name when it is
found associated with other letters. For example, if the pupil is
made to read the syllable _fry_, he is made to say _ef_, _ar_,
_y_, which invariably confuses him. It is best, therefore, to
teach children to know the letters only by the names of their real
pronunciation, to name them only by their natural sounds.” Port
Royal proposes, then, “to have children pronounce only the vowels
and the diphthongs, and not the consonants, which they need not
pronounce, except in the different combinations which they form
with the same vowels or diphthongs, in syllables and words.”
This method has become celebrated under the name of the Port Royal
Method; and it appears, from a letter of Jacqueline Pascal, that
the original notion was due to Pascal himself.[121]
165. DISCIPLINE IN PERSONAL REFLECTION.--That which profoundly
distinguishes the method of the Jansenists from the method of the
Jesuits, is that at Port Royal the purpose is less to make good
Latinists than to train sound intelligences. The effort is to call
into activity the judgment and personal reflection. As soon as the
child is capable of it, he is made to think and comprehend. In the
lessons of the class-room, not a word is allowed to pass till the
child has understood its meaning. Only those tasks are proposed
to the child which are adapted to his childish intelligence. His
attention is occupied only with the things that are within the
compass of his powers.
The grammars of Port Royal are written in French, “because it is
ridiculous,” says Nicole, “to teach the principles of a language in
the very language that is to be learned, and that for the present
is unknown.” Lancelot, in his _Methods_, abbreviates and simplifies
grammatical studies:--
“I have found out, at last, how useful this maxim of Ramus
is,--_Few precepts and much practice_: and, also, that as soon as
children begin to know these rules somewhat, it is well to make
them observe them in practice.”
It is by the reading of authors that the grammar of Port Royal
completes the theoretical study of the rules that are rigidly
reduced to their minimum. The professor, with reference to such or
such a passage of an author, will make appropriate oral remarks.
In this way the example, not the dry and uninteresting one of the
grammar, but the living example, expressive, and, drawn from a
writer that is being read with interest, will precede or accompany
the rule, and the particular case will explain the general law.
This is an excellent method, because it accords with the real
movement of the mind, and adapts the sequence of studies to the
progress of the intelligence, and also because, according to the
advice of Descartes, the child in this way proceeds from the known
to the unknown, from the simple to the complex.
166. GENERAL SPIRIT OF THE INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION AT PORT
ROYAL.--Without doubt, we need not expect to find among the
solitaries of Port Royal a disinterested devotion to science. In
their view, instruction is but a means of forming the judgment.
“The sciences should be employed,” says Nicole, “only as an
instrument for perfecting the reason.” Historical, literary, and
scientific knowledge has no intrinsic value. The thing required is
simply to employ those subjects for educating just, equitable, and
judicious men. Nicole declares that it would be better absolutely
to ignore the sciences than to become absorbed in the useless
portions of them. Speaking of astronomical researches, and of the
works of those mathematicians who believe that “it is the finest
thing in the world to know whether there is a bridge and an arch
suspended around the planet Saturn,” he concludes that it is
preferable to be ignorant of those things than to be ignorant that
they are vain.
But, on the other hand, the Jansenists have struck from their
programme of studies everything that is merely sterile verbiage,
exercises of memory or of artificial imagination. Little attention
is given to Latin verse at Port Royal. Version takes precedence of
the theme,[122] and the oral theme often replaces the written. The
pupil is to be taught, “not to be blinded by a vain flash of words
void of sense, not to rest satisfied with mere words or obscure
principles, and never to be satisfied till he has gained a clear
insight into things.”
167. PEDAGOGICAL PRINCIPLES OF NICOLE.--In his treatise on the
_Education of a Prince_, Nicole has summarized, under the form
of aphorisms, some of the essential principles of his system of
education.
Let us first notice this maxim, a true pedagogical axiom: “The
purpose of instruction is to carry forward intelligences to the
farthest point they are capable of attaining.” This is saying that
every child, whether of the nobility or of the people, has the
right to be instructed according to his aptitude and ability.
Another axiom: We must proportion difficulties to the growing
development of the child’s intelligence. “The greatest minds have
but a limited range of intelligence. In all of them there are
regions of twilight and shadow; but the intelligence of the child
is almost wholly pervaded by shadows; he catches glimpses of but
few rays of light. So everything depends on managing these rays, on
increasing them, and on exposing to them whatever we wish to have
the child comprehend.”
A corollary to the preceding axiom is, that the first appeal must
be made to the senses. “The intelligence of children always being
very dependent on the senses, we must, as far as possible, address
our instruction to the senses, and cause it to reach the mind, not
only through hearing, but also through seeing.” Consequently,
geography is a study well adapted to early years, provided we
employ books in which the largest cities are pictured. If children
study the history of a country, we must not neglect to show them
the situation of places on the map. Nicole also recommends that
they be shown pictures that represent the machines, the arms, and
the dress of the ancients, and also the portraits of kings and
illustrious men.
168. MORAL PESSIMISM.--Man is wicked, human nature is corrupt: such
is the cry of despair that comes to our ears from all the writings
of the Jansenists.
“The devil,” says Saint Cyran, “already possesses the soul of even
the unborn child.” ...
And again: “We must always pray for souls, and always be on the
watch, standing guard as in a city menaced by an enemy. On the
outside the devil makes his rounds.” ...
“As soon as children begin to have reason,” says another Jansenist,
“we observe in them only blindness and weakness. Their minds are
closed to spiritual things, and they cannot comprehend them. But,
on the contrary, their eyes are open to evil; their senses are
susceptible to all sorts of corruption, and they have a natural
inertia that inclines them to it.”
“You ought,” writes Varet, “to consider your children as wholly
inclined to evil, and carried forward towards it. All their
inclinations are corrupt, and, not being governed by reason, they
will permit them to find pleasure and diversion only in the things
that carry them towards vice.”
169. EFFECTS ON DISCIPLINE.--The doctrine of the original
perversity of man may produce contrary results, and direct
the practical conduct of those who accept it in two opposite
directions. They are either inspired with severity toward beings
deeply tainted and vicious, or they are excited to pity and to
tenderness for those fallen creatures who suffer from an incurable
evil. The solitaries of Port Royal obeyed the second tendency. They
were as affectionate and good to the children confided to their
care as, in theory, they were harsh and rigorous towards human
nature. In the presence of their pupils they felt touched with an
infinite tenderness for those poor sick souls, whom they would
willingly cure of their ills, and raise from their fall, at the
cost of any and every sacrifice.
The conception of the native wickedness of man had still another
result at Port Royal. It increased the zeal of the teachers. It
prompted them to multiply their assiduity and vigilance in order to
keep guard over young souls, and there destroy, whenever possible,
the seeds of evil that sin had sown in them. When one is charged
with the difficult mission of moral education, it is, perhaps,
dangerous to have too much confidence in human nature, and to form
too favorable an opinion of its qualities and dispositions; for
then one is tempted to accord to the child too large a liberty, and
to practise the maxim, “Let it take its own course, let it pass”
(_Laissez faire, laissez passer_). It is better to err on the other
side, in excess of mistrust; for, in this case, knowing the dangers
that menace the child, we watch over him with more attention,
abandon him less to the inspiration of his caprices, and expect
more of education; we demand of effort and labor what we judge
nature incapable of producing by herself.
Vigilance, patience, mildness,--these are the instruments of
discipline in the schools of Port Royal. There were scarcely any
punishments in the Little Schools. “To speak little, to tolerate
much, to pray still more,”--these are the three things that Saint
Cyran recommended. The threat to send children home to their
parents sufficed to maintain order in a flock somewhat small. In
fact, all whose example would have proved bad were sent away; an
excellent system of elimination when it is practicable. The pious
solitaries endured without complaint, faults in which they saw the
necessary consequences of the original fall. Penetrated, however,
as they were, with the value of human souls, their tenderness for
children was mingled with a certain respect; for they saw in them
the creatures of God, beings called from eternity to a sublime
destiny or to a terrible punishment.
170. FAULTS IN THE DISCIPLINE OF PORT ROYAL.--The Jansenists did
not shun the logical though dangerous consequences that were
involved, in germ, in their pessimistic theories of human nature.
They fell into an excess of prudence or of rigidity. They pushed
gravity and dignity to a formalism that was somewhat repulsive. At
Port Royal pupils were forbidden to thee and thou one another. The
solitaries did not like familiarities, faithful in this respect to
the _Imitation of Jesus Christ_, in which it is somewhere said that
it does not become a Christian to be on familiar terms with any
one whatever. The young were thus brought up in habits of mutual
respect, which may have had their good side, but which had the
grave fault of being a little ridiculous in children, since they
forced them to live among themselves as _little gentlemen_, while
at the same time they oppose the development of those intimate
friendships, of those lasting attachments of which all those who
have lived at college know the sweetness and the charm.
The spirit of asceticism is the general character of all the
Jansenists. Varet declares that balls are places of infamy. Pascal
denies himself every agreeable thought, and what he called an
agreeable thought was to reflect on geometry. Lancelot refuses
to take to the theatre the princes of Conti, of whom he was the
preceptor.
But perhaps a graver fault at Port Royal was, that through fear
of awakening self-love, the spirit of emulation was purposely
suppressed. It is God alone, it was said, who is to be praised for
the qualities and talents manifested by men. “If God has placed
something of good in the soul of a child, we must praise Him for
it and keep silent.” By this deliberate silence men put themselves
on guard against pride; but if pride is to be feared, is indolence
the less so? And when we purposely avoid stimulating self-love
through the hope of reward, or through a word of praise given in
due season, we run a great risk of not overcoming the indolence
that is natural to the child, and of not obtaining from him any
serious effort. Pascal, the greatest of the friends of Port Royal,
said: “The children of Port Royal, who do not feel that stimulus of
envy and glory, fall into a state of indifference.”
171. GENERAL JUDGMENT ON PORT ROYAL.--After all has been said, we
must admire the teachers of Port Royal, who were doubtless deceived
on some points, but who were animated by a powerful feeling
of their duty to educate, and by a perfect charity. Ardor and
sincerity of religious faith; a great respect for the human person;
the practice of piety held in honor, but kept subordinate to the
reality of the inner feeling; devotion advised, but not imposed;
a marked mistrust of nature, corrected by displays of tenderness
and tempered by affection; above all, the profound, unwearied
devotion of Christian souls who give themselves wholly and without
reserve to other souls to raise them up and save them,--this is
what was done by the discipline of Port Royal. But it is rather in
the methods of teaching, and in the administration of classical
studies, that we must look for the incontestable superiority of
the Jansenists. The teachers of the Little Schools were admirable
humanists, not of form, as the Jesuits were, but of judgment. They
represent, it seems to us, in all its beauty and in all its force,
that intellectual education, already divined by Montaigne, which
prepares for life men of sound judgment and of upright conscience.
They founded the teaching of the humanities. “Port Royal,” says
an historian of pedagogy, Burnier, “simplifies study without,
however, relieving it of its wholesome difficulties; it strives
to make it interesting, while it does not convert it into child’s
play; it purposes to confide to the memory only what has first been
apprehended by the intelligence.... It has given to the world ideas
that it has not again let go, and fruitful principles from which we
have but to draw their logical consequences.”
[172. ANALYTICAL SUMMARY. 1. In the history of the three great
teaching congregations we have an illustration of the supposed
power of education over the destinies of men.
2. To resist the encroachments of Protestantism that followed the
diffusion of instruction among the people, Loyola organized his
teaching corps of Catholic zealots; and this mode of competition
for purposes of moral, sectarian, and political control has
covered the earth, in all Christian countries, with institutions
of learning.
3. The tendency towards extremes, and the difficulty of
attaining symmetry and completeness, are seen in the preference
of the Jesuits for form, elegance, and mere discipline, in
their excessive use of emulation; and in the pessimism of the
Jansenists, their distrust of human nature, and their fear of
human pride.]
FOOTNOTES:
[109] Religious congregations, as known in France, are associations
of persons who, consecrating themselves to the service of God,
make a vow to live in common under the same rule. Many of these
congregations devote themselves to the work of teaching, and
these are of two classes, the authorized and the unauthorized.
For example, the “Brethren of the Christian Schools,” founded
by La Salle, is an _authorized_, and the “Society of Jesus” an
_unauthorized_, congregation. From statistics published in 1878,
it appears that there were then in France, 24 congregations of men
authorized to teach, and controlling 3096 establishments; and 528
similar congregations of women, controlling 16,478 establishments.
At the same time there were 85 unauthorized congregations of men,
and 260 unauthorized congregations of women, devoted to teaching.
(P.)
[110] The congregation of the _Doctrinaries_ founded at a later
period establishments of secondary instruction. Maine de Biran,
Laromiguière, and Lakanal were pupils of the _Doctrinaries_.
[111] _Leibnitii Opera_, Genevæ, 1768, Tome VI. p. 65.
[112] _Bacon de Augmentis Scientiarum_, Lib. VI. chap. IV.
[113] See the fourth book of the _Constitutions_.
[114] See note to § 141.
[115] Letter to Madame Montglat, Nov. 14, 1607.
[116] Saint Simon, _Mémoires_, Tome IX. 83.
[117] _Entretiens sur les Sciences_, p. 197.
[118] For the Little Schools of Port Royal, see a recent account by
Carré (_Revue Pédagogique_, 1883, Nos. 2 and 8).
[119] No more pathetic piece of history has ever been written than
that which relates the vindictive and relentless persecution of
the peaceful and pious solitaries of Port Royal: “The house was
razed to the ground, and even the very foundations ploughed up.
The gardens and walks were demolished; and the dead were even torn
from their graves, that not a vestige might be left to mark the
spot where this celebrated institution had stood.”--_Lancelot’s
Tour to La Grande Chartreuse_, p. 243. See also _Narrative of the
Demolition of Port Royal_ (London, 1816). (P.)
[120] _Du choix et de la méthode des études._
[121] See Cousin, _Jacqueline Pascal_, p. 262.
[122] _Version_: translation from Latin or Greek into French.
_Theme_: translation of French into Latin or Greek. (P.)
CHAPTER VIII.
FÉNELON.
EDUCATION IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY; FÉNELON (1651-1715);
HOW FÉNELON BECAME A TEACHER; ANALYSIS OF THE TREATISE ON
THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS; CRITICISM OF MONASTIC EDUCATION;
REFUTATION OF THE PREJUDICES RELATIVE TO WOMEN; GOOD OPINION
OF HUMAN NATURE; INSTINCTIVE CURIOSITY; LESSONS ON OBJECTS;
FEEBLENESS OF THE CHILD; INDIRECT INSTRUCTION; ALL ACTIVITY
MUST BE PLEASURABLE; FABLES AND HISTORICAL NARRATIVES; MORAL
AND RELIGIOUS EDUCATION; STUDIES PROPER FOR WOMEN; EDUCATION OF
THE DUKE DE BOURGOGNE (1689-1695); HAPPY RESULTS; THE FABLES;
THE DIALOGUES OF THE DEAD; VARIETY OF DISCIPLINARY AGENTS;
DIVERSIFIED INSTRUCTION; THE TELEMACHUS; FÉNELON AND BOSSUET;
SPHERE AND LIMITS OF EDUCATION; ANALYTICAL SUMMARY.
173. EDUCATION IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.--Outside of the teaching
congregations, the seventeenth century counts a certain number of
independent educators, isolated thinkers, who have transmitted to
us in durable records the results of their reflection or of their
experience. The most of these belong to the clergy,--they are
royal preceptors. In a monarchical government there is no grander
affair than the education of princes. Some others are philosophers,
whom the general study of human nature has led to reflect on the
principles of education. Without pretending to include everything
within the narrow compass of this elementary history, we would make
known either the fundamental doctrines or the essential methods
which have been concerned in the education of the seventeenth
century, and which, at the same time, have made a preparation for
the educational reforms of the succeeding centuries.
174. FÉNELON (1651-1715).--Fénelon holds an important place in
French literature; but it seems that of all the varied aspects of
his genius, the part he played as an educator is the most important
and the most considerable. Fénelon wrote the first classical work
of French pedagogy, and it may be said, considering the great
number of authors who have been inspired by his thoughts, that he
is the head of a school of educators.
175. HOW FÉNELON BECAME A TEACHER.--It is well known that the
valuable treatise, _On the Education of Girls_, was written in
1680, at the request of the Duke and the Duchess of Beauvilliers.
These noble friends of Fénelon, besides several boys, had eight
girls to educate. It was to assist, by his advice, in the education
of this little family school, that Fénelon wrote his book which was
not designed at first for the public, and which did not appear till
1687. The young Abbé who, in 1680, was but thirty years old, had
already had experience in educational matters in the management of
the Convent of the _New Catholics_ (1678). This was an institution
whose purpose was to retain young Protestant converts in the
Catholic faith, or even to call them there by mild force. It would
have been better, we confess, for the glory of Fénelon, if he had
gained his experience elsewhere than in that mission of fanaticism,
where he was the auxiliary of the secular arm, the accomplice of
dragoons, and where was prepared the Revocation of the Edict of
Nantes. We would have preferred that the _Education of Girls_ had
not been planned in a house where were violently confined girls
torn from their mothers, and wives stolen from their husbands. But
if the first source of Fénelon’s educational inspiration was not
as pure as one could wish, at least in the book there is nothing
that betrays the spirit of intolerance and violence with which the
author was associated. On the contrary, _The Education of Girls_
is a work of gentleness and goodness, of a complaisant and amiable
grace, which is pervaded by a spirit of progress.
Fénelon soon had occasion to apply the principles that he had set
forth in his treatise. August 16, 1689, he was chosen preceptor
of the Duke of Bourgogne,[123] with the Duke of Beauvilliers for
governor, and the Abbé Fleury for sub-preceptor. From 1689 to 1695,
he directed with marvellous success the education of a prince,
“a born terror,” as Saint Simon expressed it, but who, under the
penetrating influence of his master, became an accomplished man,
almost a saint. It was for his royal pupil that he composed, one
after another, a large number of educational works, such as the
_Collection of Fables_, the _Dialogues of the Dead_, the treatise
on _The Existence of God_, and especially the _Telemachus_, one of
the most popular works in French literature.
In furnishing occasion for the exercise of his educational
activity, events served Fénelon according to his wish. We may
say that his nature predestinated him to the work of education.
With his tender soul, preserving its paternal instincts even in
his celibate condition, with his admirable grace of spirit, with
his various erudition and profound knowledge of antiquity, with
his competence in the studies of grammar and history, attested by
different passages in his _Letter to the Academy_; finally, with
his temperate disposition and his inclinations towards liberalism
in a century of absolute monarchy, he was made to become one of the
guides, one of the masters, of French education.
176. ANALYSIS OF THE TREATISE ON THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS.--This
charming masterpiece of Fénelon’s should be read entire. A rapid
analysis would not suffice, as it is difficult to reduce to a
few essential points the flowing thought of our author. With a
facility in expression inclining to laxness, and with a copiousness
of thought somewhat lacking in exactness, Fénelon easily repeats
himself; he returns to thoughts which have already been elaborated,
and does not restrict his easy flowing thought to a rigorous and
methodical plan. We may, however, distinguish three principal parts
in the thirteen chapters composing the work. Chapters I. and II.
are critical, and in these the ordinary faults in the education
of women are brought into sharp outline; then in chapters III.
to VIII. we have general observations, and the statement of the
principles and methods that should be followed and applied in the
education of boys as in the education of girls; and finally, from
chapter IX. to the end of the book, are all the special reflections
which relate exclusively to the merits and demerits, the duties and
the studies, of women.
177. CRITICISM ON MONASTIC EDUCATION.--In the opening of the
treatise, as in another little essay[124] that is usually included
in this volume, Fénelon expresses a preference for a liberal and
humane education, where the light of the world penetrates, and
which is not confined to the shadow of a monastery:--
“I conclude that it is better for your daughter to be with you
than in the best convent that you could select.... If a convent
is not well governed, she will see vanity honored, which is the
most subtile of all the poisons that can affect a young girl.
She will there hear the world spoken of as a sort of enchanted
place, and nothing makes a more pernicious impression than that
deceptive picture of the world, which is seen at a distance with
admiration, and which exaggerates all its pleasures without showing
its disappointments and its sorrows.... So I would fear a worldly
convent even more than the world itself. If, on the contrary, a
convent conforms to the fervor and regularity of its constitution,
a girl of rank will grow up there in a profound ignorance of the
world.... She leaves the convent like one who had been confined in
the shadows of a deep cavern, and who suddenly returns to the full
light of day. Nothing is more dazzling than this sudden transition,
than this glare to which one has never been accustomed.”
178. REFUTATION OF THE PREJUDICES RELATIVE TO THE EDUCATION OF
WOMEN.--It is, then, for mothers that Fénelon writes his book,
still more than for the convents that he does not love. Woman is
destined to play a grand part in domestic life. “Can men hope for
any sweetness in life, if their most select companionship, which
is that of marriage, is turned into bitterness?” Then let us cease
to neglect the education of women, and renounce the prejudices by
which we pretend to justify this neglect. A learned woman, it is
said, is vain and affected! But it is not proposed that women shall
engage in useless studies which would make ridiculous pedants of
them; it is simply a question of teaching them what befits their
position in the household. Woman, it is said again, ordinarily has
a weaker intellect than man! But this is the best of reasons why it
is necessary to strengthen her intelligence. Finally, woman should
be brought up in ignorance of the world! But, replies Fénelon, the
world is not a phantom; “it is the aggregate of all the families”;
and women have duties to fulfill in it which are scarcely less
important than those of men. “Virtue is not less for women than for
men.”
179. GOOD OPINION OF HUMAN NATURE.--There are two categories of
Christians: the first dwell particularly on the original fall;
and the others attach themselves by preference to the doctrine of
redemption. For the first, the child is deeply tainted with sin;
his only inclinations are those towards evil; he is a child of
wrath, who must be severely punished. For the others, the child,
redeemed by grace, “has not yet a fixed tendency towards any
object”; his instincts have no need of being thwarted; all they
need is direction. Fénelon follows this last mode of thinking,
which is the correct one. He does not fear self-love, and does
not interdict deserved praise. He counts upon the spontaneity of
nature. He regrets the education of the ancients, who left more
liberty to children. Finally, in his judgments on human nature, he
is influenced by a cheerful and amiable optimism, and sometimes by
an excess of complacency and approbation.
180. FEEBLENESS OF THE CHILD.--But if Fénelon believes in the
innocence of the child, he is not the less convinced of its
feebleness. Hence the measures he recommends to those who have in
charge the bringing up of children: “The most important thing in
the first years of infancy is the management of the child’s health.
Through the selection of food and the régime of a simple life,
the body should be supplied with pure blood.... Another thing of
great importance is to allow the organs to strengthen by holding
instruction in abeyance....” The intellectual weakness of the child
comes for the most part from his inability to fix his attention.
“The mind of the child is like a lighted taper in a place exposed
to the wind, whose flame is ever unsteady.” Hence the urgent
necessity of not pressing children beyond measure, of training them
little by little as occasion permits, “of serving and assisting
Nature, without urging her.”
181. INSTRUCTIVE CURIOSITY; OBJECT LESSONS.--If the inattention
of the child is a great obstacle to his progress, his natural
curiosity, by way of compensation, is a potent auxiliary. Fénelon
knows the aid that can be derived from this source, and we shall
quote entire the remarkable passage in which he indicates the means
of calling it into exercise through familiar lessons which are
already real lessons on objects:--
“Curiosity in children is a natural tendency which comes as the
precursor of instruction. Do not fail to take advantage of it. For
example, in the country they see a mill, and they wish to know what
it is. They should be shown the manner of preparing the food that
is needed for human use. They notice harvesters, and what they are
doing should be explained to them; also, how the wheat is sown,
and how it multiplies in the earth. In the city, they see shops
where different arts are practised, and where different wares are
sold. You should never be annoyed by their questions; these are so
many opportunities offered you by nature for facilitating the work
of instruction. Show that you take pleasure in replying to such
questions, and by this means you will insensibly teach them how all
the things are made that serve human needs, and that give rise to
commercial pursuits.”
182. INDIRECT INSTRUCTION.--Even when the child has grown up, and
is more capable of receiving direct instruction, Fénelon does not
depart from his system of mild management and precaution. There are
to be no didactic lessons, but as far as possible the instruction
shall be indirect. This is the great educational method of Fénelon,
and we shall soon see how he applied it to the education of the
Duke of Bourgogne. “The less formal our lessons are, the better.”
However, there is need of discretion and prudence in the choice of
the first ideas, and the first pictures that are to be impressed on
the child’s mind.
“Into a reservoir so little and so precious only exquisite
things should be poured.” The absence of pedantry is one of the
characteristics of Fénelon. “In rhetoric,” he says, “I will give
no rules at all; it is sufficient to give good models.” As to
grammar, “I will give it no attention, or, at least, but very
little.” Instruction must be insinuated, not imposed. We must
resort to unexpected lessons,--to such as do not appear to be
lessons. Fénelon here anticipates Rousseau, and suggests the system
of pre-arranged scenes and instructive artifices, similar to those
invented for Émile.[125]
183. ALL ACTIVITY MUST BE PLEASURABLE.--One of the best qualities
of Fénelon as a teacher is that of wishing that study should be
agreeable; but this quality becomes a fault with him, because he
makes an abuse of attractive instruction. We can but applaud him
when he criticises the harsh and crabbed pedagogy of the Middle
Age, and depicts to us those tiresome and gloomy class-rooms, where
teachers are ever talking to children of words and things of which
they understand nothing. “No liberty,” he says, “no enjoyment, but
always lessons, silence, uncomfortable postures, correction, and
threats.” And so there is nothing more just than this thought: “In
the current education, all the pleasure is put on one side, and
all that is disagreeable on the other; the disagreeable is all
put into study, and all the pleasure is found in the diversions.”
Fénelon would change all this. For study, as for moral discipline,
“pleasure must do all.”
First, as to study, seek the means of making agreeable to children
whatever you require of them. “We must always place before them a
definite and agreeable aim to sustain them in their work.” “Conceal
their studies under the appearance of liberty and pleasure.”
“Let their range of vision extend itself a little, and their
intelligence acquire more breadth.” “Mingle instruction with play.”
“I have seen,” he says again, “certain children who have learned to
read while playing.”
For giving direction to the will, as for giving activity to
the intelligence, never subject children to cold and absolute
authority. Do not weary them by an indiscreet exactness. Let wisdom
appear to them only at intervals, and then with a laughing face.
Lead them by reason whenever it is possible for you to do it. Never
assume, save in case of extreme necessity, an austere, imperious
air that makes them tremble.
“You would close their heart and destroy their confidence, without
which there is no profit to hope for from education. Make yourself
loved by them. Let them feel at ease in your presence, so that they
do not fear to have you see their faults.”
Such, intellectually and morally, is the amiable discipline dreamed
of by Fénelon. It is evident that the imagination of our author
conducts him a little too far and leads him astray. Fénelon sees
everything on the bright side. In education, such as this too
complacent teacher dreams of it, there is no difficulty, nothing
laborious, no thorns. “All metals there are gold; all flowers
there are roses.” The child is almost exempted from making effort:
he shall not be made to repeat the lesson he has heard, “for fear
of annoying him.” It is necessary that he learn everything while
playing. If he has faults, he must not be told of them, save
with precaution, “for fear of hurting his feelings.” Fénelon is
decidedly too good-natured, too much given to cajolery. In his
effort to shun whatever is repulsive, he comes to exclude whatever
is laborious. He falls into an artless pleasantry when he demands
that the books of his pupil shall be “beautifully bound, with gilt
edges, and fine pictures.”
184. FABLES AND HISTORY.--Fénelon’s very decided taste for
agreeable studies, determines him to place in the foremost rank of
the child’s intellectual occupations, fables and history, because
narratives please the infant imagination above everything else. It
is with sacred history especially that he would have the attention
occupied, always selecting from it “that which presents the most
pleasing and the most magnificent pictures.” He properly demands,
moreover, that the teacher “animate his narrative with lively and
familiar tones, and so make all his characters speak.” By this
means we shall hold the attention of children without forcing it;
“for, once more,” he says, “we must be very careful not to impose
on them a law to hear and to remember these narratives.”
185. MORAL AND RELIGIOUS EDUCATION.--Contrary to Rousseau’s
notions, Fénelon requires that children should early have their
attention turned to moral and religious truths. He would have this
instruction given in the concrete, by means of examples drawn from
experience. We need not fear to speak to them of God as a venerable
old man, with white beard, etc. Whatever of the superstitious
there may be in these conceptions adapted to the infant imagination
will be corrected afterwards by the reason. It is to be noted,
moreover, that a religion of extremes is not what Fénelon desires.
He fears all exaggerations, even that of piety. What he demands is
a tempered devotion, a reasonable Christianity. He is suspicious
of false miracles. “Accustom girls,” he says, “not to accept
thoughtlessly certain unauthorized narrations, and not to practise
certain forms of devotion introduced by an indiscreet zeal.” But
possibly, without intending it, Fénelon himself is preparing the
way for the superstition he combats, when, for the purpose of
indoctrinating the child with the first principles of religion, he
presents to him the notion of God under sensible forms, and speaks
to him of a paradise where all is of gold and precious stones.
186. STUDIES PROPER FOR WOMEN.--So far, we have noted in Fénelon’s
work only general precepts applicable to boys and girls alike. But
in the last part of his work, Fénelon treats especially of women’s
own work, of the qualities peculiarly their own, of their duties,
and of the kind of instruction they need in order to fulfill them.
No one knew better than Fénelon the faults that come to woman
through ignorance,--unrest, unemployed time, inability to apply
herself to solid and serious duties, frivolity, indolence, lawless
imagination, indiscreet curiosity concerning trifles, levity, and
talkativeness, sentimentalism, and, what is remarkable with a
friend of Madame Guyon, a mania for theology: “Women are too much
inclined to speak decisively on religious questions.”
What does Fénelon propose as a corrective of these mischievous
tendencies? It must be confessed that the plan of instruction which
he proposes is still insufficient, and that it scarcely accords
with the ideal as we conceive it to-day.
“Keep young girls,” he says, “within the common bounds, and teach
them that there should be for their sex a modesty with respect to
knowledge almost as delicate as that inspired by the horror of
vice.”
Is not this the same as declaring that knowledge is not intended
for women, and that it is repugnant to their delicate nature?
When Fénelon tells us that a young girl ought to learn to read
and write correctly (and observe that account is taken only of
the daughters of the nobility and of the wealthy middle classes);
when he adds, _let her also learn grammar_, we can infer from
these puerile prescriptions, that Fénelon does not exact any great
things from women in the way of knowledge. And yet, such as it is,
this programme surpassed, in the time of Fénelon, the received
custom, and constituted a substantial progress. It was to state an
excellent principle, whose consequences should have been more fully
analyzed, to demand that women should learn all that is necessary
for them to know, in order to bring up their children. Fénelon
should also be commended for having recommended to young women
the reading of profane authors. He who had been nourished on such
literature, who was, so to speak, but a Greek turned Christian, who
knew Homer so perfectly as to write the _Telemachus_, could not,
without belying himself, advise against the studies from which he
had derived so much pleasure and profit. He also recognized the
utility of history, ancient and modern. He grants a place to poetry
and eloquence, provided an elimination be made of whatever would be
dangerous to purity of morals. What we comprehend less easily is
that he condemns, as severely as he does, music, which, he says,
“furnishes diversions that are poisonous.”
But these faults, this mistrust of too high an intellectual
culture, ought not to prevent us from admiring the _Education of
Girls_. Let us be grateful to Fénelon for having resisted, in
part, the prejudices of a period when young women were condemned
by their sex to an almost absolute ignorance; for having declared
that he would follow a course contrary “to that of alarm and of a
superficial culture of the intelligence”; and finally, for having
written a book, all the generous inspirations of which Madame de
Maintenon herself has not caught; and of which we may say, finally,
that almost everything that it contains is excellent, and that it
is defective only in what it does not contain.
187. MADAME DE LAMBERT (1647-1733).--Fénelon, as an educator of
women, was the founder of a school. From Rollin to Madame de
Genlis, how many teachers have been inspired by him! But in the
front rank of his pupils we must place Madame de Lambert. In her
_Counsels to her Son_ (1701), and especially in her _Counsels to
her Daughter_ (1728), she has taken up the tradition of Fénelon
with greater breadth and freedom of spirit. “As discreet as he with
respect to works of the imagination, of which she fears that the
reading may inflame the mind;” more severe, even, than he towards
Racine, whose name she seems to hesitate to pronounce; disposed
to exclude her daughter from “plays, representations that move
the passions, music, poetry,--all belonging to the retinue of
pleasure,--in other respects, Madame de Lambert takes precedence
and surpasses her master” (Gréard). She reproaches Molière for
having abandoned women to idleness, pastime, and pleasure. She
loves history, especially the history of France, “which no one is
permitted not to know.” Finally, without entering into the details
of her protests, she makes a powerful plea for the cause of woman’s
education; she already belongs to the eighteenth century.
188. EDUCATION OF THE DUKE OF BOURGOGNE.--Singularly enough,
Fénelon did not make an application of his ideas on education
till after he had set them forth in a theoretical treatise.
The education of the Duke of Bourgogne permitted him to make a
practical test of the rules established in the _Education of
Girls_. Nothing is of more interest to the historian of pedagogy
than the study of that princely education into which Fénelon
put all his mind and heart, and which, by its results, at once
brilliant and insufficient, exhibits the merits and the faults of
his plan of education.
189. HAPPY RESULTS.--The Duke of Bourgogne with his active
intelligence, and also with his impetuous, indocile character,
and his fits of passion, was just the pupil for the teacher who
relied on _indirect instruction_. It would have been unwise to
indoctrinate with heavy didactic lessons a spirit so impetuous.
Through tact and industry, Fénelon succeeded in captivating the
attention of the prince, and in skillfully insinuating into his
mind knowledges that he would probably have rejected, had they been
presented to it in a scientific and pedantic form. “I have never
seen a child,” says Fénelon, “who so readily understood the finest
things of poetry and eloquence.” Doubtless the happy nature of the
prince contributed a large part towards these results; but the art
of Fénelon had also its share in the final account.
190. MORAL LESSONS; THE FABLES.--How shall morals be taught to a
violent and passionate child? Fénelon did not think of preaching
fine sermons to him; but presented to him, under the form of
_Fables_, the moral precepts that he wished to inculcate. The
_Fables_ of Fénelon certainly have not, as a whole, a large
literary value; but, to form a just appreciation of them, we
must recollect that their merit is especially to be seen in the
circumstances attending their composition. Composed from day to
day, they were adapted to the circumstances of the life of the
young prince; they were filled with allusions to his faults and
his virtues, and they conveyed to him, at the favorable moment,
under the veil of a pleasing fiction, the commendation or the
censure that he deserved. “One might,” says the Cardinal de
Bausset, “follow the chronological order in which these pieces
were composed, by comparing them with the progress which age and
instruction must have made in the education of the prince.” The
apologues, even with their very general morals, will always have
their value and place in the education of children. What shall
be said of the fables in which the moral, wholly individual, was
addressed exclusively to the pupil for whom they were written,
either on account of some perversity that he let come to the
surface, or of a rising virtue that had been manifested in his
conduct? It is thus that the fable called _The Capricious_
presented to the young duke the picture of his fits of passion,
and taught him to correct himself; that of the _Bee and the Fly_
reminded him that the most brilliant qualities serve no good
purpose without moderation. One day, in a fit of anger, the prince
so far forgot himself as to say to Fénelon, who was reproving him:
“_No, no, Sir! I know who I am, and who you are!_” The next day,
doubtless in response to this explosion of princely self-conceit,
Fénelon had him read the fable entitled _Bacchus and the Faun_: “As
Bacchus could not abide a malicious jeerer always ready to make
sport of his expressions that were not correct and elegant, he said
to him in a fiery and important tone: ‘How dare you jeer the son of
Jupiter?’ The Faun replied without emotion: ‘Alas! how does the son
of Jupiter dare to commit any fault?’”
Certain fables, of a more elevated tone than the others, are not
designed simply to correct the faults of children; they prepare
the prince for the exercise of government. Thus, the fable of the
_Bees_ disclosed to him the beauties of an industrious State, and
one where order reigns; the _Nile and the Ganges_ taught him love
for the people, “compassion for humanity, harassed and suffering.”
Finally, from each of these fables there issued a serious lesson
under the pleasing exterior of a witticism; and more than once,
in reading them, the prince doubtless felt an emotion of pleasure
or of shame, as he recognized himself in a commendation or in a
reproof addressed to the imaginary personages of the _Fables_.
191. HISTORICAL LESSONS; THE DIALOGUES OF THE DEAD.--It is not
alone in moral education, but in intellectual education as well,
that Fénelon resorts to artifice. The ingenious preceptor has
employed fiction in all its forms the better to compass and
dominate the spirit of his pupil. There are the fables for moral
instruction, the dialogues for the study of history, and finally,
the epopée in the _Telemachus_, for the political education of the
heir to the throne of France.
The _Dialogues of the Dead_ put on the stage men of all countries
and conditions, Charles the Fifth and a monk of Saint-Just,
Aristotle and Descartes, Leonardo da Vinci and Poussin, Cæsar and
Alexander. History proper, literature, philosophy, the arts, were
the subjects of conversations composed, as in the _Fables_, at
different intervals, according to the progress and the needs of
the Duke of Bourgogne. These were attractive pictures that came
from time to time to be introduced into the scheme for the didactic
study of universal history. They should be taken only for what
they were intended to be,--the pleasing complement to a regular
and consecutive course of instruction. Fénelon knew better than
any one else that history is interesting in itself, and that to
make the study of it interesting, it is sufficient to present it to
the childish imagination with clearness, with vivacity, and with
feeling.
192. VARIETY OF DISCIPLINARY AGENTS.--The education of the Duke
of Bourgogne is the practical application of Fénelon’s principles
as to the necessity of employing an insinuating gentleness rather
than an authority which dryly commands. There are to be no sermons,
no lectures, but indirect means of moral instruction. The Duke
of Bourgogne was irascible. Instead of reading to him Seneca’s
treatise _On Anger_, this is Fénelon’s device: One morning he has
a cabinet-maker come to his apartments, whom he has instructed for
the purpose. The prince enters, stops, and looks at the tools. “Go
about your business, Sir,” cries the workman, who assumes a most
threatening air, “for I am not responsible for what I may do; when
I am in a passion, I break the arms and legs of those whom I meet.”
We guess the conclusion of the story, and how, by this experimental
method, Fénelon contrives to teach the prince to guard against
anger and its effects.
When indirect means did not answer, Fénelon employed others. It is
thus that he made frequent appeals to the self-love of his pupil;
he reminded him of what he owed to his name and to the hopes of
France. He had him record his word of honor that he would behave
well: “I promise the Abbé Fénelon, on the word of a prince, that
I will obey him, and that, in case I break my word, I will submit
to any kind of punishment and dishonor. Given at Versailles, this
29th day of November, 1689. Signed: Louis.” At other times Fénelon
appealed to his feelings, and conquered him by his tenderness and
goodness. It is in such moments of tender confidence that the
prince said to him, “I leave the Duke of Bourgogne outside the
door, and with you I am but the little Louis.” Finally, at other
times, Fénelon resorted to the harshest punishments; he sequestered
him, took away his books, and interdicted all conversation.
193. DIVERSIFIED INSTRUCTION.--By turns serious and tender, mild
and severe, in his moral discipline, Fénelon was not less versatile
in his methods of instruction. His dominant preoccupation was to
_diversify_ studies--the term is his own. If a given subject of
study was distasteful to his pupil, Fénelon passed to another.
Although the success of his tutorship seems to be a justification
of his course, there is ground for thinking that, as a general
rule, Fénelon’s precept is debatable, and that his example should
not be followed by making an over-use of amusement and agreeable
variety. Fénelon has too often made studies puerile through his
attempts to make them agreeable.
194. RESULTS OF THE EDUCATION OF THE DUKE OF BOURGOGNE.--It seems
like a paradox to say that Fénelon was too successful in his
educational apostleship; and yet this is the truth. Under his
hand--“the ablest hand that ever was,” says Saint Simon--the prince
became in all respects the image of his master. He was a bigot to
the extent of being unwilling to attend a royal ball because that
worldly entertainment coincided with the religious celebration of
the Epiphany; he was rather a monk than a king; he was destitute
of all spirit of initiative and liberty, irresolute, absorbed in
his pious erudition and mystic prayers; finally, he was another
Telemachus, who could not do without his Mentor. Fénelon had
monopolized and absorbed the will of his pupil. He had forgotten
that the purpose of education is to form, not a pale copy, an image
of the master, but a man independent and free, capable of sufficing
for himself.
195. THE TELEMACHUS.--The _Telemachus_, composed from 1694 to 1698,
was designed for the Duke of Bourgogne; but he was not to read it,
and did not read it, in fact, till after his marriage. Through this
epopée in prose, this romance borrowed from Homer, Fénelon purposed
to continue the moral education of his pupil. But the book abounds
in sermons. “I could have wished,” said Boileau, “that the Abbé had
made his Mentor a little less a preacher, and that the moral of the
book could have been distributed a little more imperceptibly, and
with more art.” At least, they are beautiful and excellent sermons,
aimed against luxury, the spirit of conquest, the consequences
of absolute power, and against ambition and war. Louis XIV. had
probably read the _Telemachus_, and had comprehended the allusions
concealed in the description of the Republic of Salentum, when
he said of Fénelon that he was “the most chimerical spirit in
his kingdom.” Besides the moral lesson intended for princes, the
_Telemachus_ also contains bold reflections on political questions.
For example, note the conception of a system of public instruction,
very new for the time: “Children belong less to their parents than
to the Republic, and ought to be educated by the State. There
should be established public schools in which are taught the fear
of God, love of country, and respect for the laws.”
196. BOSSUET AND FÉNELON.--Bossuet, as preceptor of the
Dauphin,[126] was far from having the same success as Fénelon.
Nothing was overlooked, however, in the education of the son of
Louis XIV.; and the _Letter to Pope Innocent XI._ (1679), in which
Bossuet presents his scheme of study, gives proof of high fitness
for educational work. He recommends assiduous labor, no leaves
of absence, and play mingled with study. “A child must play and
enjoy himself,” he says. Emulation excited by the presence of
other children, who came to compete with the prince; a thorough
reading of the Latin authors, explained, not in fragments, as with
the Jesuits, but in complete texts; a certain breadth of spirit,
since the study of the comic poets--of Terence in particular--was
expressly recommended; a familiarity with the Greeks and the
Romans, “especially with the divine Homer”; the grammar learned in
French; history, “the mistress of human life,” studied with ardor,
and presented, first, in its particular facts, in the lessons which
the Dauphin drew up, and then in its general laws, the spirit of
which has been transmitted to us in the _Discourse on Universal
History_; geography learned “while playing and making imaginary
journeys”; philosophy; and finally the sciences, brilliantly
presented,--with such a programme, and under such a master, it
seems that the Dauphin ought to have been a student of the highest
rank; but he remained a mediocre pupil, “absorbed,” to use Saint
Simon’s expression, “in his own fat and gloom.”
It must certainly be acknowledged that, notwithstanding his
excellent intentions, Bossuet was in part responsible for the fact
that these results were insufficient, or, rather, nil. He did not
know how “to condescend,” as Montaigne says, “to the boyish ways of
his pupil.” In dealing with him he proceeded on too high a plane.
“The austere genius of Bossuet,” says Henry Martin, “did not know
how to become small with the small.” Bossuet lacked in flexibility
and tact, precisely the qualities that characterized Fénelon.
Bossuet, in education, as in everything else, is grandeur, noble
and sublime bearing; Fénelon, as preceptor, is address, insinuating
grace. That which dominates in the one is authority, a majesty
almost icy; that which constitutes the charm of the other is
versatility, a persuasive gentleness, a penetrating tenderness.
To be just, however, it must be added that the faults were not all
on Bossuet’s side. In that education, stamped with failure, the
pupil was the great culprit, with his ungrateful and rebellious
nature. “My lord has much spirit,” said a courtier, “but he has it
_concealed_.” For one not a courtier, does it not amount to the
same thing to have one’s spirit concealed and to have none at all?
197. SPHERE AND LIMITS OF EDUCATION.--It seems that, on one page
of the _Education of Girls_, Fénelon has traced in advance, and by
a sort of divination, the parallels of the two educations of the
Dauphin and of the Duke of Bourgogne respectively. How can we fail
to recognize the anticipated portrait of Fénelon’s future pupil in
this passage, written in 1680?
“It must be acknowledged, that of all the difficulties in
education, none is comparable to that of bringing up children who
are lacking in sensibility. The naturally quick and sensitive are
capable of terrible mistakes,--passion and presumption do so betray
them! But they have also great resources, and when far gone often
come to themselves. Instruction is a germ concealed within them,
which starts, and sometimes bears fruit, when experience comes to
the aid of knowledge, and the passions lose their power. At least,
we know how to make them attentive, and to awaken their curiosity.
We have the means of interesting them, and of stimulating them
through their sense of honor; but, on the other hand, we can gain
no hold on indolent natures.”
On the other hand, all that follows applies perfectly to the
Dauphin, the indocile pupil of Bossuet:--
“ ... All the thoughts of these are distractions; they are never
where they ought to be; they cannot be touched to the quick even by
corrections; they hear everything and feel nothing. This indolence
makes the pupil negligent, and disgusts him with whatever he does.
Under these conditions, the best planned education runs the risk
of failure.... Many people, who think superficially, conclude
from this poor success that nature does all for the production of
men of merit, and that education has no part in the result; but
the only conclusion to be drawn from the case is, that there are
natures like ungrateful soils, upon which culture has but little
effect.”[127]
Nothing better can be said, and Fénelon has admirably summed up the
lesson that should be drawn from these two princely illustrations
of the seventeenth century. If the sorry results of Bossuet’s
efforts should inspire the educator with some modesty, and prove to
him that the best grain does not grow in an ingrate soil, is not
the brilliant education of the Duke of Bourgogne, which developed
almost all the virtues in a soul where nature seemed to have
planted the seeds of all the vices, of a nature to increase the
confidence of teachers, and show them what can be done by the art
of a shrewd and able teacher?
[198. ANALYTICAL SUMMARY.--1. Education as a plastic art has
never been exhibited in a more favorable light than in this
history of Fénelon’s teaching; and perhaps the resistance that
sometimes sets at defiance the teacher’s art could not be better
illustrated than in the case of Bossuet’s royal pupil.
2. These two historical illustrations also exhibit the play of
the two factors that enter into education,--nature and art.
Fénelon’s teaching illustrates the potency of human art in
controlling, modifying, almost re-creating a work of nature. The
Duke of Bourgogne was almost re-made to order.
3. Here is also an illustrious example of the attempt to make
education a pastime, to divest it of all constraint, to make
learning run parallel with the pupil’s inclinations. In the
natural recoil from a dry and formal teaching that had to be
enforced against the pupil’s will, it is sometimes forgotten that
a large part of life’s duties lie outside of our inclinations.
4. The policy of leading pupils at such a distance that they seem
to themselves to be following their own initiative, is one of the
highest of the teacher’s arts.
5. The inculcation of moral lessons through fables, after
Fénelon’s plan, is a practice that modern teaching might
profitably adopt.]
FOOTNOTES:
[123] Son of Louis XIV., born Aug. 6, 1682; died Feb. 18, 1712.
[124] See the _Advice_ of Fénelon, Archbishop Cambray, to a lady of
quality on the education of her daughter.
[125] For an example of this “artifice” carried to the extreme of
absurdity, see Miss Worthington’s translation of the _Émile_, p.
133. (P.)
[126] Eldest son of Louis XIV., born Nov. 1, 1661; died April 14,
1711.
[127] _Education of Girls_, Chap. V.
CHAPTER IX.
THE PHILOSOPHERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. DESCARTES,
MALEBRANCHE, LOCKE.
DESCARTES, MALEBRANCHE, LOCKE; DESCARTES (1596-1650); THE
DISCOURSE OF METHOD; CRITICISM OF THE CURRENT EDUCATION; GREAT
PRINCIPLES OF MODERN PEDAGOGY; OBJECTIVE AND SUBJECTIVE PEDAGOGY;
MALEBRANCHE (1638-1715); SENSE INSTRUCTION CONDEMNED; INFLUENCE
OF ENVIRONMENT; LOCKE (1632-1704); THE THOUGHTS CONCERNING
EDUCATION; PHYSICAL EDUCATION; THE HARDENING PROCESS; HYGIENIC
PARADOXES; MORAL EDUCATION MORE IMPORTANT THAN INSTRUCTION; SENSE
OF HONOR THE PRINCIPLE OF MORAL DISCIPLINE; CONDEMNATION OF
CORPORAL PUNISHMENT; INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION; UTILITARIAN STUDIES;
PROGRAMME OF STUDIES; ATTRACTIVE STUDIES; SHOULD A TRADE BE
LEARNED? WORKING SCHOOLS; LOCKE AND ROUSSEAU; ANALYTICAL SUMMARY.
199. DESCARTES, MALEBRANCHE, AND LOCKE.--Descartes, a spiritualist;
Malebranche, an idealist; Locke, a sensationalist,--such are the
philosophers of the seventeenth century who are related to the
history of pedagogy. And yet the first two have only a remote
connection with it, through their exposition of some of its general
principles. Locke is the only one who has resolutely approached
educational questions in a special treatise that has become a
classic in English pedagogy.