3. Much repetition to insure retention.
4. Use of the mother tongue for all instruction, and the languages to
be taught through it.
5. Everything to be taught without constraint. The teacher to teach,
and the scholars to keep order and discipline.
6. No learning by heart. Much questioning and understanding.
7. Uniformity in books and methods a necessity.
8. Knowledge of things to precede words about things.
9. Individual experience and contact and inquiry to replace authority.
We see here the essentials of the Baconian ideas, as well as the
foreshadowings of many other subsequent reforms in teaching method.
During the next half-dozen years Ratke was a much-interviewed person, as
the idea of a more general education of the people, advanced by the
Protestant reformers, had appealed strongly to the imagination of many of
the German princes. Finally the necessary money was raised to establish an
experimental school, [4] printing-presses were set up to print the
necessary books, the people of the village of Köthen, in Anhalt, were
ordered to send their children for instruction, and the school opened with
Ratke in charge and amid great expectations and enthusiasm. A year and a
half later the school had failed, through the bad management of Ratke and
his inability to realize the extravagant hopes he had aroused, and he
himself had been thrown into prison as an impostor by the princes. This
ended Ratke's work. He is important chiefly for his pioneer work as the
forerunner of the greatest educator of the seventeenth century.
JOHANN AMOS COMENIUS. We now reach not only the greatest representative of
sense realism, both in theory and practice, before the latter part of the
eighteenth century, but also one of the commanding figures in the history
of education. Comenius was born at Nivnitz, in Moravia, in 1592. As a
member, pastor, and later bishop of the Moravian church, and as a follower
of John Huss, he suffered greatly in the Catholic-Protestant warfare which
raged over his native land during the period of the Thirty Years' War. His
home twice plundered, his books and manuscripts twice burned, his wife and
children murdered, and himself at times a fugitive and later an exile,
Comenius gave his long life to the advancement of the interests of mankind
through religion and learning. Driven from his home and country, he became
a scholar of the world.
While a student at the University of Nassau, at the age of twenty, he read
and was deeply impressed by the "Address" of Ratke. Bacon's _Novum
Organum_, which appeared when he was twenty-eight, made a still deeper
impression upon him. He seems to have been familiar also with the writings
of the educational reformers of his time in all European lands. He
traveled extensively, and maintained a large correspondence with the
scholars of his time. He was master of a Latin school in Moravia from the
age of twenty-two to twenty-four, when he was ordained as a pastor of the
Moravian Church. Eight years later, in 1632, he was banished, with all
Protestant ministers, from his native land, and while an exile for a time
took charge of a school at Lissa, in Poland. Here he worked out, in
practice, the great work on method which he later published. In 1638 he
was invited to reform the schools of Sweden; in 1641 he visited England,
in connection with a plan for the organization of all knowledge; he spent
the next eight years working at school reform in Sweden; from 1650 to 1654
he was in charge of a school at Saros-Patak, in Hungary, where he worked
out his famous textbooks for teaching language; he was consulted with
reference to the presidency of Harvard College, in 1654; the same year he
returned to Lissa, and once more lost his books and manuscripts and was
made a homeless exile; and finally he found a patron and asylum in
Amsterdam, where he died in 1671, at the age of seventy-nine. The verse
beneath his portrait seems an especially appropriate commentary on his
life.
COMENIUS AND EDUCATIONAL METHOD. While teaching at Lissa, in Poland,
Comenius had formulated for himself the principles underlying school
instruction, as he saw it, in a lengthy book which he called _The Great
Didactic_. [5] The title page (R. 218) and the table of contents (R. 219)
will give an idea as to its scope. In this work Comenius formulated and
explained his two fundamental ideas, namely, that all instruction must be
carefully graded and arranged to follow the order of nature, and that, in
imparting knowledge to children, the teacher must make constant appeal
through sense-perception to the understanding of the child. We have here
the fundamental ideas of Bacon applied to the school, and Comenius stands
as the clearest exponent of sense realism in teaching up to his time, and
for more than a century afterward.
Deeply religious by nature and training, Comenius held the Holy Scriptures
to contain the beginning and end of all learning; to know God aright he
held to be the highest aim; and with true Protestant fervor he contended
that the education of every human being was a necessity if mankind was to
enter into its religious inheritance, and piety, virtue, and learning were
to be brought to their fruition. Unlike those who were enthusiasts for
religious education only, Comenius saw further, and held an ideal of
service to the State and Church here below for which proper training was
needed. Still more, he believed in the education of human beings simply
because they were human beings, and not merely for salvation, as Luther
had held.
Comenius was the first to formulate a practicable school method, working
along the new lines marked out by Bacon. He had no psychology to guide
him, and worked largely by analogies from nature. A great idea with him
was that we should study and follow nature, and this led him to the
conclusions that education should proceed from the easy to the difficult,
the near to the remote, the general to the special, and the known to the
unknown, and that the great business of the teacher was imparting and
guiding, and not storing the memory. These conclusions seem commonplaces
to us of to-day, but what is commonplace today was genius three hundred
years ago. To select the subject-matter of instruction carefully and on
the basis of utility, to eliminate needless materials, not to attempt too
much at a time, to use concrete examples, to have frequent repetitions to
fix ideas, to advance by carefully graded steps, to tie new knowledge to
old, to learn by observing and doing, and to learn by use rather than by
precept--were still other of the present-day commonplaces which Comenius
worked out and formulated in his _Didactica Magna_. [6] His plea for a
mild and gentle discipline in place of the brutality of his time, his
emphasis of the vernacular and the realities of life, his conception as to
the importance of early education, his careful gradation of the school,
and his ability to see the usefulness of Latin without over-emphasizing
its importance--all stamp him as a capable and practical schoolmaster who
saw deeply into the nature of the educational process.
[Illustration: PLATE 10. JOHN AMOS COMENIUS (1592-1671)
The Moravian Bishop at the age of fifty. (After an engraving by Glover,
printed as a frontispiece to Hartlib's _A Reformation of Schooles_.
London, 1642.)
Loe, here an Exile, who to serve his God,
Hath sharply tasted of proud Pashurs Rod
Whose learning, Piety, & true worth, being knowne
To all the world, makes all the world his owne. F.Q.]
COMENIUS' IDEAS AS TO THE ORGANIZATION OF SCHOOLS. In his _Didactica
Magna_ Comenius divided the school life of a child into four great
divisions. The first concerned the period from infancy to the age of six,
which he called The Mother School. For this period he wrote _The School of
Infancy_ (1628), a book intended primarily for parents, and one of such
deep insight and fundamental importance that parents and teachers may
still read it with interest and profit. In it he anticipated many of the
ideas of the kindergarten of to-day. The next division was The Vernacular
School, which covered the period from the ages of six to twelve. For this
period six classes were to be provided, and the emphasis was to be on the
mother tongue. This school was to be for all, of both sexes, and in it the
basis of an education for life was to be given. It was to teach its pupils
to read and write the mother tongue; enough arithmetic for the ordinary
business of life, and the commonly used measures; to sing, and to know
certain songs by rote; to know about the real things of life; the
Catechism and the Bible; a general knowledge of history, and especially
the creation, fall, and redemption of man; the elements of geography and
astronomy; and a knowledge of the trades and occupations of life; all of
which, says Comenius, can be taught better through the mother tongue than
through the medium of the Latin and Greek. In scope this school
corresponds with the vernacular school of modern Europe.
The next school was The Latin School, covering the years from twelve to
eighteen, and in this German, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew were to be taught,
by improved methods, and with physics and mathematics added. This school
he divided into six classes, named from the principal study in each, as
follows: (1) Grammar, (2) Physics, (3) Mathematics, (4) Ethics, (5)
Dialectics, (6) Rhetoric. He also later outlined a plan for a six-class
_Gymnasium_ for Saros-Patak (R. 220), culminating in a seventh year for
preparation for the ministry, which was an improvement on the Latin School
and very modern in character. Had such a school become common, secondary
education in Europe might have been a century in advance of where the
nineteenth century found it. The Latin school was to be attended only by
those of ability who were likely to enter the service of Church or State,
or who intended to pass on to the University. This last was to cover the
period from eighteen to twenty-four. Unlike all educational practice of
his time and later, Comenius here provides for an educational ladder of
the present-day American type, wholly unlike the European two-class school
system which (p. 353) later evolved.
COMENIUS' WORK IN REFORMING LANGUAGE TEACHING. At the time Comenius lived
and wrote, the languages constituted almost the only subject of study, and
Latin grammar was the great introductory subject. The mediaeval grammars
(Donatus; Alexander de Villa Dei; pp. 156, 155) had been so poor that the
instruction was difficult and, in consequence, long drawn out. Lily's
Latin Grammar (p. 276), published in 1513, and Melanchthon's Latin
Grammar, published in 1525, had represented marked advances. Still the
subject remained difficult, even when taught from these new types of
grammars. Comenius early became convinced, as a result of his teaching and
studies in educational method, that the ancient classical authors were not
only too difficult for boys beginning the study of Latin, but that they
also did not contain the type of real knowledge he felt should be taught
in the schools. He accordingly set to work to construct a series of
introductory Latin readers which would form a graded introduction to the
study of Latin, and which would also introduce the pupil to the type of
world knowledge and scientific information he felt should be taught.
His plan eventually embraced a graded series of five books, as follows:
1. The _Orbis Sensualium Pictus_, or the World of Sense Objects
Pictured. This was an illustrated primer and first reader, which
appeared in 1658, and was the first illustrated book ever written for
children (R. 221).
2. The _Vestibulum_ (Vestibule, or gate). An easy first reader,
consisting of but a few hundred of the most commonly used Latin words
and sentences, with a translation into the vernacular in parallel
columns. This book required about a half-year for its completion.
3. The _Janua Linguarum Reserata_, or Gate of Languages Unlocked.
This was the first of the series printed (1631), the _Vestibulum_
being an easy introduction to it, and the _Orbis Pictus_ being
the _Janua_ simplified and illustrated. The _Janua_
contained some eight thousand Latin words, arranged in simple
sentences, with the vernacular equivalent in parallel columns;
included information on a variety of subjects; [7] and was a regular
Noah's Ark for vocabulary purposes. It embraced sufficient reading
material and grammar for a year.
4. The _Atrium_. This was an expansion of the _Janua_, and
treated the same topics more in detail. It was intended to be an
advanced reader, based, as was the _Janua_, on studies about the
real things of life. The vocabulary now was Latin-Latin, instead of
Latin-vernacular.
5. The _Thesaurus_, which was never completed, but was planned to
be a collection of graded extracts from easy Latin authors--Cornelius
Nepos, Caesar, Cicero, Sallust, Vergil, Horace, Pliny--to furnish the
needed reading material for the three upper years of the Latin School.
THE TEXTBOOKS ILLUSTRATED. Beginning in the _Janua_, and afterwards in the
_Vestibulum_ and _Orbis Pictus_ as well, Comenius not only simplified the
teaching of Latin by producing the best textbooks for instruction in the
subject the world had ever known, but he also shifted the whole emphasis
in instruction from words to things, and made the teaching of scientific
knowledge and useful world information the keynote of his work. The
hundred different chapters of the _Janua_, and the hundred and fifty-one
chapters of the _Orbis Pictus_, were devoted to imparting information as
to all kinds of useful subjects. The following selections from the chapter
titles of the _Orbis Pictus_ illustrate how large a place the new
scientific studies occupied in his conception of the school:
The World Birds Weaving Philosophy
The Heavens Cattle Tailor Prudence
Fire Fish Barber Diligence
Wind Parts of Man Schoolmaster Temperance
Water Flesh and Bowels Shoemaker Fortitude
Clouds Chanels and Bones Carpenter Humanity
Earth Senses Potter Justice
Fruits Deformities Printing Consanguinity
Metals Husbandry Geometry A City
Trees Bees and Honey The Planets Merchandizing
Herbs Butchery Eclipses A Burial
Flowers Cookery Europe Religious Forms
The accompanying illustrations (Figs. 126, 127) reveal the nature of the
text-books he prepared. (See also R. 221 for four additional pages of
illustrations from the _Orbis Pictus_.)
[Illustration: FIG. 126. A SAMPLE PAGE FROM THE "ORBIS PICTUS"
The illustration and Latin text is from the first edition of 1658; the
English translation from the English edition of 1727.]
The success of these textbooks was immediate and very great. Within a
short time after the publication of the _Janua_ it had been translated
into Flemish, Bohemian, English, French, German, Greek, Hungarian,
Italian, Latin, Polish, Spanish, and Swedish, as well as into Arabic,
Mongolian, Russian, and Turkish. The _Orbis Pictus_ was an even greater
success. [8] It went through many editions, in many languages; stood
without a competitor in Europe for a hundred and fifteen years; and was
used as an introductory textbook for nearly two hundred years. An American
edition was brought out in New York City, as late as 1810.
[Illustration: FIG. 127. PART OF A PAGE FROM A LATIN-ENGLISH EDITION OF
THE "VESTIBULUM"]
Thousands of parents, who knew nothing of Comenius and cared nothing for
his educational ideas, bought the book for their children because they
found that they liked the pictures and learned the language easily from
it. [9]
PLACE AND INFLUENCE OF COMENIUS. Comenius stands in the history of
education in a position of commanding importance. He introduces the whole
modern conception of the educational process, and outlines many of the
modern movements for the improvement of educational procedure. What
Petrarch was to the revival of learning, what Wycliffe was to religious
thought, what Copernicus was to modern science, and what Bacon and
Descartes were to modern philosophy, Comenius was to educational practice
and thinking (R. 222). The germ of almost all eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century educational theory is to be found in his work, and he, more than
any one before him and for at least two centuries after him, made an
earnest effort to introduce the new science studies into the school. Far
more liberal than his Lutheran or Calvinistic or Anglican or Catholic
contemporaries, he planned his school for the education of youth in
religion and learning and to fit them for the needs of a modern world.
Unlike the textbooks of his time, and for more than a century afterward,
his were free from either sectarian bigotry or the intense and gloomy
atmosphere of the age.
Yet Comenius lived at an unfortunate period in the history of human
progress. The early part of the seventeenth century was not a time when an
enthusiastic and aggressive and liberal-minded reformer could expect much
of a hearing anywhere in western Europe. The shock of the contest into
which western Christendom had been plunged by the challenge of Luther had
been felt in every corner of Europe, and the culmination of a century of
warfare was then raging, with all the bitterness and brutality that a
religious motive develops. Christian Europe was too filled with an
atmosphere of suspicion and distrust and hatred to be in any mood to
consider reforms for the improvement of the education of mankind. As a
result the far-reaching changes in method formulated by Comenius made but
slight impression on his contemporaries; his attempt to introduce
scientific studies awakened suspicion, rather than interest; and the new
method which he formulated in his _Great Didactic_ was ignored and the
book itself was forgotten for centuries. His great influence on
educational progress was through the reform his textbooks worked in the
teaching of Latin, and the slow infiltration into the schools of the
scientific ideas they contained. As a result, many of the fundamentally
sound reforms for which he stood had to be worked out anew in the
nineteenth century. It is sad to contemplate how far our western world
might have been advanced in its educational organization and scientific
progress, by the close of the eighteenth century, had it been in a mood to
receive and utilize the reforms in aims and methods, and to accept the new
scientific subject-matter, proposed and worked out by this far-sighted
Moravian teacher. Religious bigotry has, in all lands and ages, proved
itself one of the most serious of all obstacles in the path of human
progress.
IV. REALISM AND THE SCHOOLS
THE VERNACULAR SCHOOLS. The ideas for which the realists just described
had stood were adopted in the people's schools but slowly, and came only
after long waiting. The final incorporation of science instruction into
elementary education did not come until the nineteenth century, and then
was an outgrowth of the reform work of Pestalozzi on the one hand, and the
new social, political, economic, and industrial forces of a modern world
on the other.
The Peace of Westphalia (1648), which closed a century of bitter and
vindictive religious warfare, was followed by another century of hatred,
suspicion, and narrow religious intolerance and reaction. All parties now
adopted an extremely conservative attitude in matters of religion and
education, and the protection of orthodoxy became the chief purpose of the
school. Reading, religion, a little counting and writing, and, in Teutonic
lands, music, came to constitute the curriculum of such elementary
vernacular schools as had come to exist, and the religious Primer and the
Bible became the great school textbooks. The people were poor, much of
Europe was impoverished and depopulated as a result of long-continued
religious strife, the common people still occupied a very low social
position, there were as yet no qualified teachers, and no need for general
education aside from religion. Still more, during more than a thousand
years the Church had established the tradition of providing free
education, and when the governing authorities of the States which turned
to Protestantism had taken from the Church both the opportunity to
continue the schools and the wealth with which to maintain them, they were
seldom willing to tax themselves to set up institutions to continue the
work formerly done gratis by the Church. In consequence, regardless of
Protestant educational theory as to the need for general education, but
little progress in providing vernacular schools was made during the whole
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Here and there in Teutonic lands, however, the new studies found an
occasional patron. In 1619 schools were organized for the little Duchy of
Weimar (p. 317) by a pupil of Ratke, and sense realism was given a place
in them. The schoolmaster, Andreas Reyher, who in 1642 drew up the _Schule
Methodus_ "the actual title of that book was 'Schulmethodus" for Duke
Ernest of Saxe-Gotha and Altenburg, was familiar with the work of both
Ratke and Comenius, and made provision for instruction in "the natural and
useful sciences" (R. 163) for Duke Ernest's children. Here and there a few
other attempts to provide schools and add instruction in the new _Realien_
were made. The number of such attempts was not large, but their work was
influential, and as a result vernacular schools and science instruction
finally became established among German-speaking peoples before they did
in any other land.
THE SECONDARY SCHOOLS. The influence of Milton's _Tractate_ on the non-
conformist Academies of England has been traced, and the transfer of the
idea of instruction in the new mathematical, scientific, literary,
historical, and political subjects to the new American Academies has been
mentioned. That these new studies also entered into the education of a
gentleman in England and France, under the private-tutor and the courtly-
academy system, and were copied from the French and constituted a large
part of the instruction organized for the _Ritterakademieen_ of the
numerous court cities in German lands, has also been mentioned. In both
England and France such private instruction exerted but little influence
on the existing Latin grammar schools, and in consequence the schools of
both countries remained largely unchanged in direction and purpose until
the second half of the nineteenth century. In German lands the
_Ritterakademieen_ idea experienced a further development, which proved to
be of large importance for the future of German education.
FRANCKE'S "INSTITUTIONS." With the introduction of French ideas and
training into the German courts, French skepticism in matters of religion
developed in the court circles. Under the influence of a pious Lutheran
clergyman, Philip Spener (1635-1705), who tried to emphasize religion as
an affair of the heart rather than the head; and especially as a result of
the work of his spiritual successor, Augustus Hermann Francke, a movement
arose in German lands, during the closing years of the seventeenth
century, which became known as _Pietism_. [10] Disgusted with the lifeless
and insincere religion of the time, these two strove to substitute a
religion of both head and heart. In 1695, moved by pity for the poor,
Francke established at Halle the first of his famous "Institutions,"--a
school for poor children. A pay school for the well-to-do was soon added,
and soon another school for the children of nobility. An orphan school
also was in time provided. The school for the poor developed into a
vernacular or _Burgher_ (_volks_; peoples) school; the school for the pay
pupils into a Latin School, or _Gymnasium_; and the school for nobles into
a higher scientific school, or _Pädagogium_ as it was called. At first
Francke encountered some theological opposition, but the "Institutions"
prospered, and at the time of his death contained over 2200 pupils, and
over 300 teachers, workers, and attendants.
[Illustration: FIG. 128. AUGUSTUS HERMANN FRANCKE (1663-1727)]
The interesting thing about Francke's work was the courses of instruction
he provided for his schools. [11] In the Burgher School he gave the
children instruction in history, geography, and animal life, in addition
to the reading, writing, counting, music, and religion of the usual German
vernacular school. Into the _Gymnasium_ he introduced instruction in
history, geography, music, science, and mathematics, in addition to the
usual Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. He also changed the purpose of the
language instruction. Greek was studied to be able to read the New
Testament in the original, and Hebrew better to understand the Old. The
_Pädagogium_ was provided with a botanical garden, a cabinet of natural
history, physical apparatus, a laboratory for the study of chemistry and
anatomy, and a workshop for turning and glass-cutting. Independent of the
work of Comenius, but as an outgrowth of the new movement for the study of
science now beginning to influence educational thought, we have here the
most important attempt at the introduction into the school of sense
realism, or _Realien_, as the Germans say, that the modern world had so
far witnessed. In 1697 Francke added a _Seminarium Praeceptorium_, to
train teachers in his new ideas. This was the first teachers' training-
school in German lands, and the teachers he trained served to scatter his
educational ideas over the German States. [12]
THE FIRST REALSCHULE. Associated with Francke as a teacher was one
Christopher Semler (1669-1740), who became deeply interested in the new
studies of the secondary school. In 1706 Semler had submitted a plan to
the government of Magdeburg for the teaching of the practical studies.
This was referred to the Berlin Society of Sciences, which approved the
plan, and later elected Semler to membership in the Society. For years
Semler continued as a teacher at Halle, but without carrying the idea far
enough to create a new type of school. In 1739 Semler published a paper
"Upon the Mathematical, Mechanical, and Agricultural Real School in the
City of Halle," in which he described the instruction given there. This
was probably the first use of the term "real school" (Realschule). The
important subjects described as taught, aside from religion, were "the
useful and in daily life wholly indispensable sciences," such as
mathematics, drawing, geography, history, natural history, agriculture,
and economics, with much emphasis on observation by the pupils.
The work at Halle soon stimulated complaints as to the existing Latin
schools, where children, destined for business or the service of the
State, were kept trying to learn Latin, "to the neglect of more practical
and more useful studies." The usefulness of the new real studies now began
to be more correctly estimated, and the conviction gradually grew that
those boys who were destined for trade--now a rapidly increasing number--
should not be obliged to follow the same course as those destined to be
scholars. In 1720 Rector Gesner, of the gymnasium at Rotenburg, wrote,
rather sarcastically:
The one class, who will not study, but will become tradesmen,
merchants, or soldiers, must be instructed in writing, arithmetic,
writing letters, geography, description of the world, and history. The
other class may be trained for studying.
In 1742 the Rector at Dresden, Schöttgen, issued a "Humble proposal for
the special class in public city schools" to provide for those children
"who are to remain without (that is, cannot learn) Latin." Instead of
forcing them to attempt to learn Donatus, which he said was useless for
them, he urged that a special class (school) be organized to train them to
become useful merchants, artists, and mechanics. In 1751 Rector Henzky, of
Prenzlau, issued a treatise to show "That Real schools can and must become
common." In 1756 Gesner, professor at the new University of Göttingen, in
a pamphlet "On the organization of a gymnasium" (R. 223), urged that there
were three classes of youths for whom schools should be provided, one of
which needed the _Realschule_.
In 1747 a clergyman by the name of Julius Hecker (1707-1768), who had been
a pupil in, and later had taught in Francke's "'Institutions," went to
Berlin and opened there the first distinct German _Realschule_. In this
school Hecker provided instruction in religion, ethics, German, French,
Latin, mathematics, drawing, history, geography, mechanics, architecture,
and a knowledge of nature and of the human body. Classes were organized in
architecture, agriculture, bookkeeping, manufacturing, and mining. The
school prospered from the first, and in time became the "Royal
_Realschule_" of Berlin. In answer to a growing demand for advanced
education for that constantly increasing number of youths destined for the
trades or a mercantile career, the _realschule_ idea was copied in a
number of the important cities of Germany. Thus early--a century in
advance of other nations, and a century and a quarter ahead of the United
States--did Prussia lay the foundations of that scientific and technical
education which, later on, did so much toward creating modern industrial
Germany.
THE UNIVERSITIES AND THE NEW SCIENTIFIC LEARNING. Though the theological
persecution of scientific workers largely died out after about the middle
of the seventeenth century, and was never much of a factor in lands which
had embraced some form of Protestantism, the new sciences nevertheless
made but little headway in the universities until after the beginning of
the eighteenth century. Up to the close of the seventeenth century the
universities in all lands continued to be dominated by their theological
faculties, and instruction still remained largely encompassed by
mediaevalism. England represents perhaps the most notable exception to
this statement, scientific studies having been received with greater
tolerance by the universities there than in other lands. In both Catholic
and Protestant lands the need was felt for orthodox training, through fear
of further heresy, and many petty restrictions were thrown about study and
teaching which were stifling to free thinking and investigation. Each
little Kingdom or State now took over the supervision of some old
university within its borders, or established a new one, that it might
more completely control orthodoxy and prepare its own civil servants. Of
the seventeenth century, Paulsen [13] well says:
It was essentially the period of the territorial-confessional
university, and is characterized by a preponderance of theological-
confessional interest.... Many new foundations, both Catholic and
Protestant, now appeared. The chief impetus leading to these numerous
foundations was the accentuation of the principle of territorial
sovereignty, from the ecclesiastical as well as the political point of
view. The consequence was that the universities began to be
_instrumentia denominationis_ of the government as professional
schools for its ecclesiastical and secular officials. Each individual
government endeavored to secure its own university in order--(1) to
make sure of wholesome instruction, which meant, of course,
instruction in harmony with the confessional standards of its
established church; (2) to retain training of its secular officials in
its own hands; and finally (3) render attendance at foreign
universities unnecessary on the part of its subjects, and thus keep
the money in the country.
Large amounts of money were not needed to establish a new university. A
few thousand guilders or thalers sufficed for the salaries of ten or
fifteen professors, a couple of preachers and physicians would undertake
the theological and medical lectures, and some old monastery would supply
the needed buildings.
After the Reformation the law faculty increased to the place of first
importance in Protestant lands, because the Reformation had created a new
demand for judges and higher court officials to replace the rule of the
clergy. The medical faculty continued to be, as in the mediaeval
universities, the smallest of all the faculties and amounted to little
before the nineteenth century. [14] The arts faculty, or philosophical as
it came to be termed in German lands, offered lectures in Latin, Greek,
and Hebrew, and a general course in philosophy, but the Aristotelian texts
and to some extent mediaeval methods in instruction continued to be used
until the beginning of the eighteenth century.
Here and there some professor "read" on mathematics, and in Protestant
lands on the new astronomy, and the study of botany began as the study of
herbs in the medical faculty, [15] but during the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries few professors or students were interested in the
scientific subjects. By 1675 Bacon's _Novum Organum_ had begun to be
taught at both Oxford and Cambridge, and by 1700 the Newtonian physics had
begun to displace Aristotle at Oxford. By 1740 it was well established
there. At first instruction in the new subjects was offered as an extra
and for a fee by men not having professional rank (R. 224), and later the
instruction was given full recognition by the university. By 1700
Cambridge had become a center for mathematical study (R. 225), and with
the growth in popularity of the Newtonian philosophy, mathematical studies
there took the place held by logic in the mediaeval university. Cambridge
has ever since remained a center for mathematical and, since the beginning
of the nineteenth century, for scientific studies as well. Between 1680
and 1700 the University of Paris was reformed, and the mathematical and
philosophical studies of Descartes (p. 394) began to be taught there. The
universities of the Netherlands began to teach the new mathematical and
scientific studies even earlier.
Aside from the above described _Realschule_ development, the new
scientific movement for a time largely passed over German lands, and in
consequence the German universities remained unreformed until the
eighteenth century. During the seventeenth century they sank to their
lowest intellectual level. In 1694, largely in protest against the
narrowness of the old universities, the new University of Halle was
founded. It received into its faculty certain forward-looking men who had
been driven from the old universities, [16] and is generally considered as
the first modern university. The new scientific and mathematical subjects
and a reformed philosophy were introduced; the instruction in Greek and
Latin was reformed; German was made the medium of classroom instruction;
and a scientific magazine in German was begun. In 1737 the University of
Göttingen became a second center of modern influence, and from these two
institutions the new scientific spirit gradually spread to all the
Protestant universities of German lands. A century later they were the
leading universities of the world.
THE TRANSITION NOW PRACTICALLY COMPLETE. From the time Petrarch made his
first "find" at Liège (1333), in the form of two previously unknown
orations of Cicero (p. 244), to the publication of the _Principia_ (p.
388) of Newton (1687), is a period of approximately three and a half
centuries. During these three and a half centuries a complete
transformation of world-life had been effected, and the mediaeval man,
with his eyes on the past, had given place to the modern man with his eyes
on the future. During these three and a half centuries revolutionary
forces had been at work in the world of ideas, and the transition from
mediaeval to modern attitudes had been accomplished. From 1333 to 1433 was
the century of "literary finds," and during this period the monastic
treasures were brought to light and edited and the classical literature of
Rome restored. Greek also was restored to the western world, and a
reformed Latin, Greek, and Hebrew were given the place of first importance
in the new humanistic school. The invention of printing took place in
1423; 1456 witnessed the appearance of the first printed book, and the
perfection of the new means for the multiplication of books and the
dissemination of ideas. Before 1500 the great era of geographical
discovery had been inaugurated; a sea-route to India was found in 1487;
and a new continent in 1492. In 1519-22 Magellan's ships rounded the
world.
In 1517 Luther issued the challenge, the shock of which was felt in every
corner of Christian Europe, and within a half-century much of northern and
western Europe had been lost to the original Roman Church. Soon
independence in thinking had been extended to the problem of the
organization of the universe, and in 1543 Copernicus issued the book that
clearly marks the beginning of modern scientific thinking and inquiry.
Bacon had done his organizing work by 1620, and Newton's _Principia_
(1687) finally established modern scientific thought and work. Comenius
died in 1671, his great organizing work done, and his textbooks, with
their many new educational ideas, in use all over Europe. The mediaeval
attitude still continued in religion and government, but the world as a
whole had left mediaeval attitudes behind it, and was facing the future of
modern world organization and life. To the educational organization of
this modern world we now turn, though before doing so we shall try to
present a cross-section, as it were, of the development in educational
theory and practice which had been attained by about the middle of the
eighteenth century.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Explain why the scholars of the time were so intent on producing a new
race of Roman youths for a revived Latin scholarly world.
2. Show that a reaction against humanism was certain to arise, and why.
3. How do you explain the very small influence exerted on the Latin
grammar schools of England by the non-conformist Academies, after they had
been absorbed into the existing English non-state system of higher
schools?
4. Compare Milton and Montaigne.
5. What would be the most probable effect on education of the erection of
the polished-man-of-the-world ideal?
6. Enumerate the forces favoring and opposing the change of the language
of instruction from Latin to the vernacular.
7. How many of the thirteen principles of the Innovators do we still hold
to be valid?
8. Just what was new in the nine fundamental rules laid down by Ratke, in
his _Methodus Nova_?
9. What is your estimate of the vernacular schools as outlined by
Comenius? Of the plans for a gymnasium at Saros-Patak?
10. Compare Comenius' Latin school with the College of Calvin.
11. State the new ideas in instruction embodied in the textbooks of
Comenius.
12. Show that Comenius dominates modern educational ideas, even though his
work was largely lost, in the same way that Petrarch or Wyclifle or
Copernicus do modern work in their fields.
13. Explain the very slow development of vernacular schools after the
Protestant Revolts.
14. Why would the introduction of real studies into them be especially
slow?
15. What explanation can you offer for the much earlier beginnings in
scientific instruction in German lands than in England or America, when
much more of the important early scientific work was done by Englishmen
than by Germans? and the failure of science for a time to find a home in
the German universities?
16. Explain the continued dominance of the theological faculty in the
universities of the seventeenth century.
SELECTED READINGS
In the accompanying _Book of Readings_ the following illustrative
selections are reproduced:
210. Rabelais: On the Nature of Education.
211. Milton: The Aim and Purpose of Education.
212. Milton: His Program for Study.
213. Adamson: Discontent of the Nobility with the Schools.
214. Montaigne: Ridicule of the Humanistic Pedants.
215. Montaigne: His Conception of Education.
216. Locke: Extracts from his Thoughts on Education.
217. Locke: Plan for Working Schools for Poor Children.
218. Comenius: Title-Page of the _Great Didactic_.
219. Comenius: Contents of the _Great Didactic_.
220. Comenius: Plan for the Gymnasium at Saros-Patak.
221. Comenius: Sample pages from the _Orbis Pictus_.
(a) A page from a Latin-German edition of 1740.
(b) Two pages from a Latin-English edition of 1727.
(c) A page from the New York edition of 1810.
222. Butler: Place of Comenius in the History of Education.
223. Gesner: Need for _Realschulen_ for the New Classes to be
Educated.
224. Handbill: How the Scientific Studies began at Cambridge.
225. Green: Cambridge Scheme of Study of 1707.
QUESTIONS ON THE READINGS
1. Show that Rabelais was in close sympathy with the best of the new
humanists of his age.
2. Would Milton's definition of the purpose of education be true, still?
3. Show from Milton's program of studies that he represents a transition
type, and also that his program contains the nucleus of the more modern
studies of the secondary school.
4. Explain the discontent of the nobility with the existing Church
schools.
5. Assuming Montaigne's description of the education of his time to be
true, explain why this might naturally be the case.
6. Just what kind of an education does Montaigne outline, and how great a
reaction was this from existing conditions?
7. In how far would Locke's ideas still apply to the education of a boy of
the leisure class?
8. Show that Locke's plan for work-house schools was in thorough accord
with English post-Reformation ideas as to the duty of the State in matters
of education, and also that it contained the beginnings of the pauper-
school idea of education which we later had to combat.
9. From the title-page and the table of contents (219) of Comenius' _Great
Didactic_, point out the originality and novelty of his ideas.
10. Compare Comenius' plan for the Saros-Patak _Gymnasium_ with such
schools as Sturm's, the college of Guyenne, the college of Calvin, and the
Jesuits.
11. Compare Comenius' plan (220) with the instruction in an American high
school of seventy-five years ago.
12. Compare the Alphabet page of Comenius' _Orbis Pictus_ with the same
page in the New England Primer.
13. When so many educational reforms were inaugurated so early by
Comenius, explain their neglect, and our having to work them out anew in
the nineteenth century.
14. What does the need for _Realschulen_ indicate as to the evolution of
German society and the recuperation from the ravages of war?
15. Compare the beginnings of scientific study at Cambridge with
beginnings of new subjects to-day in our schools.
16. Just what does the Cambridge Scheme of Study indicate as being taught
there?
SUPPLEMENTARY REFERENCES
* Adamson, J. W. _Pioneers of Modern Education, 1600-1700_.
Barnard, Henry. _German Teachers and Educators_.
* Butler, N. M. "The Place of Comenius in the History of Education": in
_Proc. N. E. A._, 1892, pp. 723-28.
Browning, Oscar, Editor. _Milton's Tractate on Education_.
* Comenius, J. A. _Orbis Pictus_ (Bardeen; Syracuse).
Hanus, Paul H. "The Permanent Influence of Comenius"; in _Educational
Review_, vol. 3, pp. 226-36 (March, 1892).
Laurie, S. S. _History of Educational Opinion since the
Renaissance_.
* Laurie, S. S. _John Amos Comenius_.
Quick, R. H., Editor. _Locke's Thoughts on Education_.
* Quick, R. H. _Essays on Educational Reformers_.
* Vostrovsky, Clara. "A European School of the Time of Comenius (Prague,
1609)"; in _Education_, vol. 17, pp. 356-60 (February, 1897.)
Wordsworth, Christopher. _Scholae Academicae; Studies at the English
Universities in the Eighteenth Century_.
CHAPTER XVIII
THEORY AND PRACTICE BY THE MIDDLE OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
We have now reached, in our history of the transition age which began with
the Revival of Learning--the great events of which were the recovery of
the ancient learning, the rediscovery of the historic past, the
reawakening of scholarship, and the rise of religious and scientific
inquiry--the end of the transition period, and we are now ready to pass to
a study of the development and progress of education in modern times.
Before doing so, however, we desire to gather up and state the progress in
both educational theory and practice which had been attained by the end of
this transition period, and to present, as it were, a cross-section of
education at about the middle of the eighteenth century. To do this, then,
before passing to a consideration of educational development in modern
times, will be the purpose of this chapter. We shall first review the
progress made in evolving a theory as to the educational purpose, and then
present a cross-section view of the schools of the time under
consideration.
I. PRE-EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY EDUCATIONAL THEORIES
THE STATE PURPOSE OF THE GREEKS AND ROMANS. As we saw, early in our study
of the rise and progress of the education of peoples, the City-States of
Greece were the first consciously to evolve a systematic plan of schooling
and a prolonged course of training for those who were to guide and direct
the State. In Sparta the training was almost wholly for military
efficiency and tribal safety, but in Athens we found a people using a
well-worked-out system of training to develop individual initiative,
advance civilization, and promote the welfare of the State. The education
provided was for but a class, to be sure, and a small ruling class at
that, but it was the first evidence of the new western, individualistic,
and democratic spirit expressing itself in the education of the young.
There also we found, for the first time, the thinkers of the State deeply
concerned with the education of the youth of the State, and viewing
education as a necessity to make life worth living and to secure the State
from dangers, both without and within. The training there given produced
wonderful results, and for two centuries the men educated by it ably
guided the destinies of Athens.
The essentials of this Greek training were later embodied in the private-
adventure school system that arose in Rome, which was adapted to
conditions and needs there, and which was used for the training of a few
Roman youths of the wealthier families for a political career. Schooling
at Rome, though, never attained the importance or rendered the service
that characterized education at Athens, and never became an instrument of
the State used consciously for State ends. One Roman writer, Quintilian,
as we have seen (R. 25), worked out a careful statement of the whole
process of educating a youth for a public career, and this, the first
practical treatise on education, was for long highly prized as the best-
written statement of the educational art.
THE FUTURE-LIFE CONCEPTION OF THE CHRISTIANS. With the decline of Roman
power and influence, and the victory of Christianity throughout the Roman
world, the State conception of education was entirely lost to western
Europe, and more than a thousand years elapsed before it again arose in
the western world. The Church now became the State, and the need for any
education for secular life almost entirely passed away. For centuries the
aim was almost entirely a preparation for life in the world to come.
Throughout all the early Middle Ages this attitude continued, supplemented
only by the meager education of a few to carry on the work of the Church
here below.
After the tenth century we noted the rise of some more or less independent
study in some of the monastery and cathedral schools, and after the
twelfth century the rise of _studia generalia_ marked the congregation
into groups of the few interested in a studious life. These in turn gave
rise to the university foundations, and to the beginning of independent
and secular study once more in the western world. The Revival of Learning,
the recovery of the ancient manuscripts, the revival of the study of Greek
in the West, the founding of libraries, the invention of paper and
printing, and the revival of trade and commerce--all were new forces
tending to give a new direction to scholarly study, and as a result a new
race of scholars, more or less independent of the Church, now arose in
western Europe. They were, however, a class, and a very small class at
that, and though the result of their work was the creation of a new
humanistic secondary school, this still ministered to the needs of but a
few. This few was intended either for the service of the Church, for the
governmental service of the towns which had by this time attained their
independence, or for the governments of the rising principalities or
states.
For the great mass of the people, whose purpose in life was to work and
believe and obey, agriculture, warfare, the rising trades with their
guilds (p. 209), and the services of the Church constituted almost all in
the way of education which they ever received. To be useful to his
overlord and master here and to be saved hereafter were the chief life-
purposes of the common man. The former he must himself undertake in order
to be able to live at all; the latter the Church undertook to supply to
those who followed her teachings.
THE RISE OF THE VERNACULAR RELIGIOUS SCHOOL. For the first time in
history, if we except the schools of the early Christian period, the
Protestant Revolts created a demand for some form of an elementary
religious school for all. The Protestant theory as to personal _versus_
collective salvation involved as a consequence the idea of the education
of all in the essentials of the Christian faith and doctrine. The aim was
the same as before--personal salvation--but the method was now changed
from that of the Church as intermediary to personal knowledge and faith
and effort. To be saved, one must know something of the Word of God, and
this necessitated instruction. To this end, in theory at least, schools
had to be established to educate the young for membership in the new type
of Church relationship. Reading the vernacular, a little counting and
writing, in Teutonic countries a little music, and careful instruction in
a religious Primer (R. 202), the Catechism, and the Bible, now came to
constitute the subject matter of a new vernacular school for the children
of Protestants, and to a certain extent in time for the children of
Catholics as well. As we pointed out earlier (p. 353), between this new
type of school for religious ends and the older Latin grammar school for
scholarly purposes there was almost no relationship, and the two developed
wholly independently of one another. In the Latin grammar schools one
studied to become a scholar and a leader in the political or
ecclesiastical world; in the vernacular religious school one learned to
read that he might be able to read the Catechism and the Bible, and to
know the will of the Heavenly Father. There was scarcely any other purpose
to the maintenance of the elementary vernacular schools. This condition
continued until well into the eighteenth century.
[Illustration: FIG. 129. A FRENCH SCHOOL BEFORE THE REVOLUTION
(After an etching by Boisseau, 1730-1809)]
EARLY UNSUCCESSFUL EDUCATIONAL REFORMERS. Back in the seventeenth century,
as we have pointed out in the preceding chapter, a very earnest effort was
made by Ratke and Comenius to introduce a larger conception of the
educational process into the elementary vernacular school, to eliminate
the gloomy religious material from the textbooks, to substitute a human-
welfare purpose for the exclusively life-beyond view, and to transform the
school into an institution for imparting both learning and religion.
Comenius in particular hoped to make of the new elementary religious
school a potent instrument for human progress by introducing new subject-
matter, and by formulating laws and developing methods for its work which
would be in harmony with the new scientific procedure so well stated by
Francis Bacon. Comenius stands as the commanding figure in seventeenth-
century pedagogical thought. He reasoned out and introduced us to the
whole modern conception of the educational process and purpose, and gave
to the school of the people a solid theoretical and practical basis.
Living, though, at an unfortunate period in human history, he was able to
awaken little interest either in rational teaching-method or in reforms
looking to the advancement of the welfare of mankind. Instead he roused
suspicion and distrust by the innovations and progressive reforms he
proposed; his now-celebrated book on teaching method (Rs. 218, 219) was
not at the time understood and was for long forgotten, while the
fundamentally sound ideas and pedagogical reforms which he proposed and
introduced were lost amid the hatreds of his time, and had to be worked
out again and reëstablished in a later and a more tolerant age.
Another unsuccessful reformer of some importance, and one whose work
antedated that of both Ratke and Comenius, was the London schoolmaster,
Richard Mulcaster (1531-1611), for twenty-five years headmaster of the
famous Merchant Taylors' School, and later Master of Saint Paul's School.
In 1581 he issued his _Positions_, a pedagogical work so far in advance of
his time, and written in such a heavy and affected style, that it passed
almost unnoticed in England, and did not become known at all in other
lands. Yet the things he stood for became the fundamental ideas of
nineteenth-century educational thought. These were:
1. That the end and aim of education is to develop the body and the
faculties of the mind, and to help nature to perfection.
2. That all teaching processes should be adapted to the pupil taught.
3. That the first stage in learning is of large importance, and
requires high skill on the part of the teacher.
4. That the thing to be learned is of less importance than the pupil
learning.
5. That proper brain development demands that pressure and one-sided
education alike be avoided.
6. That the mother tongue should be taught first and well, and should
be the language of the school from six to twelve.
7. That music and drawing should be taught.
8. That reading and writing at least should be the common right of
all, and that girls should be given equal opportunity with boys.
9. That training colleges for teachers should be established and
maintained.
The modern nature of many of Mulcaster's proposals may be seen from the
table of contents of his volume (R. 226). Mulcaster, like Comenius,
thought far in advance of his age, and in consequence his book was soon
and for long forgotten. Yet what Quick [1] says of him is very true:
It would have been a vast gain to all Europe if Mulcaster had been
followed instead of Sturm. He was one of the earliest advocates of the
use of the vernacular instead of Latin, and good reading and writing
in English were to be secured before Latin was begun. His elementary
course included five things: English reading, English writing,
drawing, singing, playing a musical instrument. If this were made to
occupy the school time up to twelve, Mulcaster held that more would be
done between twelve and sixteen than between seven and seventeen in
the ordinary (Latin grammar school) way. There would be a further gain
in that the children would not be set against learning.
John Locke, and the disciplinary theory of education. Another commanding
figure in seventeenth-century pedagogical thought was the English scholar,
philosopher, teacher, physician, and political writer, John Locke (1632-
1704). In the preceding chapter we pointed out the place of Locke as a
writer on the education of the sons of the English gentry, and illustrated
by an extract from his _Thoughts_ (R. 216) the importance he placed on
such a practical type of education as would prepare a gentleman's son for
the social and political demands of a world fast becoming modern. Locke's
place in the history of education, though, is of much more importance than
was there (p. 402) indicated. Locke was essentially the founder of modern
psychology, based on the application of the methods of modern scientific
investigation to a study of the mind, [2] and he is also of importance in
the history of educational thought as having set forth, at some length and
with much detail, the disciplinary conception of the educational process.
Locke had served as a tutor in an English nobleman's family, had worked
out his educational theories in practice and thought them through as mind
processes, and had become thoroughly convinced that it was the process of
learning that was important, rather than the thing learned. Education to
him was a process of disciplining the body, fixing good habits, training
the youth in moral situations, and training the mind through work with
studies selected because of their disciplinary value. This conception of
education he sets forth well in the following paragraph, taken from his
_Thoughts:_
The great Work of the Governor is to fashion the Carriage and form the
Mind; to settle in his Pupils good Habits and the Principles of Virtue
and Wisdom; to give him by little and little a View of Mankind, and
work him into a Love and Imitation of what is excellent and
praiseworthy; and in the Prosecution of it, to give him Vigor,
Activity, and Industry. The Studies which he sets him upon, are but as
it were the Exercise of his Faculties, and Employment of his Time, to
keep him from Sauntering and Idleness, to teach him Application, and
accustom him to take Pains, and to give him some little Taste of what
his own Industry must perfect (§94).
In his _Thoughts_ Locke first sets forth at length the necessity for
disciplining the body by means of diet, exercise, and the hardening
process. "A sound mind in a sound body" he conceives to be "a short but
full description of a happy state in this world," and a fundamental basis
for morality and learning. The formation of good habits and manners
through proper training, and the proper adjustment of punishments and
rewards next occupies his attention, and he then explains his theory as to
making all punishments the natural consequences of acts. Similarly the
mind, as the body, must be disciplined to virtue by training the child to
deny, subordinate desires, and apply reason to acts. The formation of good
habits and the disciplining of the desires Locke regards as the
foundations of virtue. On this point he says:
As the Strength of the Body lies chiefly in being able to endure
Hardship, so also does that of the Mind. And the great Principle and
Foundation of all Virtue and Worth is plac'd in this:--That a Man is
able to _deny himself_ his own Desires, cross his own
Inclinations, and purely follow what Reason directs as best, tho' the
Appetite lean the other Way (§ 33).
Similarly, in intellectual education, good thinking and the employment of
reason is the aim, and these, too, must be attained through the proper
discipline of the mind. Good intellectual education does not consist
merely in studying and learning, he contends, as was the common practice
in the grammar schools of his time, but must be achieved by a proper
drilling of the powers of the mind through the use of selected studies.
The purpose of education, he holds, is above all else to make man a
reasoning creature. Nothing, in his judgment, trains to reason closely so
well as the study of mathematics, though Locke would have his boy "look
into all sorts of knowledge," and train his understanding with a wide
variety of exercises. In the education given in the grammar schools of his
time he found much that seemed to him wasteful of time and thoroughly bad
in principle, and he used much space to point out defects and describe
better methods of teaching and management, giving in some detail reasons
therefor. His ideas as to needed reforms in the teaching of Latin (R. 227)
are illustrative.
LOCKE ON ELEMENTARY EDUCATION. For the beginnings of education, and for
elementary education in general, Locke sticks close to the prevailing
religious conception of his time. As for the education of the common
people, he writes:
The knowledge of the Bible and the business of his own calling is
enough for the ordinary man; a Gentleman ought to go further.
Continuing regarding the beginnings of education and the studies and
textbooks of his day, he says:
The Lord's Prayer, the Creeds, and the Ten Commandments, 't is
necessary he should learn perfectly by heart.... What other Books
there are in _English_ of the Kind of those above-mentioned
(besides the Primer) fit to engage the Liking of Children, and tempt
them to _read_, I do not know;... and nothing that I know has
been considered of this Kind out of the ordinary Road of the Horn
Book, Primer, Psalter, Testament, and Bible (§ 157).
Locke does, however, give some very sensible suggestions as to the reading
of the Bible (R. 228), the imparting of religious ideas to children, and
the desirability of transforming instruction so as to make it pleasant and
agreeable, with plenty of natural playful activity. [3] On this point he
writes:
He that has found a Way how to keep up a Child's Spirit easy, active,
and free, and yet at the same time to restrain him from many Things he
has a Mind to, and to draw him to Things that are uneasy to him; he, I
say, that knows how to reconcile these seeming Contradictions, has, in
my Opinion, got the true Secret of Education (§ 46).
INFLUENCE OF LOCKE'S _THOUGHTS_. The volume by Locke contains much that is
sensible in the matter of educating a boy. The emphasis on habit
formation, reasoning, physical activities and play, the individuality of
children, and a reformed method in teaching are its strong points. The
thoroughly modern character of the book, in most respects, is one of its
marked characteristics. The volume seems to have been much read by middle
and upper-class Englishmen, and copies of it have been found in so many
old colonial collections that it was probably well known among early
eighteenth-century American colonists. That the book had an important
influence on the attitude of the higher social classes of England toward
the education of their sons and, consciously or unconsciously, in time
helped to redirect the teaching in that most characteristic of English
educational institutions, the English Public (Latin Grammar) School, seems
to be fairly clear. On elementary religious and charity-school education
it had practically no influence.
Locke's great influence on educational thought did not come, though, for
nearly three quarters of a century afterward, and it came then through the
popularization of his best ideas by Rousseau. Karl Schmidt [4] well says
of his work:
Locke is a thorough Englishman, and the principle underlying his education
is the principle according to which the English people have developed.
Hence his theory of education has in the history of pedagogy the same
value that the English nation has in the history of the world. He stood in
strong opposition to the scholastic and formalized education current in
his time, a living protest against the prevailing pedantry; in the
universal development of pedagogy he gives impulse to the movement which
grounds education upon sound psychological principles, and lays stress
upon breeding and the formation of character.
Restating and expanding the leading ideas of Locke in his _Emile_ (chapter
XXI), and putting them into far more attractive literary form, Rousseau
scattered Locke's ideas as to educational reform over Europe. In
particular Rousseau popularized Locke's ideas as to the replacement of
authority by reason and investigation, his emphasis on physical activity
and health, his contention that the education of children should be along
lines that were natural and normal for children, and above all Locke's
plea for education through the senses rather than the memory. In so
popularizing Locke's ideas, and at a time when all the political
tendencies of the period were in the direction of the rejection of
authority and the emphasis of the individual, those educational reformers
who were inspired by the writings of Rousseau created and applied, largely
on the foundations laid down by John Locke, a new theory as to educational
aims and procedure which dominated all early nineteenth-century
instruction. This we shall trace further in a subsequent chapter (chapter
XXI).
It was at this point that the educational problem stood, in so far as a
theory as to educational aims and the educational process was concerned,
when Rousseau took it up (1762). Before passing to a consideration of his
work, though, and the work of those inspired by him and by the French
revolutionary writers and statesmen, let us close this third part of our
history by a brief survey of the development so far attained, the purpose,
character, aims, and nature of instruction in the schools, and their means
of support and control at about the middle of the century in which
Rousseau wrote, and before the philosophical and political revolutions of
the latter half of the eighteenth century had begun to influence
educational aims and procedure and control.
II. MID-EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY EDUCATIONAL CONDITIONS
THE PURPOSE. The purpose of maintaining the elementary vernacular school,
in all European lands, remained at the middle of the eighteenth century
much as it was a century before, though in the German States and in the
American Colonies there was a noticeable shifting of emphasis from the
older exclusively religious purpose toward a newer conception of education
as preparation for life in the world here. Still, one learned to read
chiefly "to learn some orthodox Catechism," "to read fluently in the New
Testament," and to know the will of God, or, as stated in the law of the
Connecticut Colony (R. 193), "in some competent measure to understand the
main grounds and principles of Christian religion necessary to salvation."
The teacher was still carefully looked after as to his "soundness in the
faith" (R. 238 a); he was required "to catechise his scholars in the
principles of the Christian religion," and "to commend his labors amongst
them unto God by prayer morning and evening, [5] taking care that his
scholars do reverently attend during the same." The minister in
practically all lands examined the children as to their knowledge of the
Catechism and the Bible, and on his visits quizzed them as to the Sunday
sermon. In Boston (1710) the ministers were required, on their school
visits, to pray with the pupils, and "to entertain them with some
instructions of piety adapted to their age." In Church-of-England schools
"the End and Chief Design" of the schools established continued to be
instruction in "the Knowledge and Practice of the Christian Religion as
Professed and Taught in the Church of England" (R. 238 b). In German lands
the elementary vernacular school was still regarded as "the portico of the
Temple," "Christianity its principal work," and not as "mere
establishments preparatory to public life, but be pervaded by the
religious spirit." [6] The uniform system of public schools ordered
established for Prussia by Frederick the Great, in 1763, were after all
little more than religious schools (R. 274), conducted for purposes of
both Church and State. As Frederick expressed it, "we find it necessary
and wholesome to have a good foundation laid in the schools by a rational
and a Christian education of the young for the fear of God, and other
useful ends." In the schools of La Salle's organization, which was most
prominent in elementary vernacular education in Catholic France, the aim
continued to be (R. 182) "to teach them to live honestly and uprightly, by
instructing them in the principles of our holy religion and by teaching
them Christian precepts."
WEAKENING OF THE OLD RELIGIOUS THEORY. By the middle of the eighteenth
century, however, there is a noticeable weakening of the hold of the old
religious theory on the schools in most Protestant lands. In England there
was a marked relaxation of the old religious intolerance in educational
matters as the century proceeded, and new textbooks, embodying but little
of the old gloomy religious material, appeared and began to be used. By a
series of decisions, between 1670 and 1701 (chapter XXIV), the English
courts broke the hold of the bishops in the matter of the licensing of
elementary schoolmasters, and by the Acts of 1713 and 1714 the Dissenters
were once more allowed to conduct schools of their own. Coincident with
this growth of religious tolerance among the English we find the Church of
England redoubling its efforts to hold the children of its adherents, by
the organization of parish schools and the creation of a vast system of
charitable religious schools. In German lands, too, a marked shifting of
emphasis away from solely religious ends and toward the needs of the
government began, toward the end of the eighteenth century, to be evident.
In Würtemberg, which was somewhat typical of late eighteenth-century
action by other German States, a Circular of the General Synod, of
November 1787, declares the German schools to be "those nurseries in which
should be taught the true and genuine idea of the duties of men--created
with a reasoning soul toward God, government, their fellow-men, and
themselves, and also at least the first rudiments of useful and
indispensable knowledge."
It was in the American Colonies, though, that the waning of the old
religious interest was most notable. Due to rude frontier conditions, the
decline in force of the old religious-town governments, the diversity of
sects, the rise of new trade and civil interests, and the breakdown of
old-home connections, the hold on the people of the old religious
doctrines was weakened there earlier than in the old world. By 1750 the
change in religious thinking in America had become quite marked. As a
consequence many of the earlier parochial schools had died out, while in
the New England Colonies the colonial governments had been forced to
exercise an increasing state oversight of the elementary school to keep it
from dying out there as well.
STUDIES AND TEXTBOOKS. The studies of the elementary vernacular school
remained, throughout the whole of the eighteenth century, much as before,
namely, reading, a little writing and ciphering, some spelling, religion,
and in Teutonic countries a little music. La Salle (R. 182) had
prescribed, for the Catholic vernacular schools of France, instruction in
French, some. Latin, "orthography, arithmetic, the matins and vespers, le
Pater, l'Ave Maria, le Credo et le Confiteor, the Commandments, responses,
Catechism, duties of a Christian, and maxims and precepts drawn from the
Testament." The Catechism was to be taught one half-hour daily. The
schoolbooks in England in Locke's day, as he tells us (p. 435), were "the
Horn Book, Primer, Psalter, Testament, and Bible." These indicate merely a
religious vernacular school. The purpose stated for the English Church
charity-schools (R. 238 b), schools that attained to large importance in
England and the American Colonies during the eighteenth century, shows
them to have been, similarly, religious vernacular schools. The _School
Regulations_ which Frederick the Great promulgated for Prussia (1763),
fixed the textbooks to be used (R. 274, § 20), and indicate that the
instruction in Prussia was still restricted to reading, writing, religion,
singing, and a little arithmetic. In colonial America, Noah Webster's
description (R. 230) of the schools he attended in Connecticut, about
1764-70, shows that the studies and textbooks were "chiefly or wholly
Dilworth's Spelling Books, the Psalter, Testament, and Bible," with a
little writing and ciphering. A few words of description of these older
books may prove useful here.
[Illustration: FIG. 130. A HORN BOOK]
THE HORN BOOK. The Horn Book goes back to the close of the fifteenth
century, [7] and by the end of the sixteenth century was in common use
throughout England. Somewhat similar alphabet boards, lacking the handle,
were also used in Holland, France, and in German lands. This, a thin oak
board on which was pasted a printed slip, covered by translucent horn, was
the book from which children learned their letters and began to read, the
mastery of which usually required some time. Cowper thus describes this
little book:
Neatly secured from being soiled or torn
Beneath a pane of thin translucent horn,
A book (to please us at a tender age
'T is called a book, though but a single page)
Presents the prayer the Savior designed to teach,
Which children use, and parsons--when they preach.
The Horn Book was much used well into the eighteenth century, but its
reading matter was in time incorporated into the school Primer, now
evolved out of an earlier elementary religious manual.
THE PRIMER. Originally the child next passed to the Catechism and the
Bible, but about the middle of the seventeenth century the Primer began to
be used. The Primer in its original form was a simple manual of devotion
for the laity, compiled without any thought of its use in the schools. It
contained the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, the Ten Commandments, and a few of
the more commonly used prayers and psalms. [8] The Catechism soon was
added, and with the prefixing of the alphabet and a few syllables and
words it was transformed, as schools arose, into the first reading book
for children. There was at first no attempt at grading, illustration, or
the introduction of easy reading material. About the close of the
seventeenth century the illustrated Primer, with some attempt at grading
and some additional subject-matter, made its appearance, both in England
and America, and at once leaped into great popularity.
The idea possibly goes back to the _Orbis Pictus_ (1654) of Comenius (p.
413: R. 221), the first illustrated schoolbook ever written. The first
English Primer adapted to school use was _The Protestant Tutor_, a rather
rabid anti-Catholic work which appeared in London, about 1685. A later
edition of this contained the alphabet, some syllables and words, the
figures and letters, the list of the books of the Bible, an alphabet of
lessons, the Lord's Prayer, the Creed, the Ten Commandments, and a poem,
long famous, on the death of the martyr, John Rogers. [9] It was an
abridgement of this book which the same publisher brought out in Boston,
about 1690, under the name of _The New England Primer_ (R. 202). This at
once leaped into great popularity, and became the accepted reading book in
all the schools of the American Colonies except those under the Church of
England. For the next century and a quarter it was the chief school and
reading book in use among the Dissenters and Lutherans in America.
Schoolmasters drilled the children on the reading matter and the Catechism
it contained, and the people recited from it yearly in the churches. It
was also used for such spelling as was given. It was the first great
American textbook success, and was still in use in the Boston dame schools
as late as 1806. It was reprinted in England, and enjoyed a great sale
among Dissenters there. Its sales in America alone have been estimated at
least three million copies. The sale in Europe was also large. It was
followed in England by other Primers and other introductory reading books,
of which _The History of Genesis_ (1708), a series of simple stories
retold from the first book of the Bible, and _The Child's Weeks-Work_
(1712), containing proverbs, fables, conundrums, lessons on behavior, and
a short catechism, are types. Frederick the Great, in his list of required
textbooks for Prussian schools (R. 274, § 20), does not mention a Primer.
[Illustration: THE WESTMINSTER CATECHISM.
(A page from _The New England Primer_, natural size)]
THE CATECHISM. In all Protestant German lands the Shorter Catechism
prepared by Luther, or the later Heidelberg Catechism; in Calvinistic
lands the Catechism of Calvin; and in England and the American Colonies
the Westminster Catechism, [10] formed the backbone of the religious
instruction. Teachers drilled their pupils in these as thoroughly as on
any other subject, writing masters set as copies sentences from the book,
children were required to memorize the answers, and the doctrines
contained were emphasized by teacher and preacher so that the children
were saturated with the religious ideas set forth. No book except the
Bible did so much to form the character, and none so much to fix the
religious bias of the children. Almost equal importance was given to the
Catechism in Catholic lands (R. 182, §§ 21-22), though there supplemented
by more religious influences derived from the ceremonial of the Church.
[Illustration: FIG. 132. THOMAS DILWORTH (?-1780)
The most celebrated English textbook writer of his day.
(From the Frontispiece of his _Schoolmaster's Assistant_, 1740)]
SPELLERS. The next step forward, in the transition from the religious
Primer to secular reading matter for school children, came in the use of
the so-called Spellers. Probably the first of these was _The English
School-Master_ of Edmund Coote (R. 229), first issued in 1596. This gave
thirty-two pages to the alphabet and spelling; eighteen to a shorter
Catechism, prayers, and psalms; five to chronology; two to writing copies;
two to arithmetic; and twenty to a list of hard words, alphabetically
arranged and explained. As will be seen from this analysis of contents,
this was a schoolmaster's general manual and guide. After about 1740 such
books became very popular, due to the publication that year of Thomas
Dilworth's _A New Guide to the English Tongue_. This book contained, as
the title-page (R. 229) declared, selected lists of words with rules for
their pronunciation, a short treatise on grammar, a collection of fables
with illustrations for reading, some moral selections, and forms of prayer
for children. It became very popular in New as well as in old England, and
was followed by a long line of imitators, culminating in America in the
publication of Noah Webster's famous blue-backed _American Spelling Book_,
in 1783. This was after the plan of the English Dilworth, but was put in
better teaching form. It contained numerous graded lists of words, some
illustrations, a series of graded reading lessons, and was largely secular
in character. It at once superseded the expiring _New England Primer_ in
most of the American cities, and continued popular in the United States
for more than a hundred years. [11] It was the second great American
textbook success, and was followed by a long list of popular Spellers and
Readers, leading up to the excellent secular Readers of the present day.
[Illustration: FIG. 133. FRONTISPIECE TO NOAH WEBSTER'S "AMERICAN SPELLING
BOOK"
This is from the 1827 edition, reduced one third in size.]
ARITHMETIC AND WRITING. The first English Arithmetic, published about 1540
to 1542, has been entirely lost, and was probably read by few. The first
to attain any popularity was _Cocker's Arithmetic_ (1677), this "Being a
Plain and Familiar Method suitable to the meanest Capacity, for the
understanding of that incomparable. Art." A still more popular book was
_Arithmetick: or that Necessary Art Made Most Easie_, by J. Hodder,
Writing Master, a reprint of which appeared in Boston, in 1719. The first
book written by an American author was Isaac Greenwood's _Arithmetick,
Vulgar and Decimal_, which appeared in Boston, in 1729. In 1743 appeared
Dilworth's _The Schoolmaster's Assistant_, a book which retained its
popularity in both England and America until after the beginning of the
nineteenth century.
No text in Arithmetic is mentioned in the School Regulations of Frederick
the Great (R. 274, §20), or in scarcely any of the descriptions left us of
eighteenth-century schools. The study itself was common, but not
universal, and was one that many teachers were not competent to teach. To
possess a reputation as an "arithmeticker" was an important recommendation
for a teacher, while for a pupil to be able to do sums in arithmetic was
unusual, and a matter of much pride to parents. The subject was frequently
taught by the writing master, in a separate school, [12] while the reading
teacher confined himself to reading, spelling, and religion. Thus, for
example, following earlier English practice, the Town Meeting of Boston,
in 1789, ordered "three reading schools and three writing schools
established in the town" for the instruction of children between the ages
of seven and fourteen, the subjects to be taught in each being:
The writing schools: Writing, Arithmetic
The reading schools: Spelling, Accentuation, Reading of prose and
verse, English grammar and composition
The teacher might or might not possess an arithmetic of his own, but the
instruction to the pupil was practically always dictated and copied
instruction. Each pupil made up his own book of rules and solved problems,
and few pupils ever saw a printed arithmetic. Many of the early
arithmetics were prepared after the catechism plan. There was almost no
attempt to use the subject for drill in reasoning or to give a concrete
type of instruction, before about the middle of the eighteenth century,
[13] and but little along such reform lines was accomplished until after
the beginning of the nineteenth century.
[Illustration: FIG. 134. TITLE-PAGE OF HODDER'S ARITHMETIC
An early reprint of this famous book appeared in Boston in 1719.]
Writing, similarly, was taught by dictation and practice, and the art of
the "scrivener," as the writing master was called, was one thought to be
difficult to learn. The lack of practical value of the art, the high cost
of paper, and the necessity usually for special lessons, all alike tended
to make writing a much less commonly known art than reading. Fees also
were frequently charged for instruction in writing and arithmetic;
reading, spelling, and religion being the only free subjects. The
scrivener and the arithmetic teacher also frequently moved about, as
business warranted, and was not fixed as was the teacher of the reading
school.
THE TEACHERS. The development of the vernacular school was retarded not
only by the dominance of the religious purpose of the school, but by the
poor quality of teachers found everywhere in the schools. The evolution of
the elementary-school teacher of to-day out of the church sexton, bell-
ringer, or grave-digger, [14] or out of the artisan, cripple, or old dame
who added school teaching to other employment in order to live, forms one
of the interesting as well as one of the yet-to-be-written chapters in the
history of the evolution of the elementary school.
Teachers in elementary schools everywhere in the eighteenth century were
few in number, poor in quality, and occupied but a lowly position in the
social scale. School dames in England (R. 235) and later in the American
Colonies, and on the continent of Europe teachers who were more sextons,
choristers, beadles, bell-ringers, grave-diggers, shoemakers, tailors,
barbers, pensioners, and invalids than teachers, too often formed the
teaching body for the elementary vernacular school (Rs. 231, 232, 233). In
Switzerland, the Netherlands, and some of the American Colonies, where
schools had become or were becoming local semi-civic affairs, the
standards which might be imposed for teaching also were low. The grant of
the tailoring monopoly to the elementary teachers of Prussia, [15] in
1738, and Krüsi's recollections of how he became a schoolmaster in
Switzerland, in 1793 (R. 234), were quite typical of the time. In Catholic
France, and in some German Catholic lands as well, teaching congregations
(p. 345), some of whose members had some rudimentary training for their
work, were in charge of the existing parish schools. These provided a
somewhat better type of teaching body than that frequently found in
Protestant lands, though by the latter part of the eighteenth century the
beginnings of teacher-training are to be seen in some of the German
States. The Church of England, too, had by this time organized strong
Societies [16] for the preparation of teachers for Church-of-England
schools, both at home and abroad. In Dutch, German, and Scandinavian
lands, and in colonies founded by these people in America, the parish
school, closely tied up with and dependent upon the parish church, was the
prevailing type of vernacular school, and in this the teacher was regarded
as essentially an assistant to the pastor (R. 236) and the school as a
dependency of the Church.
[FIG. 135. A "CHRISTIAN BROTHERS" SCHOOL
La Salle teaching at Grenoble. Note the adult type of dress of the boys.]
In England, in addition to regular parish schools and endowed elementary
schools, three peculiar institutions, known as the Dame School, the
religious charity-school, and the private-adventure or "hedge school" had
grown up, and the first two of these had reached a marked development by
the middle of the eighteenth century. Because these were so characteristic
of early English educational effort, and also played such an important
part in the American Colonies as well, they merit a few words of
description at this point.
THE DAME SCHOOL. The Dame School arose in England after the Reformation.
By means of it the increasing desire for a rudimentary knowledge of the
art of reading could be satisfied, and at the same time certain women
could earn a pittance. This type of school was carried early to the
American Colonies, and out of it was in time evolved, in New England, the
American elementary school. The Dame School was a very elementary school,
kept in a kitchen or living-room by some woman who, in her youth, had
obtained the rudiments of an education, and who now desired to earn a
small stipend for herself by imparting to the children of her neighborhood
her small store of learning. For a few pennies a week the dame took the
children into her home and explained to them the mysteries connected with
learning the beginnings of reading and spelling. Occasionally a little
writing and counting also were taught, though not often in England. In the
American Colonies the practical situations of a new country forced the
employment as teachers of women who could teach all three subjects, thus
early creating the American school of the so-called "3 Rs"--"Reading,
Riting, Rithmetic." The Dame School appears so frequently in English
literature, both poetry and prose, that it must have played a very
important part in the beginnings of elementary education in England. Of
this school Shenstone (1714-63) writes (R. 235):
In every village marked with little spire,
Embowered in trees, and hardly known to fame,
There dwells, in lowly shed and mean attire,
A matron old, whom we schoolmistress name,
Who boasts unruly brats with birch to tame.
[Illustration: FIG. 136. AN ENGLISH DAME SCHOOL
(From a drawing of a school in the heart of London, after Barclay)]
The Reverend George Crabbe (1754-1832), another poet of homely life,
writes (R. 235) of a deaf, poor, patient widow who sits
And awes some thirty infants as she knits;
Infants of humble, busy wives who pay,
Some trifling price for freedom through the day.
This school flourished greatly in America during the eighteenth century,
but with the coming of Infant Schools, early in the nineteenth, was merged
into these to form the American Primary School.
[Illustration: FIG. 137. GRAVEL LANE CHARITY-SCHOOL, SOUTHWARK
Founded in 1687, and one of the earliest of the Non-Conformist English
charity-schools. Still carrying on its work in the original schoolroom at
the time this picture appeared, in _Londina Illustrata_ in 1819.]
THE RELIGIOUS CHARITY-SCHOOL. Another thoroughly characteristic English
institution was the church charity-school. The first of these was founded
in Whitechapel, London, in 1680. In 1699, when the School of Saint Anne,
Soho (R. 237), was founded by "Five Earnest Laymen for the Poore Boys of
the Parish," it was the sixth of its kind in England. In 1699 the "Society
for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge" (S.P.C.K.) was founded for the
purpose, among other things, of establishing catechetical schools for the
education of the children of the poor in the principles of the Established
Church (R. 238 b). In 1701 the "Society for the Propagation of the Gospel
in Foreign Parts" (S.P.G.) was also founded to extend the work of the
Anglican Church abroad, supply schoolmasters and ministers, and establish
schools, to train children to read, write, know and understand the
Catechism, and fit into the teachings and worship of the Church. To
develop piety and help the poor to lead industrious, upright, self-
respecting lives, "to make them loyal Church members, and to fit them for
work in that station of life in which it had pleased their Heavenly Father
to place them," were the principal objects of the Society.
All were taught reading, spelling, and the Catechism, and instruction in
writing and arithmetic might be added. The training might also be coupled
with that of the "schools of industry" (workhouse schools, as described by
Locke [R. 217]) to augment the economic efficiency of the boy. Girls seem
to have been provided for almost equally with boys, and, in addition to
being taught to read and spell, were taught "to knit their Stockings and
Gloves, to Mark, Sew, and make and mend their Cloathes." Both boys and
girls were usually provided with books and clothing, [17] a regular
uniform being worn by the boys and girls of each school.
[Illustration: FIG. 138. A CHARITY-SCHOOL GIRL IN UNIFORM
Saint Anne's, Soho, England]
The chief motive in the establishment of these schools, though, was to
decrease the "Prophaness and Debauchery ... owing to a gross Ignorance of
the Christian Religion" (R. 237) and to educate "Poor Children in the
Rules and Principles of the Christian Religion as professed and taught in
the Church of England." Writing, in 1742, Reverend Griffith Jones, an
organizer for the S.P.C.K. in Wales, said:
It is but a cheap education that we would desire for them [the poor],
only the moral and religious branches of it, which indeed is the most
necessary and indispensable part. The sole design of this charity is
to inculcate upon such ... as can be prevailed upon to learn, the
knowledge and practice, the principles and duties of the Christian
religion; and to make them good people, useful members of society,
faithful servants of God, and men and heirs of eternal life.
These schools multiplied rapidly and soon became regular institutions, as
the following table, showing the growth of the S.P.C.K. schools in London
alone, shows:
Year Schools Boys Girls Total
1699 0 0 0 0
1704 54 1386 745 2131
1709 88 2181 1221 3402
1714 117 3077 1741 4818
In England and Ireland combined the Society had, by 1714, a total of 1073
schools, with 19,453 pupils enrolled, and by 1729 the number had increased
to 1658, with approximately 34,000 pupils. From England the charity-school
idea was early carried to the Anglican Colonies in America and became a
fixed institution in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and
somewhat in the Colonies farther south. In the Pennsylvania constitution
of 1790 we find the following directions for the establishment of a state
charity-school system to supplement the parish schools of the churches:
Sec. I. The legislature shall, as soon as conveniently may be,
provide, by law, for the establishment of schools throughout the
State, in such manner that the poor may be taught _gratis_.
[Illustration: FIG. 130. A CHARITY-SCHOOL BOY IN UNIFORM
Saint Anne's, Soho, England]
The first Pennsylvania school law of 1802 carried this direction into
effect by providing for pauper schools in the counties, a condition that
was not done away with until 1834. In New Jersey the system lasted until
1838.
THE PRIVATE-ADVENTURE, OR "HEDGE," SCHOOL. This was a school analogous to
the Dame School, but was kept by a man instead of a woman, and usually at
his home or shop. Plate 15, showing a shoe cobbler teaching, represents
one type of such schools. The term "hedge schools" arose in Ireland, where
teaching was forbidden the Catholics, and secret schools arose in which
priests and others taught what was possible. Of these McCarthy writes:
[18]
On the highways and on the hillsides, in ditches and behind hedges, in
the precarious shelter of the ruined walls of some ancient abbey, or
under the roof of a peasant's cabin, the priests set up schools and
taught the children of their race.
The term soon came to be applied to any kind of a poor school, taught in
an irregular manner or place. Similar irregular schools, under equivalent
names, also were found in German lands, [19] the Netherlands, and in
France, while in the American Colonies "indentured white servants" were
frequently let out as schoolmasters. The following advertisement of a
teacher for sale is typical of private-adventure elementary school-keeping
during the colonial period.
[Illustration: FIG. 140. ADVERTISEMENT FOR A TEACHER TO LET
(From the _American Weekly Mercury_ of Philadephia, 1735)]
These schools were taught by itinerant school-keepers, artisans, and
tutors of the poorer type, but offered the beginnings of elementary
education to many a child who otherwise would never have been able to
learn to read. In the early eighteenth century these schools attained a
remarkable development in England.
A new influence of tremendous future importance--general reading--was now
coming in; the vernacular was fast supplanting Latin; newspapers were
being started; little books or pamphlets (tracts) containing general
information were being sold; books for children and beginners were being
written; the popular novel and story had appeared; [20] and all these
educative forces were creating a new and a somewhat general desire for a
knowledge of the art of reading. This in turn caused a new demand for
schools to teach the long-locked-up art, and this demand was capitalized
to the profit of many types of people.
THE APPRENTICING OF ORPHANS AND CHILDREN OF THE POOR. The compulsory
apprenticing of the children of the poor, as we have seen (p. 326), was an
old English institution, and workhouse training, or the so-called "schools
of industry" became, by the eighteenth century, a prominent feature of the
English care of the poor. These represented the only form of education
supported by taxation, and the only form of education to which Parliament
gave any attention during the whole of the eighteenth century. This type
of institution also was carried to the Anglican Colonies in America, as we
have seen in the documents for Virginia (R. 200 a), and became an
established institution in America as well.
The apprenticing of boys to a trade, a still older institution, was also
much used as a means for training youths for a life in the trades, not
only in England and the American Colonies, but throughout all European
lands as well. The conditions surrounding the apprenticing of a boy had by
the eighteenth century become quite fixed. The "Indenture of
Apprenticeship" was drawn up by a lawyer, and by it the master was
carefully bound to clothe and feed the boy, train him properly in his
trade, look after his morals, and start him in life at the end of his
apprenticeship. This is well shown in the many records which have been
preserved, both in England (R. 242) and the American Colonies (R. 201).
For many boys this type of education was the best possible at the time,
and worthily started the possessor in the work of his trade.
In the eighteenth century different English church parishes began to set
up workhouse schools of various types, and to maintain these out of parish
"rates." The one established in Bishopsgate Street, London, in 1701, is
typical. This cared for about 375 children and in it, by 1720, there had
been educated and placed forth 1420 children, and in addition 123 had
died. Of this school it is recorded that poor children
"being taken into the said Workhouse are there taught to Read and
Write, and kept to Work until they are qualified to be put out to be
Apprentices, and for the Sea Service, or otherwise disposed; ... The
Habit of the Children is all the same, being made of Russit Cloth, and
a round Badge worn upon their Breast, representing a poor Boy, and
a Sheep; the Motto: '_God's Providence is our Inheritance_.'" ...
In this workhouse children were "taught to spin Wool and Flax, to Sow
and Knit, to make their own Cloaths, Shoes, and Stockings, and the
like Employments; to inure them betimes to labour. They are also
taught to read, and such as are capable, to write and cast Accounts;
and also the Catechism, to ground them in Principles of Religion and
Honesty." [21]
The school established by Saint John's parish, Southwark, London, in 1735,
and designed to train and "put out" girls for domestic service (R. 241),
and which cared for, clothed, and trained forty girls, is also typical of
these parish schools "for the children of the industrious poor."
METHODS OF INSTRUCTION. Throughout the eighteenth century the method of
instruction commonly employed in the vernacular schools was what was known
as the individual method. This was wasteful of both time and effort, and
unpedagogical to a high degree (R. 244). Everywhere the teacher was
engaged chiefly in hearing recitations, testing memory, and keeping order.
The pupils came to the master's desk, one by one (see Figures 98, 99), and
recited what they had memorized. Aside from imposing discipline, teaching
was an easy task. The pupils learned the assigned lessons and recited what
they had learned. Such a thing as methodology--technique of instruction--
was unknown. The dominance of the religious motive, too, precluded any
liberal attitude in school instruction, the individual method was time-
consuming, school buildings often were lacking, and in general there was
an almost complete lack of any teaching equipment, books, or supplies.
Viewed from any modern standpoint the schools of the eighteenth century
attained to but a low degree of efficiency (R. 244). The school hours were
long, the schoolmaster's residence or place of work or business was
commonly used as a schoolroom, and such regular schoolrooms as did exist
were dirty and noisy and but poorly suited to school purposes. Schools
everywhere, too, were ungraded, the school of one teacher being like that
of any other teacher of that class.
So wasteful of time and effort was the individual method of instruction
that children might attend school for years and get only a mere start in
reading and writing. Paulsen, [22] writing of schools in German lands at
an even later date, says that even in the better type of vernacular
schools
many children never achieved anything beyond a little reading and
knowing a few things by heart.... The instruction in reading was never
anything else but a torture, protracted through years, from saying the
alphabet and formation of syllables to the deciphering of complete
words, without any real success in the end, while writing was nothing
but a wearisome tracing of the letters, the net result of all the toil
being the gabbling of the Catechism and a few Bible texts and hymns,
learned over and over again.
The imparting of information by the teacher to a class, or a class
discussion of a topic, were almost unknown. Hearing lessons, assigning new
tasks, setting copies, making quill pens, dictating sums, and imposing
order completely absorbed the time and the attention of the teacher.
SCHOOL DISCIPLINE. The discipline everywhere was severe. "A boy has a
back; when you hit it he understands," was a favorite pedagogical maxim of
the time. Whipping-posts were sometimes set up in the schoolroom, and
practically all pictures of the schoolmasters of the time show a bundle of
switches near at hand. Boys in the Latin grammar schools were flogged for
petty offenses (R. 245). The ability to impose order on a poorly taught
and, in consequence, an unruly school was always an important requisite of
the schoolmaster. A Swabian schoolmaster, Häuberle by name, with
characteristic Teutonic attention to details, has left on record [23]
that, in the course of his fifty-one years and seven months as a teacher
he had, by a moderate computation, given 911,527 blows with a cane,
124,010 blows with a rod, 20,989 blows and raps with a ruler, 136,715
blows with the hand, 10,235 blows over the mouth, 7,905 boxes on the ear,
1,115,800 raps on the head, and 22,763 _notabenes_ with the Bible,
Catechism, singing book, and grammar. He had 777 times made boys kneel on
peas, 613 times on a triangular piece of wood, had made 3001 wear the
jackass, and 1707 hold the rod up, not to mention various more unusual
punishments he had contrived on the spur of the occasion. Of the blows
with the cane, 800,000 were for Latin words; of the rod 76,000 were for
texts from the Bible or verses from the singing book. He also had about
3000 expressions to scold with, two thirds of which were native to the
German tongue and the remainder his invention.
[Illustration: FIG. 141. A SCHOOL WHIPPING-POST
Drawn from a picture of a five-foot whipping-post which once stood in the
floor of a school-house at Sunderland, Massachusetts. Now in the Deerfield
Museum.]
[Illustration: FIG. 142. AN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY GERMAN SCHOOL
Reproduction of an engraving by J. Mettenleiter, now in the
Kupferstichkabinet, Munich, and printed in Joh. Ferd. Schlez's.
_Dorfschulen zu Langenhausen_. Nuremberg, 1795.]
Another illustration of German school discipline, of many that might be
cited, was the reform work of Johann Ernest Christian Haun, who was
appointed, in 1783, as inspector of schools in the once famous Gotha (p.
317). Due to warfare and neglect the schools there had fallen into
disrepute. Haun drove the incapable teachers from the work, and for a time
restored the schools to something of their earlier importance. Among other
reforms it is recorded that he forbade teachers to put irons around the
boys' necks, to cover them with mud, to make them kneel on peas, or to
brutally beat them. Diesterweg (R. 244) describes similar punishments as
characteristic of eighteenth-century German schools. The eighteenth-
century German schoolmaster shown in Fig. 142 was probably a good sample
of his class.
Pedagogical writers of the time uniformly complain of the severe
discipline of the schools, and the literature of the period abounds in
allusions to the prevailing harshness of the school discipline. A few
writers condemn, but most approve heartily of the use of the rod. "Spare
the rod and spoil the child" had for long been a well-grounded pedagogical
doctrine. Among many literary extracts that might be cited illustrating
this belief, the following poem by the English poet Crabbe (1754-1832) is
interesting. He puts the following words into the mouth of his early
schoolmaster:
Students like horses on the road,
Must be well lashed before they take the load;
They may be willing for a time to run,
But you must whip them ere the work be done;
To tell a boy, that if he will improve,
His friends will praise him, and his parents love,
Is doing nothing--he has not a doubt
But they will love him, nay, applaud without;
Let no fond sire a boy's ambition trust,
To make him study, let him learn he must.
CONDITIONS SURROUNDING CHILDHOOD. It is difficult for us of today to re-
create in imagination the pitiful life-conditions which surrounded
children a century and a half ago. Often the lot of the children of the
poor, who then constituted the great bulk of all children, was little less
than slavery. Wretchedly poor, dirty, unkempt, hard-worked, beaten about,
knowing strong drink early, illiterate, often vicious--their lot was a sad
one. For the children of the poor there were few, if any, educational
opportunities. Writing on the subject David Salmon says: [24]
The imagination of the twentieth century cannot fathom the poverty of
the eighteenth. The great development of mines and manufactures, which
has brought ease and independence within the reach of industrious
labour everywhere, had hardly begun; employment was so scarce and
intermittent, and wages were so low, that the working classes lived in
hovels, dressed in rags, and were familiar with the pangs of hunger;
while those who were forced to look to the rates for hovels, rags, and
food sufficient to maintain a miserable life numbered a sixth of the
whole population.
In the towns children were apprenticed out early in life, and for long
hours of daily labor. Child welfare was almost entirely neglected,
children were cuffed about and beaten at their work, juvenile delinquency
was a common condition, child mortality was heavy, and ignorance was the
rule. Schools generally were pay institutions or a charity, and not a
birthright, and usually existed only for the middle and lower-middle
classes in the population who were attendants at the churches and could
afford to pay a little for the schooling given. Reading and religion were
usually the only free subjects. Only in the New England Colonies, where
the beginnings of town and colony school systems were evident, and in a
few of the German States where state control was beginning to be
exercised, was a better condition to be found.
[Illustration: FIG. 143. CHILDREN AS MINIATURE ADULTS
Children leaving school, from an eighteenth-century drawing by Saint
Aubin.]
Among the middle and upper social classes, particularly on the continent
of Europe, a stiff artificiality everywhere prevailed. Children were
dressed and treated as miniature adults, the normal activities of
childhood were suppressed, and the natural interests and emotions of
children found little opportunity for expression. Wearing powdered and
braided hair, long gold-braided coats, embroidered waistcoats, cockaded
hats, and swords, boys were treated more as adults than as children.
Girls, too, with their long dresses, hoops, powdered hair, rouged faces,
and demure manner, were trained in a, for children, most unnatural manner.
[25]
The dancing master for their manners and graces, and the religious
instructor to develop in them the ability to read and to go through a
largely meaningless ceremonial, were the chief guides for the period of
their childhood.
SCHOOL SUPPORT. No uniform plan, in any country, had as yet been evolved
for even the meager support which the schools of the time received. The
Latin grammar schools were in nearly all cases supported by the income
from old "foundations" and from students' fees, with here and there some
state aid. The new elementary vernacular schools, though, had had assigned
to them few old foundations upon which to draw for maintenance, and in
consequence support for elementary schools had to be built up from new
sources, and this required time.
In England the Act of Conformity of 1662 (R. 166), it will be remembered
(p. 324), had laid a heavy hand on the schools by driving all Dissenters
from positions in them, and the Five Mile Act of 1665 had borne even more
severely on the teachers in the schools of the Dissenters. Fortunately for
elementary education in England, however, the English courts, in 1670, had
decided in a test case that the teacher in an elementary school could not
be deprived of his position by failure of the bishop to license him, if he
were a nominee of the founder or the lay patron of the school. The result
of this decision was that, between 1660 and 1730, 905 endowed elementary
schools were founded in England, and 72 others previously founded had
their endowments increased. The number continued to increase throughout
the eighteenth century, and by 1842 had reached a total of 2194. These new
foundations probably gave the best schooling of the time, and tended to
stir the Established Church to action. Accordingly we find that during the
eighteenth century the vestries of the different church parishes began the
creation of parish elementary schools for the children of the poor of the
parish, supporting a teacher for them out of the parish rates, and without
specific legal authorization to do so. These new parish schools also
contributed somewhat to the provision of elementary education, and mark
the beginning of the church "voluntary schools" which were such a
characteristic feature of nineteenth-century English education. We thus
have, in England, endowed elementary schools, parish schools, dame
schools, private-adventure schools of many types, and charity-schools, all
existing side by side, and drawing such support as they could from
endowment funds, parish rates, church tithes, subscriptions, and tuition
fees. The support of schools by subscription lists (R. 240) was a very
common proceeding. Education in England, more than in any other Protestant
land, early came to be regarded as a benevolence which the State was under
no obligation to support. Only workhouse schools were provided for by the
general taxation of all property.
In the Netherlands and in German lands church funds, town funds, and
tuition fees were the chief means of support, though here and there some
prince had provided for something approaching state support for the
schools of his little principality. Frederick the Great had ordered
schools established generally (1763) and had decreed the compulsory
attendance of children (R. 274), but he had depended largely on church
funds and tuition fees (§7) for maintenance, with a proviso that the
tuition of poor and orphaned children should be paid from "any funds of
the church or town, that the schoolmaster may get his income" (§8). In
Scotland the church parish school was the prevailing type. In France the
religious societies (p. 345) provided nearly all the elementary vernacular
religious education that was obtainable.
In the Dutch Provinces, in the New England Colonies, and in some of the
minor German States, we find the clearest examples of the beginnings of
state control and maintenance of elementary schools--something destined to
grow rapidly and in the nineteenth century take over the school from the
Church and maintain it as a function of the State. The Prussian kings
early made grants of land and money for endowment funds and support, and
state aid was ordered granted by Maria Theresa for Austria (R. 274 a), in
1774. In the New England Colonies the separation of the school from the
Church, and the beginnings of state support and control of education,
found perhaps their earliest and clearest exemplification. In the other
Colonies the lottery was much used (R. 246) to raise funds for schools,
while church tithes, subscription lists, and school societies after the
English pattern also helped in many places to start and support a school
or schools.
Only by some such means was it possible in the eighteenth century that the
children of the poor could ever enjoy any opportunities for education. The
parents of the poor children, themselves uneducated, could hardly be
expected to provide what they had never come to appreciate themselves. On
the other hand, few of the well-to-do classes felt under any obligation to
provide education for children not their own. There was as yet no
realization that the diffusion of education contributed to the welfare of
the State, or that the ignorance of the masses might be in any way a
public peril. This attitude is well shown for England by the fact that not
a single law relating to the education of the people, aside from workhouse
schools, was enacted by Parliament during the whole of the eighteenth
century. The same was true of France until the coming of the Revolution.
It is to a few of the German States and to the American Colonies that we
must turn for the beginnings of legislation directing school support. This
we shall describe more in detail in later chapters.
THE LATIN SECONDARY SCHOOL. The great progress made in education during
the eighteenth century, nevertheless, was in elementary education.
Concerning the secondary schools and the universities there is little to
add to what has previously been said. During this century the secondary
school, outside of German lands, remained largely stationary. Having
become formal and lifeless in its teaching (p. 283), and in England and
France crushed by religious-uniformity legislation, the Latin grammar
school of England and the surviving colleges in France practically ceased
to exert any influence on the national life. The Jesuit schools, which
once had afforded the best secondary education in Europe, had so declined
in usefulness everywhere that they were about to be driven from all lands.
The Act of Conformity of 1662 (R. 166) had dealt the grammar schools of
England a heavy blow, and the eighteenth century found them in a most
wretched condition, with few scholars, and their endowments shamefully
abused. The Law of 1662, says Montmorency, "involved such a peering into
the lives of schoolmasters, such a course of inquisitorial folly, that the
position became intolerable. Men would not become schoolmasters....
Education had no meaning when none but political and religious hypocrites
were allowed to teach.... National education was destroyed." and the
grammar schools of England were "practically withdrawn during more than
two centuries (1662-1870) from the national life." [26]
In German lands the old Latin schools continued largely unchanged until
near the middle of the eighteenth century, with Latin, taught as it had
been for a century or more, as the chief subject of study. Shortly after
the coming of Frederick the Great to the throne (1740) the Latin schools
of Prussia, and after them the Latin schools in other German States, were
reorganized and given a new life. The influence of Francke's school at
Halle (p. 418), and the new types of teaching developed there and by his
followers elsewhere, began to be felt. German, French, and mathematics
were given recognition, and some science work was here and there
introduced. Above all, though, Greek now attained to the place of first
importance in the reorganized Latin schools.
It was not until after 1740 that the German people awakened to the
possibility of an independent national life. Then, under the new impulse
toward nationality, French influence and manners were thrown off, German
literature attained its Golden Age, the _Ritterakademieen_ (p. 405) were
discarded, and a number of the German Principalities and States revised
their school regulations and erected, out of the old Latin schools, a
series of humanistic _gymnasia_ in which the study of Greek life and
culture occupied the foremost place. New methods in classical study were
thought out and applied, and a new pedagogical purpose--culture and
discipline--was given to the regenerated Latin schools. A new Renaissance,
in a way, took place in German lands, [27] and a knowledge of Greek was
proclaimed by German university and gymnasial teachers as indispensable to
a liberal education with an earnestness of conviction not exceeded by
Battista Guarino (p. 268) four centuries before. To know Greek and to have
some familiarity with Greek literature and history now came to be regarded
as necessary to the highest culture, [28] and a pedagogical theory for
such study was erected, based on the discipline of the mind, [29] which
dominated the German classical school throughout the entire nineteenth
century. It was in the eighteenth century also that the German States
began the development of the scientific secondary school (_Realschule_),
see p. 420, as described in a preceding chapter.
[Illustration: FIG. 144. A PENNSYLVANIA ACADEMY
York Academy, York, Pennsylvania, founded by the Protestant Episcopal
Church, in 1787.]
RISE OF THE ACADEMY IN AMERICA. As we have seen (p. 361), the English
Latin grammar school was early (1635) carried to New England, and set up
there and elsewhere in the Colonies, but after the close of the
seventeenth century its continued maintenance was something of a struggle.
Particularly in the central and southern colonies, where commercial
demands early made themselves felt, the tendency was to teach more
practical subjects. This tendency led to the evolution, about the middle
of the eighteenth century, of the distinctively American Academy, with a
more practical curriculum, and by the close of the century it was rapidly
superseding the older Latin grammar school. Franklin's Academy at
Philadelphia, which began instruction in 1751, and which later evolved
into the University of Pennsylvania, was probably the first American
Academy. The first in Massachusetts was founded in 1761, and by 1800 there
were seventeen in Massachusetts alone. The great period of academy
development was the first half of the nineteenth century. The Phillips
Academy, at Andover, Massachusetts, founded in 1788, reveals clearly the
newer purpose of these American secondary schools. The foundation grant of
this school gives the purpose to be:
to lay the foundation of a public free school or ACADEMY for the
purposes of instructing Youth, not only in English and Latin Grammar,
Writing, Arithmetic, and those Sciences wherein they are commonly
taught; but more especially to learn them the GREAT END AND REAL
BUSINESS OF LIVING ... it is again declared that the _first_ and
_principle_ object of this Institution is the promotion of TRUE
PIETY and VIRTUE; the _second_, instruction in the English,
Latin, and Greek Languages, together with Writing, Arithmetic, Music,
and the Art of Speaking; the _third_, practical Geometry,
Logic, and Geography; and the _fourth_, such other liberal Arts
and Sciences or Languages, as opportunity and ability may hereafter
admit, and as the TRUSTEES shall direct.
Though still deeply religious, these new schools usually were free from
denominationalism. Though retaining the study of Latin, they made most of
new subjects of more practical value. A study of real things rather than
words about things, and a new emphasis on native English and on science
were prominent features of their work. They were also usually open to
girls, as well as boys,--an innovation in secondary education before
almost wholly unknown. Many were organized later for girls only. These
institutions were the precursors of the American public high school,
itself a type of the most democratic institution for secondary education
the world has ever known.
THE UNIVERSITIES. The condition of the universities by the middle of the
eighteenth century we traced in the preceding chapter. They had lost their
earlier importance as institutions of learning, but in a few places the
sciences were slowly gaining a foothold, and in German lands we noted the
appearance of the first two modern universities--institutions destined
deeply to influence subsequent university development, as we shall point
out in a later chapter.
END OF THE TRANSITION PERIOD. We have now reached, in our study of the
history of educational progress, the end of the transition period which
marked the change in thinking from mediaeval to modern attitudes. The
period was ushered in with the beginnings of the Revival of Learning in
Italy in the fourteenth century, and it may fittingly close about the
middle of the eighteenth.
We now stand on the threshold of a new era in world history. The same
questioning spirit that animated the scholars of the Revival of Learning,
now full-grown and become bold and self-confident, is about to be applied
to affairs of politics and government, and we are soon to see absolutism
and mediaeval attitudes in both Church and State questioned and
overthrown. New political theories are to be advanced, and the divine
right of the people is to be asserted and established in England, the
American Colonies, and in France, and ultimately, early in the twentieth
century, we are to witness the final overthrow of the divine-right-of-
kings idea and a world-wide sweep of the democratic spirit. A new human
and political theory as to education is to be evolved; the school is to be
taken over from the Church, vastly expanded in scope, and made a
constructive instrument of the State; and the wonderful nineteenth century
is to witness a degree of human, scientific, political, and educational
progress not seen before in all the days from the time of the Crusades to
the opening of the nineteenth century. It is to this wonderful new era in
world history that we now turn.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Contrast a religious elementary school, with the Catechism as its chief
textbook, with a modern public elementary school.
2. Contrast the elementary schools of Mulcaster and Comenius.
3. To what extent did the religious teachings of the time support Locke's
ideas as to the disciplinary conception of education?
4. Do we to-day place as much emphasis on habit formation as did Locke? On
character? On good breeding?
5. State some of the reasons for the noticeable weakening of the hold of
the old religious theory as to education, in Protestant lands, by the
middle of the eighteenth century.