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Title: Essays on Educational Reformers

Author: Robert Hebert Quick

Editor: William Torrey Harris

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Most recently updated: October 17, 2024

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ESSAYS ON
EDUCATIONAL REFORMERS ***

International Education Series
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INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION SERIES

ESSAYS ON
EDUCATIONAL REFORMERS
BY
ROBERT HEBERT QUICK
M. A. TRIN. COLL., CAMBRIDGE
FORMERLY ASSISTANT MASTER AT HARROW, AND LECTURER ON
THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION AT CAMBRIDGE
LATE VICAR OF SEDBERGH

ONLY AUTHORIZED EDITION OF THE WORK
AS REWRITTEN IN 1890

NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1896

Copyright, 1890,
By D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.

To

DR. HENRY BARNARD,

The first United States Commissioner of Education,

WHO IN A LONG LIFE OF

SELF-SACRIFICING LABOUR HAS GIVEN TO THE ENGLISH

LANGUAGE AN EDUCATIONAL LITERATURE,

THIS VOLUME IS DEDICATED,

WITH THE ESTEEM AND ADMIRATION OF

THE AUTHOR.

Οὺ γὰρ ἔστι περὶ ὅτου θειοτέρου ἄνθρωπος ἄν
βουλεύσαιτο, ὴ περὶ παιδείας καὶ τῶν αὑτοῦ και τῶν
οἰκείων. Plato in initio Theagis (p. 122 B).
Socrates saith plainlie, that “no man goeth about a more
godlie purpose, than he that is mindfull of the good bringing
up both of hys owne and other men’s children.”—Ascham’s
Scholemaster. Preface.
Fundamentum totius reipublicæ est recta juventutis
educatio.
The very foundation of the whole commonwealth is the
proper bringing up of the young.—Cic.

EDITOR’S PREFACE.
Many years ago I proposed to my friend Mr. Quick to rewrite his
Educational Reformers, making some additions (Sturm and Froebel, for
example), and allow me to place it in this series of educational works. I had
read his essays when they first appeared, and noted their great value as a
contribution to the right kind of educational literature. They showed
admirable tact in the selection of the materials; the “epoch-making” writers
were chosen and the things that had been said and done of permanent value
were brought forward. Better than all was the running commentary on these
materials by Mr. Quick himself. His style was popular, taking the reader, as
it were, into confidential relations with him from the start, and offering now
and then a word of criticism in the most judicial spirit, leaning neither to the
extreme of destructive radicalism, which seeks revolution rather than
reform, nor, on the other hand, to the extreme of blind conservatism, which
wishes to preserve the vesture of the past rather than its wisdom.
I have called this book of Mr. Quick the most valuable history of
education in our mother-tongue, fit only to be compared with Karl von
Raumer’s Geschichte der Pädagogik for its presentation of essentials and
for the sanity of its verdicts.
I made my proposal that he “rewrite” his book because I knew that he
considered his first edition hastily written and, in many respects, not
adequate to the ideal he had conceived of the book. I knew, moreover, that
years of continued thinking on a theme necessarily modifies one’s views.
He would wish to make some changes in matter presented, some in
judgments rendered, and many more in style of presentation.
Hence it has come about that after this lapse of time Mr. Quick has
produced a substantially new book, which, retaining all or nearly all of the
admirable features of the first edition, has brought up to their standard of
excellence many others.
The history of education is a vast field, and we are accustomed to
demand bulky treatises as the only adequate ones. But the obvious
disadvantage of such works has led to the clearly defined ideal of a book

like Mr. Quick’s, which separates the gold from the dross, and offers it
small in bulk but precious in value.
The educational reformers are the men above all others who stimulate us
to think about education. Every one of these was an extremist, and erred in
his judgment as to the value of the methods which prevailed in his time, and
also overestimated the effects of the new education that he proposed in the
place of the old. But thought begins with negations, and originality shows
itself first not in creating something new, but in removing the fettering
limitations of its existing environment. The old is attacked—its good and its
bad are condemned alike. It has been imposed on us by authority, and we
have not been allowed to summon it before the bar of our reason and ask of
it its credentials. It informs us that it presented these credentials ages ago to
our ancestors—men older and wiser than we are. Such imposition of
authority leaves us no choice but to revolt. We, too, have a right to think as
well as our ancestors; we, too, must clear up the ground of our belief and
substitute insight for blind faith in tradition.
These educational reformers are prophets of the clearing-up period
(Aufklärung) of revolution against mere authority.
While we are inspired to think for ourselves, however, we must not
neglect that more important matter of thinking the truth. Free-thinking, if it
does not reach the truth, is not of great value. It sets itself as puny
individual against the might of the race, which preserves its experience in
the forms of institutions—the family, the social organism, the state, the
Church.
Hence our wiser and more scientific method studies everything that is, or
exists, in its history, and endeavors to discover how it came to be what it is.
It inquires into its evolution. The essential truth is not the present fact, but
the entire process by which the present fact grew to be what it is. For the
living force that made the present fact made also the past facts antecedent to
the present, and it will go on making subsequent facts. The revelation of the
living forces which make the facts of existence is the object of science. It
takes all these facts to reveal the living force that is acting and producing
them.
Hence the scientific attitude is superior to the attitude of these
educational reformers, and we shall in our own minds weigh these men in

our scales, asking first of all: What is their view of the world? How much
do they value human institutions? How much do they know of the
substantial good that is wrought by those institutions? If they know nothing
of these things, if they see only incumbrance in these institutions, if to them
the individual is the measure of all things, we can not do reverence to their
proposed remedies, but must account their value to us chiefly this, that they
have stimulated us to thinking, and helped us to discover what they have
not discovered—namely, the positive value of institutions.
All education deals with the boundary between ignorance and knowledge
and between bad habits and good ones. The pupil as pupil brings with him
the ignorance and the bad habits, and is engaged in acquiring good habits
and correct knowledge.
This situation gives us a general recipe for a frequently recurring type of
educational reformer. Any would-be reformer may take his stand on the
boundary mentioned, and, casting an angry look at the realm of ignorance
and bad habit not yet conquered, condemn in wholesale terms the system of
education that has not been efficient in removing this mental and moral
darkness.
Such a reformer selects an examination paper written by a pupil whose
ignorance is not yet vanquished, and parades the same as a product of the
work of the school, taking great pains to avoid an accurate and just
admeasurement of the actual work done by the school. The reformer critic
assumes that there is one factor here, whereas there are three factors—
namely, (a) the pupil’s native and acquired powers of learning, (b) his
actual knowledge acquired, and (c) the instruction given by the school. The
school is not responsible for the first and second of these factors, but it is
responsible only for what increment has grown under its tutelage. How
much and what has the pupil increased his knowledge, and how much his
power of acquiring knowledge and of doing?
The educational reformer is always telling us to leave words and take up
things. He dissuades from the study of language, and also undervalues the
knowledge of manners and customs and laws and usages. He dislikes the
study of institutions even. He “loves Nature,” as he informs us. Herbert
Spencer wants us to study the body, and to be more interested in biology
than in formal logic; more interested in natural history than in literature. But

I think he would be indignant if one were to ask him whether he thought the
study of the habits and social instincts of bees and ants is less important
than the study of insect anatomy and physiology. Anatomy and physiology
are, of course, important, but the social organism is more important than the
physiological organism, even in bees and ants.
So in man the social organism is transcendent as compared with human
physiology, and social hygiene compared with physiological hygiene is
supreme.
To suppose that the habits of plants and insects are facts, and that the
structure of human languages, the logical structure of the mind itself as
revealed in the figures and modes of the syllogism and the manners and
customs of social life, the deep ethical principles which govern peoples as
revealed in works of literature—to suppose that these and the like of these
are not real facts and worthy of study is one of the strangest delusions that
has ever prevailed.
But it is a worse delusion to suppose that the study of Nature is more
practical than the study of man, though this is often enough claimed by the
educational reformers.
The knowledge of most worth is first and foremost the knowledge of how
to behave—a knowledge of social customs and usages. Any person totally
ignorant in this regard would not escape imprisonment—perhaps I should
say decapitation—for one day in any city of the world—say in London, in
Pekin, in Timbuctoo, or in a pueblo of Arizona. A knowledge of human
customs and usages, next a knowledge of human views of Nature and man
—these are of primordial necessity to an individual, and are means of direct
self-preservation.
The old trivium or threefold course of study at the university taught
grammar, logic, and rhetoric—namely, (1) the structure of language, (2) the
structure of mind and the art of reasoning, (3) the principles and art of
persuasion. These may be seen at once to be lofty subjects and worthy
objects of science. They will always remain such, but they are not easy for
the child. In the course of mastering them he must learn to master himself
and gain great intellectual stature. Pedagogy has wisely graded the road to
these heights, and placed much easier studies at the beginning and also
made the studies more various. Improvements in methods and in grading—

devices for interesting the pupil—so essential to his self-activity, for these
we have to thank the Educational Reformers.
W. T. Harris.
Washington, D. C., 1890.

PREFACE TO EDITION OF 1868.
“It is clear that in whatever it is our duty to act, those matters also it is
our duty to study.” These words of Dr. Arnold’s seem to me
incontrovertible. So a sense of duty, as well as fondness for the subject, has
led me to devote a period of leisure to the study of Education, in the
practice of which I have been for some years engaged.
There are countries where it would be considered a truism that a teacher
in order to exercise his profession intelligently should know something
about the chief authorities in it. Here, however, I suppose such an assertion
will seem paradoxical; but there is a good deal to be said in defence of it.
De Quincey has pointed out that a man who takes up any pursuit without
knowing what advances others have made in it works at a great
disadvantage. He does not apply his strength in the right direction, he
troubles himself about small matters and neglects great, he falls into errors
that have long since been exploded. An educator is, I think, liable to these
dangers if he brings to his task no knowledge but that which he learnt for
the tripos, and no skill but that which he acquired in the cricket ground or
on the river. If his pupils are placed entirely in his hands, his work is one of
great difficulty, with heavy penalties attached to all blundering in it; though
here, as in the case of the ignorant doctor and the careless architect, the
penalties, unfortunately, are paid by his victims. If (as more commonly
happens) he has simply to give a class prescribed instruction, his smaller
scope of action limits proportionally the mischief that may ensue; but even
then it is obviously desirable that his teaching should be as good as
possible, and he is not likely to employ the best methods if he invents as he
goes along, or simply falls back on his remembrance of how he was taught
himself, perhaps in very different circumstances. I venture to think,
therefore, that practical men in education, as in most other things, may
derive benefit from the knowledge of what has already been said and done
by the leading men engaged in it, both past and present.
All study of this kind, however, is very much impeded by want of books.
“Good books are in German,” says Professor Seeley. I have found that on

the history of Education, not only good books but all books are in German
or some other foreign language.[1] I have, therefore, thought it worth while
to publish a few such imperfect sketches as these, with which the reader can
hardly be less satisfied than the author. They may, however, prove useful till
they give place to a better book.
Several of the following essays are nothing more than compilations.
Indeed, a hostile critic might assert that I had used the scissors with the
energy of Mr. Timbs and without his discretion. The reader, however, will
probably agree with me that I have done wisely in putting before him the
opinions of great writers in their own language. Where I am simply acting
as reporter, the author’s own way of expressing himself is obviously the
best; and if, following the example of the gipsies and Sir Fretful Plagiary, I
had disfigured other people’s offspring to make them pass for my own,
success would have been fatal to the purpose I have steadily kept in view.
The sources of original ideas in any subject, as the student is well aware,
are few, but for irrigation we require troughs as well as water-springs, and
these essays are intended to serve in the humbler capacity.
A word about the incomplete handling of my subjects. I have not
attempted to treat any subject completely, or even with anything like
completeness. In giving a sketch of the opinions of an author one of two
methods must be adopted; we may give an epitome of all that he has said,
or by confining ourselves to his more valuable and characteristic opinions,
may gain space to give these fully. As I detest epitomes, I have adopted the
latter method exclusively, but I may sometimes have failed in selecting an
author’s most characteristic principles; and probably no two readers of a
book would entirely agree as to what was most valuable in it: so my
account must remain, after all, but a poor substitute for the author himself.
For the part of a critic I have at least one qualification—practical
acquaintance with the subject. As boy or master, I have been connected with
no less than eleven schools, and my perception of the blunders of other
teachers is derived mainly from the remembrance of my own. Some of my
mistakes have been brought home to me by reading works on education,
even those with which I do not in the main agree. Perhaps there are teachers
who on looking through the following pages may meet with a similar
experience.

Had the essays been written in the order in which they stand, a good deal
of repetition might have been avoided, but this repetition has at least the
advantage of bringing out points which seem to me important; and as no
one will read the book as carefully as I have done, I hope no one will be so
much alive to this and other blemishes in it.
I much regret that in a work which is nothing if it is not practically
useful, I have so often neglected to mark the exact place from which
quotations are taken. I have myself paid the penalty of this carelessness in
the trouble it has cost me to verify passages which seemed inaccurate.
The authority I have had recourse to most frequently is Raumer
(Geschichte der Pädagogik). In his first two volumes he gives an account of
the chief men connected with education, from Dante to Pestalozzi. The third
volume contains essays on various parts of education, and the fourth is
devoted to German Universities. There is an English translation, published
in America, of the fourth volume only. I confess to a great partiality for
Raumer—a partiality which is not shared by a Saturday Reviewer and by
other competent authorities in this country. But surely a German author who
is not profound, and is almost perspicuous, has some claim on the gratitude
of English readers, if he gives information which we cannot get in our own
language. To Raumer I am indebted for all that I have written about Ratke,
and almost all about Basedow. Elsewhere his history has been used, though
not to the same extent.
C. A. Schmid’s Encyclopädie des Erziehungs-und-Unterrichtswesens is a
vast mine of information on everything connected with education. The work
is still in progress. The part containing Rousseau has only just reached me. I
should have been glad of it when I was giving an account of the Emile, as
Raumer was of little use to me.
Those for whom Schmid is too diffuse and expensive will find Carl
Gottlob Hergang’s Pädagogische Realencyclopädie useful. This is in two
thick volumes, and costs, to the best of my memory, about eighteen
shillings. It was finished in 1847.
The best sketch I have met with of the general history of education is in
the article on Pädagogik in Meyers Conversations-Lexicon.[2] I wish
someone would translate this article; and I should be glad to draw the

attention of the editor of an educational periodical, say the Museum or the
Quarterly Journal of Education, to it.
I have come upon references to many other works on the history of
Education, but of these the only ones I have seen are Theodore Fritz’s
Esquisse d’un Système complet d’instruction et d’éducation et de leur
histoire (3 vols., Strasburg, 1843), and Carl Schmidt’s Geschichte der
Pädagogik (4 vols.). The first of these gives only the outline of the subject.
The second is, I believe, considered a standard work. It does not seem to me
so readable as Raumer’s history, but it is much more complete, and comes
down to quite recent times.
For my account of the Jesuit schools and of Pestalozzi, the authorities
will be found elsewhere (pp. 34 and 383). In writing about Comenius I have
had much assistance from a life of him prefixed to an English translation of
his School of Infancy, by Daniel Benham (London, 1858). For almost all the
information given about Jacotot, I am indebted to Mr. Payne’s papers,
which I should not have ventured to extract from so freely if they had been
before the public in a more permanent form.
I am sorry I cannot refer to any English works on the history of
Education, except the essays of Mr. Parker and Mr. Furnivall, and Christian
Schools and Scholars, which are mentioned above, but we have a very good
treatise on the principles of education in Marcel’s Language as a Means of
Mental Culture (2 vols., London, 1853). Edgeworth’s Practical Education
seems falling into undeserved neglect, and Mr. Spencer’s recent work is not
universally known even by schoolmasters.
If the following pages attract but few readers, it will be some consolation,
though rather a melancholy one, that I share the fate of my betters.
R. H. Q.
Ingatestone, Essex, May, 1868.

PREFACE TO EDITION OF 1890.
When I was a young man (i.e., nearly forty years ago), I once did what
those who know the ground would declare a very risky, indeed, a fool-hardy
thing. I was at the highest point of the Gemmi Pass in Switzerland, above
the Rhone Valley; and being in a hurry to get down and overtake my party I
ran from the top to the bottom. The path in those days was not so good as it
is now, and it is so near the precipice that a few years afterwards a lady in
descending lost her head and fell over. No doubt I was in great danger of a
drop of a thousand feet or so. But of this I was totally unconscious. I was in
a thick mist, and saw the path for a few yards in front of me and nothing
more. When I think of the way in which this book was written three and
twenty years ago I can compare it to nothing but my first descent of the
Gemmi. I did a very risky thing without knowing it. My path came into
view little by little as I went on. All else was hid from me by a thick mist of
ignorance. When I began the book I knew next to nothing of the Reformers,
but I studied hard and wrote hard, and I turned out the essays within the
year. This feat I now regard with amazement, almost with horror. Since that
time I have given more years of work to the subject than I had then given
months, and the consequence is I find I can write fast no longer. The mist
has in a measure cleared off, and I cannot jog along in comfort as I did
when I saw less. At the same time I have no reason to repent of the
adventure. Being fortunate in my plan and thoroughly interested by my
subject, I succeeded beyond my wildest expectations in getting others to
take an interest in it also. The small English edition of 500 copies was, as
soon as I reduced the price, sold off immediately, and the book has been, in
England, for twenty years “out of print.” But no less than three publishing
firms in the United States have reprinted it (one quite recently) without my
consent, and, except in the edition of Messrs. R. Clarke & Co., Cincinnati,
with omissions and additions made without my knowledge. It seems then
that the book will live for some years yet, whether I like it or not; and while
it lives I wish it to be in a form somewhat less defective than at its first
appearance. I have therefore in a great measure re-written it, beside filling
in a gap here and there with an additional essay. Perhaps some critics will

call it a new book with an old title. If they do, they will I trust allow that the
new book has at least two merits which went far to secure the success of the
old, 1st, a good title, and 2nd, a good plan. My plan in both editions has
been to select a few people who seemed specially worth knowing about,
and to tell concerning them in some detail just that which seemed to me
specially worth knowing. So I have given what I thought very valuable or
very interesting, and everything I thought not particularly valuable or
interesting I have ruthlessly omitted. I have not attempted a complete
account of anybody or anything; and as for what the examiner may “set,” I
have not once given his questions a thought.
As the book is likely to have more readers in the country of its adoption
than in the country of its birth, I have persuaded my friend Dr. William T.
Harris, the United States Commissioner of Education, to put it into “The
International Education Series” which he edits. So the only authorized
editions of the book are the English edition, and the American edition
published by Messrs. D. Appleton & Co.
R. H. Q.
Earlswood Cottage, Redhill, Surrey, England, 28th July, 1890.

TABLE OF CONTENTS.
PAGE

Chapter I.—Effects of the Renascence 1-21
No escape from the Past 2
“Discovery” of the Classics 3
Mark Pattison’s account of Renascence 4
Revival of taste for beauty in Literature 5
What is Literature? 6
Renascence loved beauty of expression 7
No translations. The “educated” 8
Spread of literature by printing 9
School course settled before Bacon 10
First defect: Learner above Doer 11
Second: Over-estimate of literature 12
Literary taste not common 13
Third: Literature banished from school 14
Translations would be literature 15
The classics not written for children 16
Language versus Literature 17
Fourth: “Miss as good as a mile” 18
Fifth: Neglect of children 19
Child’s study of his surroundings 20
Aut Cæsar aut nihil 21

Chapter II.—Renascence Tendencies 22-26
Reviving the Past. The Scholars 23
The Scholars: things for words 24
Verbal Realists: things through words 25
Stylists: words for themselves 26

Chapter III.—Sturmius. (1507-1589) 27-32
His early life. Settles in Strassburg 28
His course of Latin. Dismissed 29
The Schoolmaster taught Latin mainly 30
Resulting verbalism 31
Some books about Sturm 32

Chapter IV.—Schools of the Jesuits 33-62
Importance of the Jesuit Schools 34
The Society in part educational 35
“Ratio atque Institutio.” Societas Professa 36
The Jesuit teacher: his preparation, &c. 37
Supervision. Maintenance. Lower Schools 38
Free instruction. Equality. Boarders 39
Classes. Curriculum. Latin only used 40
Teacher Lectured. Exercises. Saying by heart 41
Emulation. “Æmuli.” Concertations 42
“Academies.” Expedients. School-hours 43
Method of teaching. An example 44
Attention. Extra work. “Repetitio” 45
Repetition. Thoroughness 46
Yearly examinations. Moral training 47
Care of health. Punishments 48
English want of system 49
Jesuit limitations 50
Gains from memorizing 51
Popularity. Kindness 52
Sympathy with each pupil 53
Work moderate in amount and difficulty 54
The Society the Army of the Church 55
Their pedagogy not disinterested 56
Practical 57
The forces: 1. Master’s influence. 2. Emulation 57-58

A pupil’s summing-up 59
Some books 60
Barbier’s advice to new master 61
Loyola and Montaigne. Port-Royal 62

Chapter V.—Rabelais. (1483-1553.) 63-69
Rabelais’ ideal. A new start 64
Religion. Study of Things 65
“Anschauung.” Hand-work. Books and Life 66
Training the body 67
Rabelais’ Curriculum 68
Study of Scripture. Piety 69

Chapter VI.—Montaigne. (1533-1592.) 70-79
Writers and doers. Montaigne versus Renascence 71
Character before knowledge. True knowledge 72
Athens and Sparta. Wisdom before knowledge 73
Knowing, and knowing by heart 74
Learning necessary as employment 75
Montaigne and our Public Schools 76
Pressure from Science and Examinations 77
Danger from knowledge 78
Montaigne and Lord Armstrong 79

Chapter VII.—Ascham. (1515-1568.) 80-89
Wolsey on teaching 81
History of Methods useful 82
Our three celebrities 83
Ascham’s method for Latin: first stage 84
Second stage. The six points 85
Value of double translating and writing 86
Study of a model book. Queen Elizabeth 87, 88
“A dozen times at the least” 88
“Impressionists” and “Retainers” 89

Chapter VIII.—Mulcaster. (1531(?)-1611.) 90-102
Old books in English on education 91
Mulcaster’s wisdom hidden by his style 92
Education and “learning” 93
1. Development 2. Child-study 94
3. Groundwork by best workman 95
4. No forcing of young plants 96
5. The elementary course. English 97
6. Girls as well as Boys 98
7. Training of Teachers 99
Training college at the Universities 100
Mulcaster’s reasons for training teachers 101
Mulcaster’s Life and Writings 102

Chapter IX.—Ratichius. (1571-1635.) 103-118
Principles of the Innovators 104
Ratke’s Address to the Diet 105
At Augsburg. At Koethen 106
Failure at Koethen 107
German in the school. Ratichius’s services 108
1. Follow Nature. 2. One thing at a time 109
3. Over and over again 110
4. Everything through the mother-tongue 111
5. Nothing on compulsion 112
6. Nothing to be learnt by heart 113
7. Uniformity. 8. Ne modus rei ante rem 114
9. Per inductionem omnia 115
Ratke’s method for language 116
Ratke’s method and Ascham’s 117
Slow progress in methods 118

Chapter X.—Comenius. (1592-1671.) 119-171
Early years. His first book 120

Troubles. Exile 121
Pedagogic studies at Leszna 122
Didactic written. Janua published. Pansophy 123
Samuel Hartlib 124
The Prodromus and Dilucidatio 125
Comenius in London. Parliamentary schemes 126
Comenius driven away by Civil War 127
In Sweden. Interviews with Oxenstiern 128
Oxenstiern criticises 129
Comenius at Elbing 130
At Leszna again 131
Saros-Patak. Flight from Leszna 132
Last years at Amsterdam 133
Comenius sought true foundation 134
Threefold life. Seeds of learning, virtue, piety 135
Omnia sponte fluant. Analogies 136
Analogies of growth 137
Senses. Foster desire of knowledge 138
No punishments. Words and Things together 139
Languages. System of schools 140
Mother-tongue School. Girls 141
School teaching. Mother’s teaching 142
Comenius and the Kindergarten 143
Starting-points of the sciences 144
Beginnings in Geography, History, &c. 145
Drawing. Education for all 146
Scientific and Religious Agreement 147
Bishop Butler on Educating the Poor 148
Comenius and Bacon 149
“Everything Through the Senses” 150
Error of Neglecting the Senses 151
Insufficiency of the Senses 152
Comenius undervalued the Past 153
Literature and Science 154

Comenius’s use of Analogies 155
Thought-studies and Label-studies 156
Unity of Knowledges 157
Theory and the Practical Man 158
Mother-tongue. Words and Things together 159
Janua Linguarum 160
The Jesuits’ Janua 161
Comenius adapts Jesuits’ Janua 162
Anchoran’s edition of Comenius’s Janua 163
Change to be made by Janua 164
Popularity of Janua shortlived 165
Lubinus projector of Orbis Pictus 166
Orbis Pictus described 167
Why Comenius’s schoolbooks failed 168
“Compendia Dispendia” 169
Comenius and Science of Education 170
Books on Comenius 171

Chapter XI.—The Gentlemen of Port-Royal 172-196
The Jesuits and the Arnaulds 173
Saint-Cyran and Port-Royal 174
Saint-Cyran an “Evangelical” 175
Short career of the Little Schools 176
Saint-Cyran and Locke on Public Schools 177
Shadow-side of Public Schools 178
The Little Schools for the few only 179
Advantages of great schools 180
Choice of masters and servants. Watch and pray 181
No rivalry or pressure. Freedom from routine 182
Study a delight. Reading French first 183
Literature. Mother-tongue first 184
Beginners’ difficulties lightened 185
Begin with Latin into Mother-tongue 186
Sense before sound. Reason must rule 187

Not Baconian. The body despised 188
Pedagogic writings of Port-Royalists 189
Arnauld. Nicole 190
Light from within. Teach by the Senses 191
Best teaching escapes common tests 192
Studying impossible without a will 193
Against making beginnings bitter 194
Port-Royal advance. Books on Port-Royal 195
Rollin, Compayré, &c. 196

Chapter XII.—Some English Writers before Locke 197-218
Birth of Realism 198
Realist Leaders not schoolmasters 199
John Brinsley. Charles Hoole 200
Hoole’s Realism 201
Art of teaching. Abraham Cowley 202
Authors and schoolmasters. J. Dury 203
Disorderly use of our natural faculties 204
Dury’s watch simile 205
Senses, 1st; imagination, 2nd; memory, 3rd 206
Petty’s battlefield simile 207
Petty’s realism 208
Cultivate observation 209
Petty on children’s activities 210
Hand-work. Education for all. Bellers 211
Milton and School-Reform 212
Milton as spokesman of Christian Realists 213
Language an instrument. Object of education 214
Milton for barrack life and Verbal Realism 215
Milton succeeded as man not master 216
He did not advance Science of Education 217
Milton an educator of mankind 218

Chapter XIII.—Locke. (1632-1704.) 219-238

Locke’s two main characteristics 220
1st, Truth for itself. 2nd, Reason for Truth 221
Locke’s definition of knowledge 222
Knowing without seeing 223
“Discentem credere oportet” 224
Locke’s “Knowledge” and the schoolmaster’s 225
“Knowledge” in Geography 226
For children, health and habits 227
Everything educative forms habits 228
Confusion about special cases. Wax 229
Locke behind Comenius 230
Humanists, Realists, and Trainers 231
Caution against classifiers 232
Locke and development 233
Was Locke a utilitarian? 234
Utilitarianism defined 235
Locke not utilitarian in education 236
Locke’s Pisgah Vision 237
Science and education. Names of books 238

Chapter XIV.—Jean-Jacques Rousseau. (1712-1778.) 239-272
Middle Age system fell in 18th century 240
Do the opposite to the usual 241
Family life. No education before reason 242
Rousseau “neglects” essentials. Lose time 243
Early education negative 244
Childhood the sleep of reason 245
Start from study of the child 246
Rousseau’s paradoxes un-English 247
Man the corrupter. The three educations 248
The aim, living thoroughly 249
Children not small men 250
Schoolmasters’ contempt for childhood 251
Schoolroom rubbish 252

Ideas before symbols 253
Right ideas for children 254
Child-gardening. Child’s activity 255
No sitting still or reading 256
Memory without books 257
Use of the senses in childhood 258
Intellect based on the senses 259
Cultivation of the senses 260
Music and drawing 261
Drawing from objects. Morals 262
Contradictory statements on morals 263
The material world and the moral 264
Shun over-directing 265
Lessons out of school. Questioning. At 12 266
No book-learning. Study of nature 267
Against didactic teaching 268
Rousseau exaggerates about self-teaching 269
Learn with effort 270
Hand-work. The “New Education” 271
The Teacher’s business 272

Chapter XV.—Basedow and the Philanthropinum 273-289
Basedow tries to mend religion and teaching 274
Reform needed. Subscription for “Elementary” 275
A journey with Goethe 276
Goethe on Basedow 277
The Philanthropinum opened 278
Basedow’s “Elementary” and “Book of Method” 279
Subjects to be taught 280
French and Latin. Religion 281
“Fred’s Journey to Dessau” 282
At the Philanthropinum 283
Methods in the Philanthropinum 284
The Philanthropinum criticised 285

Basedow’s improvements in teaching children 286
Basedow’s successors 287
Kant on the Philanthropinum 288
Influence of Philanthropinists 289

Chapter XVI.—Pestalozzi. (1746-1827.) 290-383
His childhood and student-life 291
A Radical Student 292
Turns farmer. Bluntschli’s warning 293
New ideas in farming. A love letter 294
Resolutions. Buys land and marries 295
Pestalozzi turns to education 296
Neuhof filled with children 297
Appeal for the new Institution 298
Bankruptcy. The children sent away 299
Eighteen years of poverty and distress 300
“Gertrude” to the rescue. Pestalozzi’s religion 301
He turns author. “E. H. of Hermit” 302
Pestalozzi’s belief 303
The “Hermit” a Christian 304
Success of “Leonard and Gertrude” 305
Gertrude’s patience tried 306
Being and doing before knowing 307
Pestalozzi’s severity. Women Commissioners 308
Pestalozzi’s seven years of authorship 309
“Citizen of French Republic.” Doubts 310
Waiting. Pestalozzi’s “Inquiry” 311
Pestalozzi’s “Fables” 312
Pestalozzi’s own principles 313
Pestalozzi’s return to action 314
The French at Stanz 315
Pestalozzi at Stanz 316
Success and expulsion 317
At Stanz: Pestalozzi’s own account 318-332

Value of the five months’ experience 333
Pestalozzi a strange Schoolmaster 334
At Burgdorf. First official approval 335
A child’s notion of Pestalozzi’s teaching 336
Pestalozzi engineering a new road 337
Psychologizing instruction 338
School course. Singing; and the beautiful 339
Pestalozzi’s poverty. Kruesi joins him 340
Pestalozzi’s assistants. The Burgdorf Institute 341
Success of the Burgdorf Institute 342
Reaction. Pestalozzi and Napoleon I 343
Fellenberg, Pestalozzi goes to Yverdun 344
A portrait of Pestalozzi 345
Prussia adopts Pestalozzianism 346
Ritter and others at Yverdun 347
Causes of failure at Yverdun 348
Report made by Father Girard 349
Girard’s mistake. Schmid in flight 350
Schmid’s return. Pestalozzi’s fame found useful 351
Dr. Bell’s visit. Death of Mrs. Pestalozzi 352
Works republished. Clindy. Yverdun left. Death 353, 354
New aim: develop organism 354
True dignity of man 355
Education for all. Mothers’ part. Jacob’s Ladder 356
Educator only superintends 357
First, moral development 358
Moral and religious the same 359
Second, intellectual development 360
Learning by “intuition” 361
Buisson and Jullien on intuition 362
Pestalozzi and Locke 363
Subjects for, and art of, teaching 364
“Mastery” 365
The body’s part in education 366

Learning must not be play 367
Singing and drawing 368
Morf’s summing-up 369
Joseph Payne’s summing-up 370
The “two nations.” Mother’s lessons 371
Mistakes in teaching children 372
Children and their teachers 373
“Preparatory” Schools 374
Young boys ill taught at school 375
English folk-schools not Pestalozzian 376
Schools judged by results 377
Pupil-teachers. Teaching not educating 378
Lowe or Pestalozzi? 379
Chief force, personality of the teacher 380
English care for unessentials 381
Aim at the ideal 382
Use of theorists. Books 383

Chapter XVII.—Friedrich Froebel. (1783-1852.) 384-413
Difficulty in understanding Froebel 385
A lad’s quest of unity 386
Froebel wandering without rest 387
Finds his vocation. With Pestalozzi 388
Froebel at the Universities 389
Through the Freiheits-krieg. Mineralogy 390
The “New Education” started 391
At Keilhau. “Education of Man” published 392
Froebel fails in Switzerland 393
The first Kindergarten 394
Froebel’s last years. Prussian edict against him. His end 395
Author’s attitude towards Reformers 396
Difficulties with Froebel 397
“Cui omnia unum sunt” 398
Froebel’s ideal 399

Theory of development 400
Development through self-activity 401
True idea found in Nature 402
God acts and man acts 403
The formative and creative instinct 404
Rendering the inner outer 405
Care for “young plants.” Kindergarten 406
Child’s restlessness: how to use it 407
Employments in Kindergarten 408
No schoolwork in Kindergarten 409
Without the idea the “gifts” fail 410
The New Education and the old 411
The old still vigorous 412
Science the thought of God. Some Froebelians 413

Chapter XVIII.—Jacotot, a Methodizer. (1770-1840.) 414-438
Self-teaching 415
1. All can learn 416
2. Everyone can teach 417
Can he teach facts he does not know? 418
Languages? Sciences? 419
Arts such as drawing and music? 420
True teacher within the learner 421
Training rather than teaching 422
3. “Tout est dans tout.” Quidlibet ex quolibet 423
Connexion of knowledges 424
Connect with model book. Memorizing 425
Ways of studying the model book 426
Should the book be made or chosen? 427
Robertsonian plan 428
Hints for exercises 429
The good of having learnt 430
The old Cambridge “mathematical man” 431
Waste of memory at school 432

How to stop this waste 433
Multum, non multa. De Morgan. Helps. Stephen 434
Jacotot’s plan for reading and writing 435
For the mother-tongue 436
Method of investigation 437
Jacotot’s last days 438

Chapter XIX.—Herbert Spencer 439-469
Same knowledge for discipline and use? 440
Different stages, different knowledges 441
Relative value of knowledges 442
Knowledge for self-preservation 443
Useful knowledge versus the classics 444
Special instruction versus education 445
Scientific knowledge and money-making 446
Knowledge about rearing offspring 447
Knowledge of history: its nature and use 448
Use of history 449
Employment of leisure hours 450
Poetry and the Arts 451
More than science needed for complete living 452
Objections to Spencer’s curriculum 453
Citizen’s duties. Things not to teach 454
Need of a science of education 455
Hope of a science 456
From simple to complex: known to unknown 457
Connecting schoolwork with life outside 458
Books and life 459
Mistakes in grammar teaching 460
From indefinite to definite: concrete to abstract 461
The Individual and the Race. Empirical beginning 462
Against “telling.” Effect of bad teaching 463
Learning should be pleasurable 464
Can learning be made interesting? 465

Apathy from bad teaching 466
Should learning be made interesting? 467
Difference between theory and practice 468
Importance of Herbert Spencer’s work 469

Chapter XX.—Thoughts and Suggestions 470-491
Want of an ideal 471
Get pupils to work hard 472
For this arouse interest. Wordsworth 473
Interest needed for activity 474
Teaching young children 475
Value of pictures 476
Dr. Vater at Leipzig 477
Dr. Vogel and Dr. Vater 478
First knowledge of numbers. Grubé 479
Measuring and weighing. Reading-books 480
Respect for books. Grammar. Reading 481
Silent and Vocal Reading 482
Memorising poetry. Composition 483
Correcting exercises. Three kinds of books 484
No epitomes 485
Ascham, Bacon, Goldsmith, against them 486
Arouse interest. Dr. Arnold’s historical primer 487
A Macaulay, not Mangnall, wanted 488
Beginnings in history and geography 489
Tales of Travelers 490
Results positive and negative 491

Chapter XXI.—The Schoolmaster’s Moral and Religious
Influence 492-503
Master’s power, how gained and lost 493
Masters, the open and the reserved 494
Danger of excess either way 495
High ideal. Danger of low practice 496

Harm from overworking teachers 497
Refuge in routine work. Small schools 498
Influence through the Sixth. Day schools wanted 499
Teaching religion in England and Germany 500
Religious teaching connected with worship 501
Education to goodness and piety 502
How to avoid narrowmindedness 503

Chapter XXII.—Conclusion 504-526
A growing science of education 505
Jesuits the first Reformers 506
The Jesuits cared for more than classics 507
Rabelais for “intuition” 508
Montaigne for educating mind and body 509
17th century reaction against books 510
Reaction not felt in schools and the Universities 511
Comenius begins science of education 512
Locke’s teacher a disposer of influence 513
Locke and public schools. Escape from “idols” 514
Rousseau’s clean sweep 515
Benevolence of Nature. Man disturbs 516
We arrange sequences, capitalise ideas 517
Loss and gain from tradition 518
Rousseau for observing and following 519
Rousseau exposed “school-learning” 520
Function of “things” in education 521
“New Education” started by Rousseau 522
Drawing out. Man and the other animals 523
Intuition. Man an organism, a doer and creator 524
Antithesis of Old and New Education 525
Drill needed. What the Thinkers do for us 526

Appendix. Class Matches. Words and Things. Books for
Teachers, &c. 527-547

I
EFFECTS OF THE RENASCENCE.

§ 1. The history of education, much as it has been hitherto neglected,
especially in England, must have a great future before it. If we ignore the
Past we cannot understand the Present, or forecast the Future. In this book I
am going to speak of Reformers or Innovators who aimed at changing what
was handed down to them; but the Radical can no more escape from the
Past, than the Conservative can stereotype it. It acts not by attraction only,
but no less by repulsion. There have been thinkers in latter times who have
announced themselves as the executioners of the Past and laboured to
destroy all it has bequeathed to us. They have raised the ferocious cry, “Vive
la destruction! Vive la mort! Place à l’avenir! Hurrah for destruction!
Hurrah for death! Make room for the world that is to be!” But their very
hatred of the Past has brought them under the influence of it. “Do just the
opposite of what has been done and you will do right,” said Rousseau; and
this rule of negation would make the Past regulate the Present and the
Future no less than its opposite, “Do always what is usual.”
If we cannot get free from the Past in the domain of thought, still less can
we in action. Custom is to all our activities what the mainspring is to the
watch. We may bring forces into play to make the watch go faster or slower,
but if we took out the mainspring it would not go at all. For our mainspring
we are indebted to the Past.
§ 2. In studying the Past we must give our special attention to those
periods in which the course of ideas takes, as the French say, a new bend.[3]
Such a period was the Renascence. Then it was that the latest bend was
given to the educational ideal of the civilized world; and though we seem
now again to have arrived at a period of change, we are still, perhaps far
more than we are aware, affected by the ideas of the great scholars who
guided the intellect of Europe in the Revival of Learning.
§ 3. From the beginning to the end of the fifteenth century the balance
was trembling between two kinds of culture, and the fate of the schoolboy

depended on the result. In this century men first got a correct conception of
the globe they were inhabiting. Hitherto they had not even professed to
have any knowledge of geography; there is no mention of it in the Trivium
and Quadrivium which were then supposed to form the cycle of things
known, if not of things knowable. But Columbus and Vasco da Gama were
grand teachers of geography, and their lessons were learnt as far as
civilization extended.
The impetus thus given to the study of the earth might, at the beginning
of the sixteenth century, have engrossed the mind of Europe with the
material world, had not the leaning to physical science been encountered
and overcome by an impulse derived from another discovery. About the
time of the discovery of America there also came to light the literatures of
Greece and Rome.
§ 4. When I speak of the discovery of the ancient literatures as rivalling
that of America, this use of the word “discovery” may be disputed. It may
be urged that though the Greek language and literature were unknown in the
West of Europe till they were brought there by the fugitives after the fall of
Constantinople in 1453, yet the works of the great Latin writers had always
been known in Italy, and Dante declares himself the disciple of Virgil. And
yet I cannot give up the word “discovery.” In the life of an individual it
sometimes happens that he suddenly acquires as it were a new sense. The
world around him remains the same as before, but it is not the same to him.
A film passes from his eyes, and what has been ordinary and unmeaning
suddenly becomes a source of wonder and delight to him. Something
similar happens at times in the history of the general mind; indeed our own
century has seen a remarkable instance of it. In reading the thoughts of
great writers of earlier times, we cannot but be struck, not only with their
ignorance of the material world, but also with their ignorance of their
ignorance. Little as they know, they often speak as if they knew everything.
Newton could see that he was like a child discovering a few shells while the
unexplored ocean lay before him; but in those days it required the intellect
of a Newton to understand this. To the other children the ocean seemed to
conceal nothing, and they innocently thought that all the shells, or nearly
all, had been picked up. It was reserved for the people of our own century to
become aware of the marvels which lie around us in the material world, and
to be fascinated by the discovery. If the human race could live through

several civilizations without opening its eyes to the wonders of the earth it
inhabits, and then could suddenly become aware of them, we may well
understand its retaining unheeded the literatures of Greece and Rome for
centuries, and at length as it were discovering them, and turning to them
with unbounded enthusiasm and delight.
As students of education we can hardly attach too much importance to
this great revolution. For nearly three centuries the curriculum in the public
schools of Europe remained what the Renascence had made it. We have
again entered on an age of change, but we are still much influenced by the
ideas of the Renascence, and the best way to understand the forces now at
work is to trace them where possible to their origin. Let us then consider
what the Renascence was, and how it affected the educational system.
§ 5. In endeavouring to understand the Renascence, we cannot do better
than listen to what Mark Pattison says of it in his “Life of Casaubon”:—“In
the fifteenth century was revealed to a world which had hitherto been
trained to logical analysis, the beauty of literary form. The conception of
style or finished expression had died out with the pagan schools of rhetoric.
It was not the despotic act of Justinian in closing the schools of Athens
which had suppressed it. The sense of art in language decayed from the
same general causes which had been fatal to all artistic perception.
Banished from the Roman Empire in the sixth century or earlier, the
classical conception of beauty of form re-entered the circle of ideas after
near a thousand years of oblivion and abeyance. Cicero and Virgil, Livius
and Ovid, had been there all along, but the idea of composite harmony on
which their works were constructed was wanting. The restored conception,
as if to recoup itself for its long suppression, took entire possession of the
mind of Europe. The first period of the Renascence passed in adoration of
the awakened beauty, and in efforts to copy and multiply it.”
§ 6. Here Mark Pattison speaks as if the conception of beauty of form
belonged exclusively to the ancients and those who learnt of them. This
seems to require some abatement. There are points in which mediæval art
far excelled the art of the Renascence. The thirteenth century, as Archbishop
Trench has said, was “rich in glorious creations of almost every kind;” and
in that century our great English architect, Street, found the root of all that
is best in modern art. (See “Dublin Afternoon Lectures,” 1868.)

But there are expressions of beauty to which the Greeks, and those who
caught their spirit, were keenly alive, and to which the people of the Middle
Age seem to have been blind. The first is beauty in the human form; the
second is beauty in literature.
The old delight in beauty in the human form has never come back to us.
Mr. Ruskin tells us we are an ugly race, with ill-shapen limbs, and well
pleased with our ugliness and deformity, and in reply we only mutter
something about the necessity of clothing both for warmth and decency. But
as to the other expression of beauty, beauty in literature, the mind of Europe
again became conscious of it in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The re-
awakening of this sense of beauty we call the Renascence.
§ 7. Before we consider the effect of this intellectual revolution on
education, let us be sure that we are not “paying ourselves with words,” and
that we know exactly what we mean by “literature.”
When the conceptions of an individual mind are expressed in a
permanent form of words, we get literature. The sum total of all the
permanent forms of expression in one language make up the literature of
that language; and if no one has given his conceptions a form which has
been preserved, the language is without a literature. There are then two
things essential to a literary work: first, the conceptions of an individual
mind; second, a permanent form of expression. Hence it follows that the
domain of literature is distinct from the domain of natural or mathematical
science. Science does not give us the conceptions of an individual mind, but
it tells us what every rational person who studies the subject must think.
And science is entirely independent of any form of words: a proposition of
Euclid is science; a sonnet of Wordsworth’s is literature. We learn from
Euclid certain truths which we should have learnt from some one else if
Euclid had never existed, and the propositions may be conveyed equally
well in different forms of words and in any language. But a sonnet of
Wordsworth’s conveys thought and feeling peculiar to the poet; and even if
the same thought and feeling were conveyed to us in other words, we
should lose at least half of what he has given us. Poetry is indeed only one
kind of literature, but it is the highest kind; and what is true of literary
works in verse, is true also in a measure of literary works in prose. So great
is the difference between science and literature, that in literature, as the first

Lord Lytton said, the best books are generally the oldest; in science they are
the newest.
§ 8. At present we are concerned with literature only. There are two ways
in which a work of literature may excite our admiration and affect our
minds. These are, first, by the beauty of the conceptions it conveys to us;
and second, by the beauty of the language in which it conveys them. In the
greatest works the two excellences will be combined.[4]
Now the literary taste proper fastens especially on the second of the two,
i.e., on beauty of expression; and the Renascence was the revival of literary
taste. “It was,” as Mark Pattison says, “the conception of style or finished
expression which had died out with the pagan schools of rhetoric, and
which re-entered the circle of ideas after a thousand years of oblivion and
abeyance.” If we lose sight of this, we shall be perplexed by the unbounded
enthusiasm which we find in the sixteenth century for the old classics. What
great evangel, we may ask, had Cicero and Virgil and Ovid, or even Plato
and the Greek dramatists, for men who lived when Europe had experienced
a thousand years of Christianity? The answer is simple. They had none
whatever. Their thoughts and conceptions were not adapted to the wants of
the new world. The civilization of the Christian nations of the sixteenth
century was a very different thing from the civilization of Greece and
Rome. It had its own thoughts, its own problems, its own wants. The old-
world thoughts could not be thought over again by it. This indeed was felt
though not admitted by the Renascence scholars themselves. Had it been
the thoughts of the ancients which seemed to them so valuable they would
have made some effort to diffuse those thoughts in the languages of the
modern world. Much as a great literary work loses by translation, there may
still be enough left of it to be a source of instruction and delight. The
thoughts of Aristotle, conveyed in a Latin translation of an Arabic
translation, profoundly affected the mind of Europe in the Middle Ages.
The Bible, or Book par excellence, is known to few indeed in its original
form. Some great writers—Cervantes, and Shakespeare, and the author of
the “Arabian Nights”—please and instruct nations who know not the sound
of the languages wherein their works are composed. If then the great writers
of Greece and Rome had been valued for their matter, their works would
have been translated by the Renascence scholars as the Bible was translated
by the Reformers, and the history of modern education would have taken a

very different turn from that which awaited it. But it was not so. The
Renascence scholars did all they could to discourage translations. For the
grand discovery which we call the Revival of Learning was, not that the
ancients had something to say, but that whatever they had to say they knew
how to say it.
§ 9. And thus it happens that in the period of change, when Europe was
re-arranging its institutions, developing new ideas and settling into new
grooves of habit, we find the men most influential in education entirely
fascinated by beauty of expression, and this in two ancient languages, so
that the one thing needful for the young seemed to them an introduction to
the study of ancient writings. The inevitable consequence was this:
education became a mere synonym for instruction in Latin and Greek. The
only ideal set up for the “educated” was the classical scholar.
§ 10. Perhaps the absurdity of taking this ideal, an ideal which is
obviously fitted for a small class of men only, and proposing it for general
adoption, was partly concealed from the Renascence scholars by the
peculiar circumstances of their age. No doubt they thought literature would
in the future be a force capable of much wider application than it had ever
been before. True, literature had till then affected a small class only.
Literature meant books, books meant MSS., and MSS. were rare and costly.
Literature, the embodiment of grand thoughts in grand words, had existed
before letters, or at least without letters. The Homeric poems, for example,
had been known to thousands who could not read or write. But beauty of
expression naturally got associated and indeed confounded with the art by
which it was preserved; so the creations of the mind, when embodied in
particular combinations of words, acquired the name of literature or letters,
and became almost exclusively the affair of those who had opportunities of
study, opportunities afforded only to the few. During the Middle Ages every
one who could read was allowed his “privilege of clergy;” that is, he was
assumed to be a clergyman. Literature then was not thought of as a means
of instruction. But at the very time that the beauty of the ancient writings
dawned on the mind of Europe, a mechanical invention seemed to remove
all hindrances to the spread of literature. The scholars seized on the printing
press and thought by means of it to give all “the educated” a knowledge of
classics.

§ 11. We cannot help speculating what would have been the effect of the
discovery of printing if it had been made at another time. As there may be
literature without books, so there may be books without literature. If at the
time of the invention of printing there had been no literature, no creations of
individual minds embodied in permanent forms of speech, books might
have been used as apparatus in a mental gymnasium, or they might have
been made the means of conveying information. But just then the intellect
of Europe was tired of mental gymnastics. It had taken exercise in the
Trivium like a squirrel in its revolving cage, and was vexed to find it made
no progress.[5] As for information there was little to be had. The age of
observation and of physical science was not yet. So the printing press was
entirely at the service of the new passion for literature and the scholars
dreamed of the general diffusion of literary culture by means of printed
books.
§ 12. For some two centuries the literary spirit had supreme control over
the intellect of Europe, and the literary spirit could then find satisfaction
nowhere but in the study of the ancient classics. The natural consequence
was that throughout this period the “educated man” was supposed to be
identified with the classical scholar. The great rival of the literary spirit, the
scientific spirit which cares for nothing but sequences independent of the
human mind, began to show itself early in the seventeenth century: its first
great champion was Francis Bacon. But by this time the school course of
study had been settled, and two centuries had to elapse before the scientific
spirit could unsettle it again. Even now when we speak of a man as “well-
educated” we are commonly understood to mean that in his youth he was
taught the two classical languages.
§ 13. The taking of the classical scholar as the only ideal of the educated
man has been a fruitful source of evil in the history of education.
I. This ideal exalted the learner above the doer. As far back as Xenophon,
we find a contest between the passive ideal and the active, between the
excellence which depends on a knowledge of what others have thought and
done and the excellence which comes of thinking and doing. But the
excellence derived from learning had never been highly esteemed. To be
able to repeat Homer’s poetry was regarded in Greece as we now regard a
pleasing accomplishment; but the dignity of the learned man as such was
not within the range of Greek ideas. Many of the Romans after they began

to study Greek literature certainly piqued themselves on being good Greek
scholars, and Cicero occasionally quotes with all the airs of a pedant; but so
thoroughly was the contrary ideal, the ideal of the doer, established at
Rome, that nobody ever dreamt of placing its rival above it. In the decline
of the Empire, especially at Alexandria, we find for the first time honours
paid to the learned man; but he was soon lost sight of again. At the
Renascence he burst into sudden blaze, and it was then discovered that he
was what every man would wish to be. Thus the Renascence scholars,
notwithstanding their admiration of the great nations of antiquity, set up an
ideal which those nations would heartily have despised. The schoolmaster
very readily adopted this ideal; and schools have been places of learning,
not training, ever since.
§ 14. II. The next defect I observe in the Renascence ideal is this: it
attributes to literature more direct power over common life than literature
has ever had, or is ever likely to have.
I say direct power, for indirectly literature is one of the grand forces
which act on all of us; but it acts on us through others, its most important
function being to affect great intellects, the minds of those who think out
and act out important changes. Its direct action on the mass of mankind is
after all but insignificant. We have seen that literature consists in permanent
forms of words, expressing the conceptions of individual minds; and these
forms will be studied only by those who are interested in the conceptions or
find pleasure in the mode in which they are expressed. Now the vast
majority of ordinary people are without these inducements to literary study.
They take a keen interest in everything connected with their relations and
intimate friends, and a weaker interest in the thinkings and sayings and
doings of every one else who is personally known to them; but as to the
mental conceptions of those who lived in other times, or if now alive are not
known even by sight, the ordinary person is profoundly indifferent to them;
and of course delight in expression, as such, is out of the question. The
natural consequence is that the habit of reading books is by no means
common. Mark Pattison observes that there are few books to be found in
most English middle-class homes, and he says: “The dearth of books is only
the outward and visible sign of the mental torpor which reigns in those
destitute regions” (see “Fortnightly Review,” November, 1877). I much
doubt if he would have found more books in the middle-class homes of the

Continent. There is only one kind of reading that is nearly universal—the
reading of newspapers; and the newspaper lacks the element of
permanence, and belongs to the domain of talk rather than of literature.
Even when we get among the so-called “educated,” we find that those
who care for literature form a very small minority. The rest have of course
read Shakespeare and Milton and Walter Scott and Tennyson, but they do
not read them. The lion’s share of our time and thoughts and interests must
be given to our business or profession, whatever that may be; and in few
instances is this connected with literature. For the rest, whatever time or
thought a man can spare from his calling is mostly given to his family, or to
society, or to some hobby which is not literature.
And love of literature is not shown in such reading as is common. The
literary spirit shows itself, as I said, in appreciating beauty of expression,
and how far beauty of expression is cared for we may estimate from the fact
that few people think of reading anything a second time. The ordinary
reader is profoundly indifferent about style, and will not take the trouble to
understand ideas. He keeps to periodicals or light fiction, which enables the
mind to loll in its easy chair (so to speak) and see pass before it a series of
pleasing images. An idea, as Mark Pattison says, “is an excitant, comes
from mind and calls forth mind; an image is a sedative;” and most people
when they take up a book are seeking a sedative.
So literature is after all a very small force in the lives of most men, and
perhaps even less in the lives of most women. Why then are the
employments of the school-room arranged on the supposition that it is the
grand force of all? The reason is, that we have inherited from the
Renascence a false notion of the function of literature.
§ 15. III. I must now point out a fault in the Renascence ideal which is
perhaps the most remarkable of all. Those by whom this ideal was set up
were entirely possessed by an enthusiasm for literature, and they made the
mistake of attributing to literature a share in general culture which literature
seems incapable of taking. After this we could little have expected that the
new ideal would exclude literature from the schoolroom, and yet so it has
actually turned out.
As a literary creation contains the conceptions of an individual mind
expressed in a permanent form of words, it exists only for those who can

understand the words or at least the conceptions.
From this it follows that literature for the young must have its expression
in the vernacular. The instances are rare indeed in which any one below the
age of fifteen or sixteen (perhaps I might put the limit a year or two higher)
understands any but the mother tongue. In the mother tongue indeed some
forms of literature exercise a great influence over young minds. Ballad
literature seems especially to belong to youth, the youth of nations and of
individuals. Aristotle educated Alexander with Homer; and we can easily
imagine the effect which the Iliad must have had on the young Greeks.
Although in the days of Plato instruction was not confined to literature, he
gives this account of part of the training in the Athenian schools: “Placing
the pupils on benches, the instructors make them read and learn by heart the
poems of good poets in which are many moral lessons, many tales and
eulogies and lays of the brave men of old; that the boys may imitate them
with emulation and strive to become such themselves.” Here we see a very
important function attributed to literature in the bringing up of the young;
but the literature so used must obviously be in the language of the learners.
The influence of a literary work may, however, extend itself far beyond
the limits of its own language. When our minds can receive and take
pleasure in the conceptions of a great writer, he may speak to us by an
interpreter. At the Renascence there were books in the world which might
have affected the minds of the young—Plutarch, Herodotus, and above all
Homer. But, as I have already said, it was not the conceptions, but the
literary form of the ancients, which seemed to the Renascence scholars of
such inestimable value, so they refused to give the conceptions in any but
the original words. “Studying the ancients in translations,” says
Melancthon, “is merely looking at the shadow.” He could not have made a
greater mistake. As far as the young are concerned the truth is exactly the
reverse. The translation would give the substance: the original can give
nothing but the shadow. Let us take the experience of Mr. Kinglake, the
author of “Eothen.” This distinguished Eton man, fired by his
remembrances of Homer, visited the Troad. He had, as he tells us, “clasped
the Iliad line by line to his brain with reverence as well as love.” Well done,
Eton! we are tempted to exclaim when we read this passage: here at least is
proof that some literature was taught in those days of the dominion of the
classics. But stop! It seems that this clasping did not take place at Eton, but

in happy days before Eton, when Kinglake knew no Greek and read
translations. “Heroic days are these,” he writes, “but the Dark Ages of
schoolboy life come closing over them. I suppose it’s all right in the end:
yet, by Jove! at first sight it does seem a sad intellectual fall.... The dismal
change is ordained and thin meagre Latin (the same for everybody) with
small shreds and patches of Greek, is thrown like a pauper’s pall over all
your early lore; instead of sweet knowledge, vile monkish doggrel,
grammars and graduses, dictionaries and lexicons, horrible odds and ends
of dead languages are given you for your portion, and down you fall from
Roman story to a three-inch scrap of ‘Scriptores Romani’—from Greek
poetry down, down, to the cold rations of ‘Poetæ Græci,’ cut up by
commentators and served out by schoolmasters!” (“Eothen,” the Troad.)
We see from this how the Renascence ideal had the extraordinary effect
of banishing literature from the school-room. Literature has indeed not
ceased to influence the young; it still counts for much more in their lives
than in the lives of their seniors; but we all know who are the writers who
affected our own minds in childhood and youth, and who affect the minds
of our pupils now—not Eutropius or Xenophon, or Cæsar or Cicero, but
Defoe and Swift and Marryatt and Walter Scott. The ancient writings which
were literature to Melancthon and Erasmus, as they are still to many in our
universities and elsewhere, can never be literature to the young. Most of the
classical authors read in the schoolroom could not be made literature to
young people even by means of translations, for they were men who wrote
for men and women only. We see that it would be absurd to make an
ordinary boy of twelve or fourteen study Burke or Pope. And if we do not
make him read Burke, whose language he understands, why do we make
him read Cicero whose language he does not understand? If he cannot
appreciate Pope, why do we teach him Horace? The Renascence gives us
the explanation of this singular anomaly. The scholars of that age were so
delighted with the “composite harmony” of the ancient classics that the
study of these classics seemed to them the one thing worth living for. The
main, if not the only object they kept in view in bringing up the young was
to gain for them admission to the treasure house; and though young people
could not understand the ancient writings as literature, they might at least
study them as language and thus be ready to enjoy them as literature in
after-life. Thus the subject of instruction in the schoolroom came to be, not
the classics but, the classical languages. The classics were used as school

books, but the only meaning thought of was the meaning of the detached
word or at best of the detached sentence. You ask a child learning to read if
he understands what he is reading about, and he says, “I can’t think of the
meaning because I am thinking of the words.” The same thing happened in
the schoolboy’s study of the classics, and so it has come to pass that to this
day the great writers of antiquity discharge a humble function which they
certainly never contemplated.

“Great Cæsar’s body dead and turned to clay
May stop a hole to keep the wind away.”

And great Cæsar’s mind has been turned to uses almost as paltry. He has in
fact written for the schoolroom not a commentary on the Wars of Gaul—
nothing of the kind—but simply a book of exercises in Latin construing;
and an excellent book it would be if he had only graduated the difficulties
better.
§ 16. IV. There is yet another weakness about the Renascence ideal—a
weakness from which most ideals are free.
Most ideals have this merit at least, that he who makes even a feeble and
abortive attempt to reach them is benefited in proportion to his advance,
however small that advance may be. If he fails to seize the coat of gold, he
carries away, as the proverb tells us, at least one of the sleeves; or, to use
George Herbert’s metaphor—

“ ... Who aimeth at the sky,
Shoots higher far than he who means a tree.”

But the learned ideal has not even this advantage. The first stage, the study
of the ancient languages, is so totally different from the study of the ancient
literatures to which it is the preliminary, that the student who never goes
beyond this first stage either gets no benefit at all, or a benefit which is not
of the kind intended. Suppose I am within a walk, though a long one, of the
British Museum, and hearing of some valuable books in the library, which I
can see nowhere else, I set off to consult them. In this case it makes no
difference to me how valuable the books are if I do not get as far as the
Museum.[6] My friends may comfort me with the assurance that the walk
must have done me good. Perhaps so; but I left home to get a knowledge of
certain books, not to exercise my legs. Had exercise been my object I
should probably have chosen another direction.
Now schoolmasters, since the Renascence, have been in the habit of
leading all their pupils through the back slums of the Seven Dials and Soho
in the direction of the British Museum, with the avowed purpose of taking
them to the library, although they knew full well that not one pupil in ten,

not one in fifty, would ever reach the door. To produce a few scholars able
to appreciate the classics of Greece and Rome they have sacrificed
everybody else; and according to their own showing they have condemned
a large portion of the upper classes, nearly all the middle classes, and quite
all the poorer classes to remain “uneducated.” And, according to the theory
of the schoolroom, one-half of the human race—the women—have not been
supposed to need education. For them “accomplishments” have been held
sufficient.
§ 17. V. In conclusion I must point out one effect of the Renascence ideal
which seems to me no less mischievous than those I have already
mentioned. This ideal led the schoolmasters to attach little importance to the
education of children. Directly their pupils were old enough for Latin
Grammar the schoolmasters were quite at home; but till then the children’s
time seemed to them of small value, and they neither knew nor cared to
know how to employ it. If the little ones could learn by heart forms of
words which would afterwards “come in useful,” the schoolmasters were
ready to assist such learning by unsparing application of the rod, but no
other learning seemed worthy even of a caning. Absorbed in the world of
books they overlooked the world of nature. Galileo complains that he could
not induce them to look through his telescope, for they held that truth could
be arrived at only by comparison of MSS. No wonder then that they had so
little sympathy with children, and did not know how to teach them. It is by
slow degrees that we are breaking away from the bad tradition then
established, are getting to understand children, and with such leaders as
Rousseau, Pestalozzi, and Froebel, are investigating the best education for
them. We no longer think of them as immature men and women, but see
that each stage has its own completeness, and that there is a perfection in
childhood which must precede the perfection of manhood just as truly as
the flower goes before the fruit. “Childhood,” says Rousseau, “has its own
ways of seeing, feeling, thinking;” and it is by studying these that we find
out how children should be educated. Our connexion with the world of
nature seems much closer in our early years than ever afterwards. The
child’s mind seems drawn out to its surroundings. He is intensely interested
in the new world in which he finds himself, and whilst so many of us grown
people need a flapper, like the sages of Laputa, to call our attention from
our own thoughts to anything that meets the eye or ear, the child sees and
hears everything, and everything seen or heard becomes associated in his

mind not so much with thought as with feeling. Hence it is that we most of
us look back wistfully to our early days, and confess sorrowfully that
though years may have brought “the philosophic mind,”

“ ... Nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower.”

The material world then seems to supply just those objects, whether
birds, beasts, or flowers, by which the child is attracted, and on which his
faculties will therefore be most naturally and healthily employed. But the
Renascence schoolmasters had little notion of this. If you think that the
greatest scholar is the greatest man, you will, as a matter of course, place at
the other end of the scale those who are not scholars at all. An English
inspector, who seems to have thought children had been created with due
regard to the Revised Code of the Privy Council, spoke of the infants who
could not be classed by their performances in “the three R’s” as “the fag
end of the school;” and no doubt the Renascence schoolmasters considered
the children the fag end of humanity. The great scholars were indeed far
above the race of pedants; but the schoolmasters who adopted their ideal
were not. And what is a pedant? “A man who has got rid of his brains to
make room for his learning.”[7] The pedantic schoolmasters of the
Renascence wished the mind of the pupil to be cleared of everything else,
that it might have room for the languages of Greece and Rome. But what if
the mind failed to take in its destined freight? In that case the schoolmasters
had nothing else for it, and were content that it should go empty.

II.
RENASCENCE TENDENCIES.

§ 1. In considering and comparing the two great epochs of intellectual
activity and change in modern times, viz., the sixteenth century and the
nineteenth, we cannot but be struck with one fundamental difference
between them.
§ 2. It will affect all our thoughts, as Sir Henry Maine has said, whether
we place the Golden Age in the Past or in the Future. In the nineteenth
century the “good time” is supposed to be “coming,” but in the sixteenth
century all thinkers looked backwards. The great Italian scholars gazed with
admiration and envy on the works of ancient Greece and Rome, and longed
to restore the old languages, and as much as possible the old world, so that
such works might be produced again. Many were suspected, not altogether
perhaps without reason, of wishing to uproot Christianity itself,[8] that they
might bring back the Golden Age of Pericles.
§ 3. At the same time another movement was going on, principally in
Germany. Here too, men were endeavouring to throw off the immediate
past in order to revive the remote past. The religious reformers, like the
scholars, wished to restore a golden age, only a different age, not the age of
the Antigone, but the age of the Apostles’ Creed. Thus it happened that the
scholars and the reformers joined in attaching the very highest importance
to the ancient languages. Through these languages, and, as they thought,
through them alone, was it possible to get a glimpse into the bygone world
in which their soul delighted.
§ 4. But though all joined in extolling the ancient writings, we find at the
Renascence great differences in the way of regarding these writings and in
the objects for which they were employed. A consideration of these
differences will help us to understand the course of education when the
Renascence was a force no longer.
§ 5. Very powerful in education were the great scholars, of whom
Erasmus was perhaps the greatest, certainly the most celebrated. In

devoting their lives to the study of the ancients their object was not merely
to appreciate literary style, though this was a source of boundless delight to
them, but also to understand the classical writings and the ancient world
through them. These men, whom we may call par excellence the Scholars,
cared indeed before all things for literature; but with all their delight in the
form they never lost sight of the substance. They knew the truth that Milton
afterwards expressed in these memorable words: “Though a linguist should
pride himself to have all the tongues that Babel cleft the world into, yet if
he have not studied the solid things in them as well as the words and
lexicons, he were nothing so much to be esteemed a learned man as any
yeoman or tradesman competently wise in his mother dialect only.”
(Tractate to Hartlib, § 4).
So Erasmus and the scholars would have all the educated understand the
classical authors. But to understand words you must know the things to
which the words refer. Thus the Scholars were led to advocate a partial
study of things a kind of realism. But we must carefully observe a
peculiarity of this scholastic realism which distinguished it from the realism
of a later date—the realism of Bacon. The study of things was undertaken
not for its own sake, but simply in order to understand books. Perhaps some
of us are conscious that this kind of literary realism has not wholly passed
away. We may have observed wild flowers, or the changes in tree or cloud,
because we find that the best way to understand some favourite author, as
Wordsworth or Tennyson. This will help us to understand the realism of the
sixteenth century. The writings of great authors have been compared to the
plaster globes (“celestial globes” as we call them), which assist us in
understanding the configuration of the stars (Guesses at Truth, j. 47).
Adopting this simile we may say that the Scholars loved to study the globe
for its own sake, and when they looked at stars they did so with the object
of understanding the globe. Thus we read of doctors who recommended
their pupils to look at actual cases of disease as the best commentary on the
works of Hippocrates and Galen. This kind of realism was good as far as it
went, but it did not go far. Of course the end in view limited the study, and
the Scholars took no interest in things except those which were mentioned
in the classics. They had no desire to investigate the material universe and
make discoveries for themselves. This is why Galileo could not induce them
to look through his telescope; for the ancients had no telescopes, and the

Scholars wished to see nothing that had not been seen by their favourite
authors. First then we have the Scholars, headed by Erasmus.
§ 6. Next we find a party less numerous and for a time less influential,
who did care about things for the sake of the things themselves; but carried
away by the literary current of their age, they sought to learn about them not
directly, but only by reading. Here again we have a kind of realism which is
not yet extinct. Some years ago I was assured by a Graduate of the
University of London who had passed in chemistry, that, as far as he knew,
he had never seen a chemical in his life: he had got all his knowledge from
books. While such a thing is possible among us, we need not wonder if
those who in the sixteenth century prized the knowledge of things, allowed
books to come between the learner and the object of his study, if they
regarded Nature as a far-off country of which we could know nothing but
what great authors reported to us.
As this party, unlike the Scholars, did not delight in literature as such, but
simply as a means of acquiring knowledge, literary form was not valued by
them, and they preferred Euclid to Sophocles, Columella to Virgil. Seeking
to learn about things, not immediately, but through words, they have
received from Raumer a name they are likely to keep—Verbal Realists. In
the sixteenth century the greatest of the Verbal Realists also gave a hint of
Realism proper; for he was no less a man than Rabelais.
§ 7. Lastly we come to those who, as it turned out, were to have more
influence in the schoolroom than the Scholars and the Verbal Realists
combined. I do not know that these have had any name given them, but for
distinction sake we may call them Stylists. In studying literature the
Scholars cared both for form and substance, the Verbal Realists for
substance only, and the Stylists for form only. The Stylists gave up their
lives, not, like the scholars, to gain a thorough understanding of the ancient
writings and of the old world, but to an attempted reproduction of the
ancient languages and of the classical literary form.
§ 8. In marking these tendencies at the Renascence, we must remember
that though distinguished by their tendencies, these Scholars, Verbal
Realists, and Stylists, were not divided into clearly defined parties.
Categories like these no doubt assist us in gaining precision of thought, but
we must not gain precision at the expense of accuracy. The tendencies we

have been considering did not act in precisely opposite directions, and all
were to some extent affected by them. But one tendency was predominant
in one man and another in another; and this justifies us in calling Sturm a
Stylist, Erasmus a Scholar, and Rabelais a Verbal Realist.
§ 9. In one respect they were all agreed. The world was to be regenerated
by means of books. Nothing pleased them more than to think of their age as
the Revival of Learning.

III.
STURMIUS.
1507-1589.

§ 1. The curriculum bequeathed by the Renascence and stereotyped in the
School Codes of Germany, in the Ratio of the Jesuits, and in the English
public school system, was greatly influenced by the most famous
schoolmaster of the fifteen hundreds, John Sturm, who was for over forty
years Rector of the Strassburg Gymnasium.
§ 2. Sturm was a fine specimen of the successful man: he knew what his
contemporaries wanted, and that was just what he wanted. “He was a
blessed fellow,” as Prince Hal says of Poins, “to think as every man
thought,” and he not only “kept the roadway” himself, but he also
“personally conducted” great bands of pupils over it, at one time “200
noblemen, 24 counts and barons, and 3 princes.” What could schoolmaster
desire more?
§ 3. But I frankly own that Sturm is no favourite of mine, and that I think
that he did much harm to education. However, his influence in the
schoolroom was so great that I must not leave him unnoticed; and I give
some information, taken mainly from Raumer’s account of him, which is
translated in Henry Barnard’s “German Teachers and Educators.” I have
also looked at the exhaustive article by Dr. Bossier in K. A. Schmid’s
Encyklopädie (sub v.)
§ 4. John Sturm, born at Schleiden in the Eifel, not far from Cologne, in
1507, was one of 15 children, and would not have had much teaching had
not his father been steward to a nobleman, with whose sons he was brought
up. He always spoke with reverence and affection of his early teachers, and
from them no doubt he acquired his thirst for learning. With the nobleman’s
sons and under the guidance of a tutor he was sent to Liège, and there he
attended a school of the “Brethren of the Life in Common,” alias
Hieronymites. Many of the arrangements of this school he afterwards

reproduced in the Strassburg Gymnasium, and in this way the good
Brethren gained an influence over classical education throughout the world.
§ 5. Between the age of 15 and 20 Sturm was at Lyons, and before the
end of this period he was forced into teaching for a maintenance. He then,
like many other learned men of the time, turned printer. We next find him at
the University of Paris, where he thought of becoming a doctor of medicine,
but was finally carried away from natural science by the Renascence
devotion to literature, and he became a popular lecturer on the classics.
From Paris he was called to Strassburg (then, as now, in Germany) in 1537.
In 1538 he published his plan of a Gymnasium or Grammar School, with
the title, “The right way of opening schools of literature (De Literarum
Ludis recte aperiendis),” and some years afterwards (1565) he published his
Letters (Classicæ Epistolæ) to the different form-masters in his school.
§ 6. The object of teaching is three-fold, says Sturm, “piety, knowledge,
and the art of expression.” The student should be distinguished by
reasonable and neat speech (ratione et oratione). To attain this the boys in
his school had to give seven years to the acquirement of a pure Latin style;
then two years more were devoted to elegance; then five years of collegiate
life were to be given to the art of Latin speech. This course is for ten years
carefully mapped out by Sturm in his Letters to the masters. The foundation
is to be laid in the tenth class, which the child enters at seven years old, and
in which he learns to read, and is turned on to the declensions and
conjugations. We have for all classes the exact “pensum,” and also
specimens of the questions put in examination by the top boy of the next
class above, a hint which was not thrown away upon the Jesuits.
§ 7. Sturm cries over the superior advantages of the Roman children.
“Cicero was but twenty when he delivered his speeches in behalf of
Quintius and Roscius; but in these days where is there the man even of
eighty, who could make such speeches? Yet there are books enough and
intellect enough. What need we further? We need the Latin language and a
correct method of teaching. Both these we must have before we can arrive
at the summit of eloquence.”
§ 8. Sturm did not, like Rabelais, put Greek on a level with Latin or
above it. The reading of Greek words is begun in the sixth class. Hebrew,
Sturm did not himself learn till he was nearly sixty.

§ 9. With a thousand boys in his school, and carrying on correspondence
with the leading sovereigns of his age, Sturm was a model of the successful
man. But in the end “the religious difficulty” was too much even for him,
and he was dismissed from his post by his opponents “for old age and other
causes.” Surely the “other causes” need not have been mentioned. Sturm
was then eighty years old.
§ 10. The successful man in every age is the man who chooses a popular
and attainable object, and shows tremendous energy in pursuit of it. Most
people don’t know precisely what they want; and among the few who do,
nine-tenths or more fail through lack of energy. But Sturm was quite clear
in his aim, and having settled the means, he showed immense energy and
strength of will in going through with them. He wanted to restore the
language of Cicero and Ovid and to give his pupils great power of elegant
expression in that language. Like all schoolmasters he professed that piety
and knowledge (which in more modern phrase would be wisdom and
knowledge) should come first, but like most schoolmasters he troubled
himself mainly, if not exclusively, about the art of expression. As an
abstract proposition the schoolmaster admits that to have in your head
something worth saying is more important than to have the power of
expression ready in case anything worth saying should “come along.” But
the schoolmaster’s art always has taken, and I suppose, in the main, always
will take for its material the means of expression; and by preference it
chooses a tongue not vulgar or “understanded of the people.” Thus the
schoolmasters with Sturm at their head set themselves to teach words—
foreign words, and allowed their pupils to study nothing else, not even the
mother tongue. The satirist who wrote Hudibras has stated for us the result
—

“No sooner are the organs of the brain
Quick to receive and stedfast to retain
Best knowledges, but all’s laid out upon
Retrieving of the curse of Babylon.
...
And he that is but able to express
No sense in several languages
Will pass for learneder than he that’s known
To speak the strongest reason in his own.”[9]

§ 11. One of the scholars of the Renascence, Hieronymus Wolf, was wise
enough to see that there might be no small merit in a boy’s silence: “Nec
minima pueri virtus est tacere cum recte loqui nesciat” (Quoted by Parker).
But this virtue of silence was not encouraged by Sturm, and he determined
that by the age of sixteen his pupils should have a fair command of
expression in Latin and some knowledge of Greek.[10] Latin indeed was to
supplant the mother tongue, and boys were to be severely punished for
using their own language. By this we may judge of the pernicious effects of
following Sturm. And it is a mistake to suppose that the unwisdom of tilting
at the vernacular was not so much Sturm’s, as of the age in which he lived.
The typical English schoolmaster of the century, Mulcaster, was in this and
many other ways greatly in advance of Sturm. To him it was plain that we
should “care for that most which we ever use most, because we need it
most.”[11] The only need recognized by Sturm was need of the classical
languages. Thus he and his admirers led the unlucky schoolboy straight into
that “slough of Despond”—verbalism, in which he has struggled ever since;

“Plunged for some sense, but found no bottom there,
So learned and floundered on in mere despair.”[12]

IV.
SCHOOLS OF THE JESUITS.

§ 1. Since the Revival of Learning, no body of men has played so
prominent a part in education as the Jesuits. With characteristic sagacity and
energy they soon seized on education as a stepping-stone to power and
influence; and with their talent for organization, they framed a system of
schools which drove all important competitors from the field, and made
Jesuits the instructors of Catholic, and even, to some extent, of Protestant
Europe. Their skill in this capacity is attested by the highest authorities, by
Bacon[13] and by Descartes, the latter of whom had himself been their pupil;
and it naturally met with its reward: for more than one hundred years nearly
all the foremost men throughout Christendom, both among the clergy and
laity, had received the Jesuit training, and in most cases retained for life an
attachment to their old masters.
§ 2. About these Jesuit schools—once so celebrated and so powerful, and
still existing in great numbers, though little remains of their original
importance—there does not seem to be much information accessible to the
English reader. I have, therefore, collected the following particulars about
them; and refer any one who is dissatisfied with so meagre an account, to
the works which I have consulted.[14] The Jesuit schools, as I said, still
exist, but they did their great work in other centuries; and I therefore prefer
to speak of them as things of the past.[15]
§ 3. When the Jesuits were first formally recognized by a Bull of Paul III
in 1540, the Bull stated that the Order was formed, among other things,
“especially for the purpose of instructing boys and ignorant persons in the
Christian religion.” But the Society well understood that secular was more
in demand than religious learning; and they offered the more valued
instruction, that they might have the opportunity of inculcating lessons
which, to the Society at least, were the more valuable. From various Popes
they obtained powers for founding schools and colleges, for giving degrees,
and for lecturing publicly at universities. Their foundations rapidly
extended in the Romance countries, except in France, where they were long

in overcoming the opposition of the Regular clergy and of the University of
Paris. Over the Teutonic and Slavonic countries they spread their influence
first by means of national colleges at Rome, where boys of the different
nations were trained as missionaries. But, in time, the Jesuits pushed their
camps forward, even into the heart of the enemy’s country.
§ 4. The system of education to be adopted in all the Jesuit institutions
was settled during the Generalship of Aquaviva. In 1584 that General
appointed a School Commission, consisting of six distinguished Jesuits
from the various countries of Europe. These spent nearly a year in Rome, in
study and consultation; and the fruit of their labours was the ground-work
of the Ratio atque Institutio Studiorum Societatis Jesu. This, however, did
not take its final form till twelve other commissioners had been at work
upon it. It was then (1599) revised and approved by Aquaviva and the Fifth
and Sixth General Assemblies. By this code the Jesuit schools were
governed till 1832, when the curriculum was enlarged so as to include
physical science and modern languages.
§ 5. The Jesuits who formed the Societas Professa, i.e., those who had
taken all the vows, had spent from fifteen to eighteen years in preparation,
viz., two years as novices and one as approved scholars, during which they
were engaged chiefly in religious exercises, three years in the study of
philosophy and mathematics, four years of theology, and, in the case of the
more distinguished students, two years more in repetition and private
theological study. At some point in this course, mostly after the philosophy,
the students were sent, for a while, to teach the “lower studies” to boys.[16]
The method of teaching was to be learnt in the training schools, called
Juvenats,[17] one of which was founded in each province.
Few, even of the most distinguished students, received dispensation from
giving elementary instruction. Salmeron and Bobadilla performed this duty
in Naples, Lainez in Florence, Borgia (who had been Viceroy of Catalonia)
in Cordova, Canisius in Cologne.
§ 6. During the time the Jesuit held his post as teacher he was to give
himself up entirely to the work. His private studies were abandoned; his
religious exercises shortened. He began generally with the boys in the
lowest form, and that he might be able to study the character of his pupils
he went up the school with them, advancing a step every year, as in the

system now common in Scotland. But some forms were always taught, as
the highest is in Scotland, by the same master, who remained a teacher for
life.
§ 7. Great care was to be taken that the frequent changes in the staff of
masters did not lead to alteration in the conduct of the school. Each teacher
was bound to carry on the established instruction by the established
methods. All his personal peculiarities and opinions were to be as much as
possible suppressed. To secure this a rigid system of supervision was
adopted, and reports were furnished by each officer to his immediate
superior. Over all stood the General of the Order. Next came the Provincial,
appointed by the General. Over each college was the Rector, who was
appointed (for three years) by the General, though he was responsible to the
Provincial, and made his reports to him. Next came the Prefect of Studies,
appointed, not by the Rector, but by the Provincial. The teachers were
carefully watched both by the Rector and the Prefect of Studies, and it was
the duty of the latter to visit each teacher in his class at least once a
fortnight, to hear him teach. The other authorities, besides the masters of
classes, were usually a House Prefect, and Monitors selected from the boys,
one in each form.
§ 8. The school or college was to be built and maintained by gifts and
bequests which the Society might receive for this purpose only. Their
instruction was always given gratuitously. When sufficient funds were
raised to support the officers, teachers, and at least twelve scholars, no
effort was to be made to increase them; but if they fell short of this,
donations were to be sought by begging from house to house. Want of
money, however, was not a difficulty which the Jesuits often experienced.
§ 9. The Jesuit education included two courses of study, studia superiora
et inferiora. In the smaller colleges only the studia inferiora were carried
on; and it is to these lower schools that the following account mainly refers.
The boys usually began this course at ten years old and ended it at sixteen.
[18]

§ 10. The pupils in the Jesuit colleges were of two kinds: 1st, those who
were training for the Order, and had passed the Novitiate; 2nd, the externs,
who were pupils merely. When the building was not filled by the first of
these (the Scholastici, or Nostri, as they are called in the Jesuit writings),

other pupils were taken in to board, who had to pay simply the cost of their
living, and not even this unless they could well afford it. Instruction, as I
said, was gratuitous to all. “Gratis receive, gratis give,” was the Society’s
rule; so they would neither make any charge for instruction, nor accept any
gift that was burdened with conditions.
§ 11. Faithful to the tradition of the Catholic Church, the Society did not
estimate a man’s worth simply according to his birth and outward
circumstances. The Constitutions expressly laid down that poverty and
mean extraction were never to be any hindrance to a pupil’s admission; and
Sacchini says: “Do not let any favouring of the higher classes interfere with
the care of meaner pupils, since the birth of all is equal in Adam, and the
inheritance in Christ.”[19]
§ 12. The externs who could not be received into the building were
boarded in licensed houses, which were always liable to an unexpected visit
from the Prefect of Studies.
§ 13. The “lower school” was arranged in five classes (since increased to
eight), of which the lowest usually had two divisions. Parallel classes were
formed wherever the number of pupils was too great for five masters. The
names given to the several divisions were as follows:

1. Infima }
2. Media } Classis Grammaticæ.
3. Suprema }
4. Humanitas.
5. Rhetorica.

Each was “absolved” in a year, except Rhetorica, which required two
years (Stöckl, p. 237).
Jesuits and Protestants alike in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
thought of little but literary instruction, and that too connected only with
Latin and Greek. The subject-matter of the teaching in the Jesuit schools
was to be “præter Grammaticam, quod ad Rhetoricam, Poësim et Historiam
pertinet,” in addition to Grammar, whatever related to Rhetoric, Poetry, and
History. Reading and writing the mother-tongue might not be taught
without special leave from the Provincial. Latin was as much as possible to

supersede all other languages, even in speaking; and nothing else might be
used by the pupils in the higher forms on any day but a holiday.[20] To gain
a supply of Latin words for ordinary use, the pupils committed to memory
Latin conversations on general topics, such as Francis Pomey’s “Indiculus
Universalis” and “Colloquia Scholastica.”
§ 14. Although many good school-books were written by the Jesuits, a
great part of their teaching was given orally. The master was, in fact, a
lecturer, who expounded sometimes a piece of a Latin or Greek author,
sometimes the rules of grammar. The pupils were required to get up the
substance of these lectures, and to learn the grammar-rules and parts of the
classical authors by heart. The master for his part had to bestow great pains
on the preparation of his lectures.[21]
§ 15. Written exercises, translations, &c., were given in on every day,
except Saturday; and the master had, if possible, to go over each one with
its writer and his appointed rival or æmulus.
§ 16. The method of hearing the rules, &c., committed to memory was
this:—Certain boys in each class, who were called Decurions, repeated their
tasks to the master, and then in his presence heard the other boys repeat
theirs. The master meanwhile corrected the written exercises.[22]
§ 17. One of the leading peculiarities in the Jesuits’ system was the pains
they took to foster emulation—“cotem ingenii puerilis, calcar industriæ—
the whetstone of talent, the spur of industry.” For this purpose all the boys
in the lower part of the school were arranged in pairs, each pair being rivals
(æmuli) to one another. Every boy was to be constantly on the watch to
catch his rival tripping, and was immediately to correct him. Besides this
individual rivalry, every class was divided into two hostile camps, called
Rome and Carthage, which had frequent pitched battles of questions on set
subjects. These were the “Concertations,” in which the boys sometimes had
to put questions to the opposite camp, sometimes to expose erroneous
answers when the questions were asked by the master[23] (see Appendix:
Class Matches, p. 529). Emulation, indeed, was encouraged to a point
where, as it seems to me, it must have endangered the good feeling of the
boys among themselves. Jouvency mentions a practice of appointing mock
defenders of any particularly bad exercise, who should make the author of it
ridiculous by their excuses; and any boy whose work was very

discreditable, was placed on a form by himself, with a daily punishment,
until he could show that some one deserved to change places with him.
§ 18. In the higher classes a better kind of rivalry was cultivated by
means of “Academies,” i.e., voluntary associations for study, which met
together, under the superintendence of a master, to read themes,
translations, &c., and to discuss passages from the classics. The new
members were elected by the old, and to be thus elected was a much-
coveted distinction. In these Academies the cleverer students got practice
for the disputations, which formed an important part of the school work of
the higher classes.
§ 19. There was a vast number of other expedients by which the Jesuits
sought to work on their pupils’ amour propre, such as, on the one hand, the
weekly publication of offences per præconem, and, on the other, besides
prizes (which could be won only by the externs), titles and badges of
honour, and the like. “There are,” says Jouvency, “hundreds of expedients
of this sort, all tending to sharpen the boys’ wits, to lighten the labour of the
master, and to free him from the invidious and troublesome necessity of
punishing.”
§ 20. The school-hours were remarkably short: two hours and a half in
the morning, and the same in the afternoon; with a whole holiday a week in
summer, and a half holiday in winter. The time was spent in the first form
after the following manner:—During the first half-hour the master corrected
the exercises of the previous day, while the Decurions heard the lesson
which had been learnt by heart. Then the master heard the piece of Latin
which he had explained on the previous day. With this construing, was
connected a great deal of parsing, conjugating, declining, &c. The teacher
then explained the piece for the following day, which, in this form, was
never to exceed four lines. The last half-hour of the morning was spent in
explaining grammar. This was done very slowly and carefully: in the words
of the Ratio Studd.: “Pluribus diebus fere singula præcepta inculcanda
sunt”—“Generally take a single rule and drive it in, several days.” For the
first hour of the afternoon the master corrected exercises, and the boys
learnt grammar. If there was time, the master put questions about the
grammar he had explained in the morning. The second hour was taken up
with more explanations of grammar, and the school closed with half an
hour’s concertation, or the master corrected the notes which the pupils had

taken during the day. In the other forms, the work was very similar to this,
except that Greek was added, and also in the higher classes a little
mathematics.
§ 21. It will be observed from the above account, that almost all the
strength of the Jesuit teaching was thrown into the study of the Latin
language, which was to be used, not only for reading, but also in writing
and speaking. But under the name of “erudition” some amount of
instruction in other subjects, especially in history and geography, was given
in explaining, or rather lecturing on, the classical authors. Jouvency says
that this lecture must consist of the following parts:—1st, the general
meaning of the whole passage; 2nd, the explanation of each clause, both as
to the meaning and construction; 3rd, any information, such as accounts of
historical events, or of ancient manners and customs, which could be
connected with the text; 4th, in the higher forms, applications of the rules of
rhetoric and poetry; 5th, an examination of the Latinity; 6th, the inculcation
of some moral lesson. This treatment of a subject he illustrates by examples.
Among these is an account of a lesson for the first (i.e., lowest) class in the
Fable of the Fox and the Mask:—1st, comes the argument and the
explanation of words; 2nd, the grammar and parsing, as vulpes, a
substantive of the third declension, &c., like proles, clades, &c. (here the
master is always to give among his examples some which the boys already
know); 3rd, comes the eruditio—something about foxes, about tragedy,
about the brain, and hence about other parts of the head; 4th, Latinity, the
order of the words, choice of the words, synonyms, &c. Then the sentences
may be parodied; other suitable substantives may be found for the
adjectives and vice versâ; and every method is to be adopted of showing the
boys how to use the words they have learnt. Lastly, comes the moral.
§ 22. The practical teacher will be tempted to ask, How is the attention of
the class to be kept up whilst all this information is given? This the Jesuits
did partly by punishing the inattentive. Every boy was subsequently
required to reproduce what the teacher had said, and to show his written
notes of it. But no doubt this matter of attention was found a difficulty.
Jouvency tells the teachers to break off from time to time in their lectures,
and to ask questions; and he adds: “Variæ sunt artes excitandæ attentionis
quas docebit usus et sua cuique industria suggeret.—Very various are the
devices for arousing attention. These will occur with practice and pains.”

For private study, besides written exercises and learning by heart, the
pupils were recommended subjects to get up in their own time; and in this,
and also as to the length of some of the regular lessons, they were permitted
to decide for themselves. Here, as everywhere, the Jesuits trusted to the
sense of honour and emulation—those who did extra work were praised and
rewarded.
§ 23. One of the maxims of this system was: “Repetitio mater
studiorum.” Every lesson was connected with two repetitions—one before
it began, of preceding work, and the other at the close, of the work just
done. Besides this, one day a week was devoted entirely to repetition. In the
three lowest classes the desire of laying a solid foundation even led to the
second six months in the year being given to again going over the work of
the first six months.[24] By this means boys of extraordinary ability could
pass through these forms in eighteen months, instead of three years.
§ 23. Thoroughness in work was the one thing insisted on. Sacchini says
that much time should be spent in going over the more important things,
which are “veluti multorum fontes et capita (as it were the sources and
starting points of many others)”; and that the master should prefer to teach a
few things perfectly, to giving indistinct impressions of many things.[25] We
should remember, however, that the pupils of the Jesuits were not children.
Subjects such as grammar cannot, by any expenditure of time and trouble,
be perfectly taught to children, because children cannot perfectly
understand them; so that the Jesuit thoroughness is not always attainable.
§ 24. The usual duration of the course in the lower schools was six years
—i.e., one year in each of the four lower classes, and two years in the
highest class. Every year closed with a very formal examination. Before this
examination took place, the pupils had lessons in the manner of it, so that
they might come prepared, not only with a knowledge of the subjects, but
also of the laws of writing for examination (“scribendi ad examen leges”).
The examination was conducted by a commission appointed for the
purpose, of which commission the Prefect of Studies was an ex officio
member. The masters of the classes, though they were present, and could
make remarks, were not of the examining body. For the vivâ voce the boys
were ushered in, three at a time, before the solemn conclave. The results of
the examination, both written and verbal, were joined with the records of
the work done in the past year; and the names of those pupils who had

distinguished themselves were then published in order of merit, but the poll
was arranged alphabetically, or according to birthplace.
§ 25. As might be expected, the Jesuits were to be very careful of the
moral and religious training of their pupils. “Quam maxime in vitæ
probitate ac bonis artibus doctrinaque proficiant ad Dei gloriam.” (Ratio
Studd., quoted by Schmid.) And Sacchini tells the master to remember how
honourable his office is; as it has to do, not with grammar only, but also
with the science and practice of a Christian and religious life: “atque eo
quidem ordine ut ipsa ingenii eruditio sit expolitio morum, et humana
literatura divinæ ancilletur sapientiæ.”[26]
Each lesson was to begin with prayer or the sign of the Cross. The pupils
were to hear Mass every morning, and were to be urged to frequent
confession and receiving of the Holy Communion. The Father Confessor
was always a Jesuit, but he was not a master in the school.
§ 26. The bodily health also was to be carefully attended to. The pupils
were not to study too much or too long at a time. Nothing was to be done
for a space of from one or two hours after dinner. On holidays excursions
were made to farms in the country.[27]
§ 27. Punishments were to be as light as possible, and the master was to
shut his eyes to offences whenever he thought he might do so with safety.
Grave offences were to be visited with corporal punishment, performed by a
“corrector,” who was not a member of the Order. Where this chastisement
did not have a good effect, the pupil was to be expelled.[28]
§ 28. The dry details into which I have been drawn by faithfully copying
the manner of the Ratio Studiorum may seem to the reader to afford no
answer to the question which naturally suggests itself—To what did the
school-system of the Jesuits owe its enormous popularity? But in part, at
least, these details do afford an answer. They show us that the Jesuits were
intensely practical. The Ratio Studiorum hardly contains a single principle;
but what it does is this—it points out a perfectly attainable goal, and
carefully defines the road by which that goal is to be approached. For each
class was prescribed not only the work to be done, but also the end to be
kept in view. Thus method reigned throughout—perhaps not the best
method, as the object to be attained was assuredly not the highest object—
but the method, such as it was, was applied with undeviating exactness. In

this particular the Jesuit schools contrasted strongly with their rivals of old,
as indeed with the ordinary school of the present day. The Head Master,
who is to the modern English school what the General, Provincial, Rector,
Prefect of Studies, and Ratio Studiorum combined were to a school of the
Jesuits, has perhaps no standard in view up to which the boy should have
been brought when his school course is completed.[29] The masters of forms
teach just those portion of their subject in which they themselves are
interested, in any way that occurs to them, with by no means uniform
success; so that when two forms are examined with the same examination
paper, it is no very uncommon occurrence for the lower to be found
superior to the higher. It is, perhaps, to be expected that a course in which
uniform method tends to a definite goal would on the whole be more
successful than one in which a boy has to accustom himself by turns to half-
a-dozen different methods, invented at haphazard by individual masters
with different aims in view, if indeed they have any aim at all.
§ 29. I have said that the object which the Jesuits proposed in their
teaching was not the highest object. They did not aim at developing all the
faculties of their pupils, but mainly the receptive and reproductive faculties.
When the young man had acquired a thorough mastery of the Latin
language for all purposes, when he was well versed in the theological and
philosophical opinions of his preceptors, when he was skilful in dispute,
and could make a brilliant display from the resources of a well-stored
memory, he had reached the highest point to which the Jesuits sought to
lead him.[30] Originality and independence of mind, love of truth for its own
sake, the power of reflecting, and of forming correct judgments were not
merely neglected—they were suppressed in the Jesuits’ system. But in what
they attempted they were eminently successful, and their success went a
long way towards securing their popularity.[31]
§ 30. Their popularity was due, moreover, to the means employed, as
well as to the result attained. The Jesuit teachers were to lead, not drive
their pupils, to make their learning, not merely endurable, but even
acceptable, “disciplinam non modo tolerabilem, sed etiam amabilem.”
Sacchini expresses himself very forcibly on this subject. “It is,” says he,
“the unvarying decision of wise men, whether in ancient or modern times,
that the instruction of youth will be always best when it is pleasantest:
whence this application of the word ludus. The tenderness of youth requires

of us that we should not overstrain it, its innocence that we should abstain
from harshness.... That which enters into willing ears the mind as it were
runs to welcome, seizes with avidity, carefully stows away, and faithfully
preserves.”[32] The pupils were therefore to be encouraged in every way to
take kindly to their learning. With this end in view (and no doubt other
objects also), the masters were carefully to seek the boys’ affections. “When
pupils love the master,” says Sacchini, “they will soon love his teaching.
Let him, therefore, show an interest in everything that concerns them and
not merely in their studies. Let him rejoice with those that rejoice, and not
disdain to weep with those that weep. After the example of the Apostle let
him become a little one amongst little ones, that he may make them adult in
Christ, and Christ adult in them ... Let him unite the grave kindness and
authority of a father with a mother’s tenderness.”[33]
§ 31. In order that learning might be pleasant to the pupils, it was
necessary that they should not be overtasked. To avoid this, the master had
to study the character and capacity of each boy in his class, and to keep a
book with all particulars about him, and marks from one to six indicating
proficiency. Thus the master formed an estimate of what should be required,
and the amount varied considerably with the pupil, though the quality of the
work was always to be good.
§ 32. Not only was the work not to be excessive, it was never to be of
great difficulty. Even the grammar was to be made as easy and attractive as
possible. “I think it a mistake” says Sacchini, “to introduce at an early stage
the more thorny difficulties of grammar: ... for when the pupils have
become familiar with the earlier parts, use will, by degrees, make the more
difficult clear to them. His mind expanding and his judgment ripening as he
grows older the pupil will often see for himself that which he could hardly
be made to see by others. Moreover, in reading an author, examples of
grammatical difficulties will be more easily observed in connection with the
context, and will make more impression on the mind, than if they are taught
in an abstract form by themselves. Let them then, be carefully explained
whenever they occur.”[34]
§ 33. Perhaps no body of men in Europe (the Thugs may, in this respect,
rival them in Asia) have been so hated as the Jesuits. I once heard Frederick
Denison Maurice say he thought Kingsley could find good in every one

except the Jesuits, and, he added, he thought he could find good even in
them. But why should a devoted Christian find a difficulty in seeing good in
the Jesuits, a body of men whose devotion to their idea of Christian duty
has never been surpassed?[35] The difficulty arose from differences in ideal.
Both held that the ideal Christian would do everything “to the greater glory
of God,” or as the Jesuits put it in their business-like fashion, “A.M.D.G.,”
(i.e., ad majorem Dei gloriam). But Maurice and Kingsley thought of a
divine idea for every man. The Jesuits’ idea lost sight of the individual. Like
their enemy, Carlyle, the Jesuits in effect worshipped strength, but Carlyle
thought of the strength of the individual, the Jesuits of the strength of “the
Catholic Church.” “The Catholic Church” was to them the manifested
kingdom of God. Everything therefore that gave power to the Church
tended “A.M.D.G.” The Company of Jesus was the regular army of the
Church, so, arguing logically from their premises, they made the glory of
God and the success of the Society convertible terms.
§ 34. Thus their conception was a purely military conception. A
commander-in-chief, if he were an ardent patriot and a great general, would
do all he could to make the army powerful. He would care much for the
health, morals, and training of the soldiers, but always with direct reference
to the army. He would attend to everything that made a man a better soldier;
beyond this he would not concern himself. In his eyes the army would be
everything, and a soldier nothing but a part of it, just as a link is only a part
of a chain. Paulsen, speaking of the Jesuits, says truly that no great
organization can exist without a root idea. The root idea of the army is the
sacrifice and annihilation of the individual, that the body may be fused
together and so gain a strength greater than that of any number of
individuals. Formed on this idea the army acts all together and in obedience
to a single will, and no mob can stand its charge. Ignatius Loyola and
succeeding Generals took up this idea and formed an army for the Church,
an army that became the wonder and the terror of all men. Never, as
Compayré says, had a body been so sagaciously organized, or had wielded
so great resources for good and for evil.[36] (See Buisson, ij, 1419.)
§ 35. To the English schoolmaster the Jesuits must always be interesting,
if for no other reason at least for this—that they were so intensely practical.
“Les Jésuites ne sont pas des pédagogues assez desintéressés pour nous
plaire.—The Jesuits as schoolmasters,” says M. Compayré, “are not

disinterested enough for us.” (Buisson, sub v. Jésuites, ad f.). But
disinterested pedagogy is not much to the mind of the Englishman. It does
not seem to know quite what it would be after, and deals in generalities,
such as “Education is not a means but an end;” and the end being somewhat
indefinite, the means are still more wanting in precision. This vagueness is
what the English master hates. He prefers not to trouble himself about the
end. The wisdom of his ancestors has settled that, and he can direct his
attention to what really interests him—the practical details. In this he
resembles the Jesuits. The end has been settled for them by their founder.
They revel in practical details, in which they are truly great, and here we
may learn much from them. “Ratio applied to studies” says Father Eyre,[37]
“more naturally means Method than Principle; and our Ratio Studiorum is
essentially a Method or System of teaching and learning.” Here is a method
that has been worked uniformly and with singular success for three
centuries, and can still give a good account of its old rivals. But will it hold
its own against the late Reformers? As regards intellectual training the new
school seeks to draw out the faculties of the young mind by employing
them on subjects in which it is interested. The Jesuits fixed a course of
study which, as they frankly recognized, could not be made interesting. So
they endeavoured to secure accuracy by constant repetition, and relied for
industry on two motive powers: 1st, the personal influence of the master;
and, 2nd, “the spur of industry”—emulation.
§ 36. To acquire “influence” has ever been the main object of the Society,
and his devotion to this object makes a great distinction between the Jesuit
and most other instructors. His notion of the task was thus expressed by
Father Gerard, S. J., at the Educational Conference of 1884: “Teaching is an
art amongst arts. To be worthy of the name it must be the work of an
individual upon individuals. The true teacher must understand, appreciate,
and sympathize with those who are committed to him. He must be daily
discovering what there is (and undoubtedly there is something in each of
them) capable of fruitful development, and contriving how better to get at
them and to evoke whatever possibilities there are in them for good.” The
Jesuit master, then, tried to gain influence over the boys and to use that
influence for many purposes; to make them work well being one of these,
but not perhaps the most important.

§ 37. As for emulation, no instructors have used it so elaborately as the
Jesuits. In most English schools the prizes have no effect whatever except
on the first three or four boys, and the marking is so arranged that those
who take the lead in the first few lessons can keep their position without
much effort. This clumsy system would not suit the Jesuits. They often for
prize-giving divide a class into a number of small groups, the boys in each
group being approximately equal, and a prize is offered for each group. The
class matches, too, stimulate the weaker pupils even more than the strong.
§ 38. In conclusion, I will give the chief points of the system in the words
of one of its advocates and admirers, who was himself educated at
Stonyhurst:
“Let us now try to put together the various pieces of this school
machinery and study the effect. We have seen that the boys have masters
entirely at their disposition, not only at class time, but at recreation time
after supper in the night Reading Rooms. Each day they record victory or
defeat in the recurring exercises or themes upon various matters. By the
quarterly papers or examinations in composition, for which nine hours are
assigned, the order of merit is fixed, and this order entails many little
privileges and precedencies, in chapel, refectory, class room, and elsewhere.
Each master, if he prove a success and his health permit, continues to be the
instructor of the boys in his class during the space of six years. ‘It is
obvious’ says Sheil, in his account of Stonyhurst, ‘that much of a boy’s
acquirements, and a good deal of the character of his taste, must have
depended upon the individual to whose instructions he was thus almost
exclusively confined.’ And in many cases the effects must be a greater
interest felt in the students by their teachers, a mutual attachment founded
on long acquaintance, and a more thorough knowledge, on the part of the
master, of the weak and strong points of his pupils. Add to the above, the
‘rival’ and ‘side’ system, the effect of challenges and class combats; of the
wearing of decorations and medals by the Imperators on Sundays, Festival
Days, Concertation Days, and Examination Days; of the extraordinary work
—done much more as private than as class work—helping to give
individuality to the boy’s exertions, which might otherwise be merged in the
routine work of the class; and the ‘free time’ given for improvement on wet
evenings and after night prayers; add the Honours Matter; the Reports read
before the Rector and all subordinate Superiors, the Professors, and whole

body of Students; add the competition in each class and between the various
classes, and even between the various colleges in England of the Society;
and only one conclusion can be arrived at. It is a system which everyone is
free to admire or think inferior to some other preferred by him; but it is a
system.” (Stonyhurst College, Present and Past, by A. Hewitson, 2nd
edition, 1878, pp. 214, ff.)
§ 39. Yes, it is a system, a system built up by the united efforts of many
astute intellects and showing marvellous skill in selecting means to attain a
clearly conceived end. There is then in the history of education little that
should be more interesting or might be more instructive to the master of an
English public school than the chapter about the Jesuits.[38]

V.
RABELAIS.
(1483-1553.)

§ 1. To great geniuses it is given to think themselves in a measure free
from the ordinary notions of their time and often to anticipate the
discoveries of a future age. In all literature there is perhaps hardly a more
striking instance of this “detached” thinking than we find in Rabelais’
account of the education of Gargantua.
§ 2. We see in Rabelais an enthusiasm for learning and a tendency to
verbal realism; that is, he turned to the old writers for instruction about
things. So far he was a child of the Renascence. But in other respects he
advanced far beyond it.
§ 3. After a scornful account of the ordinary school books and methods
by which Gargantua “though he studied hard, did nevertheless profit
nothing, but only grew thereby foolish, simple, dolted, and blockish,”
Rabelais decides that “it were better for him to learn nothing at all than to
be taught suchlike books under suchlike schoolmasters.” All this old lumber
must be swept away, and in two years a youth may acquire a better
judgment, a better manner, and more command of language than could ever
have been obtained by the old method.
We are then introduced to the model pupil. The end of education has been
declared to be sapiens et eloquens pietas; and we find that though Rabelais
might have substituted knowledge for piety, he did care for piety, and
valued very highly both wisdom and eloquence. The eloquent Roman was
the ideal of the Renascence, and Rabelais’ model pupil expresses himself
“with gestures so proper, pronunciation so distinct, a voice so eloquent,
language so well turned and in such good Latin that he seemed rather a
Gracchus, a Cicero, an Æmilius of the time past than a youth of the present
age.”
§ 4. So a Renascence tutor is appointed for Gargantua and administers to
him a potion that makes him forget all he has ever learned. He then puts

him through a very different course. Like all wise instructors he first
endeavours to secure the will of the pupil. He allows Gargantua to go the
accustomed road till he can convince him it is the wrong one. This seems to
me a remarkable proof of wisdom. How often does the “new master” break
abruptly with the past, and raise the opposition of the pupil by dispraise of
all he has already done! By degrees Ponocrates, the model tutor, inspired in
his pupil a great desire for improvement. This he did by bringing him into
the society of learned men, who filled him with ambition to be like them.
Thereupon Gargantua “put himself into such a train of study that he lost not
any hour in the day, but employed all his time in learning and honest
knowledge.” The day was to begin at 4 a.m., with reading of “some chapter
of the Holy Scripture, and oftentimes he gave himself to revere, adore, pray,
and send up his supplications to that good God, whose word did show His
majesty and marvellous judgments.” This is the only hint we get in this part
of the book on the subject of religious or moral education: the training is
directed to the intellect and the body.
§ 5. The remarkable feature in Rabelais’ curriculum is this, that it is
concerned mainly with things. Of the Seven Liberal Arts of the Middle
Ages, the first three were purely formal: grammar, logic, rhetoric; while the
following course: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music, were not.
The effect of the Renascence was to cause increasing neglect of the
Quadrivium, but Rabelais cares for the Quadrivium only; Gargantua studies
arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music, and the Trivium is not
mentioned. Great use is made of books and Gargantua learned them by
heart; but all that he learned he at once “applied to practical cases
concerning the estate of man.” It was the substance of the reading, not the
form, that was thought of. At dinner “if they thought good they continued
reading or began to discourse merrily together; speaking first of the virtue,
propriety, efficacy, and nature of all that was served in at that table; of
bread, of wine, of water, of salt, of flesh, fish, fruits, herbs, roots, and of
their dressing. By means whereof he learned in a little time all the passages
that on these subjects are to be found in Pliny, Athenæus, &c. Whilst they
talked of these things, many times to be more certain they caused the very
books to be brought to the table; and so well and perfectly did he in his
memory retain the things above said, that in that time there was not a
physician that knew half so much as he did.” Again, out of doors he was to
observe trees and plants, and “compare them with what is written of them in

the books of the ancients, such as Theophrastus, Dioscorides, &c.” Here
again, actual realism was to be joined with verbal realism, for Gargantua
was to carry home with him great handfuls for herborising. Rabelais even
recommends studying the face of the heavens at night, and then observing
the change that has taken place at 4 in the morning. So he seems to have
been the first writer on education (and the first by a long interval), who
would teach about things by observing the things themselves. It was this
Anschauungs-prinzip—use of sense-impressions—that Pestalozzi extended
and claimed as his invention two centuries and a half later. Rabelais also
gives a hint of the use of hand-work as well as head-work. Gargantua and
his fellows “did recreate themselves in bottling hay, in cleaving and sawing
wood, and in threshing sheaves of corn in the barn. They also studied the art
of painting or carving.” The course was further connected with life by visits
to the various handicraftsmen, in whose workshops “they did learn and
consider the industry and invention of the trader.”
Thus, even in the time of the Renascence, Rabelais saw that the life of
the intellect might be nourished by many things besides books. But books
were still kept in the highest place. Even on a holiday, which occurred on
some fine and clear day once a month, “though spent without books or
lecture, yet was the day not without profit; for in the meadows they
repeated certain pleasant verses of Virgil’s Agriculture, of Hesiod, of
Politian’s Husbandry.” They also turned Latin epigrams into French
rondeaux.
This course of study, “although at first it seemed difficult, yet soon
became so sweet, so easy, and so delightful, that it seemed rather the
recreation of a king than the study of a scholar.”
In preferring the Quadrivial studies to the Trivial, and still more in his
use of actual things, Rabelais separates himself from all the teachers of his
time.
§ 6. Very remarkable too is the attention he pays to physical education. A
day does not pass on which Gargantua does not gallantly exercise his body
as he has already exercised his mind. The exercises prescribed are very
various, and include running, jumping, swimming, with practice on the
horizontal bar and with dumb-bells, &c. But in one respect Rabelais seems
behind our own writer, Richard Mulcaster. Mulcaster trained the body

simply with a view to health. Rabelais is thinking of the gentleman, and all
his physical exercises are to prepare him for the gentleman’s occupation,
war. The constant preparation for war had a strong and in some respects a
very beneficial influence on the education of gentlemen in the fifteen and
sixteen hundreds, as it has had on that of the Germans in the eighteen
hundreds. But to be ready to slaughter one’s fellow creatures is not an ideal
aim in education; and besides this, one half of the human race can never (as
far as we can judge at present) be affected by it. We therefore prefer the
physical training recommended by the Englishman.
Mr. Walter Besant by his Readings in Rabelais (Blackwood, 1883), has put Rabelais’ wit and
wisdom where we can get at most of it without searching in the dung-hill. But he has unfortunately
omitted Gargantua’s letter to Pantagruel at Paris (book ij, chap. 8), where we get the curriculum as
proposed by Rabelais, a chapter in which no scavenger is needed.
I will give some extracts from it:—
“Although my deceased father of happy memory, Grangousier, had bent his best endeavours to
make me profit in all perfection and political knowledge, and that my labour and study was fully
correspondent to, yea, went beyond his desire; nevertheless, the time then was not so proper and fit
for learning as it is at present, neither had I plenty of such good masters as thou hast had; for that
time was darksome, obscured with clouds of ignorance and savouring a little of the infelicity and
calamity of the Goths, who had, wherever they set footing, destroyed all good literature, which in my
age hath by the Divine Goodness been restored unto its former light and dignity, and that with such
amendment and increase of knowledge that now hardly should I be admitted unto the first form of the
little grammar school boys (des petits grimaulx): I say, I, who in my youthful days was (and that
justly) reputed the most learned of that age. Now it is that the old knowledges (disciplines) are
restored, the languages revived. Greek (without which it is a shame for any one to call himself
learned), Hebrew, Chaldee, Latin. Printing (Des impressions) too, so elegant and exact, is in use,
which in my day was invented by divine inspiration, as cannon were by suggestion of the devil. All
the world is full of men of knowledge, of very learned teachers, of large libraries; so that it seems to
me that neither in the age of Plato, nor of Cicero, nor of Papinian was there such convenience for
studying as there is now. I see the robbers, hangmen, adventurers, ostlers of to-day more learned then
the doctors and the preachers of my youth. Why, women and girls have aspired to the heavenly
manna of good learning ... I mean you to learn the languages perfectly first of all, the Greek as
Quintilian wishes, then the Latin, then Hebrew for the Scriptures, and Chaldee and Arabic at the
same time; and that thou form thy style in Greek on Plato, in Latin on Cicero. Let there be no history
which thou hast not ready in thy memory, in which cosmography will aid thee. Of the Liberal Arts,
geometry, arithmetic, music, I have given thee a taste when thou wast still a child, at the age of five
or six [Pantagruel was a giant, we must remember]; carry them on; and know’st thou all the rules of
astronomy? Don’t touch astrology for divination and the art of Lullius, which are mere vanity. In the
civil law thou must know the five texts by heart.
“ ... As for knowledge of the works of Nature, I would have thee devote thyself to them so that
there may be no sea, river, or spring of which thou knowest not the fishes; all the birds of the air, all
the trees, forest or orchard, all the herbs of the field, all the metals hid in the bowels of the earth, all
the precious stones of the East and the South, let nothing be unknown to thee.
“Then turn again with diligence to the books of the Greek physicians, and the Arabs, and the Latin,
without despising the Talmudists and the Cabalists; and by frequent dissections acquire a perfect

knowledge of the other world, which is Man. And some hours a-day begin to read the Sacred
Writings, first in Greek the New Testament and Epistles of the Apostles; then in Hebrew the Old
Testament. In brief, let me see thee an abyss and bottomless pit of knowledge, for from henceforth as
thou growest great and becomest a man thou must part from this tranquillity and rest of study ... And
because, as Solomon saith, wisdom entereth not into a malicious mind, and science without
conscience is but the ruin of the soul, thou shouldst serve, love, and fear God, and in Him centre all
thy thoughts, all thy hope; and by faith rooted in charity be joined to Him, so as never to be separated
from Him by sin.”
The influence of Rabelais on Montaigne, Locke, and Rousseau has been well traced by Dr. F. A.
Arnstädt. (François Rabelais, Leipzig, Barth, 1872.)

VI.
MONTAIGNE.
(1533-1592.)

§ 1. The learned ideal established by the Renascence was accepted by
Rabelais, though he made some suggestions about Realien[39] that seem to
us much in advance of it. When he quotes the saying “Magis magnos
clericos non sunt magis magnos sapientes” (“the greatest clerks are not the
greatest sages”), this singular piece of Latinity is appropriately put into the
mouth of a monk, who represents everything the Renascence scholars
despised. In Montaigne we strike into a new vein of thought, and we find
that what the monk alleges in defence of his ignorance the cultured
gentleman adopts as the expression of an important truth.
§ 2. We ordinary people see truths indeed, but we see them indistinctly,
and are not completely guided by them. It is reserved for men of genius to
see truths, some truths that is, often a very few, with intense clearness.
Some of these men have no great talent for speech or writing, and they try
to express the truths they see, not so much by books as by action. Such men
in education were Comenius, Pestalozzi, and Froebel. But sometimes the
man of genius has a great power over language, and then he finds for the
truths he has seen, fitting expression, which becomes almost as lasting as
the truths themselves. Such men were Montaigne and Rousseau. If the
historian of education is asked “What did Montaigne do?” he will answer
“Nothing.” “What did Froebel say?” “He said a great deal, but very few
people can read him and still fewer understand him.” Both, however, are
and must remain forces in education. Montaigne has given to some truths
imperishable form in his Essays, and Froebel’s ideas come home to all the
world in the Kindergarten.
§ 3. The ideal set up by the Renascence attached the highest importance
to learning. Montaigne maintained that the resulting training even at its best
was not suited to a gentleman or man of action. Virtue, wisdom, and
intellectual activity should be thought of before learning. Education should

be first and foremost the development and exercise of faculties. And even if
the acquirement of knowledge is thought of, Montaigne maintains that the
pedants do not understand the first conditions of knowledge and give a
semblance not the true thing.—“Il ne faut pas attacher le savoir à l’âme, il
faut l’incorporer.—Knowledge cannot be fastened on to the mind; it must
become part and parcel of the mind itself.”[40]
Here then we have two separate counts against the Renascence
education:
1st.—Knowledge is not the main thing.
2nd.—True knowledge is something very different from knowing by
heart.
§ 4. It is a pity Montaigne’s utterances about education are to be found in
English only in the complete translation of his essays. Seeing that a good
many millions of people read English, and are most of them concerned in
education, one may hope that some day the sayings of the shrewd old
Frenchman may be offered them in a convenient form.
§ 5. Here are some of them: “The evil comes of the foolish way in which
our [instructors] set to work; and on the plan on which we are taught no
wonder if neither scholars nor masters become more able, whatever they
may do in becoming more learned. In truth the trouble and expense of our
fathers are directed only to furnish our heads with knowledge: not a word of
judgment or virtue. Cry out to our people about a passer-by, ‘There’s a
learned man!’ and about another ‘There’s a good man!’ they will be all agog
after the learned man, and will not look at the good man. One might fairly
raise a third cry: ‘There’s a set of numskulls!’ We are ready enough to ask
‘Does he know Greek or know Latin? Does he write verse or write prose?’
But whether he has become wiser or better should be the first question, and
that is always the last. We ought to find out, not who knows most but who
knows best.” (I, chap. 24, Du Pédantisme, page or two beyond Odi
homines.)
§ 6. The true educators, according to Montaigne, were the Spartans, who
despised literature, and cared only for character and action. At Athens they
thought about words, at Sparta about things. At Athens boys learnt to speak
well, at Sparta to do well: at Athens to escape from sophistical arguments,

and to face all attempts to deceive them; at Sparta to escape from the
allurements of pleasure, and to face the slings and arrows of outrageous
fortune, even death itself. In the one system there was constant exercise of
the tongue, in the other of the soul. “So it is not strange that when Antipater
demanded of the Spartans fifty children as hostages they replied they would
sooner give twice as many grown men, such store did they set by their
country’s training.” (Du Pédantisme, ad f.)
§ 7. It is odd to find a man of the fifteen hundreds who quotes from the
old authors at every turn, and yet maintains that “we lean so much on the
arm of other people that we lose our own strength.” The thing a boy should
learn is not what the old authors say, but “what he himself ought to do when
he becomes a man.” Wisdom, not knowledge! “We may become learned
from the learning of others; wise we can never be except by our own
wisdom.” (Bk. j, chap. 24).
§ 8. So entirely was Montaigne detached from the thought of the
Renascence that he scoffs at his own learning, and declares that true
learning has for its subject, not the past or the future, but the present. “We
are truly learned from knowing the present, not from knowing the past any
more than the future.” And yet “we toil only to stuff the memory and leave
the conscience and the understanding void. And like birds who fly abroad to
forage for grain bring it home in their beak, without tasting it themselves, to
feed their young, so our pedants go picking knowledge here and there out of
several authors, and hold it at their tongue’s end, only to spit it out and
distribute it amongst their pupils.” (Du Pédantisme.) “We are all richer than
we think, but they drill us in borrowing and begging, and lead us to make
more use of other people’s goods than of our own.”[41] (Bk. iij, chap. 12, De
la Physionomie, beg. of 3rd paragraph).
§ 9. So far Montaigne. What do we schoolmasters say to all this? If we
would be quite candid I think we must allow that, after reading Montaigne’s
essay, we put it down with the conviction that in the main he was right, and
that he had proved the error and absurdity of a vast deal that goes on in the
schoolroom. But from this first view we have had on reflection to make
several drawbacks.
§ 10. Montaigne, like Locke and Rousseau, who followed in his steps,
arranges for every boy to have a tutor entirely devoted to him. We may

question whether this method of bringing up children is desirable, and we
may assert, without question, that in most cases it is impossible. It seems
ordained that at every stage of life we should require the companionship of
those of our own age. If we take two beings as little alike as a man and a
child and force them to be each other’s companions, so great is the
difference in their thoughts and interests that they will fall into inevitable
boredom and restraint. So we see that this plan, even in the few cases in
which it would be possible, would not be desirable; and for the great
majority of boys it would be out of the question. We must then arrange for
the young to be taught, not as individuals, but in classes, and this greatly
changes the conditions of the problem. One of the first conditions is this,
that we have to employ each class regularly and uniformly for some hours
every day. Schoolmasters know what their non-scholastic mentors forget:
we can make a class learn, but, broadly speaking, we cannot make a class
think, still less can we make it judge. As a great deal of occupation has to be
provided, we are therefore forced to make our pupils learn. Whatever may
be the value of the learning in itself it is absolutely necessary as
employment.
§ 11. No doubt it will make a vast difference whether we consider the
learning mainly as employment, as a means of taking up time and
preventing “sauntering,” as Locke boldly calls it, or whether we are chiefly
anxious to secure some special results. The knowledge of the Latin and
Greek languages and the Latin and Greek authors was a result so highly
prized by the Renascence scholars that they insisted on a prodigious
quantity of learning, not as employment, but simply as the means of
acquiring this knowledge. As the knowledge got to be less esteemed the
pressure was by degrees relaxed. In our public schools fifty or sixty years
ago the learning was to some extent retained as employment, but there
certainly was no pressure, and the majority of the boys never learnt the
ancient languages. So the masters of that time had given up the Renascence
enthusiasm for the classics, and on the negative side of his teaching had
come to an agreement with Montaigne. Any one inclined to sarcasm might
say that on the positive side they were still totally opposed to him, for he
thought virtue and judgment were the main things to be cared for, and they
did not care for these things at all. But this is not a fair statement. The one
thing gained, or supposed to be gained, in the public schools was the art of
living, and this art, though it does not demand heroic virtue, requires at least

prudence and self-control. Montaigne’s system was a revolt against the
bookishness of the Renascence. “In our studies,” says he, “whatever
presents itself before us is book enough; a roguish trick of a page, a blunder
of a servant, a jest at table, are so many new subjects.” So the education out
of school was in his eyes of more value than the education in school. And
this was acknowledged also in our public schools: “It is not the Latin and
Greek they learn or don’t learn that we consider so important,” the masters
used to say, “but it is the tone of the school and the discipline of the
games.” But of late years this virtual agreement with Montaigne has been
broken up. School work is no longer mere employment, but it is done under
pressure, and with penalties if the tale of brick turned out does not pass the
inspector.
§ 12. What has produced this great change? It is due mainly to two
causes:
1. The pressure put on the young to attain classical knowledge was
relaxed when it was thought that they could get through life very well
without this knowledge. But in these days new knowledge has awakened a
new enthusiasm. The knowledge of science promises such great advantages
that the latest reformers, headed by Mr. Herbert Spencer, seem to make the
well-being of the grown person depend mainly on the amount of scientific
knowledge he stored up in his youth. This is the first cause of educational
pressure.
§ 13. 2. The second and more urgent cause is the rapid development of
our system of examinations. Everybody’s educational status is now settled
by the examiner, a potentate whose influence has brought back in a very
malignant form all the evils of which Montaigne complains. Do what we
will, the faculty chiefly exercised in preparing for ordinary examinations is
the “carrying memory.” So the acquisition of knowledge—mere memory or
examination knowledge—has again come to be regarded as the one thing
needful in education, and there is great danger of everything else being
neglected for it. Of the fourfold results of education—virtue, wisdom, good
manners, learning—the last alone can be fairly tested in examinations; and
as the schoolmaster’s very bread depends nowadays first on his getting
through examinations himself and then on getting his pupils through, he
would be more than human, if with Locke he thought of learning “last and
least.” A great change has come over our public schools. The amount of

work required from the boys is far greater than it used to be and masters
again measure their success by the amount of knowledge the average boy
takes away with him. It seems to me high time that another Montaigne
arose to protest that a man’s intellectual life does not consist in the number
of things he remembers, and that his true life is not his intellectual life only,
but embraces his power of will and action and his love of what is noble and
right. “Wisdom cried of old, I am the mother of fair Love and Fear and
Knowledge and holy Hope” (Ecclesiasticus). In these days of science and
examinations does there not seem some danger lest knowledge should
prove the sole survivor? May not Knowledge, like another Cain, raise its
hand against its brethren “fair Love and Fear and holy Hope?” This is
perhaps the great danger of our time, a danger especially felt in education.
Every school parades its scholarships at the public schools or at the
universities, or its passes in the Oxford and Cambridge Locals, or its
percentage at the last Inspection, and asks to be judged by these. And yet
these are not the one thing or indeed the chief thing needful: and it will be
the ruin of true education if, as Mark Pattison said, the master’s attention is
concentrated on the least important part of his duty.[42]

VII.
ASCHAM.
(1515-1568.)

§ 1. Masters and scholars who sigh over what seem to them the
intricacies and obscurities of modern grammars may find some consolation
in thinking that, after all, matters might have been worse, and that our fate
is enviable indeed compared with that of the students of Latin 400 years
ago. Did the reader ever open the Doctrinale of Alexander de Villa Dei,
which was the grammar in general use from the middle of the thirteenth to
the end of the fifteenth century? (v. Appendix, p. 532). If so, he is aware
how great a step towards simplicity was made by our grammatical
reformers, Lily, Colet, and Erasmus. Indeed, those whom we now regard as
the forgers of our chains were, in their own opinion and that of their
contemporaries, the champions of freedom (Appendix, p. 533).
§ 2. I have given elsewhere (Appendix, p. 533) a remarkable passage
from Colet, in which he recommends the leaving of rules, and the study of
examples in good Latin authors. Wolsey also, in his directions to the
masters of Ipswich School (dated 1528), proposes that the boys should be
exercised in the eight parts of speech in the first form, and should begin to
speak Latin and translate from English into Latin in the second. If the
masters think fit, they may also let the pupils read Lily’s Carmen
Monitorium, or Cato’s Distichs. From the third upwards a regular course of
classical authors was to be read, and Lily’s rules were to be introduced by
degrees. “Although I confess such things are necessary,” writes Wolsey,
“yet, as far as possible, we could wish them so appointed as not to occupy
the more valuable part of the day.” Only in the sixth form, the highest but
two, Lily’s syntax was to be begun. In these schools the boys’ time was
wholly taken up with Latin, and the speaking of Latin was enforced even in
play hours, so we see that anomalies in the accidence as taught in the As in
præsenti were not given till the boys had been some time using the
language; and the syntax was kept till they had a good practical knowledge
of the usages to which the rules referred.[43]

§ 3. But although there was a great stir in education throughout this
century, and several English books were published about it, we come to
1570 before we find anything that has lived till now. We then have Roger
Ascham’s Scholemaster, a posthumous work brought out by Ascham’s
widow, and republished in 1571 and 1589. The book was then lost sight of,
but reappeared, with James Upton as editor, in 1711,[44] and has been
regarded as an educational classic ever since. Dr. Johnson says “it contains
perhaps the best advice that was ever given for the study of languages,” and
Professor J. E. B. Mayor, who on this point is a higher authority than Dr.
Johnson, declares that “this book sets forth the only sound method of
acquiring a dead language.”
§ 4. With all their contempt for theory, English schoolmasters might have
been expected to take an interest in one part of the history of education,
viz., the history of methods. There is a true saying attributed by Marcel to
Talleyrand, “Les Méthodes sont les maîtres des maîtres—Method is the
master’s master.” The history of education shows us that every subject of
instruction has been taught in various ways, and further, that the contest of
methods has not uniformly ended in the survival of the fittest. Methods then
might often teach the teachers, if the teachers cared to be taught; but till
within the last half century or so an unintelligent traditional routine has
sufficed for them. There has no doubt been a great change since men now
old were at school, but in those days the main strength of the teaching was
given to Latin, and the masters knew of no better method of starting boys in
this language than making them learn by heart Lily’s, or as it was then
called, the Eton Latin Grammar. If reason had had anything to do with
teaching, this book would have been demolished by Richard Johnson’s
Grammatical Commentaries published in 1706; but worthless as Johnson
proved it to be, the Grammar was for another 150 years treated by English
schoolmasters as the only introduction to the Latin tongue. The books that
have recently been published show a tendency to revert to methods set forth
in Elizabeth’s reign in Ascham’s Scholemaster (1570) and William Kempe’s
Education of Children (1588), but the innovators have not as a rule been
drawn to these methods by historical inquiry.
§ 5. There seem to be only three English writers on education who have
caught the ear of other nations, and these are Ascham, Locke, and Herbert
Spencer. Of a contemporary we do well to speak with the same reserve as of

“present company,” but of the other two we may say that the choice has
been somewhat capricious. Locke’s Thoughts perhaps deserves the
reputation and influence it has always had, but in it he hardly does himself
justice as a philosopher of the mind; and much of the advice which has been
considered his exclusively, is to be found in his English predecessors whose
very names are unknown except to the educational antiquarian. Ascham
wrote a few pages on method which entitle him to mention in an account of
methods of language-learning. He also wrote a great many pages about
things in general which would have shared the fate of many more valuable
but long forgotten books had he not had one peculiarity in which the other
writers were wanting, that indescribable something which Matthew Arnold
calls “charm.”
§ 6. Ascham has been very fortunate in his editors, Professor Arber and
Professor Mayor, and the last editions[45] give everyone an opportunity of
reading the Scholemaster. I shall therefore speak of nothing but the method.
§ 7. Latin is to be taught as follows:—First, let the child learn the eight
parts of speech, and then the right joining together of substantives with
adjectives, the noun with the verb, the relative with the antecedent. After the
concords are learned, let the master take Sturm’s selection of Cicero’s
Epistles, and read them after this manner: “first, let him teach the child,
cheerfully and plainly, the cause and matter of the letter; then, let him
construe it into English so oft as the child may easily carry away the
understanding of it; lastly, parse it over perfectly. This done, then let the
child by and by both construe and parse it over again; so that it may appear
that the child doubteth in nothing that his master has taught him before.
After this, the child must take a paper book, and, sitting in some place
where no man shall prompt him, by himself let him translate into English
his former lesson. Then showing it to his master, let the master take from
him his Latin book, and pausing an hour at the least, then let the child
translate his own English into Latin again in another paper book. When the
child bringeth it turned into Latin, the master must compare it with Tully’s
book, and lay them both together, and where the child doth well, praise
him,” where amiss point out why Tully’s use is better. Thus the child will
easily acquire a knowledge of grammar, “and also the ground of almost all
the rules that are so busily taught by the master, and so hardly learned by
the scholar in all common schools.... We do not contemn rules, but we

gladly teach rules; and teach them more plainly, sensibly, and orderly, than
they be commonly taught in common schools. For when the master shall
compare Tully’s book with the scholar’s translation, let the master at the
first lead and teach the scholar to join the rules of his grammar book with
the examples of his present lesson, until the scholar by himself be able to
fetch out of his grammar every rule for every example; and let the grammar
book be ever in the scholars hand, and also used by him as a dictionary for
every present use. This is a lively and perfect way of teaching of rules;
where the common way used in common schools to read the grammar alone
by itself is tedious for the master, hard for the scholar, cold and
uncomfortable for them both.” And elsewhere Ascham says: “Yea, I do wish
that all rules for young scholars were shorter than they be. For, without
doubt, grammatica itself is sooner and surer learned by examples of good
authors than by the naked rules of grammarians.”
§ 8. “As you perceive your scholar to go better on away, first, with
understanding his lesson more quickly, with parsing more readily, with
translating more speedily and perfectly than he was wont; after, give him
longer lessons to translate, and, withal, begin to teach him, both in nouns
and verbs, what is proprium and what is translatum, what synonymum, what
diversum, which be contraria, and which be most notable phrases, in all his
lectures, as—

Proprium Rex sepultus est magnifice.
Cum illo principe, sepulta est et gloria et salus
Translatum
reipublicæ.
Synonyma Ensis, gladius: laudare, prædicare.
Diversa Diligere, amare: calere, exardescere: inimicus, hostis.
Contraria Acerbum et luctuosum bellum, dulcis et læta pax.
Phrases Dare verba, adjicere obedientiam.”

Every lesson is to be thus carefully analysed, and entered under these
headings in a third MS. book.
§ 9. Here Ascham leaves his method, and returns to it only at the
beginning of Book II. He there supposes the first stage to be finished and
“your scholar to have come indeed, first to a ready perfectness in
translating, then to a ripe and skilful choice in marking out his six points.”

He now recommends a course of Cicero, Terence, Cæsar, and Livy which is
to be read “a good deal at every lecture.” And the master is to give passages
“put into plain natural English.” These the scholar shall “not know where to
find” till he shall have tried his hand at putting them into Latin; then the
master shall “bring forth the place in Tully.”
§ 10. In the Second Book of the Scholemaster, Ascham discusses the
various branches of the study then common, viz.: 1. Translatio linguarum;
2. Paraphrasis; 3. Metaphrasis; 4. Epitome; 5. Imitatio; 6. Declamatio. He
does not lay much stress on any of these, except translatio and imitatio. Of
the last he says: “All languages, both learned and mother-tongue, be gotten,
and gotten only, by imitation. For, as ye use to hear, so ye use to speak; if ye
hear no other, ye speak not yourself; and whom ye only hear, of them ye
only learn.” But translation was his great instrument for all kinds of
learning. “The translation,” he says, “is the most common and most
commendable of all other exercises for youth; most common, for all your
constructions in grammar schools be nothing else but translations, but
because they be not double translations (as I do require) they bring forth but
simple and single commodity: and because also they lack the daily use of
writing, which is the only thing that breedeth deep root, both in the wit for
good understanding and in the memory for sure keeping of all that is
learned; most commendable also, and that by the judgment of all authors
which entreat of these exercises.”
§ 11. After quoting Pliny,[46] he says: “You perceive how Pliny teacheth
that by this exercise of double translating is learned easily, sensibly, by little
and little, not only all the hard congruities of grammar, the choice of ablest
words, the right pronouncing of words and sentences, comeliness of figures,
and forms fit for every matter and proper for every tongue: but, that which
is greater also, in marking daily and following diligently thus the footsteps
of the best authors, like invention of arguments, like order in disposition,
like utterance in elocution, is easily gathered up; and hereby your scholar
shall be brought not only to like eloquence, but also to all true
understanding and rightful judgment, both for writing and speaking.”
Again he says: “For speedy attaining, I durst venture a good wager if a
scholar in whom is aptness, love, diligence, and constancy, would but
translate after this sort some little book in Tully (as De Senectute, with two
Epistles, the first ‘Ad Quintum Fratrem,’ the other ‘Ad Lentulum’), that

scholar, I say, should come to a better knowledge in the Latin tongue than
the most part do that spend from five to six years in tossing all the rules of
grammar in common schools.” After quoting the instance of Dion Prussæus,
who came to great learning and utterance by reading and following only
two books, the Phædo, and Demosthenes de Falsa Legatione, he goes on:
“And a better and nearer example herein may be our most noble Queen
Elizabeth, who never took yet Greek nor Latin grammar in her hand after
the first declining of a noun and a verb; but only by this double translating
of Demosthenes and Isocrates daily, without missing, every forenoon, and
likewise some part of Tully every afternoon, for the space of a year or two,
hath attained to such a perfect understanding in both the tongues, and to
such a ready utterance of the Latin, and that with such a judgment, as there
be few now in both Universities or elsewhere in England that be in both
tongues comparable with Her Majesty.” Ascham’s authority is indeed not
conclusive on this point, as he, in praising the Queen’s attainments, was
vaunting his own success as a teacher, and, moreover, if he flattered her he
could plead prevailing custom. But we have, I believe, abundant evidence
that Elizabeth was an accomplished scholar.
§ 12. Before I leave Ascham I must make one more quotation, to which I
shall more than once have occasion to refer. Speaking of the plan of double
translation, he says: “Ere the scholar have construed, parsed, twice
translated over by good advisement, marked out his six points by skilful
judgment, he shall have necessary occasion to read over every lecture a
dozen times at the least; which because he shall do always in order, he shall
do it always with pleasure. And pleasure allureth love: love hath lust to
labour; labour always obtaineth his purpose.”
§ 13. A good deal has been said, and perhaps something learnt, about the
teaching of Latin since the days of Ascham. As far as I know the method
which Ascham denounced, and which most English schoolmasters stuck to
for more than two centuries longer, has now been abandoned. No one thinks
of making the beginner learn by heart all the Latin Grammar before he is
introduced to the Latin language. To understand the machinery of which an
account is given in the grammar, the learner must see it at work, and must
even endeavour in a small way to work it himself. So it seems pretty well
agreed that the information given in the grammar must be joined with some
construing and some exercises from the very first. But here the agreement

ends. Our teachers, consciously or in ignorance, follow one or more of a
number of methodizers who have examined the problem of language-
learning, such men as Ascham, Ratke, Comenius, Jacotot, Hamilton,
Robertson, and Prendergast. These naturally divide themselves into two
parties, which I have ventured to call “Rapid Impressionists,” and
“Complete Retainers.” The first of these plunge the beginner into the
language, and trust to the great mass of vague impressions clearing and
defining themselves as he goes along. The second insist on his learning at
the first a very small portion of the language, and mastering and retaining
everything he learns. It will be seen that in the first stage of the course
Ascham is a “Complete Retainer.” He does not talk, like Prendergast, of
“mastery,” nor, like Jacotot, does he require the learner to begin every
lesson at the beginning of the book: but he makes the pupil go over each
lesson “a dozen times at the least,” before he may advance beyond it. As for
his practice of double translation, for the advanced pupil it is excellent, but
if it is required from the beginner, it leads to unintelligent memorizing. I
think I shall be able to show later on that other methodizers have advanced
beyond Ascham. (Infra, 246 n.)

VIII.
MULCASTER.
(1531(?)-1611.)

§ 1. The history of English thought on education has yet to be written. In
the literature of education the Germans have been the pioneers, and have
consequently settled the routes; and when a track has once been established
few travellers will face the risk and trouble of leaving it. So up to the
present time, writers on the history of European education after the
Renascence have occupied themselves chiefly with men who lived in
Germany, or wrote in German. But the French are at length exploring the
country for themselves; and in time, no doubt, the English-speaking races
will show an interest in the thoughts and doings of their common ancestors.
We know what toils and dangers men will encounter in getting to the
source of great rivers; and although, as Mr. Widgery truly says, “the study
of origins is not everybody’s business,”[47] we yet may hope that students
will be found ready to give time and trouble to an investigation of great
interest and perhaps some utility—the origin of the school course which
now affects the millions who have English for their mother-tongue.
§ 2. In the fifteen hundreds there were published several works on
education, three of which, Elyot’s Governour, Ascham’s Scholemaster, and
Mulcaster’s Positions, have been recently reprinted.[48] Others, such as
Edward Coote’s English Schoolmaster, and Mulcaster’s Elementarie, are
pretty sure to follow, without serious loss, let us hope, to their editors,
though neither Coote nor Mulcaster are likely to become as well-known
writers as Roger Ascham.
§ 3. Henry Barnard, whose knowledge of our educational literature no
less than his labours in it, makes him the greatest living authority, says that
Mulcaster’s Positions is “one of the earliest, and still one of the best
treatises in the English language.” (English Pedagogy, 2nd series, p. 177.)
Mulcaster was one of the most famous of English schoolmasters, and by his
writings he proved that he was far in advance of the schoolmasters of his

own time, and of the times which succeeded. But he paid the penalty of
thinking of himself more highly than he should have thought; and whether
or no the conjecture is right that Shakespeare had him in his mind when
writing Love’s Labour’s Lost, there is an affectation in Mulcaster’s style
which is very irritating, for it has caused even the master of Edmund
Spenser to be forgotten. In a curious and interesting allegory on the
progress of language (in the Elementarie, pp. 66, ff.), Mulcaster says that
Art selects the best age of a language to draw rules from, such as the age of
Demosthenes in Greece and of Tully in Rome; and he goes on: “Such a
period in the English tongue I take to be in our days for both the pen and the
speech.” And he suggests that the English language, having reached its
zenith, is seen to advantage, not in the writings of Shakespeare or Spenser,
but in those of Richard Mulcaster. After enumerating the excellencies of the
language, he adds: “I need no example in any of these, whereof my own
penning is a general pattern.” Here we feel tempted to exclaim with Armado
in Love’s Labour’s Lost (Act 5, sc. 2): “I protest the schoolmaster is
exceeding fantastical: too too vain, too too vain.” He speaks elsewhere of
his “so careful, I will not say so curious writing” (Elementarie, p. 253), and
says very truly: “Even some of reasonable study can hardly understand the
couching of my sentence, and the depth of my conceit” (ib., 235). And this
was the death-warrant of his literary renown.
§ 4. But there is good reason why Mulcaster should not be forgotten.
When we read his books we find that wisdom which we are importing in
the nineteenth century was in a great measure offered us by an English
schoolmaster in the sixteenth. The latest advances in pedagogy have
established (1) that the end and aim of education is to develop the faculties
of the mind and body; (2) that all teaching processes should be carefully
adapted to the mental constitution of the learner; (3) that the first stage in
learning is of immense importance and requires a very high degree of skill
in the teacher; (4) that the brain of children, especially of clever children,
should not be subjected to “pressure”; (5) that childhood should not be
spent in learning foreign languages, but that its language should be the
mother-tongue, and its exercises should include handwork, especially
drawing; (6) that girls’ education should be cared for no less than boys’; (7)
that the only hope of improving our schools lies in providing training for
our teachers. These are all regarded as planks in the platform of “the new
education,” and these were all advocated by Mulcaster.

§ 5. Before I point this out in detail I may remark how greatly education
has suffered from being confounded with learning. There are interesting
passages both in Ascham and Mulcaster which prove that the class-ideal of
the “scholar and gentleman” was of later growth. In the fifteen hundreds
learning was thought suitable, not for the rich, but for the clever. Still,
learning, and therefore education, was not for the many, but the few.
Mulcaster considers at some length how the number of the educated is to be
kept down (Positions, chapp. 36, 37, 39), though even here he is in the van,
and would have everyone taught to read and write (Positions, chapp. 5, 36).
But the true problem of education was not faced till it was discovered that
every human being was to be considered in it. This was, I think, first seen
by Comenius.
With this abatement we find Mulcaster’s sixteenth-century notions not
much behind our nineteenth.
§ 6. (1 & 2) “Why is it not good,” he asks, “to have every part of the
body and every power of the soul to be fined to his best?” (PP., p. 34[49]).
Elsewhere he says: “The end of education and train is to help Nature to her
perfection, which is, when all her abilities be perfected in their habit,
whereunto right elements be right great helps. Consideration and judgment
must wisely mark whereunto Nature is either evidently given or secretly
affectionate and must frame an education consonant thereto.” (El., p. 28).
Michelet has with justice claimed for Montaigne that he drew the
teacher’s attention from the thing to be learnt to the learner: “Non l’objet, le
savoir, mais le sujet, c’est l’homme.” (Nos Fils, p. 170.) Mulcaster has a
claim to share this honour with his great contemporary. He really laid the
foundation of a science of education. Discussing our natural abilities, he
says: “We have a perceiving by outward sense to feel, to hear, to see, to
smell, to taste all sensible things; which qualities of the outward, being
received in by the common sense and examined by fantsie, are delivered to
remembrance, and afterward prove our great and only grounds unto further
knowledge.”[50] (El., p. 32.) Here we see Mulcaster endeavouring to base
education, or as he so well calls it, “train,” on what we receive from Nature.
Elsewhere he speaks of the three things which we “find peering out of the
little young souls,” viz: “wit to take, memory to keep, and discretion to
discern.” (PP., p. 27.)

§ 7. (3) I have pointed out that the false ideal of the Renascence led
schoolmasters to neglect children. Mulcaster remarks that the ancients
considered the training of children should date from the birth; but he
himself begins with the school age. Here he has the boldness to propose that
those who teach the beginners should have the smallest number of pupils,
and should receive the highest pay. “The first groundwork would be laid by
the best workman,” says Mulcaster (PP., 130), here expressing a truth
which, like many truths that are not quite convenient, is seldom denied but
almost systematically ignored.[51]
§ 8. (4) In the Nineteenth Century Magazine for November, 1888,
appeared a vigorous protest with nearly 400 signatures, many of which
carried great weight with them, against our sacrifice of education to
examination. Our present system, whether good or bad, is the result of
accident. Winchester and Eton had large endowments, and naturally
endeavoured by means of these endowments to get hold of clever boys. At
first no doubt they succeeded fairly well; but other schools felt bound to
compete for juvenile brains, and as the number of prizes increased, many of
our preparatory schools became mere racing stables for children destined at
12 or 14 to run for “scholarship stakes.” Thus, in the scramble for the
money all thought of education has been lost sight of; injury has been done
in many cases to those who have succeeded, still greater injury to those who
have failed or who have from the first been considered “out of the running.”
These very serious evils would have been avoided had we taken counsel
with Mulcaster: “Pity it were for so petty a gain to forego a greater; to win
an hour in the morning and lose the whole day after; as those people most
commonly do which start out of their beds too early before they be well
awaked or know what it is o’clock; and be drowsy when they are up for
want of their sleep.” (PP., p. 19; see also El., xi., pp. 52 ff.)
§ 9. (5) 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 English instead of Latin (see Appendix, p. 534), and good reading
and writing in English were to be secured before Latin was begun. His
elementary course included these five things: English reading, English
writing, drawing, singing, playing a musical instrument. If the first course
were made to occupy the school-time up to the age of 12, Mulcaster held
that more would be done between 12 and 16 than between 7 and 17 in the

ordinary way. There would be the further gain that the children would not
be set against learning. “Because of the too timely onset too little is done in
too long a time, and the school is made a torture, which as it brings forth
delight in the end when learning is held fast, so should it pass on very
pleasantly by the way, while it is in learning.”[52] (PP., 33.)
§ 10. (6) Among the many changes brought about in the nineteenth
century we find little that can compare in importance with the advance in
the education of women. In the last century, whenever a woman exercised
her mental powers she had to do it by stealth,[53] and her position was
degraded indeed when compared not only with her descendants of the
nineteenth century, but also with her ancestors of the sixteenth. This I know
has been disputed by some authorities, e.g., by the late Professor Brewer:
but to others, e.g., to a man who, as regards honesty and wisdom, has had
few equals and no superiors in investigating the course of education, I mean
the late Joseph Payne, this educational superiority of the women of
Elizabeth’s time has seemed to be entirely beyond question. On this point
Mulcaster’s evidence is very valuable, and, to me at least, conclusive. He
not only “admits young maidens to learn,” but says that “custom stands for
him,” and that “the custom of my country ... hath made the maidens’ train
her own approved travail.” (PP., p. 167.)
§ 11. (7) Of all the educational reforms of the nineteenth century by far
the most fruitful and most expansive is, in my opinion, the training of
teachers. In this, as in most educational matters, the English, though
advancing, are in the rear. Far more is made of “training” on the Continent
and in the United States than in England. And yet we made a good start.
Our early writers on education saw that the teacher has immense influence,
and that to turn this influence to good account he must have made a study of
his profession and have learnt “the best that has been thought and done” in
it. Every occupation in life has a traditional capital of knowledge and
experience, and those who intend to follow the business, whatever it may
be, are required to go through some kind of training or apprenticeship
before they earn wages. To this rule there is but one exception. In English
elementary schools children are paid to “teach” children, and in the higher
schools the beginner is allowed to blunder at the expense of his first pupils
into whatever skill he may in the end manage to pick up. But our English

practice received no encouragement from the early English writers,
Mulcaster, Brinsley,[54] and Hoole.
As far as I am aware the first suggestion of a training college for teachers
came from Mulcaster. He schemed seven special colleges at the University;
and of these one is for teachers. Some of his suggestions, e.g., about
“University Readers” have lately been adopted, though without
acknowledgment; and as the University of Cambridge has since 1879
acknowledged the existence of teachers, and appointed a “Teachers’
Training Syndicate,” we may perhaps in a few centuries more carry out his
scheme, and have training colleges at Oxford and Cambridge.[55] Some of
the reasons he gives us have not gone out of date with his English. They are
as follows:—
“And why should not these men (the teachers) have both this sufficiency
in learning, and such room to rest in, thence to be chosen and set forth for
the common service? Be either children or schools so small a portion of our
multitude? or is the framing of young minds, and the training of their bodies
so mean a point of cunning? Be schoolmasters in this Realm such a paucity,
as they are not even in good sadness to be soundly thought on? If the
chancel have a minister, the belfry hath a master: and where youth is, as it is
eachwhere, there must be trainers, or there will be worse. He that will not
allow of this careful provision for such a seminary of masters, is most
unworthy either to have had a good master himself, or hereafter to have a
good one for his. Why should not teachers be well provided for, to continue
their whole life in the school, as Divines, Lawyers, Physicians do in their
several professions? Thereby judgment, cunning, and discretion will grow
in them: and masters would prove old men, and such as Xenophon setteth
over children in the schooling of Cyrus. Whereas now, the school being
used but for a shift, afterward to pass thence to the other professions,
though it send out very sufficient men to them, itself remaineth too too
naked, considering the necessity of the thing. I conclude, therefore, that this
trade requireth a particular college, for these four causes. 1. First, for the
subject being the mean to make or mar the whole fry of our State. 2.
Secondly, for the number, whether of them that are to learn, or of them that
are to teach. 3. Thirdly, for the necessity of the profession, which may not
be spared. 4. Fourthly, for the matter of their study, which is comparable to
the greatest professions, for language, for judgment, for skill how to train,

for variety in all points of learning, wherein the framing of the mind, and
the exercising of the body craveth exquisite consideration, beside the
staidness of the person.” (PP., 9 pp. 248, 9.)
§ 12. Though once a celebrated man, and moreover the master of
Edmund Spenser, Mulcaster has been long forgotten; but when the history
of education in England comes to be written, the historian will show that
few schoolmasters in the fifteen hundreds or since were so enlightened as
the first headmaster of Merchant Taylors’.[56]

IX.
RATICHIUS.
(1571-1635.)

§ 1. The history of Education in the fifteen hundreds tells chiefly of two
very different classes of men. First we have the practical men, who set
themselves to supply the general demand for instruction in the classical
languages. This class includes most of the successful schoolmasters, such as
Sturm, Trotzendorf, Neander, and the Jesuits. The other class were thinkers,
who never attempted to teach, but merely gave form to truths which would
in the end affect teaching. These were especially Rabelais and Montaigne.
§ 2. With the sixteen hundreds we come to men who have earned for
themselves a name unpleasant in our ears, although it might fittingly be
applied to all the greatest benefactors of the human race. I mean the name
of Innovators. These men were not successful; at least they seemed
unsuccessful to their contemporaries, who contrasted the promised results
with the actual. But their efforts were by no means thrown away: and
posterity at least, has acknowledged its obligations to them. One sees now
that they could hardly have expected justice in their own time. It is safe to
adopt the customary plan; it is safe to speculate how that plan may and
should be altered; but it is dangerous to attempt to translate new thought
into new action, and boldly to advance without a track, trusting to principles
which may, like the compass, show you the right direction, but, like the
compass, will give you no hint of the obstacles that lie before you.
The chief demands made by the Innovators have been: 1st, that the study
of things should precede, or be united with, the study of words (v.
Appendix, p. 538); 2nd, that knowledge should be communicated, where
possible, by appeals to the senses; 3rd, that all linguistic study should begin
with that of the mother-tongue; 4th, that Latin and Greek should be taught
to such boys only as would be likely to complete a learned education; 5th,
that physical education should be attended to in all classes of society for the
sake of health, not simply with a view to gentlemanly accomplishments;

6th, that a new method of teaching should be adopted, framed “according to
Nature.”
Their notions of method have, of course, been very various; but their
systems mostly agree in these particulars:—
1. They proceed from the concrete to the abstract, giving some
knowledge of the thing itself before the rules which refer to it. 2. They
employ the student in analysing matter put before him, rather than in
working synthetically according to precept. 3. They require the student to
teach himself and investigate for himself under the superintendence and
guidance of the master, rather than be taught by the master and receive
anything on the master’s authority. 4. They rely on the interest excited in the
pupil by the acquisition of knowledge, and renounce coercion. 5. Only that
which is understood may be committed to memory (v. supra, p. 74, n.)
§ 3. The first of the Innovators was Wolfgang Ratichius, who, oddly
enough, is known to posterity by a name he and his contemporaries never
heard of. His father’s name was Radtké or Ratké, and the son having
received a University education, translated this into Ratichius. With our
usual impatience of redundant syllables, we have attempted to reduce the
word to its original dimensions, and in the process have hit upon Ratich,
which is a new name altogether.
Ratke (to adopt the true form of the original) was connected, as Basedow
was a hundred and fifty years later, with Holstein and Hamburg. He was
born at Wilster in Holstein in 1571, and studied at Hamburg and at the
University of Rostock. He afterwards travelled to Amsterdam and to
England, and it was perhaps owing to his residence in this country that he
was acquainted with the new philosophy of Bacon. We next hear of him at
the Electoral Diet, held as usual in Frankfurt-on-Main, in 1612. He was then
over forty years old, and he had elaborated a new scheme for teaching. Like
all inventors, he was fully impressed with the importance of his discovery,
and he sent to the assembled Princes an address, in which he undertook
some startling performances. He was able, he said: (1) to teach young or old
Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, or other languages, in a very short time and
without any difficulty; (2) to establish schools in which all arts should be
taught and extended; (3) to introduce and peaceably establish throughout

the German Empire a uniform speech, a uniform government, and (still
more wonderful) a uniform religion.
§ 4. Naturally enough the address arrested the attention of the Princes.
The Landgraf Lewis of Darmstadt thought the matter worthy of
examination, and he deputed two learned men, Jung and Helwig, to confer
with Ratke. Their report was entirely favourable, and they did all they could
to get for Ratke the means of carrying his scheme into execution. “We are,”
writes Helwig, “in bondage to Latin. The Greeks and Saracens would never
have done so much for posterity if they had spent their youth in acquiring a
foreign tongue. We must study our own language, and then sciences.
Ratichius has discovered the art of teaching according to Nature. By his
method, languages will be quickly learned, so that we shall have time for
science; and science will be learned even better still, as the natural system
suits best with science, which is the study of Nature.” Moved by this report
the Town Council of Augsburg agreed to give Ratke the necessary power
over their schools, and accompanied by Helwig, he accordingly went to
Augsburg and set to work. But the good folks of Augsburg were like
children, who expect a plant as soon as they have sown the seed. They were
speedily dissatisfied, and Ratke and Helwig left Augsburg, the latter much
discouraged but still faithful to his friend. Ratke went to Frankfurt again,
and a Commission was appointed to consider his proposals, but by its
advice Ratke was “allowed to try elsewhere.”
§ 5. He would never have had a fair chance had he not had a firm friend
in the Duchess Dorothy of Weimar. Then, as now, we find women taking
the lead in everything which promises to improve education, and this good
Duchess sent for Ratke and tested his method by herself taking lessons of
him in Hebrew. With this adult pupil his plans seem to have answered well,
and she always continued his admirer and advocate. By her advice her
brother, Prince Lewis of Anhalt-Koethen, decided that the great discovery
should not be lost for want of a fair trial; so he called Ratke to Koethen and
complied with all his demands. A band of teachers sworn to secrecy were
first of all instructed in the art by Ratke himself. Next, schools with very
costly appliances were provided, and lastly some 500 little Koetheners—
boys and girls—were collected and handed over to Ratke to work his
wonders with.

§ 6. It never seems to have occurred either to Ratke or his friends or the
Prince that all the principles and methods that ever were or ever will be
established could not enable a man without experience to organize a school
of 500 children. A man who had never been in the water might just as well
plunge into the sea at once and trust to his knowledge of the laws of fluid
pressure to save him from drowning. There are endless details to be settled
which would bewilder any one without experience. Some years ago school-
buildings were provided for one of our county schools, and the council
consulted a master of great experience who strongly urged them not to start
as they had intended with 300 boys. “I would not undertake such a thing,”
said he. When pressed for his reason, he said quietly, “I would not be
responsible for the boots.” I have no doubt Ratke had to come down from
his principles and his new method to deal with numberless little questions
of caps, bonnets, late children, broken windows, and the like; and he was
without the tact and the experience which enable many ordinary men and
women, who know nothing of principles, to settle such matters
satisfactorily.
§ 7. Years afterwards there was another thinker much more profound and
influential than Ratke, who was quite as incompetent to organize. I mean
Pestalozzi. But Pestalozzi had one great advantage over Ratke. He attached
all his assistants to him by inspiring them with love and reverence of
himself. This made up for many deficiencies. But Ratke was not like the
fatherly, self-sacrificing Pestalozzi. He leads us to suspect him of being an
impostor by making a mystery of his invention, and he never could keep the
peace with his assistants.
§ 8. So, as might have been expected, the grand experiment failed. The
Prince, exasperated at being placed in a somewhat ridiculous position, and
possibly at the serious loss of money into the bargain, revenged himself on
Ratke by throwing him into prison, nor would he release him till he had
made him sign a paper in which he admitted that he had undertaken more
than he was able to fulfil.
§ 9. This was no doubt the case; and yet Ratke had done more for the
Prince than the Prince for Ratke. In Koethen had been opened the first
German school in which the children were taught to make a study of the
German language.

Ratke never recovered from his failure at Koethen, and nothing
memorable is recorded of him afterwards. He died in 1635.
§ 10. Much was written by Ratke; much has been written about him; and
those who wish to know more than the few particulars I have given may
find all they want in Raumer or Barnard. The Innovator failed in gaining the
applause of his contemporaries, and he does not seem to stand high in the
respect of posterity; but he was a pioneer in the art of didactics, and the
rules which Raumer has gathered from the Methodus Institutionis nova ...
Ratichii et Ratichianorum, published by Rhenius at Leipzig in 1626, raise
some of the most interesting points to which a teachers attention can be
directed. I will therefore state them, and say briefly what I think of them.
§ 11. I. In everything we should follow the order of Nature. There is a
certain natural sequence along which the human intelligence moves in
acquiring knowledge. This sequence must be studied, and instruction must
be based on the knowledge of it.
Here, as in all teaching of the Reformers, we find “Nature” used as if the
word stood for some definite idea. From the time of the Stoics we have
been exhorted to “follow Nature.” In more modern times the demand was
well formulated by Picus of Mirandola: “Take no heed what thing many
men do, but what thing the very law of Nature, what thing very reason, what
thing our Lord Himself showeth thee to be done.” (Trans. by Sir Thomas
More, quoted in Seebohm, Oxford Reformers.)
Pope, always happy in expression but not always clear in thought, talks
of—

“Unerring Nature, still divinely bright,
One clear, unchanged, and universal light.”
(Essay on C., i, 70.)

But as Dr. W. T. Harris has well pointed out (St. Louis, Mo., School
Report, ’78, ’79, p. 217), with this word “Nature” writers on education do a
great deal of juggling. Some times they use it for the external world,
including in it man’s unconscious growth, sometimes they make it stand for
the ideal. What sense does Ratke attach to it? One might have some
difficulty in determining. Perhaps the best meaning we can nowadays find
for his rule is: study Psychology.
§ 12. II. One thing at a time. Master one subject before you take up
another. For each language master a single book. Go over it again and again
till you have completely made it your own.
In its crude form this rule could not be carried out. If the attempt were
made the results would be no better than from the six months’ course of
Terence under Ratke. It is “against all Nature” to go on hammering away at
one thing day after day without any change; and there is a point beyond
which any attempt at thoroughness must end in simple stagnation. The rule
then would have two fatal drawbacks: 1st, it would lead to monotony; 2nd,
it would require a completeness of learning which to the young would be
impossible. But in these days no one follows Ratke. On the other hand,
concentration in study is often neglected, and our time-tables afford
specimens of the most ingenious mosaic work, in which everything has a
place, but in so small a quantity that the learners never find out what each
thing really is. School subjects are like the clubs of the eastern tale, which
did not give out their medicinal properties till the patient got warm in the
use of them.
When a good hold on a subject has once been secured, short study, with
considerable intervals between, may suffice to keep up and even increase
the knowledge already obtained; but in matters of any difficulty, e.g., in a
new language, no start is ever made without allotting to it much more than
two or three hours a week. It is perhaps a mistake to suppose that if a good
deal of the language may be learnt by giving it ten hours a week, twice that

amount might be acquired in twenty hours. It is a much greater mistake if
we think that one-fifth of the amount might be acquired in two hours.
§ 13. III. The same thing should be repeated over and over again.
This is like the Jesuits’ Repetitio Mater Studiorum; and the same notion
was well developed 200 years later by Jacotot.
By Ratke’s application of this rule some odd results were produced. The
little Koetheners were drilled for German in a book of the Bible (Genesis
was selected), and then for Latin in a play of Terence.
Unlike many “theoretical notions” this precept of Ratke’s comes more
and more into favour as the schoolmaster increases in age and experience.
But we must be careful to take our pupils with us; and this repeating the
same thing over and over may seem to them what marking time would seem
to soldiers who wanted to march. Even more than the last rule this is open
to the objections that monotony is deadening, and perfect attainment of
anything but words impossible. In keeping to a subject then we must not
rely on simple repetition. The rule now accepted is thus stated by
Diesterweg:—“Every subject of instruction should be viewed from as many
sides as possible, and as varied exercises as possible should be set on one
and the same thing.” The art of the master is shown in disguising repetition
and bringing known things into new connection, so that they may partially
at least retain their freshness.
§ 14. IV. First let the mother-tongue be studied, and teach everything
through the mother-tongue, so that the learners attention may not be
diverted to the language.
We saw that Sturm, the leading schoolmaster of Renascence, tried to
suppress the mother-tongue and substitute Latin for it. Against this a
vigorous protest was made in this country by Mulcaster. And our language
was never conquered by a foreign language, as German was conquered first
by Latin and then by French. But “the tongues” have always had the lion’s
share of attention in the schoolroom, and though many have seen and
Milton has said that “our understanding cannot in this body found itself but
on sensible things,” this truth is only now making its way into the
schoolroom. Hitherto the foundation has hardly been laid before “the
schoolmaster has stept in and staid the building by confounding the

language.”[57] Ratke’s protest against this will always be put to his credit in
the history of education.
§ 15. V. Everything without constraint. “The young should not be beaten
to make them learn or for not having learnt. It is compulsion and stripes that
set young people against studying. Boys are often beaten for not having
learnt, but they would have learnt had they been well taught. The human
understanding is so formed that it has pleasure in receiving what it should
retain: and this pleasure you destroy by your harshness. Where the master is
skilful and judicious, the boys will take to him and to their lessons. Folly
lurks indeed in the heart of the child and must be driven out with the rod;
but not by the teacher.”
Here at least there is nothing original in Ratke’s precept. A goodly array
of authorities have condemned learning “upon compulsion.” This array
extends at least as far as from Plato to Bishop Dupanloup. “In the case of
the mind, no study pursued under compulsion remains rooted in the
memory,” says Plato.[58] “Everything depends,” says Dupanloup, “on what
the teacher induces his pupils to do freely: for authority is not constraint—it
ought to be inseparable from respect and devotion. I will respect human
liberty in the smallest child.” As far as I have observed there is only one
class of persons whom the authorities from Plato to Dupanloup have failed
to convince, and that is the schoolmasters. This is the class to which I have
belonged, and I should not be prepared to take Plato’s counsel: “Bring up
your boys in their studies without constraint and in a playful manner.” (Ib.)
At the same time I see the importance of self-activity, and there is no such
thing as self-activity upon compulsion. You can no more hurry thought with
the cane than you can hurry a snail with a pin. So without interest there can
be no proper learning. Interest must be aroused—even in Latin Grammar.
But if they could choose their own occupation, the boys, however interested
in their work, would probably find something else more interesting still. We
cannot get on, and never shall, without the must.
§ 16. VI. Nothing may be learnt by heart.
It has always been a common mistake in the schoolroom to confound the
power of running along a sequence of sounds with a mastery of the thought
with which those sounds should be connected. But, as I have remarked
elsewhere (supra, p. 74, note), the two things, though different, are not

opposed. Too much is likely to be made of learning by heart, for of the two
things the pupils find it the easier, and the teacher the more easily tested.
We may, however, guard against the abuse without giving up the use.
§ 17. VII.[59] Uniformity in all things.
Both in the way of learning, and in the books, and the rules, a uniform
method should be observed, says Ratke.
The right plan is for the learner to acquire familiar knowledge of one
subject or part of a subject, and then use this for comparison when he learns
beyond it. If the same method of learning is adopted throughout, this will
render comparison more easy and more striking.[60]
§ 18. VIII. The thing itself should come first, then whatever explains it.
To those who do not with closed eyes cling to the method of their
predecessors, this rule may seem founded on common-sense. Would any
one but a “teacher,” or a writer of school books, ever think of making
children who do not know a word of French, learn about the French
accents? And yet what Ratke said 250 years ago has not been disproved
since: “Accidens rei priusquam rem ipsam quaerere prorsus absonum et
absurdum esse videtur,” which I take to mean: “Before the learner has a
notion of the thing itself, it is folly to worry him about its accidents or even
its properties, essential or unessential.” Ne modus rei ante rem.[61]
This rule of Ratke’s warns teachers against a very common mistake. The
subject is to them in full view, and they make the most minute observations
on it. But these things cannot be seen by their pupils; and even if the
beginner could see these minutiæ, he would find in them neither interest nor
advantage. But when we apply Ratke’s principle more widely, we find
ourselves involved in the great question whether our method should be
based on synthesis or analysis, a question which Ratke’s method did not
settle for us.
§ 19. IX. Everything by experience and examination of the parts. Or as
he states the rule in Latin: Per inductionem et experimentum omnia.
Nothing was to be received on authority, and this disciple of Bacon went
beyond his master and took for his motto: Vetustas cessit, ratio vicit (“Age

has yielded, reason prevailed”); as if reason must be brand-new, and truth
might wax old and be ready to vanish away.
§ 20. From these rules of his we see that Ratke did much to formulate the
main principles of Didactics. He also deserves to be remembered among the
methodizers who have tackled the problem—how to teach a language.
At Köthen the instructor of the lowest class had to talk with the children,
and to take pains with their pronunciation. When they knew their letters
(Ickelsamer’s plan for reading Ratke seems to have neglected) the teacher
read the Book of Genesis through to them, each chapter twice over,
requiring the children to follow with eye and finger. Then the teacher began
the chapter again, and read about four lines only, which the children read
after him. When the book had been worked over in this way, the children
were required to read it through without assistance. Reading once secured,
the master proceeded to grammar. He explained, say, what a substantive
was, and then showed instances in Genesis, and next required the children
to point out others. In this way the grammar was verified throughout from
Genesis, and the pupils were exercised in declining and conjugating words
taken from the Book.
When they advanced to the study of Latin, they were given a translation
of a play of Terence, and worked over it several times before they were
shown the Latin.
The master then translated the play to them, each half-hour’s work twice
over. At the next reading, the master translated the first half-hour, and the
boys translated the same piece the second. Having thus got through the
play, they began again, and only the boys translated. After this there was a
course of grammar, which was applied to the Terence, as the grammar of
the mother-tongue had been to Genesis. Finally, the pupils were put through
a course of exercises, in which they had to turn into Latin sentences
imitated from the Terence, and differing from the original only in the
number or person used.
Raumer gives other particulars, and quotes largely from the almost
unreadable account of Kromayer, one of Ratke’s followers, in order that we
may have, as he says, a notion of the tediousness of the method. No doubt
anyone who has followed me hitherto, will consider that this point has been
brought out already with sufficient distinctness.

§ 21. When we compare Ratke’s method with Ascham’s, we find several
points of agreement. Ratke would begin the study of a language by taking a
model book, and working through it with the pupil a great many times.
Ascham did the same. Each lecture according to his plan would be gone
over “a dozen times at the least.” Both construed to the pupil instead of
requiring him to make out the sense for himself. Both Ratke and Ascham
taught grammar not by itself, but in connection with the model book.
But the points of difference are still more striking. In one respect Ratke’s
plan was weak. It gave the pupils little to do, and made no use of the pen.
Ascham’s was better in this and also as a training in accuracy. Ascham was,
as I have pointed out, a “complete retainer.” Ratke was a “rapid
impressionist.” His system was a good deal like that which had great vogue
in the early part of this century as the “Hamiltonian System.” From the first
the language was to be laid on “very thick,” in the belief that “some of it
was sure to stick.” The impressions would be slight, and there would at first
be much confusion between words which had a superficial resemblance, but
accuracy it was thought would come in time.
§ 22. The contest between the two schools of thought of which Ascham
and Ratke may be taken as representatives has continued till now, and
within the last few years both parties have made great advances in method.
But in nothing does progress seem slower than in education; and the plan of
grammar-teaching in vogue fifty years ago was inferior to the methods
advocated by the old writers.[62]

X.
COMENIUS.
(1592-1671).

§ 1. One of the most hopeful signs of the improvement of education is the
rapid advance in the last thirty years of the fame of Comenius, and the
growth of a large literature about the man and his ideas. Twenty-three years
ago, when I first became interested in him, his name was hardly known
beyond Germany. In English there was indeed an excellent life of him
prefixed to a translation of his School of Infancy; but this work, by Daniel
Benham (London, 1858), had not then, and has not now, anything like the
circulation it deserves. A much more successful book has been Professor S.
S. Laurie’s John Amos Comenius (Cambridge University Press), and this is
known to most, and should be to all, English students of education. By the
Germans and French Comenius is now recognised as the man who first
treated education in a scientific spirit, and who bequeathed the rudiments of
a science to later ages. On this account the great library of pedagogy at
Leipzig has been named in his honour the “Comenius Stiftung.”
§ 2. John Amos Komensky or Comenius, the son of a miller, who
belonged to the Moravian Brethren, was born, at the Moravian village of
Niwnic, in 1592. Of his early life we know nothing but what he himself
tells us in the following passage:—“Losing both my parents while I was yet
a child, I began, through the neglect of my guardians, but at sixteen years of
age to taste of the Latin tongue. Yet by the goodness of God, that taste bred
such a thirst in me, that I ceased not from that time, by all means and
endeavours, to labour for the repairing of my lost years; and now not only
for myself, but for the good of others also. For I could not but pity others
also in this respect, especially in my own nation, which is too slothful and
careless in matter of learning. Thereupon I was continually full of thoughts
for the finding out of some means whereby more might be inflamed with
the love of learning, and whereby learning itself might be made more
compendious, both in matter of the charge and cost, and of the labour
belonging thereto, that so the youth might be brought by a more easy

method, unto some notable proficiency in learning.”[63] With these thoughts
in his head, he pursued his studies in several German towns, especially at
Herborn in Nassau. Here he saw the Report on Ratke’s method published in
1612 for the Universities of Jena and Giessen; and we find him shortly
afterwards writing his first book, Grammaticæ facilioris Præcepta, which
was published at Prag in 1616. On his return to Moravia, he was appointed
to the Brethren’s school at Prerau, but (to use his own words) “being shortly
after at the age of twenty-four called to the service of the Church, because
that divine function challenged all my endeavours (divinumque HOC AGE
præ oculis erat) these scholastic cares were laid aside.”[64] His pastoral
charge was at Fulneck, the headquarters of the Brethren. As such it soon felt
the effects of the Battle of Prag, being in the following year (1621) taken
and plundered by the Spaniards. On this occasion Comenius lost his MSS.
and almost everything he possessed. The year after his wife died, and then
his only child. In 1624 all Protestant ministers were banished, and in 1627 a
new decree extended the banishment to Protestants of every description.
Comenius bore up against wave after wave of calamity with Christian
courage and resignation, and his writings at this period were of great value
to his fellow-sufferers.
§ 3. For a time he found a hiding-place in the family of a Bohemian
nobleman, Baron Sadowsky, at Slaupna, in the Bohemian mountains, and in
this retirement, his attention was again directed to the science of teaching.
The Baron had engaged Stadius, one of the proscribed, to educate his three
sons, and, at Stadius’ request, Comenius wrote “some canons of a better
method,” for his use. We find him, too, endeavouring to enrich the literature
of his mother-tongue, making a metrical translation of the Psalms of David,
and even writing imitations of Virgil, Ovid, and Cato’s Distichs.
In 1627, however, the persecution waxed so hot, that Comenius, with
most of the Brethren, had to flee their country, never to return. On crossing
the border, Comenius and the exiles who accompanied him knelt down, and
prayed that God would not suffer His truth to fail out of their native land.
§ 4. Comenius had now, as Michelet says, lost his country and found his
country, which was the world. Many of the banished, and Comenius among
them, settled at the Polish town of Leszna, or, as the Germans call it, Lissa,
near the Silesian frontier. Here there was an old-established school of the
Brethren, in which Comenius found employment. Once more engaged in

education, he earnestly set about improving the traditional methods. As he
himself says,[65] “Being by God’s permission banished my country with
divers others, and forced for my sustenance to apply myself to the
instruction of youth, I gave my mind to the perusal of divers authors, and
lighted upon many which in this age have made a beginning in reforming
the method of studies, as Ratichius, Helvicus, Rhenius, Ritterus, Glaumius,
Cæcilius, and who indeed should have had the first place, Joannes
Valentinus Andreæ, a man of a nimble and clear brain; as also Campanella
and the Lord Verulam, those famous restorers of philosophy;—by reading
of whom I was raised in good hope, that at last those so many various
sparks would conspire into a flame; yet observing here and there some
defects and gaps as it were, I could not contain myself from attempting
something that might rest upon an immovable foundation, and which, if it
could be once found out, should not be subject to any ruin. Therefore, after
many workings and tossings of my thoughts, by reducing everything to the
immovable laws of Nature, I lighted upon my Didactica Magna, which
shows the art of readily and solidly teaching all men all things.”
§ 5. This work did not immediately see the light, but in 1631 Comenius
published a book which made him and the little Polish town where he lived
known throughout Europe and beyond it. This was the Janua Linguarum
Reserata, or “Gate of Tongues unlocked.” Writing about it many years
afterwards he says that he never could have imagined that that little work,
fitted only for children (puerile istud opusculum), would have been received
with applause by all the learned world. Letters of congratulation came to
him from every quarter; and the work was translated not only into Greek,
Bohemian, Polish, Swedish, Belgian, English, French, Spanish, Italian,
Hungarian, but also into Turkish, Arabic, Persian, and even “Mongolian,
which is familiar to all the East Indies.” (Dedication of Schola Ludus in vol.
i. of collected works.)
§ 6. Incited by the applause of the learned, Comenius now planned a
scheme of universal knowledge, to impart which a series of works would
have to be written, far exceeding what the resources and industry of one
man, however great a scholar, could produce. He therefore looked about for
a patron to supply money for the support of himself and his assistants,
whilst these works were in progress. “The vastness of the labours I
contemplate,” he writes to a Polish nobleman, “demands that I should have

a wealthy patron, whether we look at their extent, or at the necessity of
securing assistants, or at the expenses generally.”
§ 7. At Leszna there seemed no prospect of his obtaining the aid he
required; but his fame now procured him invitations from distant countries.
First he received a call to improve the schools of Sweden. After declining
this he was induced by his English friends to undertake a journey to
London, where Parliament had shown its interest in the matter of education,
and had employed Hartlib,[66] an enthusiastic admirer of Comenius, to
attempt a reform. Probably through his family connections, Hartlib was on
intimate terms with Comenius, and he had much influence on his career. It
would seem that Comenius, though never tired of forming magnificent
schemes, hung back from putting anything into a definite shape. After the
appearance of the Janua Linguarum Reserata, he planned a Janua Rerum,
and even allowed that title to appear in “the list of new books to come forth
at the next Mart at Frankford.”[67] But again he hesitated, and withdrew the
announcement. Here Hartlib came in, and forced him into print without his
intending or even knowing it (“præter meam spem et me inconsulto”;
preface to Conatuum Pansophicorum Dilucidatio, 1638). Hartlib begged of
Comenius a sketch of his great scheme, and with apologies to the author for
not awaiting his consent, he published it at Oxford in 1637, under the title
of Conatuum Comenianorum Præludia. Comenius accepted the fait
accompli with the best grace he could—pleased at the stir the book made in
the learned world, but galled by criticisms, especially by doubts of his
orthodoxy. To refute the cavillers, he wrote a tract called Conatuum
Pansophicorum Dilucidatio which was published in 1638. In 1639 Hartlib
issued in London a new duodecimo edition of the Præludia (or as he then
called it, Prodromus) and the Dilucidatio, adding a dissertation by
Comenius on the study of Latin. Now, when everything seemed ripe for a
change in education, and Comenius himself was on his way to England,
Hartlib translated the Prodromus, and when Comenius had come he
published it with the title, A Reformation of Schools, 1642.[68]
§ 8. It was no doubt by Hartlib’s influence that Parliament had been led
to summon Comenius, and at any other time the visit might have been “the
occasion of great good to this island,” but inter arma silent magistri, and
Comenius went away again. This is the account he himself has left us:—

“When seriously proposing to abandon the thorny studies of Didactics,
and pass on to the pleasing studies of philosophical truth, I find myself
again among the same thorns.... After the Pansophiæ Prodromus had been
published and dispersed through various kingdoms of Europe, many of the
learned approved of the object and plan of the work, but despaired of its
ever being accomplished by one man alone, and therefore advised that a
college of learned men should be instituted to carry it into effect. Mr. S.
Hartlib, who had forwarded the publication of the Pansophiæ Prodromus in
England, laboured earnestly in this matter, and endeavoured, by every
possible means, to bring together for this purpose a number of men of
intellectual activity. And at length, having found one or two, he invited me
also, with many very strong entreaties. My people having consented to the
journey, I came to London on the very day of the autumnal equinox
(September 22, 1641), and there at last learnt that I had been invited by the
order of the Parliament. But as the Parliament, the King having then gone to
Scotland [August 10], was dismissed for a three months’ recess [not quite
three months, but from September 9 to October 20], I was detained there
through the winter, my friends mustering what pansophic apparatus they
could, though it was but slender.... The Parliament meanwhile, having re
assembled, and our presence being known, I had orders to wait until they
should have sufficient leisure from other business to appoint a Commission
of learned and wise men from their body for hearing us and considering the
grounds of our design. They communicated also beforehand their thoughts
of assigning to us some college with its revenues, whereby a certain number
of learned and industrious men called from all nations might be honourably
maintained, either for a term of years or in perpetuity. There was even
named for the purpose The Savoy in London; Winchester College out of
London was named; and again nearer the city, Chelsea College, inventories
of which and of its revenues were communicated to us, so that nothing
seemed more certain than that the design of the great Verulam, concerning
the opening somewhere of a Universal College, devoted to the advancement
of the Sciences could be carried out. But the rumour of the Insurrection in
Ireland, and of the massacre in one night of more than 200,000 English
[October, November], and the sudden departure of the King from London
[January 10, 1641-2], and the plentiful signs of the bloody war about to
break out disturbed these plans, and obliged me to hasten my return to my
own people.”[69]

§ 9. While Comenius was in England, where he stayed till August, 1642,
he received an invitation to France. This invitation, which he did not accept,
came perhaps through his correspondent Mersenne, a man of great learning,
who is said to have been highly esteemed and often consulted by Descartes.
It is characteristic of the state of opinion in such matters in those days, that
Mersenne tells Comenius of a certain Le Maire, by whose method a boy of
six years old, might, with nine months’ instruction, acquire a perfect
knowledge of three languages. Mersenne also had dreams of a universal
alphabet, and even of a universal language.
§ 10. Comenius’ hopes of assistance in England being at an end, he
thought of returning to Leszna; but a letter now reached him from a rich
Dutch merchant, Lewis de Geer, who offered him a home and means for
carrying out his plans. This Lewis de Geer, “the Grand Almoner of Europe,”
as Comenius calls him, displayed a princely munificence in the assistance
he gave the exiled Protestants. At this time he was living at Nordcoping in
Sweden. Comenius having now found such a patron as he was seeking, set
out from England and joined him there.
§ 11. Soon after the arrival of Comenius in Sweden, the great Oxenstiern
sent for him to Stockholm, and with John Skyte, the Chancellor of Upsal
University, examined him and his system. “These two,” as Comenius says,
“exercised me in colloquy for four days, and chiefly the most illustrious
Oxenstiern, that eagle of the North (Aquila Aquilonius). He inquired into
the foundations of both my schemes, the Didactic and the Pansophic, so
searchingly, that it was unlike anything that had been done before by any of
my learned critics. In the first two days he examined the Didactics, and
finally said: ‘From an early age I perceived that our Method of Studies
generally in use is a harsh and crude one (violentum quiddam), but where
the thing stuck I could not find out. At length, having been sent by my King
of glorious memory [i.e., by Gustavus Adolphus], as ambassador into
Germany, I conversed on the subject with various learned men. And when I
had heard that Wolfgang Ratichius was toiling at an amended Method I had
no rest of mind till I had him before me, but instead of talking on the
subject, he put into my hands a big quarto volume. I swallowed this trouble,
and having turned over the whole book, I saw that he had detected well
enough the maladies of our schools but the remedies he proposed did not
seem to me sufficient. Yours, Mr. Comenius, rest on firmer foundations. Go

on with the work.’ I answered that I had done all I could in those matters,
and must now go on to others. ‘I know,’ said he, ‘that you are toiling at
greater affairs, for I have read your Prodromus Pansophiæ. That we will
discuss to-morrow, I must now to public business.’ Next day he began on
my Pansophic attempts, and examined them with still greater severity. ‘Are
you a man,’ he asked, ‘who can bear contradiction?’ ‘I can,’ said I, ‘and for
that reason my Prodromus or preliminary sketch was sent out first (not
indeed that I sent it out myself, this was done by friends), that it might meet
with criticism. And if we seek the criticism of all and sundry, how much
more from men of mature wisdom and heroic reason?’ He began
accordingly to discourse against the hope of a better state of things arising
from a rightly instituted study of Pansophia; first, objecting political
reasons, then what was said in Scripture about ‘the last times.’ All which
objections I so answered that he ended with these words: ‘Into no one’s
mind do I think such things have come before. Stand upon these grounds of
yours; so shall we some time come to agreement, or there will be no way
left. My advice, however,’ added he, ‘is that you first do something for the
schools, and bring the study of the Latin tongue to a greater facility; thus
you will prepare the way for those greater matters.’” As Skyte and
afterwards De Geer gave the same advice, Comenius felt himself
constrained to follow it; so he agreed to settle at Elbing, in Prussia, and
there write a work on teaching, in which the principles of the Didactica
Magna should be worked out with especial reference to teaching languages.
Notwithstanding the remonstrances of his English friends, to which
Comenius would gladly have listened, he was kept by Oxenstiern and De
Geer strictly to his agreement, and thus, much against his will, he was held
fast for eight years in what he calls the “miry entanglements of logomachy.”
§ 12. Elbing, where, after a journey to Leszna to fetch his family (for he
had married again), Comenius now settled, is in West Prussia, thirty-six
miles south-east of Dantzic. From 1577 to 1660 an English trading
company was settled here, with which the family of Hartlib was connected.
This perhaps was one reason why Comenius chose this town for his
residence. But although he had a grant of £300 a year from Parliament,
Hartlib, instead of assisting with money, seems at this time to have himself
needed assistance, for in October, 1642, Comenius writes to De Geer that he
fears Fundanius and Hartlib are suffering from want, and that he intends for

them £200 promised by the London booksellers; he suggests that De Geer
shall give them £30 each meanwhile. (Benham, p. 63.)
§ 13. The relation between Comenius and his patron naturally proved a
difficult one. The Dutchman thought that as he supported Comenius, and
contributed something more for the assistants, he might expect of Comenius
that he would devote all his time to the scholastic treatise he had
undertaken. Comenius, however, was a man of immense energy and of
widely extended sympathies and connections. He was a “Bishop” of the
religious body to which he belonged, and in this capacity he engaged in
controversy, and attended some religious conferences. Then again, pupils
were pressed upon him, and as money to pay five writers whom he kept at
work was always running short, he did not decline them. De Geer
complained of this, and supplies were not furnished with wonted regularity.
In 1647 Comenius writes to Hartlib that he is almost overwhelmed with
cares, and sick to death of writing begging-letters. Yet in this year he found
means to publish a book On the Causes of this (i.e., the Thirty Years) War,
in which the Roman Catholics are attacked with great bitterness—a
bitterness for which the position of the writer affords too good an excuse.
§ 14. The year 1648 brought with it the downfall of all Comenius’ hopes
of returning to his native land. The Peace of Westphalia was concluded
without any provision being made for the restoration of the exiles. But
though thus doomed to pass the remaining years of his life in banishment,
Comenius, in this year, seemed to have found an escape from all his
pecuniary difficulties. The Senior Bishop, the head of the Moravian
Brethren, died, and Comenius was chosen to succeed him. In consequence
of this, Comenius returned to Leszna, where due provision was made for
him by the Brethren. Before he left Elbing, however, the fruit of his
residence there, the Methodus Linguarum Novissima, had been submitted to
a commission of learned Swedes, and approved of by them. The MS. went
with him to Leszna, where it was published.
§ 15. As head of the Moravian Church, there now devolved upon
Comenius the care of all the exiles, and his widespread reputation enabled
him to get situations for many of them in all Protestant countries. But he
was now so much connected with the science of education, that even his
post at Leszna did not prevent his receiving and accepting a call to reform
the schools in Transylvania. A model school was formed at Saros-Patak,

where there was a settlement of the banished Brethren, and in this school
Comenius laboured from 1650 till 1654. At this time he wrote his most
celebrated book, which is indeed only an abridgment of his Janua with the
important addition of pictures, and sent it to Nürnberg, where it appeared
three years later (1657). This was the famous Orbis Pictus.
§ 16. Full of trouble as Comenius’ life had hitherto been, its greatest
calamity was still before him. After he was again settled at Leszna, Poland
was invaded by the Swedes, on which occasion the sympathies of the
Brethren were with their fellow-Protestants, and Comenius was imprudent
enough to write a congratulatory address to the Swedish King. A peace
followed, by the terms of which, several towns, and Leszna among them,
were made over to Sweden; but when the King withdrew, the Poles took up
arms again, and Leszna, the headquarters of the Protestants, the town in
which the chief of the Moravian Brethren had written his address
welcoming the enemy, was taken and plundered.
Comenius and his family escaped, but his house was marked for special
violence, and nothing was preserved. His sole remaining possessions were
the clothes in which he and his family travelled. All his books and
manuscripts were burnt, among them his valued work on Pansophia, and a
Latin-Bohemian and Bohemian-Latin Dictionary, giving words, phrases,
idioms, adages, and aphorisms—a book on which he had been labouring for
forty years. “This loss,” he writes, “I shall cease to lament only when I
cease to breathe.”
§ 17. After wandering for some time about Germany, and being
prostrated by fever at Hamburg, he at length came to Amsterdam, where
Lawrence De Geer, the son of his deceased patron, gave him an asylum.
Here were spent the remaining years of his life in ease and dignity.
Compassion for his misfortunes was united with veneration for his learning
and piety. He earned a sufficient income by giving instruction in the
families of the wealthy; and by the liberality of De Geer he was enabled to
publish a fine folio edition of all his writings on Education (1657). His
political works, however, were to the last a source of trouble to him. His
hostility to the Pope and the House of Hapsburg made him the dupe of
certain “prophets” whose soothsayings he published as Lux in Tenebris.
One of these prophets, who had announced that the Turk was to take
Vienna, was executed at Pressburg, and the Lux in Tenebris at the same time

burnt by the hangman. Before the news of this disgrace reached
Amsterdam, Comenius was no more. He died in the year 1671, at the
advanced age of eighty, and with him terminated the office of Chief Bishop
among the Moravian Brethren.
§ 18. His long life had been full of trouble, and he saw little of the
improvements he so earnestly desired and laboured after, but he continued
the struggle hopefully to the end. In his seventy-seventh year he wrote these
memorable words: “I thank God that I have all my life been a man of
aspirations.... For the longing after good, however it spring up in the heart,
is always a rill flowing from the Fountain of all good—from God.”[70]
Labouring in this spirit he did not toil in vain, and the historians of
education have agreed in ranking him among the most influential as well as
the most noble-minded of the Reformers.
§ 19. Before Comenius, no one had brought the mind of a philosopher to
bear practically on the subject of education. Montaigne and Bacon had
advanced principles, leaving others to see to their application. A few able
schoolmasters, Ascham, e.g., had investigated new methods, but had made
success in teaching the test to which they appealed, rather than any abstract
principle. Comenius was at once a philosopher who had learnt of Bacon,
and a schoolmaster who had earned his livelihood by teaching the
rudiments. Dissatisfied with the state of education as he found it, he sought
for a better system by an examination of the laws of Nature. Whatever is
thus established is indeed on an immovable foundation, and, as Comenius
himself says, “not liable to any ruin.” It will hardly be disputed, when
broadly stated, that there are laws of Nature which must be obeyed in
dealing with the mind, as with the body. No doubt these laws are not so
easily established in the first case as in the second, nor can we find them
without much “groping” and some mistakes; but whoever in any way assists
or even tries to assist in the discovery, deserves our gratitude; and greatly
are we indebted to him who first boldly set about the task, and devoted to it
years of patient labour.
§ 20. Comenius has left voluminous Latin writings. Professor Laurie
gives us the titles of the books connected with education, and they are in
number forty-two: so there must be much repetition and indeed retractation;
for Comenius was always learning, and one of his last books was
Ventilabrum Sapientiæ, sive sapienter sua retractandi Ars—i.e., “Wisdom’s

Winnowing-machine, or the Art of wisely withdrawing one’s own
assertions.” We owe much to Professor Laurie, who has served as a
ventilabrum and left us a succinct and clear account of the Reformer’s
teaching. I have read little of the writings of Comenius except the German
translation of the “Great Didactic,” from which the following is taken.
§ 21. We live, says Comenius, a threefold life—a vegetative, an animal,
and an intellectual or spiritual. Of these, the first is perfect in the womb, the
last in heaven. He is happy who comes with healthy body into the world,
much more he who goes with healthy spirit out of it. According to the
heavenly idea, man should (1) know all things; (2) should be master of all
things, and of himself; (3) should refer everything to God. So that within us
Nature has implanted the seeds of (1) learning, (2) virtue, and (3) piety. To
bring these seeds to maturity is the object of education. All men require
education, and God has made children unfit for other employments that
they may have leisure to learn.
§ 22. But schools have failed, and instead of keeping to the true object of
education, and teaching the foundations, relations, and intentions of all the
most important things, they have neglected even the mother tongue, and
confined the teaching to Latin; and yet that has been so badly taught, and so
much time has been wasted over grammar rules and dictionaries, that from
ten to twenty years are spent in acquiring as much knowledge of Latin as is
speedily acquired of any modern tongue.
§ 23. The cause of this want of success is that the system does not follow
Nature. Everything natural goes smoothly and easily. There must therefore
be no pressure. Learning should come to children as swimming to fish,
flying to birds, running to animals. As Aristotle says, the desire of
knowledge is implanted in man: and the mind grows as the body does—by
taking proper nourishment, not by being stretched on the rack.
§ 24. If we would ascertain how teaching and learning are to have good
results, we must look to the known processes of Nature and Art. A man
sows seed, and it comes up he knows not how, but in sowing it he must
attend to the requirements of Nature. Let us then look to Nature to find out
how knowledge takes root in young minds. We find that Nature waits for
the fit time. Then, too, she has prepared the material before she gives it
form. In our teaching we constantly run counter to these principles of hers.

We give instruction before the young minds are ready to receive it. We give
the form before the material. Words are taught before the things to which
they refer. When a foreign tongue is to be taught, we commonly give the
form, i.e., the grammatical rules, before we give the material, i.e., the
language, to which the rules apply. We should begin with an author, or
properly prepared translation-book, and abstract rules should never come
before the examples.
§ 25. Again, Nature begins each of her works with its inmost part.
Moreover, the crude form comes first, then the elaboration of the parts. The
architect, acting on this principle, first makes a rough plan or model, and
then by degrees designs the details; last of all he attends to the
ornamentation. In teaching, then, let the inmost part, i.e., the understanding
of the subject, come first; then let the thing understood be used to exercise
the memory, the speech, and the hands; and let every language, science, and
art be taught first in its rudimentary outline; then more completely with
examples and rules; finally, with exceptions and anomalies. Instead of this,
some teachers are foolish enough to require beginners to get up all the
anomalies in Latin Grammar, and the dialects in Greek.
§ 26. Again, as Nature does nothing per saltum, nor halts when she has
begun, the whole course of studies should be arranged in strict order, so that
the earlier studies prepare the way for the later. Every year, every month,
every day and hour even, should have its task marked out beforehand, and
the plan should be rigidly carried out. Much loss is occasioned by absence
of boys from school, and by changes in the instruction. Iron that might be
wrought with one heating should not be allowed to get cold, and be heated
over and over again.
§ 27. Nature protects her work from injurious influences, so boys should
be kept from injurious companionships and books.
§ 28. In a chapter devoted to the principles of easy teaching, Comenius
lays down, among rules similar to the foregoing, that children will learn if
they are taught only what they have a desire to learn, with due regard to
their age and the method of instruction, and especially when everything is
first taught by means of the senses. On this point Comenius laid great stress,
and he was the first who did so. Education should proceed, he said, in the
following order: first, educate the senses, then the memory, then the

intellect; last of all the critical faculty. This is the order of Nature. The child
first perceives through the senses. “Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius
fuerit in sensu. Everything in the intellect must have come through the
senses.” These perceptions are stored in the memory, and called up by the
imagination.[71] By comparing one with another, the understanding forms
general ideas, and at length the judgment decides between the false and the
true. By keeping to this order, Comenius believed it would be possible to
make learning entirely pleasant to the pupils, however young. Here
Comenius went even further than the Jesuits. They wished to make learning
pleasant, but despaired of doing this except by external influences,
emulation and the like. Comenius did not neglect external means to make
the road to learning agreeable. Like the Jesuits, he would have short school-
hours, and would make great use of praise and blame, but he did not
depend, as they did almost exclusively, on emulation. He would have the
desire of learning fostered in every possible way—by parents, by teachers,
by school buildings and apparatus, by the subjects themselves, by the
method of teaching them, and lastly, by the public authorities. (1) The
parents must praise learning and learned men, must show children beautiful
books, &c., must treat the teachers with great respect. (2) The teacher must
be kind and fatherly, he must distribute praise and reward, and must always,
where it is possible, give the children something to look at. (3) The school
buildings must be light, airy, and cheerful, and well furnished with
apparatus, as pictures, maps, models, collections of specimens. (4) The
subjects taught must not be too hard for the learner’s comprehension, and
the more entertaining parts of them must be especially dwelt upon. (5) The
method must be natural, and everything that is not essential to the subject or
is beyond the pupil must be omitted. Fables and allegories should be
introduced, and enigmas given for the pupils to guess. (6) The authorities
must appoint public examinations and reward merit.
§ 29. Nature helps herself in various ways, so the pupils should have
every assistance given them. It should especially be made clear what the
pupils are to learn, and how they should learn it.
§ 30. The pupils should be punished for offences against morals only. If
they do not learn, the fault is with the teacher.
§ 31. One of Comenius’s most distinctive principles was that there should
no longer be “infelix divortium rerum et verborum, the wretched divorce of

words from things” (the phrase, I think, is Campanella’s), but that
knowledge of things and words should go together. This, together with his
desire of submitting everything to the pupil’s senses, would have introduced
a great change into the course of instruction, which was then, as it has for
the most part continued, purely literary. We should learn, says Comenius, as
much as possible, not from books, but from the great book of Nature, from
heaven and earth, from oaks and beeches.
§ 32. When languages are to be learnt, he would have them taught
separately. Till the pupil is from eight to ten years old, he should be
instructed only in the mother-tongue, and about things. Then other
languages can be acquired in about a year each; Latin (which is to be
studied more thoroughly) in about two years. Every language must be learnt
by use rather than by rules, i.e., it must be learnt by hearing, reading and re-
reading, transcribing, attempting imitations in writing and orally, and by
using the language in conversation. Rules assist and confirm practice, but
they must come after, not before it. The first exercises in a language should
take for their subject something of which the sense is already known, so
that the mind may be fixed on the words and their connections.[72] The
Catechism and Bible History may be used for this purpose.
§ 33. Considering the classical authors not suited to boys’ understanding,
and not fit for the education of Christians, Comenius proposed writing a set
of Latin manuals for the different stages between childhood and manhood:
these were to be called “Vestibulum,” “Janua,” “Palatium” or “Atrium,”
“Thesaurus.” The “Vestibulum,” “Janua,” and “Atrium” were really carried
out.
§ 34. In Comenius’s scheme there were to be four kinds of schools for a
perfect educational course:—1st, the mother’s breast for infancy; 2nd, the
public vernacular school for children, to which all should be sent from six
years old till twelve; 3rd, the Latin school or Gymnasium; 4th, residence at
a University and travelling, to complete the course. The public schools were
to be for all classes alike, and for girls[73] as well as boys.
§ 35. Most boys and girls in every community would stop at the
vernacular school; and as this school is a very distinctive feature in
Comenius’s plan, it may be worth while to give his programme of studies.
In this school the children should learn—1st, to read and write the mother-

tongue well, both with writing and printing letters; 2nd, to compose
grammatically; 3rd, to cipher; 4th, to measure and weigh; 5th, to sing, at
first popular airs, then from music; 6th, to say by heart, sacred psalms and
hymns; 7th, Catechism, Bible History, and texts; 8th, moral rules, with
examples; 9th, economics and politics, as far as they could be understood;
10th, general history of the world; 11th, figure of the earth and motion of
stars, &c., physics and geography, especially of native land; 12th, general
knowledge of arts and handicrafts.
§ 36. Each school was to be divided into six classes, corresponding to the
six years the pupil should spend in it. The hours of work were to be, in
school, two hours in the morning and two in the afternoon, with nearly the
same amount of private study. In the morning the mind and memory were to
be exercised, in the afternoon the hands and voice. Each class was to have
its proper lesson-book written expressly for it, so as to contain everything
that class had to learn. When a lesson was to be got by heart from the book,
the teacher was first to read it to the class, explain it, and re-read it; the boys
then to read it aloud by turns till one of them offered to repeat it without
book; the others were to do the same as soon as they were able, till all had
repeated it. This lesson was then to be worked over again as a writing
lesson, &c. In the higher forms of the vernacular school a modern language
was to be taught and duly practised.
§ 37. Here we see a regular school course projected which differed
essentially from the only complete school course still earlier, that of the
Jesuits. In education Comenius was immeasurably in advance of Loyola
and Aquaviva. Like the great thinkers, Pestalozzi and Froebel, who most
resemble him, he thought of the development of the child from its birth; and
in a singularly wise little book, called Schola materni gremii, or “School of
the Mother’s Breast,” he has given advice for bringing up children to the
age of six.[74]
§ 38. Very interesting are the hints here given, in which we get the first
approaches to Kindergarten training. Comenius saw that, much as their
elders might do to develop children’s powers of thought and expression,
“yet children of the same age and the same manners and habits are of
greater service still. When they talk or play together, they sharpen each
other more effectually; for the one does not surpass the other in depth of
invention, and there is among them no assumption of superiority of the one

over the other, only love, candour, free questionings and answers” (School
of Infancy, vi, 12, p. 38).[75] The constant activity of children must be
provided for. “It is better to play than to be idle, for during play the mind is
intent on some object which often sharpens the abilities. In this way
children may be early exercised to an active life without any difficulty,
since Nature herself stirs them up to be doing something” (Ib. ix, 15, p. 55).
“In the second, third, fourth years, &c., let their spirits be stirred up by
means of agreeable play with them or their playing among themselves....
Nay, if some little occupation can be conveniently provided for the child’s
eyes, ears, or other senses, these will contribute to its vigour of mind and
body” (Ib. vi, 21, p. 31).
§ 39. We have the usual cautions against forcing. “Early fruit is useful for
the day, but will not keep; whereas late fruit may be kept all the year. As
some natural capacities would fly, as it were, before the sixth, the fifth, or
even the fourth year, yet it will be beneficial rather to restrain than permit
this; but very much worse to enforce it.” “It is safer that the brain be rightly
consolidated before it begin to sustain labours: in a little child the whole
bregma is scarcely closed and the brain consolidated within the fifth or
sixth year. It is sufficient, therefore, for this age to comprehend
spontaneously, imperceptibly and as it were in play, so much as is employed
in the domestic circle” (Ib. chap. xi).
§ 40. One disastrous tendency has always shown itself in the schoolroom
—the tendency to sever all connection between studies in the schoolroom
and life outside. The young pack away their knowledge as it were in water-
tight compartments, where it may lie conveniently till the scholastic voyage
is over and it can be again unshipped.[76] Against this tendency many great
teachers have striven, and none more vigorously than Comenius. Like
Pestalozzi he sought to resolve everything into its simplest elements, and he
finds the commencements before the school age. In the School of Infancy he
says (speaking of rhetoric), “My aim is to shew, although this is not
generally attended to, that the roots of all sciences and arts in every instance
arise as early as in the tender age, and that on these foundations it is neither
impossible nor difficult for the whole superstructure to be laid; provided
always that we act reasonably with a reasonable creature” (viij, 6, p. 46).
This principle he applies in his chapter, “How children ought to be
accustomed to an active life and perpetual employment” (chap. vij). In the

fourth and fifth year their powers are to be drawn out in mechanical or
architectural efforts, in drawing and writing, in music, in arithmetic,
geometry, and dialectics. For arithmetic in the fourth, fifth, or sixth year, it
will be sufficient if they count up to twenty; and they may be taught to play
at “odd and even.” In geometry they may learn in the fourth year what are
lines, what are squares, what are circles; also the usual measures—foot,
pint, quart, &c., and soon they should try to measure and weigh for
themselves. Similar beginnings are found for other sciences such as
physics, astronomy, geography, history, economics, and politics. “The
elements of geography will be during the course of the first year and
thenceforward, when children begin to distinguish between their cradles
and their mother’s bosom” (vj, 6, p. 34). As this geographical knowledge
extends, they discover “what a field is, what a mountain, forest, meadow,
river” (iv, 9, p. 17). “The beginning of history will be, to be able to
remember what was done yesterday, what recently, what a year ago.”[77]
(Ib.)
§ 41. In this book Comenius is careful to provide children with
occupation for “mind and hand” (iv, 10, p. 18). Drawing is to be practised
by all. “It matters not,” says Comenius, “whether the objects be correctly
drawn or otherwise provided that they afford delight to the mind.”[78]
§ 42. We see then that this restless thinker considered the entire course of
a child’s bringing-up from the cradle to maturity; and we cannot doubt that
Raumer is right in saying, “The influence of Comenius on subsequent
thinkers and workers in education, especially on the Methodizers, is
incalculable.” (Gesch. d. P., ij, “Comenius,” § 10.)
Before we think of his methods and school books, let us inquire what he
did for education that has proved to be on a solid foundation and “not liable
to any ruin.”
§ 43. He was the first to reach a standpoint which was and perhaps
always will be above the heads of “the practical men,” and demand
education for all. “We design for all who have been born human beings,
general instruction to fit them for everything human. They must, therefore,
as far as possible be taught together, so that they may mutually draw each
other out, enliven and stimulate. Of the ‘mother-tongue school’ the end and
aim will be, that all the youth of both sexes between the sixth and the

twelfth or thirteenth years be taught those things which will be useful to
them all their life long.”[79]
In these days we often hear controversies between the men of science and
the ministers of religion. It is as far beyond my intention as it is beyond my
abilities to discuss how far the antithesis between religion and science is a
true one; but our subject sometimes forces us to observe that religion and
science often bring thinkers by different paths to the same result; e.g., they
both refuse to recognise class distinctions and make us see an essential
unity underlying superficial variations. In Comenius we have an earnest
Christian minister who was also an enthusiast for science. Moreover he was
without social and virtually without national restrictions, and he was thus in
a good position for expressing freely and without bias what both his science
and his religion taught him. “Not only are the children of the rich and noble
to be drawn to the school, but all alike, gentle and simple, rich and poor,
boys and girls, in great towns and small, down to the country villages. And
for this reason. Every one who is born a human being is born with this
intent—that he should be a human being, that is, a reasonable creature
ruling over the other creatures and bearing the likeness of his Maker.”
(Didactica M. ix, § 1.) This sounds to me nobler than the utterances of
Rousseau and the French Revolutionists, not to mention Locke who fell
back on considering merely “the gentleman’s calling.” Even Bishop Butler
a century after Comenius hardly takes so firm a ground, though he lays it
down that “children have as much right to some proper education as to have
their lives preserved.”[80]
§ 44. The first man who demanded training for every human being
because he or she was a human being must always be thought of with
respect and gratitude by all who care either for science or religion. It has
taken us 250 years to reach the standpoint of Comenius; but we have
reached it, or almost reached it at last, and when we have once got hold of
the idea we are not likely to lose it again. The only question is whether we
shall not go on and in the end agree with Comenius that the primary school
shall be for rich and poor alike. At present the practical men, in England
especially, have things all their own way; but their horizon is and must be
very limited. They have already had to adjust themselves to many things
which their predecessors declared to be “quite impracticable—indeed

impossible.” May not their successors in like manner get accustomed to
other “impossible” things, this scheme of Comenius among them?
§ 45. The champions of realism have always recognised Comenius as one
of their earliest leaders. Bacon had just given voice to the scientific spirit
which had at length rebelled against the literary spirit dominant at the
Renascence, and had begun to turn from all that had been thought and said
about Nature, straight to Nature herself. Comenius was the professed
disciple of “the noble Verulam, who,” said he, “has given us the true key of
Nature.” Furnished with this key, Comenius would unlock the door of the
treasure-house for himself. “It grieved me,” he says, “that I saw most noble
Verulam present us indeed with a true key of Nature, but not to open the
secrets of Nature, only shewing us by a few examples how they were to be
opened, and leave [i.e., leaving] the rest to depend on observations and
inductions continued for several ages.” Comenius thought that by the light
of the senses, of reason, and of the Bible, he might advance faster. “For
what? Are not we as well as the old philosophers placed in Nature’s garden?
Why then do we not cast about our eyes, nostrils, and ears as well as they?
Why should we learn the works of Nature of any other master rather than of
these our senses? Why do we not, I say, turn over the living book of the
world instead of dead papers? In it we may contemplate more things and
with greater delight and profit than any one can tell us. If we have anywhere
need of an interpreter, the Maker of Nature is the best interpreter Himself.”
(Preface to Naturall Philosophie reformed. English trans., 1651.)
§ 46. Several things are involved in this so-called “realism.” First,
Comenius would fix the mind of learners on material objects. Secondly, he
would have them acquire their notions of these for themselves through the
senses. From these two principles he drew the corollary that the vast
accumulation of traditional learning and literature must be thrown
overboard.
§ 47. The demand for the study of things has been best formulated by one
of the greatest masters of words, by Milton. “Because our understanding
cannot in the body found itself but on sensible things, nor arrive so clearly
to the knowledge of God and things invisible, as by orderly conning over
the visible and inferior creature, the same method is necessarily to be
followed in all discreet teaching.” (To Hartlib.) Its material surroundings
then are to be the subjects on which the mind of the child must be fixed.

This being settled, Comenius demands that the child’s knowledge shall not
be verbal but real realism, knowledge derived at first hand through the
senses.[81]
§ 48. On this subject Comenius may speak for himself: “The ground of
this business is, that sensual objects [we now say sensible: why not
sensuous?] be rightly presented to the senses, for fear they may not be
received. I say, and say it again aloud, that this last is the foundation of all
the rest: because we can neither act nor speak wisely, unless we first rightly
understand all the things which are to be done and whereof we have to
speak. Now there is nothing in the understanding which was not before in
the sense. And therefore to exercise the senses well about the right
perceiving the differences of things will be to lay the grounds for all
wisdom and all wise discourse and all discreet actions in one’s course of
life. Which, because it is commonly neglected in Schools, and the things
that are to be learned are offered to scholars without their being understood
or being rightly presented to the senses, it cometh to pass that the work of
teaching and learning goeth heavily onward and affordeth little benefit.”
(Preface to Orbis Pictus, Hoole’s trans. A.D. 1658.)
§ 49. Without going into any metaphysical discussion, we must all agree
that a vast amount of impressions come to children through the senses, and
that it is by the exercise of the senses that they learn most readily. As
Comenius says: “The senses (being the main guides of childhood, because
therein the mind doth not as yet raise up it self to an abstracted
contemplation of things) evermore seek their own objects; and if these be
away, they grow dull, and wry themselves hither and thither out of a
weariness of themselves: but when their objects are present, they grow
merry, wax lively, and willingly suffer themselves to be fastened upon them
till the thing be sufficiently discerned.” (P. to Orbis.) This truth lay at the
root of most of the methods of Pestalozzi; and though it has had little effect
on teaching in England (where for the word anschaulich there is no
equivalent), everything that goes on in a German Folkschool has reference
to it.
§ 50. For children then Comenius gave good counsel when he would
have their senses exercised on the world about them. But after all, whatever
may be thought of the proposition that all knowledge comes through the
senses, we must not ignore what is bequeathed to us, both in science and in

literature. Comenius says: “And now I beseech you let this be our business
that the schools may cease to persuade and begin to demonstrate; cease to
dispute and begin to look; cease lastly to believe and begin to know. For that
Aristotellical maxim ‘Discentem oportet credere, A learner must believe,’ is
as tyrannical as it is dangerous; so also is that same Pythagorean ‘Ipse dixit,
The Master has said it.’ Let no man be compelled to swear to his Masters
words, but let the things themselves constrain the intellect.” (P. to Nat. Phil.
R.) But the things themselves will not take us far. Even in Natural Science
we need teachers, for Science is not reached through the senses but through
the intellectual grasp of knowledge which has been accumulating for
centuries. If the education of times past has neglected the senses, we must
not demand that the education of the future should care for the senses only.
There is as yet little danger of our thinking too much of physical education;
but we sometimes hear reformers talking as if the true ideal were sketched
in “Locksley Hall:”

“Iron-jointed, supple-sinew’d, they shall dive, and they shall run,
Catch the wild goat by the hair, and hurl their lances in the sun,
Whistle back the parrot’s call, and leap the rainbows of the brooks;
Not with blinded eyesight poring over miserable books.”

There seems, however, still some reason for counting “the gray barbarian
lower than the Christian child.” And the reason is that we are “the heirs of
all the ages.” Our education must enable every child to enter in some
measure on his inheritance; and not a few of our most precious heirlooms
will be found not only in scientific discoveries but also in those great works
of literature which the votaries of science are apt to despise as “miserable
books.” This truth was not duly appreciated by Comenius. As Professor
Laurie well says, “he accepted only in a half-hearted way the products of
the genius of past ages.” (Laurie’s C., p. 22.) In his day there was a violent
reaction from the Renascence passion for literature, and Comenius would
entirely banish from education the only literatures which were then
important, the “heathen” literatures of Greece and Rome. “Our most learned
men,” says he, “even among the theologians take from Christ only the
mask: the blood and life they draw from Aristotle and a crowd of other
heathens.” (See Paulsen’s Gesch., pp. 312, ff.) So for Cicero and Virgil he
would substitute, and his contemporaries at first seemed willing to accept,

the Janua Linguarum. But though there may be much more “real”
knowledge in the Janua, the classics have survived it.[82] In these days there
is a passion for the study of things which in its intensity resembles the
Renascence passion for literature. There is a craving for knowledge, and we
know only the truths we can verify; so this craving must be satisfied, not by
words, but things. And yet that domain which the physicists
contemptuously describe as the study of words must not be lost sight of,
indeed cannot be, either by young or old. As Matthew Arnold has said,
“those who are for giving to natural knowledge the chief place in the
education of the majority of mankind leave one important thing out of their
account—the constitution of human nature.”

“We live by Admiration, Hope, and Love,
And e’en as these are well and wisely fixed,
In dignity of being we ascend.”

So says Wordsworth, and if this assertion cannot be verified, no more can
it be disproved; that the words have become almost proverbial shows that it
commends itself to the general consciousness. Whatever knowledge we
may acquire, it will have little effect on our lives unless we can “relate it”
(again to use Matthew Arnold’s words), “to our sense of conduct and our
sense of beauty.” (Discourses in America. “Literature and Science.”) So
long as we retain our sense for these, “the humanities” are safe. Like Milton
we may have no inclination to study “modern Januas,” but we shall not
cease to value many of the works which the Janua of Comenius was
supposed to have supplanted.[83]
§ 51. “Analogies are good for illustration, not for proof.” If Comenius
had accepted this caution, he would have escaped much useless labour, and
might have had a better foundation for his rules than fanciful applications of
what he observed in the external world. “Comenius” as August Vogel has
said, “is unquestionably right in wishing to draw his principles of education
from Nature; but instead of examining the proper constitution and nature of
man, and taking that as the basis of his theory, he watches the life of birds,
the growth of trees, or the quiet influence of the sun, and thus substitutes for
the nature of man nature without man (die objective Natur). And yet by
Nature he understands that first and primordial state to which as to our
original [idea] we should be restored, and by the voice of Nature he

understands the universal Providence of God or the ceaseless influence of
the Divine Goodness working all in all, that is, leading every creature to the
state ordained for it. The vegetative and animal life in Nature is according
to Comenius himself not life at all in its highest sense, but the only true life
is the intellectual or spiritual life of Man. No doubt in the two lower kinds
of life certain analogies may be found for the higher; but nothing can be
less worthy of reliance and less scientific than a method which draws its
principles for the higher life from what has been observed in the lower.” (A.
Vogel’s Gesch. d. Pädagogik als Wissenschaft, p. 94.)
§ 52. This seems to me judicious criticism; but whatever mistakes he may
have made, Comenius, like Froebel long after him, strove after a higher
unity which should embrace knowledge of every kind. The connexion of
knowledges (so constantly overlooked in the schoolroom) was always in his
thoughts. “We see that the branches of a tree cannot live unless they all
alike suck their juices from a common trunk with common roots. And can
we hope that the branches of Wisdom can be torn asunder with safety to
their life, that is to truth? Can one be a Natural Philosopher who is not also
a Metaphysician? or an Ethical Thinker who does not know something of
Physical Science? or a Logician who has no knowledge of real matters? or a
Theologian, a jurisconsult, or a Physician, who is not first a Philosopher? or
an Orator or Poet, who is not all these at once? He deprives himself of light,
of hand, and of regulation, who pushes away from him any shred of the
knowable.” (Quoted in Masson’s L. of Milton vol. iij., p. 213 from the
Delineatio, [i.e., Pansophiæ Prodromus]. Conf. J. H. Newman, Idea of a
University, Disc. iij.)
§ 53. We see then that on the side of theory, Comenius was truly great.
But the practical man who has always been the tyrant of the schoolroom
cared nothing for theory and held, with a modern English minister
responsible for education, who proved his ignorance of theory by his “New
Code,” that there was, and could be no such thing. So the reputation of
Comenius became pretty much what our great authority Hallam has
recorded, that he was a person of some ingenuity and little judgment who
invented a new way of learning Latin. This estimate of him enables us to
follow some windings in the stream of thought about education. Comenius
faced the whole problem in its double bearing, theory and practice: he
asked, What is the educator’s task? How can he best accomplish it? But his

contemporaries had not yet recovered from the idolatry of Latin which had
been bequeathed to them by their fathers from the Renascence, and they too
saw in Comenius chiefly an inventor of a new way of learning Latin. He
sought to train up children for this world and the next; they supposed, as
Oxenstiern himself said, that the main thing to be remedied was the clumsy
way of teaching Latin. So Comenius was little understood. His books were
seized upon as affording at once an introduction to the knowledge of things
and a short way of learning Latin. But in the long run they were found more
tiresome than the old classics: so they went out of fashion, and their author
was forgotten with them. Now that schoolmasters are forming a more
worthy conception of their office, they are beginning to do justice to
Comenius.
§ 54. As the Jesuits kept to Latin as the common language of the Church,
so Comenius thought to use it as a means of inter-communication for the
instructed of every nationality. But he was singularly free from over-
estimating the value of Latin, and he demanded that all nations should be
taught in their own language wherein they were born. On this subject he
expresses himself with great emphasis. “We desire and protest that studies
of wisdom be no longer committed to Latin alone, and kept shut up in the
schools, as has hitherto been done, to the greatest contempt and injury of
the people at large, and the popular tongues. Let all things be delivered to
each nation in its own speech.” (Delineatio [Prodromus] in Masson ut
supra.)
§ 55. Comenius was then neither a verbalist nor a classicist, and yet his
contemporaries were not entirely wrong in thinking of him as “a man who
had invented a new way of learning Latin.” His great principle was that
instruction in words and things should go together.[84] The young were to
learn about things, and at the same time were to acquire both in the
vernacular and also in Latin, the international tongue, the words which were
connected with the things. Having settled on this plan of concurrent
instruction in words and things, Comenius determined to write a book for
carrying it out. Just then there fell into his hands a book which a less open-
minded man might have thrown aside on account of its origin, for it was
written by the bitter foes and persecutors of the Bohemian Protestants, by
the Jesuits. But Comenius says truly, “I care not whether I teach or whether
I learn,” and he gave a marvellous proof of this by adopting the linguistic

method of the Jesuits’ Janua Linguarum.[85] This “Noah’s Ark for words,”
treated in a series of proverbs of all kinds of subjects, in such a way as to
introduce in a natural connection every common word in the Latin
language. “The idea,” says Comenius, “was better than the execution.
Nevertheless, inasmuch as they (the Jesuits) were the prime inventors, we
thankfully acknowledge it, nor will we upbraid them with those errors they
have committed.” (Preface to Anchoran’s trans. of Janua.)
§ 56. The plan commended itself to Comenius on various grounds. First,
he had a notion of giving an outline of all knowledge before anything was
taught in detail. Next, he could by such a book connect the teaching about
simple things with instruction in the Latin words which applied to them.
And thirdly, he hoped by this means to give such a complete Latin
vocabulary as to render the use of Latin easy for all requirements of modern
society. He accordingly wrote a short account of things in general, which he
put in the form of a dialogue, and this he published in Latin and German at
Leszna in 1531. The success of this work, as we have already seen, was
prodigious. No doubt the spirit which animated Bacon was largely diffused
among educated men in all countries, and they hailed the appearance of a
book which called the youth from the study of old philosophical ideas to
observe the facts around them.
§ 57. The countrymen of Bacon were not backward in adopting the new
work, as the following, from the title-page of a volume in the British
Museum, will show: “The Gate of Tongues Unlocked and Opened; or else,
a Seminary or Seed-plot of all Tongues and Sciences. That is, a short way of
teaching and thoroughly learning, within a yeare and a half at the furthest,
the Latine, English, French and any other tongue, with the ground and
foundation of arts and sciences, comprised under a hundred titles and 1058
periods. In Latin first, and now, as a token of thankfulness, brought to light
in Latine, English and French, in the behalfe of the most illustrious Prince
Charles, and of British, French, and Irish youth. The 4th edition, much
enlarged, by the labour and industry of John Anchoran, Licentiate in
Divinity, London. Printed by Edward Griffin for Michael Sparke, dwelling
at the Blew Bible in Green Arbor, 1639.” The first edition must have been
some years earlier, and the work contains a letter to Anchoran from
Comenius dated “Lessivæ polonorum (Leszna) 11th Oct, 1632.” So we see

that, however the connexion arose, it was Anchoran not Hartlib who first
made Comenius known in England.
§ 58. In the preface to the volume (signed by Anchoran and Comenius)
we read of the complaints of “Ascam, Vives, Erasmus, Sturmius, Frisclinus,
Dornavius and others.” The Scaligers and Lipsius did climb but left no
track. “Hence it is that the greater number of schools (howsoever some
boast the happinesse of the age and the splendour of learning) have not as
yet shaked off their ataxies. The youth was held off, nay distracted, and is
yet in many places delayed with grammar precepts infinitely tedious,
perplexed, obscure, and (for the most part) unprofitable, and that for many
years.” The names of things were taught to those who were in total
ignorance of the things themselves.
§ 59. From this barren region the pupil was to escape to become
acquainted with things. “Come on,” says the teacher in the opening
dialogue, “let us go forth into the open air. There you shall view whatsoever
God produced from the beginning, and doth yet effect by nature. Afterwards
we will go into towns, shops, schools, where you shall see how men do both
apply those Divine works to their uses, and also instruct themselves in arts,
manners, tongues. Then we will enter into houses, courts, and palaces of
princes, to see in what manner communities of men are governed. At last
we will visit temples, where you shall observe how diversely mortals seek
to worship their Creator and to be spiritually united unto Him, and how He
by His Almightiness disposeth all things.” (This is from the 1656 edition,
by “W.D.”)
The book is still amusing, but only from the quaint manner in which the
mode of life two hundred years ago is described in it.[86]
§ 60. But though parts of the book may on first reading have gratified the
youth of the seventeenth century, a great deal of it gave scanty information
about difficult subjects, such as physiology, geometry, logic, rhetoric, and
that too in the driest and dullest way. Moreover, in his first version (much
modified at Saros-Patak) Comenius following the Jesuit boasts that no
important word occurs twice; so that the book, to attain the end of giving a
perfect stock of Latin words, would have to be read and re-read till it was
almost known by heart; and however amusing boys might find an account
of their toys written in Latin the first time of reading, the interest would

somewhat wear away by the fifth or sixth time. We cannot then feel much
surprised on reading this “general verdict,” written some years later,
touching those earlier works of Comenius: “They are of singular use, and
very advantageous to those of more discretion (especially to such as have
already got a smattering in Latin), to help their memories to retain what
they have scatteringly gotten here and there, and to furnish them with many
words which perhaps they had not formerly read or so well observed; but to
young children (whom we have chiefly to instruct, as those that are ignorant
altogether of most things and words), they prove rather a mere toil and
burden than a delight and furtherance.” (Chas. Hoole’s preface to his trans.
of Orbis Pictus, dated “From my school in Lothbury, London, Jan. 25,
1658.”)
§ 61. The “Janua” would, therefore, have had but a short-lived popularity
with teachers, and a still shorter with learners, if Comenius had not carried
out his principle of appealing to the senses, and adopted a plan which had
been suggested, nearly 50 years earlier, by a Protestant divine, Lubinus,[87]
of Rostock. The artist was called in, and with Endter at Nürnberg in 1657
was published the first edition of a book which long outlived the Janua.
This was the famous Orbis Sensualium Pictus, which was used for a
century at least in many a schoolroom, and lives in imitations to the present
day. Comenius wrote this book on the same lines as the Janua, but he goes
into less detail, and every subject is illustrated by a small engraving. The
text is mostly on the opposite page to the picture, and is connected with it
by a series of corresponding numbers. Everything named in the text is
numbered as in the picture. The artist employed must have been a bold man,
as he sticks at nothing; but in skill he was not the equal of many of his
contemporaries; witness the pictures in the Schaffhausen Janua (Editio
secunda, SchaffhusI, 1658), in Daniel’s edition of the Janua, 1562, and the
very small but beautiful illustrations in the Vestibulum of “Jacob Redinger
and J. S.” (Amsterdam, 1673). However, the Orbis Pictus gives such a
quaint delineation of life 200 years ago that copies with the original
engravings keep rising in value, and an American publisher (Bardeen of
Syracuse, New York), has lately reproduced the old book with the help of
photography.
§ 62. And yet as instruments of teaching, these books, i.e. the Vestibulum
and the Janua and even the Orbis Pictus which in a great measure

superseded both, proved a failure. How shall we account for this?
Comenius immensely over-estimated the importance of knowledge and
the power of the human mind to acquire knowledge. He took it for the
heavenly idea that man should know all things. This notion started him on
the wrong road for forming a scheme of instruction, and it needed many
years and much experience to show him his error. When he wrote the Orbis
Pictus he said of it: “It is a little book, as you see, of no great bulk, yet a
brief of the whole world and a whole language;” (Hoole’s trans. Preface);
and he afterwards speaks of “this our little encyclopædia of things subject
to the senses.” But in his old age he saw that his text-books were too
condensed and attempted too much (Laurie, p. 59); and he admitted that
after all Seneca was right: “Melius est scire pauca et iis recté uti quam scire
multa, quorum ignores usum. It is better to know a few things and have the
right use of them than to know many things which you cannot use at all.”
§ 63. The attempt to give “information” has been the ruin of a vast
number of professing educators since Comenius. Masters “of the old
school” whom some of us can still remember made boys learn Latin and
Greek Grammar and nothing else. Their successors seem to think that boys
should not learn Latin and Greek Grammar but everything else: and the last
error I take to be much worse than the first. As Ruskin has neatly said,
education is not teaching people to know what they do not know, but to
behave as they do not behave. It is to be judged not by the knowledge
acquired, but the habits, powers, interests: knowledge must be thought of
“last and least.”
§ 64. So the attempt to teach about everything was unwise. The means
adopted were unwise also. It is a great mistake to suppose that a “general
view” should come first; this is not the right way to give knowledge in any
subject. “A child begins by seeing bits of everything—here a little and there
a little; it makes up its wholes out of its own littles, and is long in reaching
the fulness of a whole; and in this we are children all our lives in much.”
(Dr. John Brown in Horæ Subsecivæ, p. 5.) So nothing could have been
much more unfortunate than an attempt to give the young “a brief of the
whole world.” Compendia, dispendia.
§ 65. Corresponding to “a brief of the whole world,” Comenius offers “a
brief of a whole language.” The two mistakes were well matched. In “the

whole world” there are a vast number of things of which we must, and a
good number of which we very advantageously may be ignorant. In a
language there are many words which we cannot know and many more
which we do not want to know. The language lives for us in a small
vocabulary of essential words, and our hold upon the language depends
upon the power we have in receiving and expressing thought by means of
those words. But the Jesuit Bath, and after him Comenius, made the
tremendous mistake of treating all Latin words as of equal value, and took
credit for using each word once and once only! Moreover, Comenius wrote
not simply to teach the Latin language, but also to stretch the Latin
language till it covered the whole area of modern life. He aimed at two
things and missed them both.
§ 66. We see then that Comenius was not what Hallam calls him, “a man
who invented a new way of learning Latin.” He did not do this, but he did
much more than this. He saw that every human creature should be trained
up to become a reasonable being, and that the training should be such as to
draw out God-given faculties. Thus he struck the key-note of the science of
education.
The quantity and the diffuseness of the writings of Comenius are truly bewildering. In these days
eminent men, Carlyle, e.g., sometimes find it difficult to get into print; but printing-presses all over
Europe seemed to be at the service of Comenius. An account of the various editions of the Janua
would be an interesting piece of bibliography, but the task of making it would not be a light one. The
earliest copy of which I can find a trace is entered in the catalogue of the Bodleian: “Comenius J. A.
Janua Linguarum, 8vo, Lips (Leipzig) 1632.” I also find there another copy entered “per
Anchoranum, cum clave per W. Saltonstall, London, 1633.”
The fame of Comenius is increasing and many interesting works have now been written about him.
I have already mentioned the English books of Benham and Laurie. In German I have the following
books, but not the time to read them all:—
Daniel, H. A. Zerstreute Blätter. Halle, 1866.
Free, H. Pädagogik d. Comenius. Bernburg, 1884.
Hiller, R. Latein Methode d. J. A. Comenius. Zschopau, 1883. (v. g. and terse; only 46 pp.)
Müller, Walter. Comenius ein Systematiker in d. Päd. Dresden, 1887.
Pappenheim, E. Amos Comenius. Berlin, 1871.
Seyffarth, L. W. J. A. Comenius. Leipzig, 2nd edition, 1871. (A careful and, as far as I can judge in
haste, an excellent piece of work.)
Zoubek, Fr. J. J. A. Comenius. Eine quellenmässige Lebensskizze, (Prefixed to trans. of Didac. M.
in Richter’s Päd. Bibliothek.)
For a Port-Royalist’s criticism of the Janua, see infra. (p. 185 note.)

XI.
THE GENTLEMEN OF PORT-ROYAL.[88]

§ 1. In the sixteen-hundreds by far the most successful schoolmasters
were the Jesuits. In spite of their exclusion from the University, they had in
the Province of Paris some 14,000 pupils, and in Paris itself at the Collège
de Clermont, 1,800. Might they not have neglected “the Little Schools,”
which were organized by the friends and disciples of the Abbé de Saint-
Cyran, schools in which the numbers were always small, about twenty or
twenty-five, and only once increasing to fifty? And yet the Jesuits left no
stone unturned, no weapon unemployed, in their attack on “the Little
Schools.” The conflict seems to us like an engagement between a man-of-
war and a fishing-boat. That the poor fishing-boat would soon be beneath
the waves, was clear enough from the beginning, and she did indeed
speedily disappear; but the victors have never recovered from their victory
and never will. Whenever we think of Jesuitism we are not more forcibly
reminded of Loyola than of Pascal. All educated Frenchmen, most educated
people everywhere, get their best remembered impressions of the Society of
Loyola from the Provincial Letters.[89]
§ 2. The Society had a long standing rivalry with the University of Paris,
and the University not only refused to admit the Jesuits, but several times
petitioned the Parliament to chase them out of France. On one of these
occasions the advocate who was retained by the University was Antoine
Arnauld, a man of renowned eloquence; and he threw himself into the
attack with all his heart. From that time the Jesuits had a standing feud with
the house of Arnauld.
§ 3. But it was no mere personal dislike that separated the Port-Royalists
and the Jesuits. Port-Royal with which the Arnauld family was so closely
united, became the stronghold of a theology which was unlike that of the
Jesuits, and was denounced by them as heresy. The daughter of Antoine
Arnauld was made, at the age of eleven years, Abbess of Port-Royal, a
Cistercian convent not far from Versailles. This position was obtained for
her by a fraud of Marion, Henry IV’s advocate-general, who thought only

of providing comfortably for one of the twenty children to whom his
daughter, Made. Arnauld, had made him grandfather. Never was a
nomination more scandalously obtained or used to better purpose. The Mère
Angélique is one of the saints of the universal church, and she soon became
the restorer of the religious life first in her own and then by her influence
and example in other convents of her Order.
§ 4. In these reforms she had nothing to fear from her hereditary foes the
Jesuits; but she soon came under the influence of a man whose theory of
life was as much opposed to the Jesuits’ theory as to that of the world which
found in the Jesuits the most accommodating father confessors.
Duvergier de Hauranne (1581-1643) better known by the name of his
“abbaye,” Saint-Cyran, was one of those commanding spirits who seem
born to direct others and form a distinct society. In vain Richelieu offered
him the posts most likely to tempt him. The prize that Saint-Cyran had set
his heart upon was not of this world, and Richelieu could assist him in one
way only—by persecution. This assistance the Cardinal readily granted, and
by his orders Saint-Cyran was imprisoned at Vincennes, and not set at
liberty till Richelieu was himself summoned before a higher tribunal.
§ 5. Driven by prevailing sickness from Port-Royal des Champs, the
Mère Angélique transported her community (in 1626) to a house purchased
for them in Paris by her mother who in her widowhood became one of the
Sisters. In Paris Angélique sought for herself and her convent the spiritual
direction of Saint-Cyran (not yet a prisoner), and from that time Saint-
Cyran added the Abbess and Sisters of Port-Royal to the number of those
who looked up to him as their pattern and guide in all things.
Port-Royal des Champs was in course of time occupied by a band of
solitaries who at the bidding of Saint-Cyran renounced the world and
devoted themselves to prayer and study. To them we owe the works of “the
Gentlemen of Port-Royal.”
§ 6. It is then to Saint-Cyran we must look for the ideas which became
the distinctive mark of the Port-Royalists.
Saint-Cyran was before all things a theologian. In his early days at
Bayonne his studies had been shared by a friend who afterwards was
professor of theology at Louvain, and then Bishop of Ypres. This friend was

Jansenius. Their searches after truth had brought them to opinions which in
the England of the nineteenth century are known as “Evangelical.”
According to “Catholic” teaching all those who receive the creed and the
sacraments of the Church and do not commit “mortal” sin are in a “state of
salvation,” that is to say the great majority of Christians are saved. This
teaching is rejected by those of another school of thought who hold that
only a few “elect” are saved and that the great body even of Christians are
doomed to perdition.
§ 7. Such a belief as this would seem to be associated of necessity with
harshness and gloom; but from whatever cause, there has been found in
many, even in most, cases no such connexion. Those who have held that the
great mass of their fellow-creatures had no hope in a future world, have
thrown themselves lovingly into all attempts to improve their condition in
this world. Still, their main effort has always been to increase the number of
the converted and to preserve them from the wiles of the enemy. This Saint-
Cyran sought to do by selecting a few children and bringing them up in
their tender years like hot-house plants, in the hope that they would be
prepared when older and stronger, to resist the evil influences of the world.
§ 8. His first plan was to choose out of all Paris six children and to
confide them to the care of a priest appointed to direct their consciences,
and a tutor of not more than twenty-five years old, to teach them Latin. “I
should think,” says he, “it was doing a good deal if I did not advance them
far in Latin before the age of twelve, and made them pass their first years
confined to one house or a monastery in the country where they might be
allowed all the pastimes suited to their age and where they might see only
the example of a good life set by those about them.” (Letter quoted by
Carré, p. 20.)
§ 9. His imprisonment put a stop to this plan, “but,” says Saint-Cyran, “I
do not lightly break off what I undertake for God;” so when intrusted with
the disposal of 2,000 francs by M. Bignon, he started the first “Little
School,” in which two small sons of M. Bignon’s were taken as pupils. The
name of “Little Schools,” was given partly perhaps because according to
their design the numbers in any school could never be large, partly no doubt
to deprecate any suspicion of rivalry with the schools of the University. The
children were to be taken at an early age, nine or ten, before they could
have any guilty knowledge of evil, and Saint-Cyran made in all cases a

stipulation that at any time a child might be returned to his friends; but in
cases where the master’s care seemed successful, the pupils were to be kept
under it till they were grown up.
§ 10. The Little Schools had a short and troubled career of hardly more
than fifteen years. They were not fully organized till 1646; they were
proscribed a few years later and in 1661 were finally broken up by Louis
XIV, who was under the influence of their enemies the Jesuits. But in that
time the Gentlemen of Port-Royal had introduced new ideas which have
been a force in French education and indeed in all literary education ever
since.
To Saint-Cyran then we trace the attempt at a particular kind of school,
and to his followers some new departures in the training of the intellect.
§ 11. Basing his system on the Fall of Man, Saint-Cyran came to a
conclusion which was also reached by Locke though by a different road. To
both of them it seemed that children require much more individual care and
watching than they can possibly get in a public school. Saint-Cyran would
have said what Locke said: “The difference is great between two or three
pupils in the same house and three or four score boys lodged up and down:
for let the master’s industry and skill be never so great, it is impossible he
should have fifty or one hundred scholars under his eye any longer than
they are in school together: Nor can it be expected that he should instruct
them successfully in anything but their books; the forming of their minds
and manners [preserving them from the danger of the enemy, Saint-Cyran
would have said] requiring a constant attention and particular application to
every single boy, which is impossible in a numerous flock, and would be
wholly in vain (could he have time to study and correct everyone’s peculiar
defects and wrong inclinations) when the lad was to be left to himself or the
prevailing infection of his fellows the greater part of the four-and-twenty
hours.” (Thoughts c. Ed. § 70.)
§ 12. An English public schoolmaster told the Commission on Public
Schools, that he stood in loco parentis to fifty boys. “Rather a large family,”
observed one of the Commissioners drily. The truth is that in the bringing
up of the young there is the place of the schoolmaster and of the school-
fellows, as well as that of the parents; and of these several forces one cannot
fulfil the functions of the others.

§ 13. According to the theory or at least the practice of English public
schools, boys are left in their leisure hours to organize their life for
themselves, and they form a community from which the masters are, partly
by their own over-work, partly by the traditions of the school, utterly
excluded. From this the intellectual education of the boys no doubt suffers.
“Engage them in conversation with men of parts and breeding,” says Locke;
and this was the old notion of training when boys of good family grew up as
pages in the household of some nobleman. But, except in the holidays, the
young aristocrats of the present day talk only with other boys, and servants,
and tradesmen. Hence the amount of thought and conversation given to
school topics, especially the games, is out of all proportion to the
importance of such things; and this does much to increase what Matthew
Arnold calls “the barbarians’” inaptitude for ideas.
§ 14. What are we to say about the effects of the system on the morals of
the boys? If we were to start like Saint-Cyran from the doctrine of human
depravity, we should entirely condemn the system and predict from it the
most disastrous results;[90] but from experience we come to a very different
conclusion. Bishop Dupanloup, indeed, spoke of the public schools of
France as “ces gouffres.” This is not what is said or thought of the English
schools, and they are filled with boys whose fathers and grandfathers were
brought up in them, and desire above all things to maintain the old
traditions.
§ 15. The Little Schools of Port-Royal aimed at training a few boys very
differently; each master had the charge of five or six only, and these were
never to be out of his presence day or night.[91]
§ 16. It may reasonably be objected that such schools would be possible
only for a few children of well-to-do parents, and that men who would thus
devote themselves could be found only at seasons of great enthusiasm.
Under ordinary circumstances small schools have most of the drawbacks
and few of the advantages which are to be found in large schools. As I have
already said, parents, schoolmasters, and school-fellows have separate
functions in education; and even in the smallest school the master can never
take the place of the parent, or the school become the home. Children at
home enter into the world of their father and mother; the family friends are
their friends, the family events affect them as a matter of course. But in the
school, however small, the children’s interests are unconnected with the

master and the master’s family. The boys may be on the most intimate, even
affectionate terms with the grown people who have charge of them; but the
mental horizon of the two parties is very different, and their common area
of vision but small. In such cases the young do not rise into the world of the
adults, and it is almost impossible for the adults to descend into theirs. They
are “no company” the one for the other, and to be constantly in each other’s
presence would subject both to very irksome restraint. When left to
themselves, boys in small numbers are far more likely to get into harm than
boys in large numbers. In large communities even of boys, “the common
sense of most” is a check on the badly disposed. So as it seems to me if
from any cause the young cannot live at home and attend a day-school, they
will be far better off in a large boarding school than in one that would better
fulfil the requirements of Erasmus,[92] Saint-Cyran, and Locke.
§ 17. As Saint-Cyran attributed immense importance to the part of the
master in education, he was not easily satisfied with his qualifications.
“There is no occupation in the Church that is more worthy of a Christian;
next to giving up one’s life there is no greater charity.... The charge of the
soul of one of these little ones is a higher employment than the government
of all the world.” (Cadet, 2.) So thought Saint-Cyran, and he was ready to
go to the ends of the earth to find the sort of teacher he wanted.
§ 18. He was so anxious that the children should see only that which was
good that the servants were chosen with peculiar care.
§ 19. For the masters his favourite rule was: “Speak little; put up with
much; pray still more.” Piety was not to be instilled so much by precepts as
by the atmosphere in which the children grew up. “Do not spend so much
time in speaking to them about God as to God about them:” so formal
instruction was never to be made wearisome. But there was to be an
incessant watch against evil influences and for good. “In guarding the
citadel,” says Lancelot, “we fail if we leave open a single gateway by which
the enemy might enter.”
§ 20. Though anxious, like the Jesuits, to make their boys’ studies “not
only endurable, but even delightful,” the Gentlemen of Port-Royal banished
every form of rivalry. Each pupil was to think of one whom he should try to
catch up, but this was not a school-fellow, but his own higher self, his ideal.
Here Pascal admits that the exclusion of competition had its drawbacks and

that the boys sometimes became indifferent—“tombent dans la
nonchalance,” as he says.
§ 21. As for the instruction it was founded on this principle: the object of
schools being piety rather than knowledge there was to be no pressure in
studying, but the children were to be taught what was sound and enduring.
§ 22. In all occupations there is of necessity a tradition. In the higher
callings the tradition may be of several kinds. First there may be a tradition
of noble thoughts and high ideals, which will be conveyed in the words of
the greatest men who have been engaged in that calling, or have thought out
the theory of it. Next there will be the tradition of the very best workers in
it. And lastly there is the tradition of the common man who learns and
passes on just the ordinary views of his class and the ordinary expedients
for getting through ordinary work. Of these different kinds of tradition, the
school-room has always shown a tendency to keep to this last, and the
common man is supreme. Young teachers are mostly required to fulfil their
daily tasks without the smallest preparation for them; so they have to get
through as best they can, and have no time to think of any high ideal, or of
any way of doing their work except that which gives them least trouble.
“Practice makes perfect,” says the proverb, but it would be truer to say that
practice in doing work badly soon makes perfect in contentment with bad
workmanship. Thus it is that the tradition of the school-room settles down
for the most part into a deadly routine, and teachers who have long been
engaged in carrying it on seem to lose their powers of vision like horses
who turn mills in the dark.
The Gentlemen of Port-Royal worked free from school-room tradition.
“If the want of emulation was a drawback,” says Sainte-Beuve, “it was a
clear gain to escape from all routine, from all pedantry. La crasse et la
morgue des régents n’en approchaient pas.” (P.R. vol. iij, p. 414) Piety as
we have seen was their main object. Next to it they wished to “carry the
intellects of their pupils to the highest point they could attain to.”
§ 23. In doing this they profited by their freedom from routine to try
experiments. They used their own judgments and sought to train the
judgment of their pupils. Themselves knowing the delights of literature,
they resolved that their pupils should know them also. They would banish
all useless difficulties and do what they could to “help the young and make

study even more pleasant to them than play and pastime.” (Preface to Cic.’s
Billets, quoted by Sainte-Beuve, vol. iij, p. 423.)
§ 24. One of their innovations, though startling to their contemporaries,
does not seem to us very surprising. It was the custom to begin reading with
a three or four years’ course of reading Latin, because in that language all
the letters were pronounced. The connexion between sound and sense is in
our days not always thought of, but even among teachers no advocates
would now be found for the old method which kept young people for the
first three or four years uttering sounds they could by no possibility
understand. The French language might have some disadvantage from its
silent letters, but this was small compared with the disadvantage felt in
Latin from its silent sense. So the Port-Royalists began reading with French.
§ 25. Further than this, they objected to reading through spelling, and
pointed out that as consonants cannot be pronounced by themselves they
should be taken only in connexion with the adjacent vowel. Pascal applied
himself to the subject and invented the method described in the 6th chap. of
the General Grammar (Carré, p. xxiij) and introduced by his sister
Jacqueline at Port-Royal des Champs.
§ 26. When the child could read French, the Gentlemen of Port-Royal
sought for him books within the range of his intelligence. There was
nothing suitable in French, so they set to work to produce translations in
good French of the most readable Latin books, “altering them just a little—
en y changeant fort peu de chose,” as said the chief translator De Saci, for
the sake of purity. In this way they gallicised the Fables of Phædrus, three
Comedies of Terence, and the Familiar Letters (Billets) of Cicero.
§ 27. In this we see an important innovation. As I have tried to explain
(supra pp. 14 ff.) the effect of the Renascence was to banish both the
mother-tongue and literature proper from the school-room; for no language
was tolerated but Latin, and no literature was thought possible except in
Latin or Greek. Before any literature could be known, or indeed, instruction
in any subject could be given, the pupils had to learn Latin. This neglect of
the mother-tongue was one of the traditional mistakes pointed out and
abandoned by the Port-Royalists. “People of quality complain,” says De
Saci, “and complain with reason, that in giving their children Latin we take
away French, and to turn them into citizens of ancient Rome we make them

strangers in their native land. After learning Latin and Greek for 10 or 12
years, we are often obliged at the age of 30 to learn French.” (Cadet, 10.) So
Port-Royal proposed breaking through this bondage to Latin, and laid down
the principle, new in France, though not in the country of Mulcaster or of
Ratke, that everything should be taught through the mother-tongue.
Next, the Port-Royalists sought to give their pupils an early and a
pleasing introduction to literature. The best literature in those days was the
classical; and suitable works from that literature might be made intelligible
by means of translations. In this way the Port-Royalists led their pupils to
look upon some of the classical authors not as inventors of examples in
syntax, but as writers of books that meant something. And thus both the
mother-tongue and literature were brought into the school-room.
§ 28. When the boys had by this means got some feeling for literature
and some acquaintance with the world of the ancients, they began the study
of Latin. Here again all needless difficulties were taken out of their way. No
attempt indeed was made to teach language without grammar, the rationale
of language, but the science of grammar was reduced to first principles (set
forth in the Grammaire Générale et Raisonnée of Arnauld and Lancelot),
and the special grammar of the Latin language was no longer taught by
means of the work established in the University, the Latin Latin Grammar
of Despautère, but by a “New Method” written in French which gave
essentials only and had for its motto: “Mihi inter virtutes grammatici
habebitur aliqua nescire—To me it will be among the grammarian’s good
points not to know everything.” (Quintil.)[93]
§ 29. With this minimum of the essentials of the grammar and with a
previous acquaintance with the sense of the book the pupils were introduced
to the Latin language and were taught to translate a Latin author into
French. This was a departure from the ordinary route, which after a course
of learning grammar-rules in Latin went to the “theme,” i.e., to composition
in Latin.
The art of translating into the mother-tongue was made much of. School
“construes,” which consist in substituting a word for a word, were entirely
forbidden, and the pupils had to produce the old writer’s thoughts in
French.[94]

§30. From this we see that the training was literary. But in the study of
form the Port-Royalists did not neglect the inward for the outward. Their
great work, which still stands the attacks of time, is the Port-Royal Logic,
or the Art of Thinking (see Trans, by T. Spencer Baynes, 1850). This was
substantially the work of Arnauld; and it was Arnauld who led the Port-
Royalists in their rupture with the philosophy of the Middle Age, and who
openly followed Descartes. In the Logic we find the claims of reason
asserted as if in defiance of the Jesuits. “It is a heavy bondage to think
oneself forced to agree in everything with Aristotle and to take him as the
standard of truth in philosophy.... The world cannot long continue in this
restraint, and is recovering by degrees its natural and reasonable liberty,
which consists in accepting that which we judge to be true and rejecting that
which we judge to be false.” (Quoted by Cadet, p. 31.)[95]
§ 31. To mark the change, the Port-Royalists called their book not “the
Art of Reasoning,” but “the Art of Thinking,” and it was in this art of
thinking that they endeavoured to train their scholars. They paid great
attention to geometry, and Arnauld wrote a book (“New Elements of
Geometry”) which so well satisfied Pascal that after reading the MS. he
burnt a similar work of his own.
§ 32. The Port-Royalists then sought to introduce into the school-room a
“sweet reasonableness.” They were not touched, as Comenius was, by the
spirit of Bacon, and knew nothing of a key for opening the secrets of
Nature. They loved literature and resolved that their pupils should love it
also; and with this end they would give the first notions of it in the mother-
tongue; but the love of literature still bound them to the past, and they
aimed simply at making the best of the Old Education without any thought
of a New.
§ 33. In one respect they seem less wise than Rabelais and Mulcaster, less
wise perhaps than their foes the Jesuits. They gave little heed to training the
body, and thought of the soul and the mind only; or if they thought of the
body they were concerned merely that it should do no harm. “Not only must
we form the minds of our pupils to virtue,” says Nicole, “we must also bend
their bodies to it, that is, we must endeavour that the body do not prove a
hindrance to their leading a well-regulated life or draw them by its weight
to any disorder. For we should know that as men are made up of mind and
body, a wrong turn given to the body in youth is often in after life a great

hindrance to piety.” (Vues p. bien élever un prince, quoted by Cadet, p.
206.)
§ 34. But let us not underrate the good effect produced by this united
effort of Christian toil and Christian thought. “Nothing should be more
highly esteemed than good sense,” (Preface to the Logique), and Port-Royal
did a great work in bringing good sense and reason to bear on the practice
of the school-room. When the Little Schools were dispersed the Gentlemen
still continued to teach, but the lessons they gave were now in the “art of
thinking” and in the art of teaching; and all the world might learn of them,
for they taught in the only way left open to them; they published books.
§ 35. Of these writers on pedagogy the most distinguished was “the great
Arnauld,” i.e., Antoine Arnauld, (1612-1694) brother of the Mère
Angélique. His “Règlement des Études” shows us how literary instruction
was given at Port-Royal. In these directions we have not so much the rules
observed in the Little Schools as the experience of the Little Schools
rendered available for the schools of the University. On this account Sainte-
Beuve speaks of the Règlement of Arnauld as forming a preface to the
Treatise on Studies (Traité des Études) of Rollin. In the Règlement we see
Arnauld yielding to what seems a practical necessity and admitting
competition and prizes. Some excellent advice is given, especially on
practice in the use of the mother-tongue. The young people are to question
and answer each other about the substance of what they have read, about
the more remarkable thoughts in their author or the more beautiful
expressions. Each day two of the boys are to narrate a story which they
themselves have selected from a classical author.[96]
§ 36. With the notable exception of Pascal, Arnauld was the most
distinguished writer among the Gentlemen of Port-Royal. A writer less
devoted to controversy than Arnauld, less attached to the thought of Saint-
Cyran and of Descartes, but of wider popularity, was Nicole, who had
Made. de Sévigné for an admirer, and Locke for one of his translators.
Nicole has given us a valuable contribution to pedagogy in his essay on
the right bringing-up of a prince. (Vues générales pour bien élever un
prince.) In this essay he shows us with what thought and care he had
applied himself to the art of instruction, and he gives us hints that all
teachers may profit by. Take the following:—

§ 37. “Properly speaking it is not the masters, it is no instruction from
without, that makes things understood; at the best the masters do nothing
but expose the things to the interior light of the mind, by which alone they
can be understood. It follows that where this light is wanting instruction is
as useless as trying to shew pictures in the dark. The very greatest minds are
nothing but lights in confinement, and they have always sombre and shady
spots; but in children the mind is nearly full of shade and emits but little
rays of light. So everything depends on making the most of these rays, on
increasing them and exposing to them what one wishes to have understood.
For this reason it is hard to give general rules for instructing anyone,
because the instruction must be adapted to the mixture of light and
darkness, which differs widely in different minds, especially with children.
We must look where the day is breaking and bring to it what we wish them
to understand; and to do this we must try a variety of ways for getting at
their minds and must persevere with such as we find have most success.
“But generally speaking we may say that, as in children the light depends
greatly on their senses, we should as far as possible attach to the senses the
instruction we give them, and make it enter not only by the ear but also by
the sight, as there is no sense which makes so lively an impression on the
mind and forms such sharp and clear ideas.”
This is excellent. There is a wise proverb that warns us that “however
soon we get up in the morning the sunrise comes never the earlier.” A vast
amount of instruction is thrown away because the instructors will not wait
for the day-break.
§ 38. For the moral training of the young there is one qualification in the
teacher which is absolutely indispensable—goodness. Similarly for the
intellectual training, there is an indispensable qualification—intelligence.
This is the qualification required by the system of Port-Royal, but not
required in working the ordinary machinery of the school-room either in
those days or in ours. When Nicole has described how instruction should be
given so as to train the judgment and cultivate the taste, he continues:
“As this kind of instruction comes without observation, so is the profit
derived from it likely to escape observation also; that is, it will not
announce itself by anything on the surface and palpable to the common
man. And on this account persons of small intelligence are mistaken about it

and think that a boy thus instructed is no better than another, because he
cannot make a better translation from Latin into French, or beat him in
saying his Virgil. Thus judging of the instruction by these trifles only, they
often make less account of a really able teacher than of one of little science
and of a mind without light.” (Nicole in Cadet, p. 204; Carré, p. 187.)
In these days of marks and percentages we seem agreed that it must be all
right if the children can stand the tests of the examiner or the inspector.
Something may no doubt be got at by these tests; but we cannot hope for
any genuine care for education while everything is estimated “par des
signes grossiers et extérieurs.”
§ 39. Whatever was required to adapt the thought of Port-Royal to the
needs of classical schools, especially the schools of the University of Paris
was supplied by Rollin (1661-1741) whose Traité des Études or “Way of
teaching and studying Literature,” united the lessons of Port-Royal with
much material drawn from his own experience and from his acquaintance
with the writings of other authors, especially Quintilian and Seneca. Having
been twice Rector of the University (in 1694 and 1695) Rollin had managed
to bring into the schools much that was due to Port-Royal; and in his Traité
he has the tact to give the improved methods as the ordinary practice of his
colleagues.
§ 40. Much that Rollin has said applies only to classical or at most to
literary instruction; but some of his advice will be good for all teachers as
long as the human mind needs instruction. I have met with nothing that
seems to me to go more truly to the very foundation of the art of teaching
than the following:
“We should never lose sight of this grand principle that study depends on
the will, and the will does not endure constraint: ‘Studium discendi
voluntate quæ cogi non potest constat.’ (Quint. j, 1, cap. 3.)[97] We can, to
be sure, put constraint on the body and make a pupil, however unwilling,
stick to his desk, can double his toil by punishment, compel him to finish a
task imposed upon him, and with this object we can deprive him of play and
recreation. But is this work of the galley-slave studying? And what remains
to the pupil from this kind of study but a hatred of books, of learning, and
of masters, often till the end of his days? It is then the will that we must
draw on our side, and this we must do by gentleness, by friendliness, by

persuasion, and above all by the allurement of pleasure.” (Traité, 8th Bk.
Du Gouvernement des Classes, 1re Partie, Art. x.)
§ 41. The passage I have quoted is from the Article “on giving a taste for
study (rendre l’étude aimable);” and if some masters do not agree that this
is “one of the most important points concerning education,” they will not
deny that “it is at the same time one of the most difficult.” As Rollin truly
says, “among a very great number of masters who in other respects are
highly meritorious there will be found very few who manage to get their
pupils to like their work.”
§ 42. One of the great causes of the disinclination for school work is to
be found according to Rollin and Quintilian, in the repulsive form in which
children first become acquainted with the elements of learning. “In this
matter success depends very much on first impressions; and the main effort
of the masters who teach the first rudiments should be so to do this, that the
child who cannot as yet love study should at least not get an aversion for it
from that time forward, for fear lest the bitter taste once acquired should
still be in his mouth when he grows older.”[98] (Begin. of Art. x, as above.)
§ 43. In this matter Rollin was more truly the disciple of the Port-
Royalists than of Quintilian. They it was who protested against the dismal
“grind” of learning to read first in an unknown tongue, and of studying the
rules of Latin in Latin with no knowledge of Latin, a course which
professed to lead, as Sainte-Beuve puts it, “to the unknown through the
unintelligible.” They directed their highly-trained intellects to the teaching
of the elements, and succeeded in proving that the ordinary difficulties were
due not to the dulness of the learners, but to the stupidity of the masters.
They showed how much might be done to remove these difficulties by
following not routine but the dictates of thought, and study and love of the
little ones.

There is an excellent though condensed account of the Port-Royalists under “Jansenists” in
Sonnenschein’s Cyclopædia of Education. In vol. ij, of Charles Beard’s Port-Royal, (2 vols., 1861)
there is a chapter on the Little Schools. The most pleasing account I have seen in English of the Port-
Royalists (without reference to education) is in Sir Jas. Stephen’s Essays on Ecclesiastical
Biography. In French the great work on the subject is Sainte-Beuve’s Port-Royal, 5 vols. (71 ed., 6
vols.) The account of the Schools is in 4th bk., in vol. iij, of 1st ed. Very useful for studying the
pedagogy of Port-Royal are L’Education à Port-Royal by Félix Cadet (Hachette, 1887) and Les
Pédagogues de Port-Royal, by I. Carré (Delagrave, 1887). These last give extracts from the main
writings on education by Arnauld, Nicole, Lancelot, Coustel, &c. The article, Port-Royal, in
Buisson’s D., is the “Introduction” to Carré’s book. A 3-vol. ed. of Rollin’s Traité was published
(Paris, Didot) in 1872. The more interesting parts of this book are contained in F. Cadet’s Rollin:
Traité des Études (Delagrave, 1882). Rollin’s work was at one time well-known in the English trans.,
and copies of it are often to be found “second-hand.” The best part comes last; which may account
for the neglect into which the book has fallen. The accounts of Port-Royal and of Rollin in G.
Compayré’s Histoire Critique are very good parts of a very good book. Vérin’s Étude sur Lancelot I
have not seen, and it is only too probable that I have not given to Lancelot the attention due to him.

XII.
SOME ENGLISH WRITERS BEFORE LOCKE.

§ 1. The beginning of the 17th century brought with it a change in the
main direction of thought and interest. As we have seen, the 16th century
adored literature and was thrown back on the remote past. Some of the great
scholars like Sturm had indeed visions of literary works to be written, that
would rival the old models on which they were fashioned; but whether they
hoped or not to bring back the Golden Age all the scholars of the
Renascence thought of it as having been. With the change of century,
however, a new conception came into men’s minds. Might not this worship
of the old writers after all be somewhat of a superstition? The languages in
which they wrote were beautiful languages, no doubt, but they were ill
adapted to express the ideas and wants of the modern world. As for the
substance of these old writings, this did not satisfy the cravings of men’s
minds. It left unsolved all the main problems of existence, and offered for
knowledge mere speculations or poetic fancies or polished rhetoric. Man
needed to understand his position with regard to God and to Nature; but on
both of these topics the classics were either silent or misleading. Revelation
had supplied what the classics could not give concerning man’s relation to
God; but nothing had as yet thrown light on his relation to Nature. And yet
with his material body and animal life he could not but see how close that
relation was, and could not but wish that something about it might be
known, not simply guessed or feigned. Hence the demand for real
knowledge, that is, a knowledge of the facts of the universe as distinct from
the knowledge of what men have thought and said. We have heard of the
mathematician who put down Paradise Lost with the remark that it seemed
to him a poor book, for it did not prove anything; and it was just in this
spirit that the new school of thinkers, the Realists, looked upon the classics.
They wanted to know Nature’s laws: and words which did not convey such
knowledge seemed to them of little value.
§ 2. Here was a tremendous revolution from the mode of thought
prevalent in the Renascence. No longer was the Golden Age in the past. In

science the Golden Age must always be in the future. Scientific men start
with what has been discovered and add to it. Every discovery passes into
the common stock of knowledge, and becomes the property of everyone
who knows it just as much as of the discoverer. Harvey had no more
property in the circulation of the blood, Newton and Leibnitz no more
property in the Differential Calculus than Columbus in the Continent of
America; indeed not so much, for Columbus gained some exclusive rights
in America, but Harvey gained none over the blood.
So we see that whereas the literary spirit made the dominant minds
reverence the past, the scientific spirit led them to despise the past; and
whereas the literary spirit raised the value of words and led to the study of
celebrated writings, the scientific spirit was totally careless about words and
prized only physical truths which were entirely independent of words.
Again, the literary spirit naturally favoured the principle of authority, for its
oracles had already spoken: the scientific spirit set aside all authority and
accepted nothing that did not of itself satisfy the reason. (Compare
Comenius, supra p. 152.)
§ 3. The first great leader in this revolution was an Englishman, Francis
Bacon. But the school-room felt his influence only through those who learnt
from him; and among educational reformers, the chief advocates of realism
have been found on the Continent, e.g., Ratke and Comenius.[99] But the
desire to learn by “things, not words” affected the minds of many English
writers on education, and we find this spirit showing itself even in Milton
and Locke, and far more clearly in some writers less known to fame.
§ 4. There is a wide distinction in educational writers between those who
were schoolmasters and those who were not. Schoolmasters have to come
to terms with what exists and to make a livelihood by it. So they are
conservatives by position, and rarely get beyond an attempt at showing how
that which is now done badly might be done well. Suggestions of radical
change usually come from those who never belonged to the class of
teachers, or who, not without disgust, have left it.
Among English schoolmasters of the olden times the chief writers I have
met with besides Mulcaster are John Brinsley the elder, and Charles Hoole.
§ 5. John Brinsley the elder, a Puritan schoolmaster at Ashby-de-la-
Zouch, a brother-in-law of Bishop Hall’s, and father of John Brinsley the

younger who became a leading Puritan minister and author, was a veritable
reformer, but only with reference to methods. His most interesting books
are Ludus Literarius or the Grammar Schoole, 1612 (written after 20 years’
experience in teaching, as we learn from the Consolation, p. 45), and A
Consolation for our Grammar Schooles: or a faithfull and most
comfortable incouragement for laying of a sure foundation of all good
learning in our schooles and for prosperous building thereupon, 1622. The
first of these, when reprinted, as it is sure to be, will always secure for its
author the notice and the gratitude of students of the history of our
education; for in this book he tells us not only what should be done in the
school-room, but also what was done. In a dialogue with the ordinary
schoolmaster the reformer draws to light the usual practice, criticizes it, and
suggests improvements.
§ 6. In Brinsley we get no hint of realism; but by the middle of the
sixteen hundreds we find the realistic spirit is felt even by a schoolmaster,
Charles Hoole,[100] who was a kinsman of Bishop Sanderson, the Casuist,
and was master first of the Grammar School at Rotherham, then of a private
Grammar School in London, published besides a number of school books, a
translation of the Orbis Pictus (date of preface, January, 1658), and also “A
New Discovery of the old art of teaching schoole ... published for the
general profit, especially of young Schoolemasters” (date of preface,
December, 1659). In these books we find that Hoole succeeded even in the
school-room in keeping his mind open. He complains of the neglect of
English, and evidently in theory at least went a long way with the realistic
reformers. “Comenius,” he says, “hath proceeded (as Nature itself doth) in
an orderly way, first to exercise the senses well by presenting their objects
to them, and then to fasten upon the intellect by impressing the first notions
of things upon it and linking them one to another by a rational discourse;
whereas indeed we generally, missing this way, do teach children as we do
parrots to speak they know not what, nay, which is worse, we taking the
way of teaching little ones by grammar only, at the first do puzzle their
imaginations with abstractive terms and secondary intentions, which, till
they be somewhat acquainted with things, and the words belonging to them
in the language which they learn, they cannot apprehend what they mean.
And this I guess to be the reason why many greater persons do resolve
sometimes not to put a child to school till he be at least eleven or twelve
years of age.... You then, that have the care of little children, do not too

much trouble their thoughts and clog their memories with bare grammar
rudiments, which to them are harsh in getting, and fluid in retaining;
because indeed to them they signifie nothing but a meer swimming notion
of a general term, which they know not what it meaneth till they
comprehend all particulars: but by this [i.e., the Orbis P.] or the like
subsidiarie inform them first with some knowledge of things and words
wherewith to express them; and then their rules of speaking will be better
understood and more firmly kept in mind. Else how should a child conceive
what a rule meaneth when he neither knoweth what the Latine word
importeth, nor what manner of thing it is which is signified to him in his
own native language which is given him thereby to understand the rule? for
rules consisting of generalities are delivered (as I may say) at a third hand,
presuming first the things and then the words to be already apprehended
touching which they are made.” This subject Hoole wisely commends to the
consideration of teachers, “it being the very basis of our profession to
search into the way of children’s taking hold by little and little of what we
teach them, that so we may apply ourselves to their reach.” (Preface to
trans. of Orbis Pictus.)
§ 7. “Good Lord! how many good and clear wits of children be now-a-
days perished by ignorant schoolmasters!” So said Sir Thomas Elyot in his
Governor in 1531, and the complaint would not have been out of date in the
17th century, possibly not in the 19th. In the sixteen hundreds we certainly
find little advance in practice, though in theory many bold projects were
advanced, some of which pointed to the study of things, to the training of
the hand, and even to observation of the “educands.”
§ 8. The poet Cowley’s “proposition for the advancement of experimental
philosophy” is a scheme of a college near London to which is to be attached
a school of 200 boys. “And because it is deplorable to consider the loss
which children make of their time at most schools, employing or rather
casting away six or seven years in the learning of words only, and that too
very imperfectly; that a method be here established for the infusing
knowledge and language at the same time, [Is this an echo of Comenius?]
and that this may be their apprenticeship in Natural Philosophy.”[101]
§ 9. Rarely indeed have those who either theoretically or practically have
made a study of education ever acquired sufficient literary skill to catch the
ear of the public or (what is at least as difficult) the ear of the teaching

body. And among the eminent writers who have spoken on education, as
Rabelais, Montaigne, Milton, Locke, Rousseau, Herbert Spencer, we cannot
find one who has given to it more than passing, if not accidental, attention.
Schoolmasters are, as I said, conservative, at least in the school-room; and
moreover, they seldom find the necessary time, money, or inclination for
publishing on the work of their calling. The current thought at any period
must then be gathered from books only to be found in our great libraries,
books in which writers now long forgotten give hints of what was wanted
out of the school-room and grumble at what went on in it.
§ 10. One of the most original of these writers that have come in my way
is John Dury, a Puritan, who was at one time Chaplain to the English
Company of Merchants at Elbing, and laboured with Comenius and Hartlib
to promote unity among the various Christian bodies of the reformed faith
(see Masson’s Life of Milton, vol. iii). About 1649 Dury published The
Reformed Schoole which gives the scheme of an association for the purpose
of educating a number of boys and girls “in a Christian way.”
§ 11. That Dury was not himself a schoolmaster is plain from the first of
his “rules of education.” “The chief rule of the whole work is that nothing
be made tedious and grievous to the children, but all the toilsomeness of
their business the Governor and Ushers are to take upon themselves; that by
diligence and industry all things may be so prepared, methodized and
ordered for their apprehension, that this work may unto them be as a
delightful recreation by the variety and easiness thereof.”
§ 12. “The things to be looked unto in the care of their education,” he
enumerates in the order of importance: “1. Their advancement in piety; 2.
The preservation of their health; 3. The forming of their manners; 4. Their
proficiency in learning” (p. 24). “Godliness and bodily health are absolutely
necessary,” says Dury; “the one for spiritual and the other for their temporal
felicitie” (p. 31): so great care is to be taken in “exercising their bodies in
husbandry or manufactures or military employments.”[102]
§ 13. About instruction we find the usual complaints which like
“mother’s truth keep constant youth.” “Children,” says Dury, “are taught to
read authors and learn words and sentences before they can have any notion
of the things signified by those words and sentences or of the author’s strain
and wit in setting them together; and they are made to learn by heart the

generall rules, sentences and precepts of Arts before they are furnished with
any matter whereunto to apply those rules and precepts” (p. 38). Dury
would entirely sweep away the old routine, and in all instruction he would
keep in view the following end: “the true end of all human learning is to
supply in ourselves and others the defects which proceed from our
ignorance of the nature and use of the creatures, and the disorderliness of
our natural faculties in using them and reflecting upon them” (p. 41).
§ 14. “Our natural faculties”—here Dury struck a new note, which has
now become the keynote in the science of education. He enforces his point
with the following ingenious illustration:—“As in a watch one wheel
rightly set doth with its teeth take hold of another and sets that a-work
towards a third; and so all move one by another when they are in their right
places for the end for which the watch is made; so is it with the faculties of
the human nature being rightly ordered to the ends for which God hath
created them. But contrariwise, if the wheels be not rightly set, or the watch
not duly wound up, it is useless to him that hath it. And so it is with the
faculties of Man; if his wheels be not rightly ordered and wound up by the
ends of sciences in their subordination leading him to employ the same
according to his capacity to make use of the creatures for that whereunto
God hath made them, he becomes not only useless, but even a burthen and
hurtful unto himself and others by the misusing of them” (p. 43).
§ 15. “As in Nature sense is the servant of imagination; imagination of
memory; memory of reason; so in teaching arts and sciences we must set
these faculties a-work in this order towards their proper objects in
everything which is to be taught. Whence this will follow, that as the
faculties of Man’s soul naturally perfect each other by their mutual
subordination; so the Arts which perfect those faculties should be gradually
suggested: and the objects wherewith the faculties are to be conversant
according to the rules of Art should be offered in that order which is
answerable to their proper ends and uses and not otherwise.”
§ 16. In this and much else that Dury says we see a firm grasp of the
principle that the instruction given should be regulated by the gradual
development of the learner’s faculties. The three sources of our knowledge,
says he, are—1. Sense; 2. Tradition; 3. Reason; and Sense comes first. “Art
or sciences which may be learnt by mere sense should not be learnt any
other way.” “As children’s faculties break forth in them by degrees to be

vigorous with their years and the growth of their bodies, so they are to be
filled with objects whereof they are capable, and plied with arts; whence
followeth that while children are not capable of the acts of reasoning, the
method of filling their senses and imaginations with outward objects should
be plied. Nor is their memory at this time to be charged further with any
objects than their imagination rightly ordered and fixed doth of itself
impress the same upon them.” After speaking of the common abuse of
general rules, he says: “So far as those faculties (viz., sense, imagination,
and memory) are started with matters of observation, so far rules may be
given to direct the mind in the use of the same, and no further.” “The arts
and sciences which lead us to reflect upon the use of our own faculties are
not to be taught till we are fully acquainted with their proper objects, and
the direct acts of the faculties about them.” So “it is a very absurd and
preposterous course to teach Logick and Metaphysicks before or with other
Humane Sciences which depend more upon Sense and Imagination than
reasoning” (p. 46).
§ 17. In all this it seems to me that the worthy Puritan, of whom nobody
but Dr. Barnard and Professor Masson has ever heard, has truly done more
to lay a foundation for the art of teaching than his famous contemporaries
Milton and Locke.
§ 18. Another writer of that day better known than Dury and with far
more power of expression was Sir William Petty. He is the “W.P.,” who in
an Epistle “to his honoured friend Master Samuel Hartlib,” set down his
“thoughts concerning the advancement of real learning” (1647). This letter
is to be shown only “to those few that are Reall Friends to the Designe of
Realities.”[103]
§ 19. Petty sees the need of intercommunication of those who wish to
advance any art or science. He complains that “the wits and endeavours of
the world are as so many scattered coals or fire-brands, which for want of
union are soon quenched, whereas being but laid together they would yield
a comfortable light and heat.” This is a thought which may well be applied
to the bringing up of the young; and the following passage might have been
written to secure a training for teachers: “Methinks the present condition of
men is like a field where a battle hath been lately fought, where we may see
many legs and arms and eyes lying here and there, which for want of a
union and a soul to quicken and enliven them are good for nothing but to

feed ravens and infect the air. So we see many wits and ingenuities lying
scattered up and down the world, whereof some are now labouring to do
what is already done, and puzzling themselves to re-invent what is already
invented. Others we see quite stuck fast in difficulties for want of a few
directions which some other man (might he be met withal) both could and
would most easily give him.” I wonder how many young teachers are now
wasting their own and their pupils’ time in this awkward predicament.
§ 20. “As for ... education,” says Petty, “we cannot but hope that those
who make it their trade will supply it and render the idea thereof much
more perfect.” His own contributions to the more perfect idea consist
mainly in making the study of “realities” precede literature, and thus
announcing the principle which in later times has led to the introduction of
“object lessons.” The Baconians thought that the good time was at hand,
and that they had found the right road at last. By experiments they would
learn to interpret Nature. After scheming a “Gymnasium, Mechanicum, or
College of Tradesmen,” Petty says, “What experiments and stuff would all
those shops and operations afford to active and philosophical heads, out of
which to extract that interpretation of nature whereof there is so little, and
that so bad, as yet extant in the world!”[104] And this study of things was to
affect the work of the school-room, and redeem it from the dismal state into
which it was fallen. “As for the studies to which children are now-a-days
put,” says Petty, “they are altogether unfit for want of judgment which is
but weak in them, and also for want of will, which is sufficiently seen ... by
the difficulty of keeping them at schools and the punishment they will
endure rather than be altogether debarred from the pleasure which they take
in things.”
§ 21. The grand reform required is thus set forth; “Since few children
have need of reading before they know or can be acquainted with the things
they read of; or of writing before their thoughts are worth the recording or
they are able to put them into any form (which we call inditing); much less
of learning languages when there be books enough for their present use in
their own mother-tongue; our opinion is that those things being withal
somewhat above their capacity (as being to be attained by judgment which
is weakest in children) be deferred awhile, and others more needful for
them, such as are in the order of Nature before those afore-mentioned, and
are attainable by the help of memory which is either most strong or

unpreoccupied in children, be studied before them. We wish, therefore, that
the educands be taught to observe and remember all sensible objects and
actions, whether they be natural or artificial, which the educators must upon
all occasions expound unto them.”
§ 22. In proposing this great change Petty was influenced not merely by
his own delight in the study of things but by something far more important
for education, by observation of the children themselves. This study of
things instead of “a rabble of words” would be “more easy and pleasant to
the young as the more suitable to the natural propensions we observe in
them. For we see children do delight in drums, pipes, fiddles, guns made of
elder sticks, and bellows’ noses, piped keys, &c., painting flags and ensigns
with elderberries and cornpoppy, making ships with paper, and setting even
nut-shells a-swimming, handling the tools of workmen as soon as they turn
their backs and trying to work themselves; fishing, fowling, hunting, setting
springes and traps for birds and other animals, making pictures in their
writing-books, making tops, gigs and whirligigs, gilting balls, practising
divers juggling tricks upon the cards, &c., with a million more besides. And
for the females they will be making pies with clay, making their babies’
clothes and dressing them therewith; they will spit leaves on sticks as if
they were roasting meat; they will imitate all the talk and actions which
they observe in their mother and her gossips, and punctually act the comedy
or the tragedy (I know not whether to call it) of a woman’s lying-in. By all
which it is most evident that children do most naturally delight in things and
are most capable of learning them, having quick senses to receive them and
unpreoccupied memories to retain them” (ad f.).
§ 23. In these writers, Dury and Petty, we find a wonderful advance in the
theory of instruction. Children are to be taught about things and this
because their inward constitution determines them towards things.
Moreover the subjects of instruction are to be graduated to accord with the
development of the learner’s faculties. The giving of rules and
incomprehensible statements that will come in useful at a future stage is
entirely forbidden. All this is excellent, and greatly have children suffered,
greatly do they suffer still, from their teachers’ neglect of it. There seems to
me to have been no important advance on the thought of these men till
Pestalozzi and Froebel fixed their attention on the mind of the child, and

valued things not in themselves but simply as the means best fitted for
drawing out the child’s self-activity.
§ 24. In several other matters we find Sir William Petty’s
recommendations in advance of the practice of his own time and ours. He
advises “that the business of education be not (as now) committed to the
worst and unworthiest of men [here at least we have improved] but that it
be seriously studied and practised by the best and abler persons.” To this
standard we have not yet attained.
§ 25. Handwork is to be practised, but its educational value is not clearly
perceived. “All children, though of the highest rank, are to be taught some
gentle manufacture in their minority.” Ergastula Literaria, literary
workhouses, are to be instituted where children may be taught as well to do
something towards their living as to read and write.[105]
§ 26. Education was to be universal, but chiefly with the object of
bringing to the front the clever sons of poor parents. The rule he would lay
down is “that all children of above seven years old may be presented to this
kind of education, none being to be excluded by reason of the poverty and
unability of their parents, for hereby it hath come to pass that many are now
holding the plough which might have been made fit to steer the state.”[106]
§ 27. From these enthusiasts for realities we find a change when we turn
to their contemporary, a schoolmaster and author of a Latin Accidence, who
was perhaps the most notable Englishman who ever kept a school or
published a school-book.
§ 28. Milton was not only a great poet: he was also a great scholar.
Everything he said or wrote bore traces of his learning. The world of books
then rather than the world of the senses is his world. He has benefited as he
says “among old renowned authors” and “his inclination leads him not” to
read modern Januas and Didactics, or apparently the writings of any of his
contemporaries including those of his great countryman, Bacon. But, as
Professor Laurie reminds us, no man, not even a Milton, however he may
ignore the originators of ideas can keep himself outside the influence of the
ideas themselves when they are in the air; and so we find Milton using his
incomparable power of expression in the service of the Realists.

§ 29. But brief he endeavours to be, and paying the Horatian penalty he
becomes obscure. In the “few observations which flowered off and were the
burnishing of many studious and contemplative years,” Milton touches only
on the bringing up of gentlemen’s sons between the ages of 12 and 21, and
his suggestions do not, like those of Comenius, deal with the education of
the people, or of both sexes.[107] This limit of age, sex, and station deprives
Milton’s plan of much of its interest, as the absence of detail deprives it of
much of its value.
§ 30. Still, we find in the Tractate a very great advance on the ideas
current at the Renascence. Learning is no longer the aim of education but is
regarded simply as a means. No finer expression has been given in our
literature to the main thesis of the Christian and of the Realist and to the
Realist’s contempt of verbalism, than this: “The end of learning is to repair
the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of
that knowledge to love Him, to imitate Him, to be like Him, as we may the
nearest by possessing our souls of true virtue, which being united to the
heavenly grace of faith makes up the highest perfection. But because our
understanding cannot in this body found itself but on sensible things, nor
arrive so clearly to the knowledge of God and things invisible, as by orderly
conning over the visible and inferior creature, the same method is
necessarily to be followed in all discreet teaching. And seeing every Nation
affords not experience and tradition enough for all kind of learning,
therefore we are chiefly taught the languages of those people who have at
any time been most industrious after wisdom; so that language is but the
instrument conveying to us things useful to be known. And though a
linguist should pride himself to have all the tongues that Babel cleft the
world into, yet, if he have not studied the solid things in them as well as the
words and lexicons, he were nothing so much to be esteemed a learned man
as any yeoman or tradesman competently wise in his mother-dialect only.”
§ 31. The several propositions here implied have thus been
“disentangled” by Professor Laurie (John Milton in Addresses, &c., p. 167).
1. The aim of education is the knowledge of God and likeness to God.
2. Likeness to God we attain by possessing our souls of true virtue and by
the Heavenly Grace of Faith.
3. Knowledge of God we attain by the study of the visible things of God.

4. Teaching then has for its aim this knowledge.
5. Language is merely an instrument or vehicle for the knowledge of
things.
6. The linguist may be less learned (i.e., educated) in the true sense than
a man who can make good use of his mother-tongue though he knows no
other.
§ 32. Elsewhere, Milton gives his idea of “a complete and generous
education;” it “fits a man to perform justly, skilfully, and magnanimously
all the offices both private and public of Peace and War.” (Browning’s
edition, p. 8.) Here and indeed in all that Milton says we feel that “the noble
moral glow that pervades the Tractate on Education, the mood of
magnanimity in which it is conceived and written, and the faith it inculcates
in the powers of the young human spirit, if rightly nurtured and directed, are
merits everlasting.” (Masson iij, p. 252.)
§ 33. But in this moral glow and in an intense hatred of verbalism lie as it
seems to me the chief merits of the Tractate. The practical suggestions are
either incomprehensible or of doubtful wisdom. The reforming of education
was, as Milton says, one of the greatest and noblest designs that could be
thought on, but he does not take the right road when he proposes for every
city in England a joint school and university for about 120 boarders. The
advice to keep boys between 12 and 21 in this barrack life I consider, with
Professor Laurie, to be “fundamentally unsound;” and the project of uniting
the military training of Sparta with the humanistic training of Athens seems
to me a pure chimæra.
§ 34. When we come to instruction we find that Milton after announcing
the distinctive principle of the Realists proves to be himself the last survivor
of the Verbal Realists. (See supra, p. 25.) No doubt

“His daily teachers had been woods and rills,”

but his thoughts had been even more in his books; and for the young he
sketches out a purely bookish curriculum. The young are to learn about
things, but they are to learn through books; and the only books to which
Milton attaches importance are written in Latin, Greek, or Hebrew. He held,
probably with good reason, that far too much time “is now bestowed in pure

trifling at grammar and sophistry.” “We do amiss,” he says, “to spend 7 or 8
years merely in scraping together so much miserable Latin and Greek as
might be learned otherwise easily and delightfully in one year.” Without an
explanation of the “otherwise” this statement is a truism, and what Milton
says further hardly amounts to an explanation. His plan, if plan it can be
called, is as follows: “If after some preparatory grounds of speech by their
certain forms got into memory, the boys were led to the praxis thereof in
some chosen short book lessoned thoroughly to them, they might then
proceed to learn the substance of good things and arts in due order, which
would bring the whole language quickly into their power. This,” adds
Milton, “I take to be the most rational and most profitable way of learning
languages.” It is, however, not the most intelligible.
§ 35. “I doubt not but ye shall have more ado to drive our dullest and
laziest youth, our stocks and stubbs, from the infinite desire of such a happy
nurture than we have now to hale and drag our choicest and hopefullest wits
to that asinine feast of sow thistles and brambles which is commonly set
before them as all the food and entertainment of their tenderest and most
docible age.” We cannot but wonder whether this belief survived the
experience of “the pretty garden-house in Aldersgate.” From the little we
are told by his nephew and old pupil Edward Phillips we should infer that
Milton was not unsuccessful as a schoolmaster. In this we have a striking
proof how much more important is the teacher than the teaching. A
character such as Milton’s in which we find the noblest aims united with
untiring energy in pursuit of them could not but dominate the
impressionable minds of young people brought under its influence. But
whatever success he met with could not have been due to the things he
taught nor to his method in teaching them. In spite of the “moral glow”
about his recommendations they are “not a bow for every [or any] man to
shoot in that counts himself a teacher.”
§ 36. Nor did he do much for the science of education. His scheme is
vitiated, as Mark Pattison says, by “the information fallacy.” In the literary
instruction there is no thought of training the faculties of all or the special
faculties of the individual. “It requires much observation of young minds to
discover that the rapid inculcation of unassimilable information stupefies
the faculties instead of training them,” says Pattison; and Milton absorbed

by his own thoughts and the thoughts of the ancients did not observe the
minds of the young, and knew little of the powers of any mind but his own.
For information the youths are not required to observe for themselves but
are to be taught “a general compact of physicks.” “Also in course might be
read to them out of some not tedious writer the Institution of Physick; that
they may know the tempers, the humours, the seasons, and how to manage
a crudity.”
§ 37. Even the study of the classics is advocated by Milton on false
grounds. If, like the Port-Royalists, he had recommended the study of the
classical authors for the sake of pure Latin and Greek or as models of
literary style, the means would have been suited to the end; but it was very
different when he directed boys to study Virgil and Columella in order to
learn about bees and farming. In after-life they would find these authorities
a little out of date; and if they ever attempted to improve tillage, “to recover
the bad soil and to remedy the waste that is made of good, which was one of
Hercules’s praises,” they would have found a knowledge of the methods of
Hercules about as useful as of the methods of the Romans.
§ 38. Milton was then a reformer “for his own hand;” and
notwithstanding his moral and intellectual elevation and his superb power
of rhetoric, he seems to me a less useful writer on education than the
humble Puritans whom he probably would not deign to read. In his haughty
self-reliance, he, like Carlyle with whom Seeley has well compared him
(Lectures and Addresses: Milton), addressed his contemporaries de haut en
bas, and though ready to teach could learn only among the old renowned
authors with whom he associated himself and we associate him.
§ 39. Judged from our present standpoint the Tractate is found with many
weaknesses to be strong in this, that it co-ordinates physical, moral, mental
and æsthetic training.
§ 40. But nothing of Milton’s can be judged by our ordinary canons. He
soars far above them and raises us with him “to mysterious altitudes above
the earth” (supra, p. 153, note). Whatever we little people may say about
the suggestions of the Tractate, Milton will remain one of the great
educators of mankind.[108]

XIII.
LOCKE.
(1632-1704).

§ 1. When an English University established an examination for future
teachers,[109] the “special subjects” first set were “Locke and Dr. Arnold.”
The selection seems to me a very happy one. Arnold greatly affected the
spirit and even the organization of our public schools at a time when the old
schools were about to have new life infused into them, and when new
schools were to be started on the model of the old. He is perhaps the
greatest educator of the English type, i.e., the greatest educator who had
accepted the system handed down to him and tried to make the best of it.
Locke on the other hand, whose reputation is more European than English,
belongs rather to the continental type. Like his disciple Rousseau and like
Rousseau’s disciples the French Revolutionists, Locke refused the
traditional system and appealed from tradition and authority to reason. We
English revere Arnold, but so long as the history of education continues to
be written, as it has been written hitherto, on the Continent, the only
Englishman celebrated in it will be as now not the great schoolmaster but
the great philosopher.
§ 2. In order to understand Locke we must always bear in mind what I
may call his two main characteristics; 1st, his craving to know and to speak
the truth and the whole truth in everything, truth not for a purpose but for
itself[110]; 2nd, his perfect trust in the reason as the guide, the only guide, to
truth.[111]
§ 3. 1st. Those who have not reflected much on the subject will naturally
suppose that the desire to know the truth is common to all men, and the
desire to speak the truth common to most. But this is very far from being
the case. If we had any earnest desire for truth we should examine things
carefully before we admitted them as truths; in other words our opinions
would be the growth of long and energetic thought. But instead of this they
are formed for the most part quite carelessly and at haphazard, and we value

them not on account of their supposed agreement with fact but because
though “poor things” they are “our own” or those of our sect or party.
Locke on the other hand was always endeavouring to get at the truth for its
own sake. This separated him from men in general. And he brought great
powers of mind to bear on the investigation. This raised him above them.
§ 4. 2nd. Locke’s second characteristic was his entire reliance on the
guidance of reason. “The faculty of reasoning,” says he, “seldom or never
deceives those who trust to it.” Elsewhere, borrowing a metaphor from
Solomon (Prov. xx, 27), he speaks of this faculty as “the candle of the Lord
set up by Himself in men’s minds.” (F. B. ij., 129). In a fine passage in the
Conduct of the Understanding he calls it “the touchstone of truth” (§ iij,
Fowler’s edition, p. 10). He even goes so far in his correspondence with
Molyneux as to maintain that intelligent honest men cannot possibly differ.
[112]

But if we consider it from one point of view the treatise on the Conduct
of the Understanding is itself a witness that human reason is a compass
liable to incalculable variations and likely enough to shipwreck those who
steer by it alone. In this book Locke shows us that to come to a true result
the understanding (1) must be perfectly trained, (2) must not be affected by
any feeling in favour of or against any particular result, and (3) must have
before it all the data necessary for forming a judgment. In practice these
conditions are seldom (if ever) fulfilled; and Locke himself, when he wants
an instance of a mind that can acquiesce in the certainty of its conclusions,
takes it from “angels and separate spirits who may be endowed with more
comprehensive faculties” than we are (C. of U. § iij, 3).
§ 5. It seems to me then that Locke much exaggerates the power of the
individual reason for getting at the truth. And to exaggerate the importance
of one function of the mind is to unduly diminish the importance of the rest.
Thus we find that in Locke’s scheme of education little thought is taken for
the play of the affections and feelings; and as for the imagination it is
treated merely as a source of mischief.
§ 6. Locke, as it has often been pointed out, differs from the schoolmaster
in making small account of the knowledge to be acquired by those under
education. But it has not been so often remarked that the fundamental
difference is much deeper than this and lies in the conception of knowledge

itself. With the ordinary schoolmaster the test of knowledge is the power of
reproduction. Whatever pupils can reproduce with difficulty they know
imperfectly; whatever they can reproduce with ease they know thoroughly.
But Locke’s definition of knowledge confines it to a much smaller area.
According to him knowledge is “the internal perception of the mind”
(Locke to Stillingfleet v. F. B. ij, 432). “Knowing is seeing; and if it be so, it
is madness to persuade ourselves we do so by another man’s eyes, let him
use never so many words to tell us that what he asserts is very visible. Till
we ourselves see it with our own eyes, and perceive it by our own
understandings, we are as much in the dark and as void of knowledge as
before, let us believe any learned authors as much as we will” (C. of U. §
24).[113]
§ 7. Here Locke makes no distinction between different classes of truths.
But surely very important differences exist.
About some physical facts our knowledge is at once most certain and
most definite when we derive it through the evidence of our own senses.
“Seeing is believing,” says the proverb. It may be believing, but it is not
knowing. That certainty which we call knowledge we often arrive at better
by the testimony of others than by that of our own senses.
Miss Martineau in her Autobiography tells us that as a child of ten she
entirely and unaccountably failed to see a comet which was visible to all
other people; but, although her own senses were at fault, the evidence for
the comet was so conclusive that she may be said to have known there was a
comet in the sky.
On sufficient evidence we can know anything, just as we know there is a
great water-fall at Niagara though we may never have crossed the Atlantic.
But we cannot be so certain simply on the evidence of our senses. If we
trusted entirely to them we might take the earth for a plane and “know” that
the sun moved round it.
§ 8. But Locke probably considers as the subject of knowledge not so
much physical facts as the great body of truths which are ascertained by the
intellect. It is the eye of the mind by which alone knowledge is to be gained.
Of these truths the purest specimens are the truths of geometry. It may be
said that only those who have followed the proofs know that the area of the
square on the side opposite the right angle in a right-angled triangle is equal

to the sum of the squares on the other sides. But even in pure reasoning like
this, the tiro often seems to see what he does not really see; and where his
own reason brings him to a conclusion different from the one established he
knows only that he is mistaken.
§ 9. It must be admitted then that first-hand knowledge, knowledge
derived from the vision of the eye or of the mind, is not the only knowledge
the young require. Every learner must take things on trust, as even Lord
Bacon admits. Discentem credere oportet. To use Locke’s own words:—“I
do not say, to be a good geographer that a man should visit every mountain,
river, promontory, and creek upon the face of the earth, view the buildings
and survey the land everywhere as if he were going to make a purchase” (C.
of U., iij, ad f.). So that even according to Locke’s own shewing we must
use the eyes of others as well as our own, and this is true not in geography
only, but in all other branches of knowledge.
§ 10. But are we driven to the alternative of agreeing either with Locke or
with the schoolmaster? I do not see that we are. The thought which
underlies Locke’s system of education is this: true knowledge can be
acquired only by the exercise of the reason: in childhood the reasoning
power is not strong enough for the pursuit of knowledge: knowledge,
therefore, is out of the question at that age, and the only thing to be thought
of is the formation of habits. Opposed to this we have the schoolmaster’s
ideal which is governed by examinations. According to this ideal the object
of the school course is to give certain “knowledge,” linguistic and other,
and to fix it in the memory in such a manner that it can be displayed on the
day of examination. “Knowledge” of this kind often makes no demand
whatever on the reasoning faculty, or indeed on any faculty but that of
remembering and reproducing what the learner has been told; in extreme
cases the memory of mere sounds or symbols suffices.
But after all we are not compelled to choose between these two theories.
Take, e.g., the subject which Locke has mentioned, geography. The
schoolmasters of the olden time began with the use of the globes, a plan
which, by the way, Locke himself seems to have winked at. His disciple
Molyneux tells him of the performances of the small Molyneux. When he
was but just turned five he could read perfectly well, and on the globe could
have traced out and pointed at all the noted ports, countries, and cities of the
world, both land and sea; by five and a half could perform many of the

plainest problems on the globe, as the longitude and latitude, the Antipodes,
the time with them and other countries, &c. (Molyneux to L., 24th August,
1695.) Here we find a child brought up, without any protest from Locke, on
mere examination knowledge, which according to Locke himself is not
knowledge at all. It is strange that Locke did not at once point out to
Molyneux that the child was not really learning what the father supposed
him to be learning. When the child turned over the plaster ball and found
the word “Paris,” the father no doubt attributed to the child much that was
in his own mind only. To the child “the Globe” (as Rousseau afterwards
said), was nothing but a plaster ball; “Paris” was nothing but some letters
marked on that ball. Comenius had already got a notion how children may
be given some knowledge of geography. “Children begin geography,” said
he, “when they get to understand what a hill, a valley, a field, a river, a
village, a town is.” (Supra, p. 145.) When this beginning has been made,
geographical knowledge is at once possible to the child, and not before.
Perfect knowledge in geography, as in most other things, is out of every
one’s reach. Nobody knows, e.g., all that could be known about Paris. The
knowledge its inhabitants have of it is very various, but in all cases this
knowledge is far greater than that of a visitor. The visitor’s knowledge
again is far greater than that of strangers who have never seen Paris.
Nobody, then, can know everything even about Paris; but a child who
knows what a large town is, and can fancy to himself a big town called
Paris, which is the biggest and most important town in France has some
knowledge about it. This must be maintained against Locke. Against the
schoolmaster it may be pointed out that making an Eskimo say the words:
—“Paris is the capital of France,” would not be giving him any knowledge
at all; and the same may be said of many “lessons” in the school-room. If a
common sailor were to teach an Eskimo English, he would very likely
suppose that when he had taught the sounds “Paris is the capital of France,”
he had conveyed to his pupil all the ideas which those sounds suggested to
his own mind. A common schoolmaster may fall into a similar error.
§ 11. In the most celebrated work which has been affected by the
Thoughts of Locke, Rousseau’s Emile, we find childhood treated in a
manner altogether different from youth: the child’s education is mainly
physical, and instruction is not given till the age of twelve. Locke’s system
on first sight seems very different to this, but there is a deeper connection

between the two than is usually observed. We have seen that Locke allowed
nothing to be knowledge that was not acquired by the perception of the
intellect. But in children the intellectual power is not yet developed; so
according to Locke knowledge properly so-called is not within their reach.
What then can the educator do for them? He can prepare them for the age of
reason in two ways, by caring first for their physical health, second for the
formation of good habits.
§ 12. 1st. On the Continent Locke has always been considered one of the
first advocates of physical education, and he does, it is true, give physical
education the first place, a feature in his system, which we naturally
connect with his study of medicine, and also with the trouble he had all his
life with his own health. But care of the body, and especially bodily
exercises, were always much thought of in this country, and the main
writers on education before Locke, e.g., Sir Thos. Elyot, Mulcaster, Milton,
were very emphatic about physical training.
In the autobiography of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, we may see what
attention was paid in Locke’s own century to this part of education.[114]
§ 13. 2nd. “That, and that only, is educative which moulds forms or
modifies the soul or mind.” (Mark Pattison in New Quarterly Magazine,
January, 1880.)
Here we have a proposition which is perhaps seldom denied, but very
commonly ignored by those who bring up the young. But Locke seems to
have been entirely possessed with this notion, and the greater part of the
Thoughts is nothing but a long application of it. The principle which lies at
the root of most of his advice, he has himself expressed as follows: “That
which I cannot too often inculcate is, that whatever the matter be about
which it is conversant whether great or small, the main, I had almost said
only thing, to be considered in every action of a child is what influence it
will have upon his mind; what habit it tends to, and is likely to settle in him:
how it will become him when he is bigger, and if it be encouraged, whither
it will lead him when he is grown up.” (Thoughts, § 107, p. 86.)
Here we see that Locke differed widely from the schoolmasters of his
time, perhaps of all time. A man must be a philosopher indeed if he can
spend his life in teaching boys, and yet always think more about what they
will be and what they will do when their schooling is over than what they

will know. And in these days if we stopped to think at all we should be
trodden on by the examiner.[115]
In this respect Locke has not been surpassed. Like his predecessor
Montaigne he took for his centre not the object, knowledge, but the subject,
man.[116]
§ 14. In some other respects he does not seem so happy. He makes little
attempt to reach a scientific standpoint and to establish general truths about
our common human nature. He thinks not so much of the man as the
gentleman, not so much of the common laws of the mind as of the
peculiarities of the individual child. He even hints that differences of
disposition in children render treatises on education defective if not useless.
“There are a thousand other things that may need consideration” he writes
“especially if one should take in the various tempers, different inclinations,
and particular defaults that are to be found in children and prescribe proper
remedies. The variety is so great that it would require a volume, nor would
that reach it. Each man’s mind has some peculiarity as well as his face, that
distinguishes him from all others; and there are possibly scarce two children
who can be conducted by exactly the same method: besides that I think a
prince, a nobleman, or an ordinary gentleman’s son should have different
ways of breeding. But having had here only some general views in
reference to the main end and aims in education, and those designed for a
gentleman’s son, whom being then very little I considered only as white
paper or wax to be moulded and fashioned as one pleases, I have touched
little more than those heads which I judged necessary for the breeding of a
young gentleman of his condition in general.” (Thoughts, § 217, p. 187.)
No language could bring out more clearly the inferiority of Locke’s
standpoint to that of later thinkers. He makes little account of our common
nature and wishes education to be based upon an estimate of the
peculiarities of the individual pupil and of his social needs. And no one with
an adequate notion of education could ever compare the young child to
“white paper or wax.” Perhaps the development of an organism was a
conception that could not have been formed without a great advance in
physical science. Froebel who makes most of it learnt it from the scientific
study of trees and from mineralogy. We need not then be surprised that
Locke does not say, as Pestalozzi said a hundred years later, “Education
instead of merely considering what is to be imparted to children ought to

consider first what they already possess.” But if he had read Comenius he
would have been saved from comparing the child to wax or white paper in
the hands of the educator. Comenius had said: “Nature has implanted within
us the seeds of learning, of virtue, and of piety. The object of education is to
bring these seeds to perfection.” (Supra, p. 135.) This seems to me a higher
conception than any that I meet with in Locke.
§ 15. But if our philosopher did not learn from Comenius he certainly
learnt from Montaigne.[117] Indeed Dr. Arnstädt (v. supra, p. 69) has put him
into a series of thinkers who have much in common. This succession is as
follows: Rabelais, Montaigne, Locke, Rousseau; and, according to Mr.
Browning’s division, they form a school by themselves. “Thinkers on
education,” says Mr. Browning,[118] “are 1st those who wish to educate
through the study of the classics, or 2nd those who wish to educate through
the study of the works of Nature, or 3rd those who aim at an education
independent of study and knowledge, and think rather of the training of
character and the attaining to the Greek ideal, the man beautiful and good.”
To the three schools Mr. Browning gives the names Humanist, Realist, and
Naturalist, (“nos autres naturalistes,” Montaigne says). Locke he considers
one of the principal writers of the “naturalistic” school, and says, Locke
“has given a powerful bias to naturalistic education both in England and on
the Continent for the last 200 years.” (Ed. Theories, p. 85.)
This use of the word “naturalistic” seems to me somewhat misleading, or
at best vague, and it is a word overworked already: so I should prefer to
speak of the “developing” or “training” school. The classification itself
certainly has its uses but it must be employed with caution. If caught up by
those who have only an elementary acquaintance with the subject a class of
persons apt to delight in such arrangements as an aid to memory, these
divisions may easily prove a hindrance to light.
§ 16. This subject of classification is so important to students that it may
be worth while to make a few remarks upon it. The only thoroughly
consistent people are the people of fiction. We can know all about them.
Directly we understand their central thought or peculiarity we may be sure
that everything they say and do will be strictly in accordance with it, will
indeed be explainable by it. To take a bald and simple instance, directly we
know that Mrs. Jellaby in Bleak House is absorbed by her interest in an
African Mission, we know all that is to be known about her; and everything

she does or omits to do has some reference to Borrioboola Ghar. But in real
life not only are people much less easily understood, but when we actually
have seized their main idea or peculiarity or interest we must not expect to
find them always consistent: and they will say and do much which if not
inconsistent with the main idea or peculiarity or interest has at least no
connection with it. Suppose, e.g., you can make out with some certainty that
Locke belonged to the developing school, you must not expect him to pay
little heed to instruction as such. Again, suppose you find that his
philosophy was utilitarian; you must not suppose that in everything he says
he will be thinking of utility.
Now the historian is tempted to treat real men and women as the writer of
fiction treats his puppets. Having fastened, quite correctly let us suppose, on
their main peculiarity he considers it necessary to square everything with
his theory of them, and whatever will not fall in with it he, if he is
unscrupulous, misrepresents, or if he is scrupulous, suppresses.
Again, we are too apt to read into words meanings derived from
controversies unknown at the time when the words were uttered. This is a
well-known fact in the history of religious thought. We must always
consider not merely the words used but the time when they were used. What
a man might say quite naturally and orthodoxly at one period would be
sufficient to convict him of sympathizing with some terrible heresy if
uttered half a century later. We find something like this in the history of
education. If anyone nowadays speaks of the pleasure with which as a
young man he read Tacitus, he is understood to mean that he is opposed to
the introduction of “modern studies” into the school-room. If on the other
hand he extols botany, or regrets that he never learned chemistry, this is
taken for an assault on classical instruction. But, of course, no such
inference could be drawn if we went back to a time when the antithesis
between classics and natural science had not been accentuated. In many
other instances we have to be on our guard against forcing into language
meaning which belongs rather to a later date.
§ 17. With these cautions in mind let us see how far Locke may be said
(1) to be a trainer, and (2) how far a utilitarian.
§ 18. I. Mr. Browning attributes to Rabelais, Montaigne, and Locke the
desire to bring up a well-developed man rather than a good scholar. But

Rabelais certainly craved for the knowledge of things; and if he is to be
classed at all I should put him rather with the Realists, albeit he lived before
the realistic spirit became powerful. Montaigne went more on the lines of
developing rather than teaching, and, shrewd man of the world as he was,
he thought a great deal about the art of living. But his ideal was not so much
the man as the gentleman. This was true also of Locke; and here we see
some explanation why both Montaigne and Locke do not value classical
learning.[119] On the Continent classical learning has never been associated
with the character of an accomplished gentleman; and, as far as I know, the
conception that the highest type of excellence is found in the union of “the
scholar and the gentleman” is peculiar to this country. In the society of
Locke’s day this union does not seem to have been recognized, and Locke
observes: “A great part of the learning now in fashion in the schools of
Europe, and that goes ordinarily into the round of education, a gentleman
may in a good measure be unfurnished with, without any great
disparagement to himself or prejudice to his affairs.” (Thoughts, § 94, p.
74.) So Locke sought as the true essential for the young gentleman
“prudence and good breeding.” He puts his requisites in the following order
of importance:—1, virtue; 2, wisdom; 3, manners; 4, learning; and so
“places learning last and least.” Here he shews himself far ahead of those
who still held to the learned ideal; but his notions of development were
cramped by his thinking only of the gentleman and what was requisite for
him.
§ 19. II. Was Locke a utilitarian in education? It is the fashion (and in
history as in other things fashion is a powerful force), it is the fashion to
treat of Locke as a great champion of utilitarianism. We might expect this in
the ordinary historians, for “when they do agree their unanimity is” not
perhaps very wonderful. But there is one great English authority quite
uninfluenced by them who has said the same thing, viz.—Cardinal
Newman. The Cardinal, as the champion of authority, is perhaps prejudiced
against Locke, who holds that “the faculty of reasoning seldom or never
deceived those who trusted to it.” Be this as it may, Newman asserts that
“the tone of Locke’s remarks is condemnatory of any teaching which tends
to the general cultivation of the mind.” (Idea of a University. Discourse vij.,
§ 4; see also § 6.) A very interesting point for us to consider is then, Is this
reputation of Locke’s for utilitarianism well deserved?

§ 20. First let us be quite certain of our definition.
In learning anything there are two points to be considered; 1st, the
advantage we shall find from knowing that subject or having that skill, and
2nd, the effect which the study of that subject or practising for that skill will
have on the mind or the body.
These two points are in themselves distinct, though it is open to anyone
to maintain that they need not be considered separately. Nature has
provided that the bodies of most animals should get the exercise best for
them in procuring food. So Mr. Herbert Spencer has come to the conclusion
that it would be contrary to “the economy of nature” if one set of
occupations were needed as gymnastics and another for utility. In other
words he considers that it is in learning the most useful things we get the
best training.
The utilitarian view of instruction is that we should teach things useful in
themselves and either neglect the result on the mind and body of the learner
or assume Mr. Spencer’s law of “the economy of nature.”
Again, when the subjects are settled the utilitarian thinks how the
knowledge or skill may be most speedily acquired, and not how this method
or that method of acquisition will affect the faculties.
§ 21. This being utilitarianism in education the question is how far was
Locke the utilitarian he is generally considered?
If we take by itself what he says under the head of “Learning” in the
Thoughts concerning Education no doubt we should pronounce him a
utilitarian. He considers each subject of instruction and pronounces for or
against it according as it seems likely or unlikely to be useful to a
gentleman. And in the methods he suggests he simply points out the
quickest route, as if the knowledge were the only thing to be thought of.
Hence his utilitarian reputation.
But two very important considerations have been lost sight of.
1st. Learning is with him “the last and least part” in education.
2nd. Intellectual education was not for childhood but for the age when we
can teach ourselves. “When a man has got an entrance into any of the
sciences,” says he, “it will be time then to depend on himself and rely upon

his own understanding and exercise his own faculties, which is the only
way to improvement and mastery.” (L. to Peterborough, quoted in Camb.
edition of Thoughts, p. 229.) “So,” he says, “the business of education is
not, as I think, to make the young perfect in any one of the sciences but so
to open and dispose their minds as may best make them capable of any
when they shall apply themselves to it.” The studies he proposes in the
Conduct of the Understanding (which is his treatise on intellectual
education) have for their object “an increase of the powers and activity of
the mind, not an enlargement of its possessions” (C. of U. § 19, ad f.).
Thus strange to say the supposed leader of the Utilitarians has actually
propounded in so many words the doctrine of their opponents.
§ 22. When Locke is more studied it will be found that the Thoughts are
misleading if we neglect his other works, more particularly the Conduct of
the Understanding.
§ 23. Towards the end of his days, Locke was conscious of gleams of the
“untravelled world” which lay before the generations to come. With great
pathos he writes to a friend: “When I consider how much of my life has
been trifled away in beaten tracks where I vamped on with others only to
follow those who went before me, I cannot but think I have just as much
reason to be proud as if I had travelled all England and, if you will, all
France too, only to acquaint myself with the roads, and be able to tell how
the highways lie wherein those of equipage, and even the common herd too,
travel. Now, methinks—and these are often old men’s dreams—I see
openings to truth and direct paths leading to it, wherein a little application
and industry would settle one’s mind with satisfaction and leave no
darkness or doubt. But this is the end of my day when my sun is setting: and
though the prospect it has given me be what I would not for anything be
without—there is so much truth, beauty, and consistency in it—yet it is for
one of your age, I think I ought to say for yourself, to set about” (L. to
Bolde, quoted by Fowler, Locke, p. 120). But another 200 years have not
sufficed to put us in possession of the Promised Land of which Locke had
these Pisgah visions. We still “vamp on,” following those who went before
us and getting small help from expounders of “Education as a Science.” But
as it would seem the days of vamping on blindly in the beaten track are
drawing to a close. We cannot doubt that if Locke had known the wonderful
advance which various sciences have made since his day he would have

seen in them “openings to truth and direct paths leading to it” for many
purposes, certainly for education. It is for our age and ages to come to set
about applying our scientific knowledge to the bringing up of children; and
thinkers such as Froebel will shew us how.
Locke’s Thoughts concerning Education and his Conduct of the Understanding should be in the
hands of all students of education who know the English language. I have therefore not attempted to
epitomise what he has said, but have endeavoured to get at the main thoughts which are, so to speak,
the taproot of his system. Of the Thoughts there is an edition published by the National Society and
another by the Pitt Press, Cambridge. The Cambridge edition gives from Fox-Bourne’s Life Locke’s
scheme of “Working Schools” and from Lord King’s the essay “Of Study.” Of the Conduct there is
an edition published by the Clarendon Press. “F.B.” in the references above stands for Fox-Bourne’s
Life of Locke.
In the above essay I have not treated of Locke as a methodizer; but he advocated teaching foreign
languages without grammar, and he published “Æsop’s Fables in English and Latin, interlineary. For
the benefit of those, who not having a master would learn either of these Tongues.” When I edited the
Thoughts for Pitt Press I did not know of this book or I should have mentioned it.

XIV.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU.
(1712-1778).

§ 1. The great men whom we meet with in the history of education may
be divided into two classes, thinkers and doers. There would seem no good
reason why the thinker should not be great as a doer or the doer as a
thinker; and yet we hardly find any records of men who have been
successful both in investigating theory and directing practice. History tells
us of first-rate practical schoolmasters like Sturm and the Jesuits; but they
did not think out their own theory of their task: they accepted the current
theory of their time. On the other hand, men who like Montaigne and Locke
rejected the current theory and sought to establish a better by an appeal to
reason were not practical schoolmasters. Whenever the thinker tries to turn
his thought into action he has cause to be disappointed with the result. We
saw this in the disastrous failure of Ratke; and even the books in which
Comenius tried to work out his principles, the Vestibulum, Janua and the
rest, with the exception of the Orbis Pictus, were speedily forgotten. In the
world of education as elsewhere it takes time to find for great thoughts the
practice which gives effect to them. The course of great thoughts is in some
ways like the course of great rivers. Most romantic and beautiful near their
source, they are not most useful. They must leave the mountains in which
they first appeared, and must flow not in cataracts but smoothly along the
plain among the dwellings of common men before they can be turned to
account in the every-day business of life.
§ 2. The eighteenth century was soon distinguished by boundless activity
of thought; and this thought was directed mainly to a great work of
destruction. Europe had outgrown the ideas of the Middle Age, and the
framework of Society, which the Middle Age had bequeathed, had waxed
old and was ready to vanish as soon as any strong force could be found to
push it out of the way. As Matthew Arnold has described it—

“It’s frame yet stood without a breach
“When blood and warmth were fled;
“And still it spake it’s wonted speech—
“But every word was dead.”

Here then there was need of some destructive power that should remove
and burn up much that had become mere obstacle and incumbrance. This
power was found in the writings which appeared in France about the middle
of the century; and among the authors of them none spoke with more effect
than one who differed from all the rest, a vagabond without family ties or
social position of any kind, with no literary training, with little knowledge
and in conduct at least, with no morals. The writings of Rousseau and the
results produced by them are among the strangest things in history; and
especially in matters of education it is more than doubtful if the wise man
of the world Montaigne, the Christian philanthropist Comenius, or that
“slave of truth and reason” the philosopher Locke, had half as much
influence as this depraved serving man.
§ 3. The work by which Rousseau became famous was a prize essay in
which he maintained that civilization, the arts and all human institutions
were from first to last pernicious in their effects, and that no happiness was
possible for the human race without giving them all up and returning to
what he called the state of Nature. He glorified the “noble savage.” If man
had brought himself to a state of misery bordering on despair by following
his own many inventions, take away all these inventions and you will have
man in his proper condition. The argument seems something of this kind:
Man was once happy: Man is now miserable: undo everything that has been
done and Man will be happy again.
§ 4. This principle of a so-called “natural” state existing before man’s
many inventions, Rousseau applied boldly to education, and he deduced
this general rule: “Do precisely the opposite to what is usually done, and
you will have hit on the right plan.” Not reform but revolution was his
advice. He took the ordinary school teaching and held it up to ridicule, and
certainly he did prove its absurdity. And a most valuable service he thus
rendered to teachers. Every employment while it makes us see some things
clearly, also provides us with blinkers, so to speak, which prevent our
seeing other things at all. The school teacher’s blinkers often prevent his

seeing much that is plain enough to other people; and when a writer like
Rousseau takes off our blinkers for us and makes us look about us, he does
us a great deal of good. But we need more than this: if we have children
entrusted to us we must do something with them, and Rousseau’s rule of
doing the opposite to what is usual will not be found universally applicable.
So we consult Rousseau again, and what is his advice?
§ 5. Rousseau would bring everything back to the “natural” state, and
unfortunately he never pauses to settle whether he means by this a state of
ideal perfection, or of simply savagery. The savage, he says, gets his
education without any one’s troubling about it, and so he infers that all the
trouble taken by the civilized is worse than thrown away. (Girardin’s
Rousseau, ij., 85.) But he does not fall back on laisser faire. He urges on
parents the duty of themselves attending to the bringing up of their children.
“Point de mère, point d’enfant—no mother, no child,” says he; and he
would have the father see to the training of the child whom the mother has
suckled.
§ 6. Rousseau’s picture of family life is given us where few Englishmen
are likely to find it, enveloped in the Nouvelle Héloïse. Here we read how
Julie always has her children with her, and while seeming to let them do as
they like, conceals with the air of apparent carelessness the most vigilant
observation. Possessed by the notion that there can be no intellectual
education before the age of reason, she proclaims: “La fonction dont je suis
chargée n’est pas d’élever mes fils, mais de les préparer pour être élevés:
My business is not to educate my sons, but to prepare them for being
educated.” (N. Héloïse, 5th P., Lett. 3.)[120]
§ 7. There is much that is very pleasing in this picture of ideal family life;
but when Rousseau comes formally to propound his ideas on education, he
gives up family life to attain greater simplicity. “Je m’en tiens à ce qui est
plus simple,” says he: “What I stick to is the more simple.” He tries to state
everything in its lowest terms, so to speak; and this method is excellent so
long as he puts on one side only what is accidental, and retains all the
essentials of the problem. But his rage for simplicity sometimes carried him
beyond this. There is an old Cambridge story of a problem introducing an
elephant “whose weight may be neglected.” This is after the manner of
Rousseau. In the bringing up of the model child, he “neglects” parents,
brothers and sisters, young companions; and though he says that the needful

qualities of a master may be expected only in “un homme de génie,” he
hands over Émile to a governor to live an isolated life in the country.
§ 8. This governor is to devote himself, for some years, entirely to
imparting to his pupil these difficult arts—the art of being ignorant and of
losing time. Till he is twelve years old, Émile is to have no direct
instruction whatever. “At that age he shall not know what a book is,” says
Rousseau; though elsewhere we are told that he will learn to read of his
own accord by the time he is ten, if no attempt is made to teach him. He is
to be under no restraint, and is to do nothing but what he sees to be useful.
§ 9. Freedom from restraint is, however, to be apparent, not real. As in
ordinary education the child employs all its faculties in duping the master,
so in education “according to Nature” the master is to devote himself to
duping the child. “Let him always be his own master in appearance, and do
you take care to be so in reality. There is no subjection so complete as that
which preserves the appearance of liberty; it is by this means even the will
is led captive.”
§ 10. “The most critical interval of human nature is that between the hour
of our birth and twelve years of age. This is the time wherein vice and error
take root without our being possessed of any instrument to destroy them.”
(Ém. ij., 79.) Throughout this season, the governor is to be at work training
the pupil in the art of being ignorant and losing time. “The first education
should be purely negative. It consists by no means in teaching virtue or
truth, but in securing the heart from vice and the intellect from error. If you
could do nothing and let nothing be done, if you could bring on your pupil
healthy and strong to the age of 12 without his being able to tell his right
hand from his left, from your very first lessons the eyes of his
understanding would open to reason. Being without prejudices and without
habits he would have nothing in him to thwart the effect of your care; and
by beginning with doing nothing you would have made an educational
prodigy.”[121]
“Exercise his body, his organs, his senses, his powers; but keep his mind
passive as long as possible. Mistrust all his sentiments formed before the
judgment which determines their value. Restrain, avoid all foreign
impressions, and to prevent the birth of evil be in no hurry to cause good;
for good is good only in the light of reason. Look on all delays as so many

advantages: it is a great gain to advance towards the goal without loss: let
childhood ripen in children. In short, whatever lesson they may need, be
sure not to give it them to-day if you can safely put it off till to-
morrow.”[122]
“Do not, then, alarm yourself much about this apparent idleness. What
would you say of the man, who, in order to make the most of life, should
determine never to go to sleep? You would say, The man is mad: he is not
enjoying the time; he is depriving himself of it: to avoid sleep he is hurrying
towards death. Consider, then, that it is the same here, and that childhood is
the sleep of reason.”[123]
§ 11. We have now reached the climax (or shall we say the nadir?) in
negation. Rousseau has given the coup de grâce to the ideal of the
Renascence. Comenius was the first to take a comprehensive view of the
educator’s task and to connect it with man’s nature and destiny; but he
could not get clear from an over-estimate of the importance of knowledge.
According to his ideal, man should know all things; so in practice he
thought too much of imparting knowledge. Then came Locke and treated
the imparting of knowledge as of trifling importance when compared with
the formation of character; but he too in practice hardly went so far as this
principle might have led him. He was much under the influence of social
distinctions, and could not help thinking of what it was necessary for a
gentleman to know. So that Rousseau was the very first to shake himself
entirely free from the notion which the Renascence had handed down that
man was mainly a learning animal. Rousseau has the courage to deny this
in the most emphatic manner possible, and to say: “For the first 12 years the
educator must teach the child nothing.”
§ 12. In this reaction against the Renascence Rousseau puts the truth in
the form of such a violent paradox that we start back in terror. But it was
perhaps necessary thus to sweep away the ordinary schoolroom rubbish
before the true nature of the educator’s task could be fairly considered. The
rubbish having been cleared away what was to take its place? No longer
having his mind engrossed by the knowledge he wished to communicate,
the educator had now an eye for something else not less worthy of his
attention, viz., the child itself. Rousseau was the first to base education
entirely on a study of the child to be educated; and by doing this he became,
as I believe, one of the greatest of educational Reformers.

§ 13. It was, however, purely as a thinker, or rather as a voice giving
expression to the general discontent that Rousseau became such a
tremendous force in Europe. He has indeed often been called the father of
the first French Revolution which he did not live to see. But, as Macaulay
has well said, a good deal besides eloquent writing is needed to cause such
a convulsion; and we can no more attribute the French Revolution to the
writings of Rousseau than we can attribute the shock of an explosion of
gunpowder to the lucifer match without which it might never have
happened (v. Macaulay’s Barrère). Rousseau did in the world of ideas what
the French Revolutionists afterwards did in the world of politics; he made a
clean sweep and endeavoured to start afresh.
§ 14. I have already said that as regards education I think his labours in
destruction were of very great value. But what shall we say of his efforts at
construction? There would not be the least difficulty in showing that most
of his proposals are impracticable. It is no more “natural” to treat as a
typical case a child brought up in solitude than it would be to write a
treatise on the rearing of a bee cut off from the hive.[124] Rousseau requires
impossibilities, e.g., he postulates that the child is never to be brought into
contact with anyone who might set a bad example. Modern science has
shown us that the young are liable to take diseases from impurities in the air
they breathe: but as yet no one has proposed that all children should be kept
at an elevation of 5,000 feet above the level of the sea. Yet the advice would
be about as practicable as the advice of Rousseau. A method which always
starts with paradox and not infrequently ends with platitude might seem to
have little in its favour; and Rousseau has had far less influence since (in
the words of Herman Merivale) “he was dethroned with the fall of his
extravagant child, the [First] Republic.” No doubt the great exponent of
English opinion was right in calling Rousseau “the most un-English
stranger who ever landed on our shores” (Times, 29 Aug., 1873); and the
torch of his eloquence will never cause a conflagration, still less an
explosion, here. His disregard for “appearances”—or rather his evident
purpose of making an impression by defying “appearances” and saying just
the opposite of what is expected, is simply distressing to us. But there is no
denying Rousseau’s genius. His was one of the original voices that go on
sounding and awakening echoes in all lands. Willingly or unwillingly, at
first hand or from imperfect echoes, everyone who studies education must
study Rousseau.

§ 15. As specimens of Rousseau’s teaching I will give a few
characteristic passages from the Émile.
“Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Creator: everything
degenerates in the hands of man.”[125] These are the first words of the
“Émile,” and the key-note of Rousseau’s philosophy.
§ 16. “We are born weak, we have need of strength; we are born destitute
of everything, we have need of assistance; we are born stupid, we have need
of understanding. All that we have not at our birth, and which we require
when grown up, is bestowed on us by education. This education we receive
from nature, from men, or from things. The internal development of our
organs and faculties is the education of nature: the use we are taught to
make of that development is the education given us by men; and in the
acquisitions made by our own experience on the objects that surround us,
consists our education from things.”[126] “Since the concurrence of these
three kinds of education is necessary to their perfection, it is by that one
which is entirely independent of us, we must regulate the two others.”[127]
§ 17. Now “to live is not merely to breathe; it is to act, it is to make use
of our organs, our senses, our faculties, and of all those parts of ourselves
which give us the feeling of our existence. The man who has lived most, is
not he who has counted the greatest number of years, but he who has most
thoroughly felt life.”[128]
§ 18. The aim of education, then, must be complete living.
But ordinary education, instead of seeking to develop the life of the child,
sacrifices childhood to the acquirement of knowledge, or rather the
semblance of knowledge, which it is thought will prove useful to the youth
or the man. Rousseau’s great merit lies in his having exposed this
fundamental error. He says, very truly, “We do not understand childhood,
and pursuing false ideas of it our every step takes us further astray. The
wisest among us fix upon what it concerns men to know without ever
considering what children are capable of learning. They always expect to
find the man in the child without thinking of what the child is before it is a
man. And this is the study to which I have especially devoted myself, in
order that should my entire method be false and visionary, my observations
might always turn to account. I may not have seen aright what ought to be

done: but I believe I have seen aright the subject on which we have to act.
Begin then by studying your pupils better, for most certainly you do not
understand them.”[129] “Nature wills that children should be children before
they are men. If we seek to pervert this order we shall produce forward
fruits without ripeness or flavour, and tho’ not ripe, soon rotten: we shall
have young savans and old children. Childhood has ways of seeing,
thinking, feeling peculiar to itself; nothing is more absurd than to wish to
substitute ours in their place.”[130] “We never know how to put ourselves in
the place of children; we do not enter into their ideas, we attribute to them
our own; and following always our own train of thought, even with
syllogisms we manage to fill their heads with nothing but extravagance and
error.”[131] “I wish some discreet person would give us a treatise on the art
of observing children—an art which would be of immense value to us, but
of which fathers and schoolmasters have not as yet learnt the very first
rudiments.”[132]
§ 19. In these passages, Rousseau strikes the key-note of true education.
The first thing necessary for us is to see aright the subject on which we have
to act. Unfortunately, however, this subject has often been the subject most
neglected in the schoolroom. Children have been treated as if they were
made for their school books, not their school books for them. As education
has been thought of as learning, childhood has been treated as unimportant,
a necessary stage in existence no doubt, but far more troublesome and
hardly more interesting than the state of the chrysalis. If some forms of
words, tables, declensions, county towns, and the like can be drummed into
children, this is, say educators of the old school, a clear gain. For the rest
nothing can be done with them except teaching them to read, write, and say
the multiplication table.
But since the publication of the Émile, there has been in the world a very
different view of education. According to this view, the importance of
childhood is not to be measured by the amount of our knowledge, or even
the number of our words, we can force it to remember. According to this
view, in dealing with children we must not think of our knowledge or of our
notions at all. We must think not of our own minds, but of the minds of the
little ones.[133]

§ 20. The absurd results in which the opposite course has ended,
Rousseau exposes with great severity. “All the studies demanded from the
poor unfortunates lead to such things as are entirely beyond the range of
their ideas, so you may judge what amount of attention they can give to
them. Schoolmasters who make a great display of the instruction they give
their pupils are paid to differ from me; but we see from what they do that
they are entirely of my opinion. For what do they really teach? Words,
words, for ever words. Among the various knowledges which they boast of
giving, they are careful not to include such as would be of use; because
these would involve a knowledge of things, and there they would be sure to
fail; but they choose subjects that seem to be known when the terms are
known such as heraldry, geography, chronology, languages and the like; all
of them studies so foreign to a man, and still more to a child, that it is a
great chance if anything of the whole lot ever proves useful to him on a
single occasion in his whole life.”[134] “Whatever the study may be, without
the idea of the things represented the signs representing them go for
nothing. And yet the child is always kept to these signs without our being
able to make him comprehend any of the things they represent.”[135] What
does a child understand by “the globe”? An old geography book says
candidly, that it is a round thing made of plaster; and this is the only notion
children have of it. What a fearful waste, and worse than waste, it is to
make them learn the signs without the things, when if they ever learn the
things, they must at the same time acquire the signs! (Conf. Ruskin supra p.
159, note.) “No! if Nature gives to the child’s brain this pliability which
makes it capable of receiving impressions of every kind, this is not that we
may engrave on it the names of kings, dates, the technical words of
heraldry, of astronomy, of geography, and all those words meaningless at
his age and useless at any age, with which we oppress his sad and sterile
childhood; but that all the ideas which he can conceive and which are useful
to him, all those which relate to his happiness and will one day make his
duty plain to him, may trace themselves there in characters never to be
effaced, and may assist him in conducting himself through life in a manner
appropriate to his nature and his faculties.”[136]
§ 21. With Rousseau, as afterwards with Froebel, education was a kind of
“child-gardening.” “Plants are developed by cultivation,” says he, “men by
education: On façonne les plantes par la culture, et les hommes par

l’éducation” (Ém. j., 6). The governor, who is the child-gardener, is to aim
at three things: first, he is to shield the child from all corrupting influences;
second, he is to devote himself to developing in the child a healthy and
strong body in which the senses are to be rendered acute by exercise; third,
he is, by practice not precept, to cultivate the child’s sense of duty.
§ 22. In his study of children Rousseau fixed on their never-resting
activity. “The failing energy concentrates itself in the heart of the old man;
in the heart of the child energy is overflowing and spreads outwards; he
feels in him life enough to animate all his surroundings. Whether he makes
or mars it is all one to him: it is enough that he has changed the state of
things, and every change is an action. If he seems by preference to destroy,
this is not from mischief; but the act of construction is always slow, and the
act of destruction being quicker is more suited to his vivacity.”[137]
One of the first requisites in the care of the young is then to provide for
the expansion of their activity. All restraints such as swaddling clothes for
infants and “school” and “lessons” for children are to be entirely done away
with.[138] Literary instruction must not be thought of. “There must be no
other book than the world,” says Rousseau, “no other instruction than facts.
The child who reads does not think, he does nothing but read, he gets no
instruction; he learns words: Point d’autre livre que le monde, point d’autre
instruction que les faits. L’enfant qui lit ne pense pas, il ne fait que lire; il ne
s’instruit pas, il apprend les mots.” (Ém. iij., 181.)[139]
§ 23. If it be objected that, according to Rousseau’s plan, there would be
a neglect of memory, he replies: “Without the study of books the kind of
memory that a child should have will not remain inactive; all he sees, all he
hears, strikes him, and he remembers it; he keeps a record in himself of
people’s actions and people’s talk; and all around him makes the book by
which without thinking of it he is constantly enriching his memory against
the time that his judgment may benefit by it: Sans étudier dans les livres,
l’espèce de mémoire que peut avoir un enfant ne reste pas pour cela oisive;
tout ce qu’il voit, tout ce qu’il entend le frappe, et il s’en souvient; il tient
registre en lui-même des actions, des discours des hommes; et tout ce qui
l’environne est le livre, dans lequel, sans y songer, il enrichit
continuellement sa mémoire, en attendant que son jugement puisse en
profiter.” (Ém. ij., 106.) We should be most careful not to commit to our

memory anything we do not understand, for if we do, we can never tell
what part of our stores really belong to us. (Ém. iij., 236.)
§ 24. On the positive side the most striking part of Rousseau’s advice
relates to the training of the senses. “The first faculties which become
strong in us,” says he, “are our senses. These then are the first that should
be cultivated; they are in fact the only faculties we forget or at least those
which we neglect most completely.” We find that the young child “wants to
touch and handle everything. By no means check this restlessness; it points
to a very necessary apprenticeship. Thus it is that the child gets to be
conscious of the hotness or coldness, the hardness or softness, the heaviness
or lightness of bodies, to judge of their size and shape and all their sensible
properties by looking, feeling, listening, especially by comparing sight and
touch, and combining the sensations of the eye with those of the
fingers.”[140] “See a cat enter a room for the first time; she examines round
and stares and sniffs about without a moment’s rest, she is satisfied with
nothing before she has tried it and made it out. This is just what a child does
when he begins to walk, and enters, so to say, the chamber of the world.
The only difference is that to the sight which is common to the child and the
cat the first joins in his observations the hands which nature has given him,
and the other animal that subtle sense of smell which has been bestowed
upon her. It is this tendency, according as it is well cultivated or the reverse,
that makes children either sharp or dull, active or slow, giddy or thoughtful.
“The first natural movements of the child being then to measure himself
with his surroundings and to test in everything he sees all its sensible
properties which may concern him, his first study is a kind of experimental
physics relating to his own preservation; and from this we divert him to
speculative studies before he feels himself at home here below. So long as
his delicate and flexible organs can adjust themselves to the bodies on
which they ought to act, so long as his senses as yet uncorrupted are free
from illusion, this is the time to exercise them all in their proper functions;
this is the time to learn to understand the sensuous relations which things
have with us. As everything that enters the mind finds its way through the
senses, the first reason of a human being is a reason of sensations; this it is
which forms the basis of the intellectual reason; our first masters in
philosophy are our feet, our hands, our eyes. Substituting books for all this

is not teaching us to reason, but simply to use the reason of other people; it
teaches us to take a great deal on trust and never to know anything.
“In order to practise an art we must begin by getting the proper
implements; and that we may have good use of these implements they must
be made strong enough to stand wear and tear. That we may learn to think
we must then exercise our members, our senses, our organs, as these are the
implements of our intelligence; and that we may make the most of these
implements the body which supplies them must be strong and healthy. We
see then that far from man’s true reason forming itself independently of his
body, it is the sound constitution of the body that makes the operations of
the mind easy and certain.”[141]
§ 25. Rousseau does not confine himself to advising that the senses
should be cultivated; he also gives some hints of the way in which they
should be cultivated, and many modern experiments, such as “object
lessons” and the use of actual weights and measures, may be directly traced
to him. “As soon as a child begins to distinguish objects, a proper choice
should be made in those which are presented to him.” Elsewhere he says,
“To exercise the senses is not simply to make use of them; it is to learn to
judge aright by means of them; it is to learn, so to say, to perceive; for we
can only touch and see and hear according as we have learnt how. There is a
kind of exercise perfectly natural and mechanical which serves to make the
body strong without giving anything for the judgment to lay hold of:
swimming, running, jumping, whip-top, stone throwing; all this is capital;
but have we nothing but arms and legs? have we not also eyes and ears? and
are these organs not needed in our use of the others? Do not then merely
exercise the strength but exercise all the senses which direct it; get all you
can out of each of them, and then check the impressions of one by the
impressions of another. Measure, reckon, weigh, compare.”[142]
§ 26. Two subjects there were in which Émile was to receive instruction,
viz.: music and drawing. Rousseau’s advice about drawing is well worth
considering. He says: “Children who are great imitators all try to draw. I
should wish my child to cultivate this art, not exactly for the art itself, but to
make his eye correct and his hand supple: Les enfants, grands imitateurs,
essayent tous de dessiner: je voudrais que le mien cultivât cet art, non
précisément pour l’art même, mais pour se rendre l’œil juste et la main
flexible.” (Ém. ij., 149). But Émile is to be kept clear of the ordinary

drawing-master who would put him to imitate imitations; and there is a
striking contrast between Rousseau’s suggestions and those of the
authorities at South Kensington. Technical skill he cares for less than the
training of the eye; so Émile is always to draw from the object, and, says
Rousseau, “my intention is not so much that he should get to imitate the
objects, as get to know them: mon intention n’est pas tant qu’il sache imiter
les objets que les connaître.” (Ém. ij., 150).
§ 27. Before we pass the age of twelve years, at which point, as someone
says, Rousseau substitutes another Émile for the one he has hitherto spoken
of, let us look at his proposals for moral training. Rousseau is right, beyond
question, in desiring that children should be treated as children. But what
are children? What can they understand? What is the world in which they
live? Is it the material world only, or is the moral world also open to them?
(Girardin’s R., vol. ij., 136). On the subject of morals Rousseau seems to
have admirable instincts,[143] but no principles, and moral as he is “on
instinct,” there is always some confusion in what he Says. At one time he
asserts that “there is only one knowledge to give children, and that is a
knowledge of duty: Il n’y a qu’une science à enseigner aux enfants: c’est
celle des devoirs de l’homme.” (Ém. j., 26). Elsewhere he says: “To know
right from wrong, to be conscious of the reason of duty is not the business
of a child: Connaître le bien et le mal, sentir la raison des devoirs de
l’homme, n’est pas l’affaire d’un enfant.” (Ém. ij., 75).[144] In another place
he mounts his hobby that “the most sublime virtues are negative” (Ém. ij.,
95), and that about the best man who ever lived (till he found Friday?) was
Robinson Crusoe. The outcome of all Rousseau’s teaching on this subject
seems that we should in every way develop the child’s animal or physical
life, retard his intellectual life, and ignore his life as a spiritual and moral
being.
§ 28. A variety of influences had combined, as they combine still, to draw
attention away from the importance of physical training; and by placing the
child’s bodily organs and senses as the first things to be thought of in
education, Rousseau did much to save us from the bad tradition of the
Renascence. But there were more things in heaven and earth than were
dreamt of in his philosophy, and whatever Rousseau might say, Émile could
never be restrained from inquiring after them. Every boy will think; i.e., he
will think for himself, however unable he may seem to think in the direction

in which his instructors try to urge him. The wise elders who have charge of
him must take this into account, and must endeavour to guide him into
thinking modestly and thinking right. Then again, as soon as the child can
speak, or before, the world of sensation becomes for him a world, not of
sensations only, but also of sentiments, of sympathies, of affections, of
consciousness of right and wrong, good and evil. All these feelings, it is
true, may be affected by traditional prejudices. The air the child breathes
may also contain much that is noxious; but we have no more power to
exclude the atmosphere of the moral world than of the physical. All we can
do is to take thought for fresh air in both cases. As for Rousseau’s notion
that we can withdraw the child from the moral atmosphere, we see in it
nothing but a proof how little he understood the problems he professed to
solve.[145]
§ 29. Although the governor is to devote himself to a single child,
Rousseau is careful to protest against over-direction. “You would stupify
the child,” says he, “if you were constantly directing him, if you were
always saying to him, ‘Come here! Go there! Stop! Do this! Don’t do that!’
If your head always directs his arms, his own head becomes useless to
him.” (Ém., ij., 114). Here we have a warning which should not be
neglected by those who maintain the Lycées in France, and the ordinary
private boarding-schools in England. In these schools a boy is hardly called
upon to exercise his will all day long. He rises in the morning when he
must; at meals he eats till he is obliged to stop; he is taken out for exercise
like a horse; he has all his indoor work prescribed for him both as to time
and quantity. In this kind of life he never has occasion to think or act for
himself. He is therefore without self-reliance. So much care is taken to
prevent his doing wrong, that he gets to think only of checks from without.
He is therefore incapable of self-restraint. In the English public schools
boys have much less supervision from their elders, and organise a great
portion of their lives for themselves. This proves a better preparation for life
after the school age; and most public schoolmasters would agree with
Rousseau that “the lessons the boys get from each other in the playground
are a hundred times more useful to them than the lessons given them in
school: les leçons que les écoliers prennent entre eux dans la cour du
collège leur sont cent fois plus utiles que tout ce qu’on leur dira jamais dans
la classe.” (Ém. ij., 123.)

§ 30. On questions put by children, Rousseau says: “The art of
questioning is not so easy as it may be thought; it is rather the art of the
master than of the pupil. We must have learnt a good deal of a thing to be
able to ask what we do not know. The learned know and inquire, says an
Indian proverb, but the ignorant know not what to inquire about.” And from
this he infers that children learn less from asking than from being asked
questions. (N. H., 5th p. 490.)
§ 31. At twelve years old Émile is said to be fit for instruction. “Now is
the time for labour, for instruction, for study; and observe that it is not I
who arbitrarily make this choice; it is pointed out to us by Nature herself.”
§ 32. What novelties await us here? As we have seen Rousseau was
determined to recommend nothing that would harmonise with ordinary
educational practice; but even a genius, though he may abandon previous
practice, cannot keep clear of previous thought, and Rousseau’s plan for
instruction is obviously connected with the thoughts of Montaigne and of
Locke. But while on the same lines with these great writers Rousseau goes
beyond them and is both clearer and bolder than they are.
§ 33. Rousseau’s proposals for instruction have the following main
features.
1st. Instruction is to be no longer literary or linguistic. The teaching about
words is to disappear, and the young are not to learn by books or about
books.
2nd. The subjects to be studied are to be mathematics and physical
science.
3rd. The method to be adopted is not the didactic but the method of self-
teaching.
4th. The hands are to be called into play as a means of learning.
§ 34. 1st. Till quite recently the only learning ever given in schools was
book-learning, a fact to which the language of the people still bears witness:
when a child does not profit by school instruction he is always said to be
“no good at his book.” Now-a-days the tendency is to change the character
of the schools so that they may become less and less mere “Ludi Literarii.”
In this Rousseau seems to have been a century and more in advance of us;
and yet we cannot credit him with any remarkable wisdom or insight about

literature. He himself used books as a means of “collecting a store of ideas,
true or false, but at any rate clear” (J. Morley’s Rousseau, j. chap. 3, p. 85),
and he has recorded for us his opinion that “the sensible and interesting
conversations of a young woman of merit are more proper to form a young
man than all the pedantical philosophy of books” (Confessions, quoted by
Morley j., 87). After this, whatever we may think of the merit of his
suggestions we can sit at the Sage’s feet no longer.
§ 35. 2nd. Rousseau had himself little knowledge of mathematics and
natural science, but he was strongly in favour of the “study of Nature”; and
in his last years his devotion to botany became a passion. His curriculum
for Émile is in the air, but the chief thing is to get him to attend to the
phenomena of nature, and “to foster his curiosity by being in no hurry to
satisfy it.”
§ 36. 3rd. About teaching and learning, there is one point on which we
find a consensus of great authorities extending from the least learned of
writers who was probably Rousseau to the most learned who was probably
Friedrich August Wolf. In one form or other these assert that there is no true
teaching but self-teaching.
Past a doubt the besetting weakness of teachers is “telling.” They can
hardly resist the tendency to be didactic. They have the knowledge which
they desire to find in their pupils, and they cannot help expressing it and
endeavouring to pass it on to those who need it, “like wealthy men who care
not how they give.” But true “teaching,” as Jacotot and his disciple Joseph
Payne were never tired of testifying, is “causing to learn,” and it is seldom
that “didactic” teaching has this effect. Rousseau saw this clearly, and
clearly pointed out the danger of didacticism. As usual he by exaggeration
laid himself open to an answer that seems to refute him, but in spite of this
we feel that there is valuable truth underlying what he says. “I like not
explanations given in long discourses,” says he; “young people pay little
attention to them and retain little from them. The things themselves! The
things themselves! I shall never repeat often enough that we attach too
much importance to words: with our chattering education we make nothing
but chatterers.”[146] Accordingly Rousseau lays down the rule that Émile is
not to learn science but to invent it (qu’il n’apprenne pas la science; qu’il
l’invente); and he even expects him to invent geometry. As Émile is not
supposed to be a young Pascal but only an ordinary boy with extraordinary

physical development such a requirement is obviously absurd, and Herbart
has reckoned it among Rousseau’s Hauptfehler (Päd. Schriften, ij., 242).
The training prescribed is in fact the training of the intellectual athlete; and
the trainer may put the body through its exercises much more easily than
the mind. Of this the practical teacher is only too conscious, and he will
accept Rousseau’s advice, if at all, only as “counsels of perfection.”
Rousseau says: “Émile, obliged to learn of himself, makes use of his own
reason and not that of others; for to give no weight to opinion, none must be
given to authority; and the more part of our mistakes come less from
ourselves than from other people. From this constant exercise there should
result a vigour of mind like that which the body gets from labour and
fatigue. Another advantage is that we advance only in proportion to our
strength. The mind like the body carries that only which it can carry. When
the understanding makes things its own before they are committed to
memory, whatever it afterwards draws forth belongs to it; but if the memory
is burdened with what the understanding knows nothing about we are in
danger of bringing from it things which the understanding declines to
acknowledge.”[147] Again he writes: “Beyond contradiction we get much
more clear and certain notions of the things we learn thus of ourselves than
of those we derive from other people’s instruction, and besides not
accustoming our reason to bow as a slave before authority, we become more
ingenious in finding connexions, in uniting ideas, and in inventing our
implements, than when we take all that is given us and let our minds sink
into indifference, like the body of a man who always has his clothes put on
for him, is waited on by his servants and drawn about by his horses till at
length he loses the strength and use of his limbs. Boileau boasted of having
taught Racine to find difficulty in rhyming. Among all the admirable
methods of shortening the study of the sciences we might have need that
some one should give us a way of learning them with effort.”[148]
§ 37. 4th. However highly we may value our gains from the use of books
we must admit that in some ways the use of books tends to the neglect of
powers that should not be neglected. As Rousseau wished to see the young
brought up without books he naturally looked to other means of learning,
especially to learning by the eye and by the hand. Much is now said about
using the hand for education, and many will agree with Rousseau: “If
instead of making a child stick to his books I employ him in a workshop,

his hands work to the advantage of his intellect: he becomes a philosopher
while he thinks he is becoming simply an artisan: Au lieu de coller un
enfant sur des livres, si je l’occupe dans un atelier, ses mains travaillent au
profit de son esprit: il devient philosophe, et croît n’être qu’un ouvrier.”
(Ém. iij., 193).
§ 38. In these essays I have done what I could to shew the best that each
reformer has left us. In Rousseau’s case I have been obliged to confine
myself to his words. “We attach far too much importance to words,” said
Rousseau, and yet it is by words and words only that Rousseau still lives;
and for the sake of his words we forget his deeds. Of the Émile Mr. Morley
says: “It is one of the seminal books in the history of literature. It cleared
away the accumulation of clogging prejudices and obscure inveterate usage
which made education one of the dark formalistic arts; and it admitted
floods of light and air into tightly-closed nurseries and schoolrooms”
(Rousseau, ij., 248). In the region of thought it set us free from the
Renascence; and it did more than this, it announced the true nature of the
teacher’s calling, “Study the subject you have to act upon.” In these words
we have the starting point of the “New Education.” From them the educator
gets a fresh conception of his task. We grown people have received
innumerable impressions which, forgotten as they are, have left their mark
behind in our way of looking at things; and as we advance in life these
experiences and associations cluster around everything to which we direct
our attention, till in the end the past seems to dominate the present and to us
“nothing is but what is not.” But to the child the present with its revelations
and the future which will be “something more, a bringer of new things,” are
all engrossing. It is our business as teachers to try to realize how the world
looks from the child’s point of view. We may know a great many things and
be ready to teach them, but we shall have little success unless we get
another knowledge which we cannot teach and can learn only by patient
observation, a knowledge of “the subject to be acted on,” of the mind of our
pupils and what goes on there. When we set out on this path, which was
first clearly pointed out by Rousseau, teaching becomes a new occupation
with boundless possibilities and unceasing interest in it. Every teacher
becomes a learner, for we have to study the minds of the young, their way
of looking at things, their habits, their difficulties, their likes and dislikes,
how they are stimulated to exertion, how they are discouraged, how one
mood succeeds another. What we need we may well devote a lifetime to

acquiring; it is a knowledge of the human mind with the object of
influencing it.

XV.
BASEDOW AND THE PHILANTHROPINUM.

§ 1. One of the most famous movements ever made in educational reform
was started in the last century by John Bernard Basedow. Basedow was
born at Hamburg in 1723, the son of a wigmaker. His early years were not
spent in the ordinary happiness of childhood. His mother he describes as
melancholy, almost to madness, and his father was severe almost to
brutality. It was the father’s intention to bring up his son to his own
business, but the lad ran away, and engaged himself as servant to a
gentleman in Holstein. The master soon perceived what had never occurred
to the father, viz., that the youth had very extraordinary abilities. Sent home
with a letter from his master pointing out this notable discovery, Basedow
was allowed to renounce the paternal calling, and to go to the Hamburg
Grammar School (Gymnasium), where he was under Reimarus, the author
of the “Wolfenbüttel Fragment.” In due course his friends managed to send
him to the University of Leipzig to prepare himself for the least expensive
of the learned professions—the clerical. Basedow, however, was not a man
to follow the beaten tracks. After an irregular life he left the university too
unorthodox to think of being ordained, and in 1749 became private tutor to
the children of Herr von Quaalen in Holstein. In this situation his talent for
inventing new methods of teaching first showed itself. He knew how to
adapt himself to the capacity of the children, and he taught them much by
conversation, and in the way of play, connecting his instruction with
surrounding objects in the house, garden, and fields. Through Quaalen’s
influence, he next obtained a professorship at Soroe, in Denmark, where he
lectured for eight years, but his unorthodox writings raised a storm of
opposition, and the Government finally removed him to the Gymnasium at
Altona. Here he still continued his efforts to change the prevailing opinions
in religious matters; and so great a stir was made by the publication of his
“Philalethia,” and his “Methodical Instruction in both Natural and Biblical
Religion,” that he and his family were refused the Communion at Altona,
and his books were excluded, under a heavy penalty, from Lübeck.

§ 2. About this time Basedow, incited by Rousseau’s “Emile,” turned his
attention to a fresh field of activity, in which he was to make as many
friends as in theology he had found enemies. A very general dissatisfaction
was then felt with the condition of the schools. Physical education was not
attempted in them. The mother-tongue was neglected. Instruction in Latin
and Greek, which was the only instruction given, was carried on in a
mechanical way, without any thought of improvement. The education of the
poor and of the middle classes received but little attention. “Youth,” says
Raumer, “was in those days, for most children, a sadly harassed period.
Instruction was hard and heartlessly severe. Grammar was caned into the
memory, so were portions of Scripture and poetry. A common school
punishment was to learn by heart Psalm cxix. School-rooms were dismally
dark. No one conceived it possible that the young could find pleasure in any
kind of work, or that they had eyes for aught besides reading and writing.
The pernicious age of Louis XIV. had inflicted on the poor children of the
upper class, hair curled by the barber and messed with powder and pomade,
braided coats, knee breeches, silk stockings, and a dagger by the side—for
active, lively children a perfect torture” (Gesch. d. Pädagogik, ii. 297). Kant
gave expression to a very wide-spread feeling when he said that what was
wanted in education was no longer a reform but a revolution. Here, then,
was a good scope offered for innovators, and Basedow was a prince of
innovators.
§ 3. Having succeeded in interesting the Danish minister, Bernstorff, in
his plans, he was permitted to devote himself entirely to a work on the
subject of education whilst retaining his income from the Altona
Gymnasium. The result was his “Address to Philanthropists and Men of
Property on Schools and Studies and their Influence on the Public Weal”
(1766), in which he announces the plan of his “Elementary.”[149] In this
address he calls upon princes, governments, town-councils, dignitaries of
the Church, freemasons’ lodges, &c., &c., if they loved their fellow-
creatures, to come to his assistance in bringing out his book. Nor did he call
in vain. When the “Elementary” at length appeared (in 1774), he had to
acknowledge contributions from the Emperor Joseph II., from Catherine II.
of Russia, from Christian VII. of Denmark, from the Grand Prince Paul, and
many other celebrities, the total sum received being over 2,000l.

§ 4. While Basedow was travelling about (in 1774) to get subscriptions,
he spent some time in Frankfurt, and thence made an excursion to Ems with
two distinguished companions, one of them Lavater, and the other a young
man of five-and-twenty, already celebrated as the author of “Götz von
Berlichingen,” and the “Sorrows of Werther.” Of Basedow’s personal
peculiarities at this time Goethe has left us an amusing description in the
“Wahrheit und Dichtung;” but we must accept the portrait with caution: the
sketch was thrown in as an artistic contrast with that of Lavater, and no
doubt exaggerates those features in which the antithesis could be brought
out with best effect.
“One could not see,” writes Goethe, “a more marked contrast than
between Lavater and Basedow. As the lines of Lavater’s countenance were
free and open to the beholder, so were Basedow’s contracted, and as it were
drawn inwards, Lavater’s eye, clear and benign, under a very wide eye-lid;
Basedow’s, on the other hand, deep in his head, small, black, sharp,
gleaming out from under shaggy eyebrows, whilst Lavater’s frontal bone
seemed bounded by two arches of the softest brown hair. Basedow’s
impetuous rough voice, his rapid and sharp utterances, a certain derisive
laugh, an abrupt changing of the topic of conversation, and whatever else
distinguished him, all were opposed to the peculiarities and the behaviour
by which Lavater had been making us over-fastidious.”
§ 5. Goethe approved of Basedow’s desire to make all instruction lively
and natural, and thought that his system would promote mental activity and
give the young a fresher view of the world: but he finds fault with the
“Elementary,” and prefers the “Orbis Pictus” of Comenius, in which
subjects are presented in their natural connection. Basedow himself, says
Goethe, was not a man either to edify or to lead other people. Although the
object of his journey was to interest the public in his philanthropic
enterprise, and to open not only hearts but purses, and he was able to speak
eloquently and convincingly on the subject of education, he spoilt
everything by his tirades against prevalent religious belief, especially on the
subject of the Trinity.
§ 6. Goethe found in Basedow’s society an opportunity of “exercising, if
not enlightening,” his mind, so he bore with his personal peculiarities,
though apparently with great difficulty. Basedow seems to have delighted in
worrying his associates. “He would never see anyone quiet but he provoked

him with mocking irony, in a hoarse voice, or put him to confusion by an
unexpected question, and laughed bitterly when he had gained his end; yet
he was pleased when the object of his jests was quick enough to collect
himself, and answer in the same strain.” So far Goethe was his match; but
he was nearly routed by Basedow’s use of bad tobacco, and of some tinder
still worse with which he was constantly lighting his pipe and poisoning the
air insufferably. He soon discovered Goethe’s dislike to this preparation of
his, so he took a malicious pleasure in using it and dilating upon its merits.
§ 7. Here is an odd account of their intercourse. During their stay at Ems
Goethe went a great deal into fashionable society. “To make up for these
dissipations,” he writes, “I always passed a part of the night with Basedow.
He never went to bed, but dictated without cessation. Occasionally he cast
himself on the couch and slumbered, while his amanuensis sat quietly, pen
in hand, ready to continue his work when the half-awakened author should
once more give free course to his thoughts. All this took place in a close
confined chamber, filled with the fumes of tobacco and the odious tinder.
As often as I was disengaged from a dance I hastened up to Basedow, who
was ready at once to speak and dispute on any question; and when after a
time I hurried again to the ball-room, before I had closed the door behind
me he would resume the thread of his essay as composedly as if he had
been engaged with nothing else.”
§ 8. It was through a friend of Goethe’s, Behrisch, whose acquaintance
we make in the “Wahrheit und Dichtung,” that Basedow became connected
with Prince Leopold of Dessau. Behrisch was tutor to the Prince’s son, and
by him the Prince was so interested in Basedow’s plans that he determined
to found an Institute in which they should be realised. Basedow was
therefore called to Dessau, and under his direction was opened the famous
Philanthropinum. Then for the first, and probably for the last time, a school
was started in which use and wont were entirely set aside, and everything
done on “improved principles.” Such a bold enterprise attracted the
attention of all interested in education, far and near: but it would seem that
few parents considered their own children vilia corpora on whom
experiments might be made for the public good. When, in May 1776, a
number of schoolmasters and others collected from different parts of
Germany, and even from beyond Germany, to be present by Basedow’s

invitation at an examination of the children, they found only thirteen pupils
in the Philanthropinum, including Basedow’s own son and daughter.
§ 9. Before we investigate how Basedow’s principles were embodied in
the Philanthropinum, let us see the form in which he had already announced
them. The great work from which all children were to be taught was the
“Elementary.” As a companion to this was published the “Book of Method”
(Methodenbuch) for parents and teachers. The “Elementary” is a work in
which a great deal of information about things in general is given in the
form of dialogue, interspersed with tales and easy poetry. Except in bulk, it
does not seem to me to differ very materially from many of the reading-
books, which, in late years, have been published in this country. It had the
advantage, however, of being accompanied by a set of engravings to which
the text referred, though they were too large to be bound up with it. The
root-ideas of Basedow put forth in his “Book of Method,” and other
writings, are those of Rousseau. For example, “You should attend to nature
in your children far more than to art. The elegant manners and usages of the
world are for the most part unnatural (Unnatur). These come of themselves
in later years. Treat children like children, that they may remain the longer
uncorrupted. A boy whose acutest faculties are his senses, and who has no
perception of anything abstract, must first of all be made acquainted with
the world as it presents itself to the senses. Let this be shown him in nature
herself, or where this is impossible, in faithful drawings or models. Thereby
can he, even in play, learn how the various objects are to be named.
Comenius alone has pointed out the right road in this matter. By all means
reduce the wretched exercises of the memory.” Elsewhere he gives
instances of the sort of things to which this method should be applied. 1st.
Man. Here he would use pictures of foreigners and wild men, also a
skeleton, a hand in spirits, and other objects still more appropriate to a
surgical museum. 2nd. Animals. Only such animals are to be depicted as it
is useful to know about, because there is much that ought to be known, and
a good method of instruction must shorten rather than increase the hours of
study. Articles of commerce made from the animals may also be exhibited.
3rd. Trees and plants. Only the most important are to be selected. Of these
the seeds also must be shown, and cubes formed of the different woods.
Gardeners’ and farmers’ implements are to be explained. 4th. Minerals and
chemical substances. 5th. Mathematical instruments for weighing and
measuring; also the air-pump, siphon, and the like. The form and motion of

the earth are to be explained with globes and maps. 6th. Trades. The use of
various tools is to be taught. 7th. History. This is to be illustrated by
engravings of historical events. 8th. Commerce. Samples of commodities
may be produced. 9th. The younger children should be shown pictures of
familiar objects about the house and its surroundings.
§ 10. We see from this list that Basedow contemplated giving his
educational course the charm of variety. Indeed, with that candour in
acknowledging mistakes which partly makes amends for the effrontery too
common in the trumpetings of his own performances, past, present, and to
come, he confesses that when he began the “Elementary” he had
exaggerated notions of the amount boys were capable of learning, and that
he had subsequently very much contracted his proposed curriculum. And
even “the Revolution,” which was to introduce so much new learning into
the schools, could not afford entirely to neglect the old. However pleased
parents might be with the novel acquirements of their children, they were
not likely to be satisfied without the usual knowledge of Latin, and still less
would they tolerate the neglect of French, which in German polite society
of the eighteenth century was the recognised substitute for the vulgar
tongue. These, then, must be taught. But the old methods might be
abandoned, if not the old subjects. Basedow proposed to teach both French
and Latin by conversation. Let a cabinet of models, or something of the
kind, be shown the children; let them learn the names of the different
objects in Latin or French; then let questions be asked in those languages,
and the right answers at first put into the children’s mouths. When they have
in this way acquired some knowledge of the language, they may apply it to
the translating of an easy book. Basedow does not claim originality for the
conversational method. He appeals to the success with which it had been
already used in teaching French. “Are the French governesses,” he asks,
“who, without vocabularies and grammars, first by conversation, then by
reading, teach their language very successfully and very rapidly in schools
of from thirty to forty children, better teachers than most masters in our
Latin schools?”
§ 11. On the subject of religion the instruction was to be quite as original
as in matters of less importance. The teachers were to give an impartial
account of all religions, and nothing but “natural religion” was to be
inculcated.

§ 12. The key-note of the whole system was to be—everything according
to nature. The natural desires and inclinations of the children were to be
educated and directed aright, but in no case to be suppressed.
§ 13. These, then, were the principles and the methods which, as
Basedow believed, were to revolutionise education through the success of
the Philanthropinum. Basedow himself, as we might infer from Goethe’s
description of him, was by no means a model director for the model
Institution, but he was fortunate in his assistants. Of these he had three at
the time of the public examination, of whom Wolke is said to have been the
ablest.
§ 14. A lively description of the examination was afterwards published by
Herr Schummel of Magdeburg, under the title of “Fred’s Journey to
Dessau.” It purports to be written by a boy of twelve years old, and to
describe what took place without attempting criticism. A few extracts will
give us a notion of the instruction carried on in the Philanthropin.
“I have just come from a visit with my father to the Philanthropinum,
where I saw Herr Basedow, Herr Wolke, Herr Simon, Herr Schweighäuser,
and the little Philanthropinists. I am delighted with all that I have seen, and
hardly know where to begin my description of it. There are two large white
houses, and near them a field with trees. A pupil—not one of the regular
scholars, but of those they call Famulants (a poorer class, who were
servitors)—received us at the door, and asked if we wished to see Herr
Basedow. We said ‘Yes,’ and he took us into the other house, where we
found Herr Basedow in a dressing-gown, writing at a desk. We came at an
inconvenient time, and Herr Basedow said he was very busy. He was very
friendly, however, and promised to visit us in the evening. We then went
into the other house, and enquired for Herr Wolke.” By him they were taken
to the scholars. “They have,” says Fred, “their hair cut very short, and no
wig-maker is employed. Their throats are quite open, and their shirt-collars
fall back over their coats.” Further on he describes the examination. “The
little ones have gone through the oddest performances. They play at ‘word
of command.’ Eight or ten stand in a line like soldiers, and Herr Wolke is
officer. He gives the word in Latin, and they must do whatever he says. For
instance, when he says Claudite oculos, they all shut their eyes; when he
says Circumspicite, they look about them; Imitamini sartorem, they all sew
like tailors; Imitamini sutorem, they draw the waxed thread like the

cobblers. Herr Wolke gives a thousand different commands in the drollest
fashion. Another game, ‘the hiding game,’ I will also teach you. Some one
writes a name, and hides it from the children—the name of some part of the
body, or of a plant, or animal, or metal—and the children guess what it is.
Whoever guesses right gets an apple or a piece of cake. One of the visitors
wrote Intestina, and told the children it was a part of the body. Then the
guessing began. One guessed caput, another nasus, another os, another
manus, pes, digiti, pectus, and so forth, for a long time; but one of them hit
it at last. Next Herr Wolke wrote the name of a beast, a quadruped. Then
came the guesses: leo, ursus, camelus, elephas, and so on, till one guessed
right—it was mus. Then a town was written, and they guessed Lisbon,
Madrid, Paris, London, till a child won with St. Petersburg. They had
another game, which was this: Herr Wolke gave the command in Latin, and
they imitated the noises of different animals, and made us laugh till we were
tired. They roared like lions, crowed like cocks, mewed like cats, just as
they were bid.”
§ 15. The subject that was next handled had also the effect of making the
strangers laugh, till a severe reproof from Herr Wolke restored their gravity.
A picture was brought, in which was represented a sad-looking woman,
whose person indicated the approaching arrival of another subject for
education. From one part of the picture it also appeared that the prospective
mother, with a prodigality of forethought, had got ready clothing for both a
boy and a girl. After a warning from Herr Wolke, that this was a most
serious and important subject, the children were questioned on the topics
the picture suggested. They were further taught the debt of gratitude they
owed to their mothers, and the German fiction about the stork was
dismissed with due contempt.
§ 16. Next came the examination in arithmetic. Here there seems to have
been nothing remarkable, except that all the rules were worked vivâ voce.
From the arithmetic Herr Wolke went on to an “Attempt at various small
drawings.” He asked the children what he should draw. Some one answered
leonem. He then pretended he was drawing a lion, but put a beak to it;
whereupon the children shouted Non est Leo—leones non habent rostrum!
He went on to other subjects, as the children directed him, sometimes going
wrong that the children might put him right. In the next exercise dice were
introduced, and the children threw to see who should give an account of an

engraving. The engravings represented workmen at their different trades,
and the child had to explain the process, the tools, &c. A lesson on
ploughing and harrowing was given in French, and another, on Alexander’s
expedition to India, in Latin. Four of the pupils translated passages from
Curtius and from Castalio’s Bible, which were read to them. “These
children,” said the teacher, “knew not a word of Latin a year ago.” “The
listeners were well pleased with the Latin,” writes Fred, “except two or
three, whom I heard grumbling that this was all child’s play, and that if
Cicero, Livy, and Horace were introduced, it would soon be seen what was
the value of Philanthropinist Latin.” After the examination, two comedies
were acted by the children, one in French, the other in German.
Most of the strangers seem to have left Dessau with a favourable
impression of the Philanthropin. They were especially struck with the
brightness and animation of the children.
§ 17. How far did the Philanthropinum really deserve their good opinion?
The conclusion to which we are driven by Fred’s narrative is, that Basedow
carried to excess his principle—“Treat children as children, that they may
remain the longer uncorrupted;” and that the Philanthropinum was, in fact,
nothing but a good infant-school. Surely none of the thirteen children who
were the subjects of Basedow’s experiments could have been more than ten
years old. But if we consider Basedow’s system to have been intended for
children, say between the ages of six and ten, we must allow that it
possessed great merits. At the very beginning of a boy’s learning, it has
always been too much the custom to make him hate the sight of a book, and
escape at every opportunity from school-work, by giving him difficult tasks,
and neglecting his acutest faculties. “Children love motion and noise,” says
Basedow: “here is a hint from nature.” Yet the youngest children in most
schools are expected to keep quiet and to sit at their books for as many
hours as the youths of seventeen or eighteen. Their vivacity is repressed
with the cane. Their delight in exercising their hands and eyes and ears is
taken no notice of; and they are required to keep their attention fixed on
subjects often beyond their comprehension, and almost always beyond the
range of their interests. Everyone who has had experience in teaching boys
knows how hard it is to get them to throw themselves heartily into any task
whatever; and probably this difficulty arises in many cases, from the habits
of inattention and of shirking school-work, which the boys have acquired

almost necessarily from the dreariness of their earliest lessons.[150]
Basedow determined to change all this; and in the Philanthropin no doubt
he succeeded. We have already seen some of the expedients by which he
sought to render school-work pleasurable. He appealed, wherever it was
possible, to the children’s senses; and these, especially the sight, were
trained with great care by exercises, such as drawing, shooting at a mark,
&c. One of these exercises, intended to give quick perception, bears a
curious likeness to what has since been practised in a very different
educational system. A picture, with a somewhat varied subject, was
exhibited for a short time and removed. The boys had then, either verbally
or on paper, to give an account of it, naming the different objects in proper
order. Houdin, if I rightly remember, tells us that the young thieves of Paris
are required by their masters to make a mental inventory of the contents of
a shop window, which they see only as they walk rapidly by. Other
exercises of the Philanthropinum connected the pupils with more
honourable callings. They became acquainted with both skilled and
unskilled manual labour. Every boy was taught a handicraft, such as
carpentering and turning, and was put to such tasks as threshing corn.
Basedow’s division of the twenty-four hours was the following: Eight hours
for sleep, eight for food and amusement, and, for the children of the rich,
six hours of school-work, and two of manual labour. In the case of the
children of the poor, he would have the division of the last eight hours
inverted, and would give for school-work two, and for manual labour six.
The development of the body was specially cared for in the
Philanthropinum. Gymnastics were now first introduced into modern
schools; and the boys were taken long expeditions on foot—the
commencement, I believe, of a practice now common throughout Germany.
§ 18. As I have already said, Basedow proved a very unfit person to be at
the head of the model Institution. Many of his friends agreed with Herder,
that he was not fit to have calves entrusted to him, much less children. He
soon resigned his post; and was succeeded by Campe, who had been one of
the visitors at the public examination. Campe did not remain long at the
Philanthropinum; but left it to set up a school, on like principles, at
Hamburg. His fame now rests on his writings for the young; one of which
—“Robinson Crusoe the Younger”—is still a general favourite.

Other distinguished men became connected with the Philanthropin—
among them Salzmann, and Matthison the poet—and the number of pupils
rose to over fifty; gathered we are told, from all parts of Europe between
Riga and Lisbon. But this number is by no means a fair measure of the
interest, nay, enthusiasm, which the experiment excited. We find Pastor
Oberlin raising money on his wife’s earrings to send a donation. We find the
philosopher Kant prophesying that quite another race of men would grow
up, now that education according to Nature had been introduced.
§ 19. These hopes were disappointed. Kant confesses as much in the
following passage in his treatise “On Pædagogy”:—
“One fancies, indeed, that experiments in education would not be
necessary; and that we might judge by the understanding whether any plan
would turn out well or ill. But this is a great mistake. Experience shows that
often in our experiments we get quite opposite results from what we had
anticipated. We see, too, that since experiments are necessary, it is not in the
power of one generation to form a complete plan of education. The only
experimental school which, to some extent, made a beginning in clearing
the road, was the Institute at Dessau. This praise at least must be allowed it,
notwithstanding the many faults which could be brought up against it—
faults which are sure to show themselves when we come to the results of
our experiments, and which merely prove that fresh experiments are
necessary. It was the only School in which the teachers had liberty to work
according to their own methods and schemes, and where they were in free
communication both among themselves and with all learned men
throughout Germany.”
§ 20. We observe here, that Kant speaks of the Philanthropinum as a
thing of the past. It was finally closed in 1793. But even from Kant we learn
that the experiment had been by no means a useless one. The conservatives,
of course, did not neglect to point out that young Philanthropinists, when
they left school, were not in all respects the superiors of their fellow-
creatures. But, although no one could pretend that the Philanthropinum had
effected a tithe of what Basedow promised, and the “friends of humanity”
throughout Europe expected, it had introduced many new ideas, which in
time had their influence, even in the schools of the opposite party.
Moreover, teachers who had been connected with the Philanthropinum
founded schools on similar principles in different parts of Germany and

Switzerland, as Bahrd’s at Heidesheim, and Salzmann’s celebrated school at
Schnepfenthal, which is, I believe, still thriving. Their doctrines, too, made
converts among other masters, the most celebrated of whom was Meierotto
of Berlin.
§ 21. Little remains to be said of Basedow. He lived chiefly at Dessau,
earning his subsistence by private tuition, but giving offence by his
irregularities. In 1790, when visiting Magdeburg, he died, after a short
illness, in his sixty-seventh year. His last words were, “I wish my body to
be dissected for the good of my fellow-creatures.”

Basedow has a posthumous connexion with this country as the great-grandfather of Professor Max
Müller. Basedow’s son became “Regierungs Präsident,” in Dessau. The President’s daughter, born in
1800, became the wife of the poet Wilhelm Müller, and the mother of Max Müller. Max Müller has
contributed a life of his great-grandfather to the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie.
Those who read German and care about either Basedow or Comenius should get Die Didaktik
Basedows im Vergleiche zur Didaktik des Comenius von Dr. Petru Garbovicianu (Bucarest, C. Gobl),
1887. This is a very good piece of work; it is printed in roman type, and the price is only 1s. 6d.
Since the above was in type I have got an important book, L’Education en Allemagne au Dix-
huitième Siècle: Basedow et le Philanthropinisme, by A. Pinloche (Paris, A. Colin, 1889.)

XVI.
PESTALOZZI.
1746-1827.

§ 1. Qui facit per alium facit per se. It is thus the law holds us
accountable for the action of others which we direct. By the extension of
this rule we immensely increase the personality of great writers and may
credit them with vast spheres of action which never come within their
consciousness. No man gains and suffers more from this consideration than
Rousseau. On the one hand, we may attribute to him the crimes of
Robespierre and Saint-Just; on the other Pestalozzi was instigated by him to
turn to farming and—education.
In treating of Rousseau as an educational reformer I passed over a life in
which almost every incident tends to weaken the effect of his words. With
Pestalozzi we must turn to his life for the true source of his writings and the
best comment on them.
§ 2. John Henry Pestalozzi was born at Zurich in 1746. His father dying
when he was five years old, he was brought up with a brother and sister by
a pious and self-denying mother and by a faithful servant “Babeli,” who had
comforted the father in his last hours by promising to stay with his family.
Thus Pestalozzi had an advantage denied to Rousseau and denied as it
would seem to Locke; there was scope for his home affections, and the head
was not developed before the heart. When he was sent to a day-school he
became to some extent the laughing stock of his companions who dubbed
him Harry Oddity of Foolborough; but he gained their good-will by his
unselfishness. It was remembered that on the shock of an earthquake when
teachers and taught fled from the school building Harry Oddity was induced
to go back and bring away what his companions considered precious. His
holidays he spent with his grandfather the pastor of a village some three
miles from Zurich, where the lad learnt the condition of the rural poor and
saw what a good man could do for them. He always looked back to these
visits as an important element in his education. “The best way for a child to

acquire the fear of God,” he wrote, “is for him to see and hear a true
Christian.” The grandfather’s example so affected him that he wished to
follow in his steps, and he became a student of theology.[151]
§ 3. Even as a student Pestalozzi proved that he was no ordinary man. In
his time there was great intellectual and moral enthusiasm among the
students of the little Swiss University. Some distinguished professors,
especially Bodmer, had awakened a craving for the old Swiss virtues of
plain living and high thinking; and a band of students, among whom
Lavater was leader and Pestalozzi played a prominent part, became eager
reformers. The citizens of the great towns like Geneva and Zurich had
become in effect privileged classes; and as their spokesmen the Geneva
magistrates condemned the Contrat Social and the Emile. This raised the
indignation of the reforming students at Zurich; and though their organ, a
periodical called the Memorial, kept clear of politics, one Muller wrote a
paper which contained some strong language, and this was held to be proof
of a conspiracy. Muller fled and was banished. Pestalozzi and some other of
his friends were imprisoned. The Memorial was suppressed.
§ 4. It is in this Memorial, a weekly paper edited by Lavater who was
five years Pestalozzi’s senior that we have Pestalozzi’s earliest writing. We
find him coming forward as “a man of aspirations.” No one he says can
object to his expressing his wishes. And “wishes” with a man of 19 are
usually hopes. Among other wishes he says: “I would that some one would
draw up in a simple manner a few principles of education intelligible to
everybody; that some generous people would then share the expense of
printing, so that the pamphlet might be given to the public for nothing or
next to nothing. I would then have clergymen distribute it to all fathers and
mothers, so that they might bring up their children in a rational and
Christian manner. But,” he adds, “perhaps this is asking too much at a
time.”
The Memorial was suppressed because “the privileged classes” knew that
it was in the hands of their opponents. Pestalozzi then and always felt
keenly the oppression to which the peasants were exposed; and he spoke of
“the privileged” as men on stilts who must descend among the people
before they could secure a natural and firm position. He also satirises them
in some of his fables, as, e.g., that of the “Fishes and the Pike.” “The fishes
in a pond brought an accusation against the pike who were making great

ravages among them. The judge, an old pike, said that their complaint was
well founded, and that the defendants, to make amends, should allow two
ordinary fish every year to become pike.”
§ 5. By this time Pestalozzi had given up theology and had taken to the
law. Now under the influence of Rousseau, or rather of the craving for a
simple “natural” life which found its most eloquent expression in
Rousseau’s writing, Pestalozzi made a bonfire of his MSS. and decided on
becoming a farmer.
§ 6. There was another person concerned in this decision. In his
childhood he had one day ventured into the shop of one of the leading
tradesmen, Herr Schulthess, bent on procuring for his farthings some object
of delight; but he found there a little shop-keeper, Anna Schulthess, seven
years his senior, who discouraged his extravagance and persuaded him to
keep his money. Anna and he since those days had become engaged—not at
all to the satisfaction of her parents. Their intimacy had been strengthened
by their concern for a common friend, a young man named Bluntschli, who
died of consumption. This friend, three years older than Pestalozzi, seems to
have understood him thoroughly; and in the parting advice he gave him
there was a warning which happily for the general good was in after years
neglected. “I am going,” said Bluntschli, “and you will be left alone. Avoid
any career in which you might become the victim of your own goodness
and trust, and choose some quiet life in which you will run no risk. Above
all, do not take part in any important undertaking without having at your
side a man who by his cool judgment, knowledge of men and things, and
unshakable fidelity may be able to protect you from the dangers to which
you will be exposed.”
§ 7. When the friendship with Anna Schulthess had ripened into a
betrothal Pestalozzi spent a year in the neighbourhood of Bern learning
farming under a man then famous for his innovations. His new ideas
Pestalozzi absorbed very readily. “I had come to him,” he says, “a political
visionary, though with many profound and correct attainments, views, and
anticipations in matters political. I went away from him just as great an
agricultural visionary, though with many enlarged and correct ideas and
intentions with regard to agriculture.”

§ 8. During his “learning year” he kept up a correspondence with his
betrothed, and the letters of both, which have been preserved, differ very
widely from love-letters in general. Of himself Pestalozzi gives an account
which shows that in part at least he could see himself as others saw him.
“Dearest,” he writes, “those of my faults which appear to me most
important in relation to the situation in which I may be placed in after-life
are improvidence, incautiousness, and a want of presence of mind to meet
unexpected changes in my prospects.... Of my great, and indeed very
reprehensible negligence in all matters of etiquette, and generally in all
matters which are not in themselves of importance, I need not speak;
anyone may see them at first sight of me. I also owe you the open
confession, my dear, that I shall always consider my duties toward my
beloved partner subordinate to my duties towards my country; and that,
although I shall be the tenderest husband, nevertheless, I hold myself bound
to be inexorable to the tears of my wife if she should ever attempt to
restrain me by them from the direct performance of my duties as a citizen,
whatever this must lead to. My wife shall be the confidante of my heart, the
partner of all my most secret counsels. A great and honest simplicity shall
reign in my house. And one thing more. My life will not pass without
important and very critical undertakings. I shall not forget ... my first
resolutions to devote myself wholly to my country. I shall never, from fear
of man, refrain from speaking when I see that the good of my country calls
upon me to speak. My whole heart is my country’s: I will risk all to
alleviate the need and misery of my fellow-countrymen. What
consequences may the undertakings to which I feel myself urged on draw
after them! how unequal to them am I! and how imperative is my duty to
show you the possibility of the great dangers which they may bring upon
me! My dear, my beloved friend, I have now spoken candidly of my
character and my aspirations. Reflect upon everything. If the traits which it
was my duty to mention diminish your respect for me, you will still esteem
my sincerity, and you will not think less highly of me, that I did not take
advantage of your want of acquaintance with my character for the
attainment of my inmost wishes.”
§ 9. The young lady addressed was worthy of her lover. “Such nobleness,
such elevation of character, reach my very soul,” said she. With equal
nobleness she encouraged Pestalozzi in his schemes and took the
consequences without a murmur during their long married life of 46 years.

§ 10. Full of new ideas about farming Pestalozzi now thought he saw his
way to making a fortune. He took some poor land near Birr not far from
Zurich, and persuaded a banking firm to advance money with which he
proposed to cultivate vegetables and madder. In September, 1769, he was
married, and six months later the pair settled in a new house, “Neuhof,”
which Pestalozzi had built on his land.
§ 11. But in spite of his excellent ideas and great industry, his speculation
failed. The bankers soon withdrew their money. Pestalozzi was not cautious
enough for them. However, his wife’s friends prevented an immediate
collapse.
§ 12. But before he had any reason to doubt the success of his speculation
Pestalozzi had begun to reproach himself with being engrossed by it. What
had become of all his thoughts for the people? Was he not spending his
strength entirely to gain the prosperity of himself and his household? These
thoughts came to him with all the more force when a son was born to him;
and at this time they naturally connected themselves with education. He had
now seen a good deal of the degraded state of the peasantry. How were they
to be raised out of it?
§ 13. To Pestalozzi there seemed one answer and one only. This was by
education. To many people in the present day it might seem that
“education,” when quite successful, would qualify labourers to become
clerks. This was not the notion of Pestalozzi. Rousseau had completely
freed him from bondage to the Renascence, and education did not mean to
him a training in the use of books. He looked at the children of the lowest
class of the peasants and asked himself what they needed to raise them.
Knowledge would not do it. “The thing was not that they should know what
they did not know, but that they should behave as they did not behave”
(supra, p. 169); and the road to right action lay through right feeling. If they
could be made conscious that they were loved and cared for, their hearts
would open and give back love and respect in return. More than this, they
must be taught not only to respect their elders but also themselves. They
must be taught to help themselves and contribute to their own maintenance.
So Pestalozzi resolved to take into his own house some of the very poorest
children, to bring them up in an atmosphere of love, and to instruct them in
field-work and spinning which would soon partly (as Pestalozzi hoped,
wholly) pay for their keep. Thus, just at the time when the experiment for

himself failed he began for others an experiment that seemed likely to add
indefinitely to his difficulties.
§ 14. In the winter of 1774 the first children were taken into Neuhof. The
consequences to his wife and to his little son only four years old might have
vanquished the courage of a less ardent philanthropist. “Our position
entailed much suffering on my wife;” he writes, “but nothing could shake
us in our resolve to devote our time, strength and remaining fortune to the
simplification of the instruction and domestic education of the people.”
§ 15. These children, at first not more than 20 in number, Pestalozzi
treated as his own. They worked with him in the summer in the garden and
fields, in winter in the house. Very little time was given to separate lessons,
the children often learning while they worked with their hands. Pestalozzi
held that talking should come before reading and writing; and he practised
them in conversation on subjects taken from their every day life. They also
repeated passages from the Bible till they knew them by heart.
§ 16. In a few months, as we are told, the appearance of these poor little
creatures had entirely changed; though fed only on bread and vegetables
they looked strong and hearty, and their faces gained an expression of
cheerfulness, frankness and intelligence which till then had been totally
wanting. They made good progress with their manual work as well as with
the associated lessons, and took pleasure in both. In all they said and did,
they seemed to show their consciousness of their benefactor’s kind care of
them.
§ 17. This experiment naturally drew much attention to it, and when it
had gone on over a year Pestalozzi was induced by his friend Iselin of Basel
to insert in the Ephemerides (a paper of which Iselin was editor), an “appeal
... for an institution intended to provide education and work for poor
country children.” In this appeal Pestalozzi narrates his experience. “I have
proved,” says he, “that it is not regular work that stops the development of
so many poor children, but the turmoil and irregularity of their lives, the
privations they endure, the excesses they indulge in when opportunity
offers, the wild rebellious passions so seldom restrained, and the
hopelessness to which they are so often a prey. I have proved that children
after having lost health, strength and courage in a life of idleness and
mendicity have, when once set to regular work quickly recovered their

health and spirits and grown rapidly. I have found that when taken out of
their abject condition they soon become kindly, trustful and sympathetic;
that even the most degraded of them are touched by kindness, and that the
eyes of the child who has been steeped in misery, grow bright with pleasure
and surprise, when, after years of hardship, he sees a gentle friendly hand
stretched out to help him; and I am convinced that when a child’s heart has
been touched the consequences will be great for his development and entire
moral character.”
Pestalozzi therefore would have the very poorest children brought up in
private establishments where agriculture and industry were combined, and
where they would learn to work steadily and carefully with their hands, the
chief part of their time being devoted to this manual work, and their
instruction and education being associated with it. And he asks for support
in greatly increasing the establishment he has already begun.
§ 18. Encouraged by the support he received and still more by his love
for the children and his own too sanguine disposition Pestalozzi enlarged
his undertaking. The consequence was bankruptcy. Several causes
conspired to bring about this result. Whatever he might do for the children,
he could not educate the parents, and these were many of them beggars with
the ordinary vices of their class. With the usual discernment of such people
they soon came to the conclusion that Pestalozzi was making a fortune out
of their children’s labour; so they haunted Neuhof, treated Pestalozzi with
the greatest insolence, and often induced their children to run away in their
new clothes. This would account for much, but there was another cause of
failure that accounted for a great deal more. This was Pestalozzi’s extreme
incapacity as an administrator. Even his industrial experiment he carried on
in such a way that it proved a source of expense rather than of profit. He
says himself, that, contrary to his own principles, which should have led
him to begin at the beginning and lay a good foundation in teaching, he put
the children to work that was too difficult for them, wanted them to spin
fine thread before their hands got steadiness and skill by exercise on the
coarser kind, and to manufacture muslin before they could turn out well-
made cotton goods. “Before I was aware of it,” he adds, “I was deeply
involved in debt, and the greater part of my dear wife’s property and
expectations had, as it were, in an instant gone up in smoke.”

§ 19. The precise arrangement made with the creditors we do not know.
The bare facts remain that the children were sent away, and that the land
was let for the creditors’ benefit; but Pestalozzi remained in the house. This
was settled in 1780.
§ 20. We have now come to the most gloomy period in Pestalozzi’s
history, a period of eighteen years, and those the best years in a man’s life,
which Pestalozzi spent in great distress from poverty without and doubt and
despondency within. When he got into difficulties, his friends, he tells us,
loved him without hope: “in the whole surrounding district it was
everywhere said that I was a lost man, that nothing more could be done for
me.” “In his only too elegant country house,” we are told, “he often wanted
money, bread, fuel, to protect himself against hunger and cold.” “Eighteen
years!—what a time for a soul like his to wait! History passes lightly over
such a period. Ten, twenty, thirty years—it makes but a cipher difference if
nothing great happens in them. But with what agony must he have seen day
after day, year after year gliding by, who in his fervent soul longed to labour
for the good of mankind and yet looked in vain for the opportunity!”
(Palmer.)
§ 21. But he who was always ready to sacrifice himself for others now
found someone, and that a stranger, ready to make a great sacrifice for him.
A servant, named Elizabeth Naef, heard of the disaster and distress at
Neuhof, and her master having just died she resolved to go to the rescue. At
first Pestalozzi refused her help. He did not wish her to share the poverty of
his household, and he felt himself out of sympathy with her “evangelical”
form of piety. But Elizabeth declared she had come to stay, and when
Pestalozzi found he could not shake her determination he consented, saying,
“Well, you will find after all that God is in our house also.”
§ 22. To this pious sensible but illiterate peasant woman Pestalozzi was
fond of tracing many of his ideas. She was the original of his Gertrude, and
it was of her he wrote: “God’s sun pursues its path from morning to
evening; yet your eye detects no movement, your ear no sound. Even when
it goes down, you know that it will rise again and continue to ripen the
fruits of the earth. Extreme as it may seem, I am not ashamed to say that
this is an image of Gertrude as of every woman who makes her house a
temple of the living God and wins heaven for her husband and children.”
(Leonard and Gertrude). She was invaluable at Neuhof and restored

comfort to the household. In after years she managed the establishment at
Yverdun and married one of the Krüsis who were Pestalozzi’s assistants.
§ 23. Writing of the gloomy years at Neuhof Pestalozzi afterwards said;
“My head was grey, yet I was still a child. With a heart in which all the
foundations of life were shaken, I still pursued in those stormy times my
favourite object, but my way was one of prejudice, of passion and of error.”
But with Pestalozzi self-depreciation had “almost grown the habit of his
soul,” and in his writings at Neuhof at this period we find no traces of this
prejudice, passion and error from which he supposes himself to have
suffered. He certainly did not abandon his love of humanity; and in his
sacrifice for it he sought a religious basis. In these Neuhof days he wrote:
“Christ teaches us by His example and doctrine to sacrifice not only our
possessions but ourselves for the good of others, and shews us that nothing
we have received is absolutely ours but is merely entrusted to us by God to
be piously employed in the service of charity.” (Quoted by Guimps. R’s
trans. 72.) Whatever were his doubts and difficulties, he never swerved
from pursuing the great object of his life, and nothing could cloud his mind
as to the true method of attaining that object. As he afterwards wrote to
Gessner (Wie Gertrud u.s.w.), “Even while I was the sport of men who
condemned me I never lost sight for a moment of the object I had in view,
which was the removal of the causes of the misery that I saw on all sides of
me. My strength too kept on increasing, and my own misfortunes taught me
valuable truths. I knew the people as no one else did. What deceived no one
else always deceived me, but what deceived everybody else deceived me no
longer.... My own sufferings have enabled me to understand the sufferings
of the people and their causes as no man without suffering can understand
them. I suffered what the people suffered and saw them as no one else saw
them; and strange as it may seem, I was never more profoundly convinced
of the fundamental truths on which I had based my undertaking than when I
saw that I had failed.” (R’s. Guimps 74.)
§ 24. Pestalozzi still had a few friends who did not despise the dreamer of
dreams. Among them was the editor of the Ephemerides, Iselin. This friend
encouraged him to write, and there soon appeared in the Ephemerides a
series of reflexions under the title of “The Evening Hour of a Hermit.” Not
many editors would have printed these aphorisms, and they attracted little
or no attention at the time, but they have proved worth attending to. “The

fruit of Pestalozzi’s past years, they are,” says Raumer, “at the same time
the seed-corn of the years that were to come, the plan and key to his action
in pedagogy.... The drawing of the architect of genius contains his work,
even though the architect himself has not skill enough to carry out his own
design.” (Quoted by Otto Fischer).[152]
§ 25. What was the connexion between Pestalozzi’s belief at this season
and complete belief in dogmatic Christianity? The question is one that will
always be asked and can never, I think, be fully answered. In the days
preceding the French Revolution it was a proof of wisdom to “Cleave ever
to the sunnier side of doubt, and cling to Faith,” even though the Faith were
“beyond the forms of Faith” (see Tennyson’s Ancient Sage). But Pestalozzi
did far more than this. He traced all virtue and strength in the people to
belief in the Fatherhood of God; and he saw in unbelief the severance of all
the bonds of society. The “Hermit” does not indeed use the phrases
common among “evangelical” Christians, but that he was indeed a Christian
is established not only by the general tone of his aphorisms but still more
clearly by his last words: “The Man of God, who with his sufferings and
death has restored to humanity the lost feeling of the child’s disposition
towards God is the Redeemer of the world; he is the sacrificed Priest of the
Lord; he is the Mediator between God and God-forgetting mankind. His
teaching is pure justice, educating philosophy of the people; it is the
revelation of God the Father to the lost race of his children.”
§ 26. The “Evening Hour” remaining almost unnoticed, Pestalozzi’s
friends urged him to write something in a more popular form. So he set to
work on a tale which should depict the life of the peasantry and shew the
causes of their degradation and the cure. With extraordinary rapidity he
wrote between the lines of an old account book the first part of his
“Leonard and Gertrude.” The book, which was complete in itself, and
through the good offices of Iselin (of the Ephemerides), soon found a
publisher, suddenly sprang into immense popularity, a popularity of which
nothing but the “continuations” could ever have deprived it. In the works of
a great artist we see natural objects represented with perfect fidelity and yet
with a life breathed into them by genius, which is wanting or at least is not
visible to common eyes in the originals. Just so do we find Swiss peasant
life depicted by Pestalozzi. The delineation is evidently true to nature; and,
at the same time, shows Nature as she reveals herself to genius. But for this

work something more than genius was necessary, viz., sympathy and love.
In the preface to the first edition, he says, “In that which I here relate, and
which I have, for the most part, seen and heard myself in the course of an
active life, I have taken care not once to add my own opinion to what I saw
and heard the people themselves saying, feeling; believing, judging, and
attempting.” In a later edition (1800) he says, “I desired nothing then, and I
desire nothing else now, as the object of my life, but the welfare of the
people, whom I love, and whom I feel to be miserable as few feel them to
be miserable, because I have with them borne their sufferings as few have
borne them.”
§ 27. Wherever German was read this book excited vast interest, and
though it seemed to most people only a good tale, it met with some more
discerning readers. The Bern Agricultural Society sent the author their
thanks and a gold medal, and Pestalozzi was at once recognised as a man
who understood the peasantry and had good ideas for raising them. The
book is and must remain a classic, but Pestalozzi in his zeal to spread the
truth added again and again “continuations,” and these became less and less
popular in the method of exposition.[153]
§ 28. Here and there we get glimpses of the trials Pestalozzi had gone
through in his industrial experiment. “The love and patience,” he writes,
“with which Gertrude bore with the disorderly and untrained little ones was
almost past belief. Their eyes were often anywhere but on their yarn, so that
this would now be too thick, and now too thin. When they had spoiled it,
they would watch for a moment when Gertrude was not looking, and throw
it out of the window by the handful, until they found that she discovered the
trick when she weighed their work at night.” (E. C’s. trans., p. 122.) And in
this connexion Pestalozzi preached his doctrine of perfect attainment.
“‘What you can’t do blindfold,’” said Harry, “‘you can’t do at all.’” (ib.)
§ 29. “Gertrude,” we are told, “seemed quite unable to explain her
method in words;” and here no doubt Pestalozzi was speaking of himself;
but like Gertrude he “would let fall some significant remark which went to
the root of the whole matter of education.” As an instance we may take
what Gertrude said to the schoolmaster: “You should do for the children
what their parents fail to do for them. The reading, writing, and arithmetic
are not after all what they most need. It is all well and good for them to
learn something, but the really important thing for them is to be

something.” When this truth is fully realized by teachers and school
managers there will be some hope for national education.
§ 30. “Although Gertrude exerted herself to develop very early the
manual dexterity of her children, she was in no haste for them to learn to
read and write; but she took pains to teach them early how to speak: for, as
she said, ‘Of what use is it for a person to be able to read and write if he
cannot speak, since reading and writing are only an artificial sort of
speech.’ ... She did not adopt the tone of an instructor towards the children
... and her verbal instruction seemed to vanish in the spirit of her real
activity, in which it always had its source. The result of her system was that
each child was skilful, intelligent, and active to the full extent that its age
and development allowed.” (Ib. p. 130.)
§ 31. In this book we see that knowledge is treated as valueless unless it
has a basis in action. “The pastor was soon convinced that all verbal
instruction in so far as it aims at true human wisdom and at the highest goal
of this wisdom, true religion, ought to be subordinated to a constant training
in practical domestic labour.... So he strove to lead the children without
many words to a quiet industrious life, and thus to lay the foundations of a
silent worship of God and love of humanity. To this end he connected every
word of his brief religious teachings with their actual every-day experience,
so that when he spoke of God and eternity, it seemed to them as if he were
speaking of father and mother, house and home; in short of the things with
which they were most familiar” (p. 156). Thus he built on the foundation
laid by the schoolmaster, who “cared for the children’s heads as he did for
their hearts, and demanded that whatever entered them should be plain and
clear as the silent moon in the sky. To insure this he taught them to see and
hear with accuracy, and cultivated their powers of attention” (p. 157).
§ 32. With all his love for the children, an element of severity was not
wanting. Pestalozzi maintained that “love was only useful in the education
of men when in conjunction with fear: for they must learn to root out thorns
and thistles, which they never do of their own accord, but only under
compulsion and in consequence of training” (p. 157).
§ 33. Just at the end of the book “the Duke” appoints a commission to
report on the success of the Bonal experiment, and Pestalozzi makes him
give the following order: “To insure thoroughness there must be among the

examiners men skilled in law and finance, merchants, clergymen,
government officials, schoolmasters, and physicians, besides women of
different ranks and conditions of life who shall view the matter with their
woman’s eyes and be sure there is nothing visionary in the background” (p.
180). In this respect Pestalozzi is in advance of us still. No woman has yet
sat on an educational commission.
§ 34. Thus we find Pestalozzi at the age of thirty-five turning author, and
for the next six or seven years he worked indefatigably with his pen. Most
men of genius have some leading purpose which unites their varied
activities, and this was specially true of Pestalozzi. He never lost sight of
his one object, which was the elevation of the people; and this he held to be
attainable only by means of education properly so called. The success of the
first part of Leonard and Gertrude he now endeavoured to turn to account
in spreading true ideas of education. With this intent he published
Christopher and Eliza: My Second Book for the People (1782), which was a
kind of commentary on Leonard and Gertrude. But the public wished to be
amused, not taught; and the book was a failure. He was thus driven into the
attempt already mentioned to catch the public ear by continuing Leonard
and Gertrude, thus endangering his first and, as it proved, his only great
success in literature.
§ 35. To gain circulation for his ideas he also started a weekly paper
called the Swiss Journal, and issued it regularly throughout the year 1782;
but the subscribers were so few that he was then obliged to give it up. I
have not the smallest doubt that it was, as Guimps says, full of wisdom, but
not the kind of wisdom that readers of periodicals are likely to care for.[154]
§ 36. In the Swiss Journal we get a hint of the analogy between the
development of the plant and of the man. This analogy, often as it had been
observed before, was never before so fruitful as it became in the hands of
Pestalozzi and Froebel. The passage quoted by Guimps is this: “Teach me,
summer day, that man formed from the dust of the earth, grows and ripens
like the plant rooted in the soil.”
§ 37. Between the close of the year 1787 and 1797 Pestalozzi did not
publish anything. Though he had become famous, had made the
acquaintance of the greatest men in Germany, such as Goethe, Wieland,
Herder, and Fichte, and had been declared a “Citizen of the French

Republic,” together with Bentham, Tom Payne, Wilberforce, Clarkson,
Washington, Madison, Klopstock, Kozciusko, &c., he was nearly starving,
and, naturally enough in that state of affairs both private and public, he was
in great despondency. As we have seen, his whole life and work were
founded on religion and on the only religion possible for us, the Christian
religion; but carried away by his political radicalism he seems at this time to
have doubted whether Christianity was more than the highest human
wisdom. In October, 1793, he wrote to a friend in Berlin: “I doubt, not
because I look on doubt as the truth, but because the sum of the impressions
of my life has driven faith with its blessings from my soul. Thus impelled
by my fate I see nothing more in Christianity but the purest and noblest
teaching of the victory of the spirit over the flesh, the one possible means of
raising our nature to its true nobility, or in other words of establishing the
empire of the reason over the senses by the development of the purest
feelings of the heart.” If this was the lowest point to which Pestalozzi’s faith
sank in the days of the Revolution, it remained for practical purposes higher
than the faith of most professing Christians then and since.
§ 38. At this time we find him complaining: “My agriculture swallows up
all my time. I am longing for winter with its leisure. My time passes like a
shadow.” He was then forty-six years of age and seemed to himself to have
done nothing.
§ 39. Another five years he had to wait before he found an opportunity
for action. During this time, impelled by Fichte, he endeavoured to give his
ideas philosophic completeness, and after labouring for three years with
almost incredible toil he published in 1797 his “Inquiry into the Course of
Nature in the Development of the Human Race.” This book is pronounced
even by his biographer Guimps to be “prolix and obscure,” and, says
Pestalozzi, “nobody understood me.” But even in this book there was much
wisdom, had the world cared to learn; but the world had then no place for
Pestalozzi, and as he says at the end of this book, “without even asking
whether the fault was his or another’s, it crushed him with its iron hammer
as the mason crushes a useless stone.” He was, however, not actually
crushed, and a place was in time found for him.
§ 40. The world might be pardoned for neglecting an Inquiry which even
a biographer finds “prolix and obscure.” But why could it see nothing in
another book which Pestalozzi published in the same year, “Figures to my

ABC Book,” or according to its later title, “Fables,” a series of apologues as
witty and wise as those of Lessing.[155]
§ 41. As I have said already (supra p. 239) there seems a marked
distinction between thinkers and doers, at least in education, and we seldom
find a man great in both. But with all his weakness as a practical man
Pestalozzi proved great both as a thinker and a doer. He not only thought
out what should be done, but he also made splendid efforts to do it. His first
attempt at Neuhof was, as we have seen, all his own; so was the next at
Stanz; but afterwards he had to work with others, and the work would have
come to a standstill if he had not gained the co-operation of the magistrates,
the parents of the children, and his own assistants. So he never again had
the free hand, or at least the free thought which bore such good fruit in his
enforced cessation from practice in the years between 1780 and 1798. It is
well then to ask, as his biographer Guimps has asked, what was the main
outcome of Pestalozzi’s thought before he plunged into action a second time
in 1798.
§ 42. Pestalozzi set himself to find a means of rescuing the people from
their poverty and degradation. This he held would last as long as their moral
and intellectual poverty lasted; so there was no hope except in an education
that should make them better and more intelligent. In studying the children
even of the most degraded parents he found the seeds, as it were, of a
wealth of faculties, sentiments, tastes, and capabilities, which, if developed,
might make them reasonable and upright human beings. But what was
called education did nothing of the kind. Instead of developing the noblest
part of the child’s nature it neglected this entirely, and bringing to the child
the knowledge, ideas, and feelings of others, it tried to make him “learn”
them. So “education” did little beyond stifling the child’s individuality
under a mass of borrowed ideas. The schoolmaster worked, as it were, from
without to within. This Pestalozzi would change, and make education begin
in the child and work from within outwards. Acting on this principle he
sought for some means of developing the child’s inborn faculties, and he
found as he says: “Nature develops all the powers of humanity by
exercising them; they increase with use.” (Evening Hour, Aph. 22.) No
means can be found of exercising the higher faculties which can be
compared with the actual relations of daily life; so Pestalozzi declares: “The
pure sentiment of truth and wisdom is formed in the narrow circle of the

relationships which affect us, the circumstances which suggest our actions,
and the common knowledge which we cannot do without.” And taking as
his starting-point the needs, desires, and connexions of actual life he was
naturally led to associate the work of the body with that of the mind, to
develop industry and study side by side, to combine the workshop and the
school. With regard to instruction he was never tired of insisting on the
importance of thorough mastery in the first elements, and there was to be no
advance till this mastery was attained. (See what “Harry” says, supra p.
306.) “The schools,” he says (E. H., No. 28), “hastily substitute an artificial
method of words for the truer method of Nature which knows no hurry but
waits.”
§ 43. In this account of Pestalozzi’s doctrine before 1798 I have as usual
followed M. Guimps. According to him Pestalozzi had discovered “a
principle which settles the law of man’s development, and is the
fundamental principle of education.” This principle M. Guimps briefly
states as follows: “All the real knowledge, useful powers, and noble
sentiments that a man can acquire are but the extension of his individuality
by the development of the powers and faculties that God has put in him, and
by their assimilation of the elements supplied by the outer world. There
exists for this development and the work of assimilation a natural and
necessary order, an order which the school mostly sets at nought.”
§ 44. Now we come to the period of Pestalozzi’s practical activity. In
1798 Switzerland was overrun by the French. Everything was remodelled
after the French pattern; and in conformity with the existing phase in the
model country the government of Switzerland was declared to be in the
hands of five “Directors.” Pestalozzi was a Radical, and he at once set to
work to serve the new government with his pen. The Directors gladly
welcomed such an ally as the author of Leonard and Gertrude, and they
made him editor of a newspaper intended to diffuse the revolutionary
principles among the people. Naturally enough they supposed that he, like
other people, “wanted” something; but when asked what he wanted he
replied simply that he wished to be a schoolmaster. The Directors,
especially Le Grand, took a genuine interest in education, and were quite
willing that Pestalozzi should be allowed a free hand in his “new
departure.” They therefore agreed to find the funds with which Pestalozzi
might open a new Institution in Aargau.