Modern educators and their ideals
Date: 2026-02-18T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Education; Education -- History

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Title: Modern educators and their ideals

Author: Tadasu Misawa

Release date: February 18, 2026 [eBook #77974]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1909

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MODERN EDUCATORS
AND THEIR IDEALS

MODERN EDUCATORS
AND THEIR IDEALS

BY
TADASU MISAWA, Ph.D.

D. APPLETON    AND    COMPANY

N E W Y O R KM C M I X

Copyright, 1909, by
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

Published March, 1909

PREFACE

The present work is intended mainly for students of pedagogy in colleges or normal schools, teachers and other practical workers in educational fields, and those parents who take a special interest in the problems of education. It aims to give a general idea of the educational views of great philosophers and reformers in modern times, which form the basis of the present day education in its ideals and practice. The author’s endeavor has been to present the fundamental ideas of these thinkers and epoch makers in a concise and coherent form, and with a sympathetic interpretation. An academic criticism or amplification of any theories is purposely avoided; and very little is added to what each writer has said for himself, beyond that which was found necessary to make the connection of thought clearer and its significance more comprehensible to the reader.

Thus the book practically consists of excerpts from the main works of the thinkers here chosen, which are either put in their original form or modified by the author so as to meet the extent and intent of the book. And he believes that, though not always agreeing with their ideas, he has made himself a faithful mouthpiece for each of them.

The bibliographies attached are by no means meant to be exhaustive. They include only those references specially consulted by the author as well as those which were judged to be easily accessible and worthy of recommendation to the reader.

The author wishes to express his sense of great indebtedness to President G. Stanley Hall for inspiration and help in many ways, to Professor William H. Burnham for suggestions and encouragement, to Dr. Arnold L. Gesell for aid in correcting his English, and to Dr. Theodate L. Smith for assistance in revising the manuscript and putting the book through the press.

CONTENTS

Chapter | | Page
I. | —Introduction | 1
II. | —John Amos Comenius (1592-1670) | 18
III. | —John Locke (1632-1704) | 35
IV. | —Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) | 59

V.

—Basedow and Kant
Johann Bernard Basedow (1723-1790)
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

93
98

VI. | —Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746-1826) | 116
VII. | —Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) | 143
VIII. | —Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852) | 166
IX. | —Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776-1841) | 199
X. | —Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) | 223
XI. | —Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) | 245

XII.

—W. T. Harris and G. Stanley Hall
William Torrey Harris (1835-1909)
Granville Stanley Hall (1844-1924)

267
278

Index | ... ... ... | 295

MODERN EDUCATORS AND THEIR IDEALS

————●————

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTION

The Ægean peninsula was the great reservoir of ancient civilization into which the cultural stream of every nation around the Mediterranean had its outlet and from which all subsequent ages of Europe have drawn. Therefore without an understanding of the Greek ideas and ideals of education we shall not be able to understand the European ideas and ideals of education. As Compayré says, “in respect to education, as in respect to everything else, the higher spiritual life of modern nations has been developed under the influence of Grecian antiquity” (ch-I-ref:5: p. 18). And we can safely say that, with the exception of the ancient Chinese—so misunderstood and misrepresented in the West, but the Greek of the Orient in my opinion—no nation in antiquity represents modern conceptions so nearly as the Greek, especially the Athenian.

The complete and harmonious development of the human body and soul in their strength and beauty; the perfect and full, yet regulated enjoyment of earthly life in its social as well as individual form; the attainment of virtue and happiness in and through the state—these were the fundamental ideals which governed the ancient Greeks. The state not only took nearly the sole charge of the education of its citizens, but it was in itself the educational and educative institution. People were educated through their social and communal life. The part played by the school was very small; it had a later and private origin, beginning with the rhetoricians and philosophers, and meeting the need of the few.

There were two main types in Greek education, one represented by the Spartans, the other by the Athenians. In the former, the power and vigor of personality were emphasized above all else, while in the latter, beauty and wisdom were adored. The former produced men of action, the latter, persons of elegant manners and speech. Efficiency in the state service had larger place in the former; individual perfection and felicity received more attention in the latter. In a word, the Athenian represented intellectual and æsthetic culture; the Spartan, military and moral culture.

In Greece, the Athenian ideals and tendencies superseded the Spartan, and Greece lost her vitality under the pressure of overintellectualization, overrefinement, and the almost necessary consequence, overindividualization. But the Spartan ideal revived in Rome; military and political Rome needed men of strength and action for its citizens. So, while the Greek philosophy degenerated into Neo-Pythagorean and Neo-Platonic mysticism, stern and practical stoicism took root in Italy. Roman education was essentially the education of her warriors and legislators; physical and mental vigor and courage, justice, integrity, and practical sense were to be cultivated above everything else; mere knowledge and effeminate refinement were despised. While the Greeks intrusted the education of their children largely to the State, the Romans laid great stress upon the home training. Not the group life of children among themselves and under adult influences, but the personal direction and discipline of parents were to be the chief molding power. Rome thus had no public institution concerned with the education of her children until she began to imitate Greece and establish schools for the teaching of grammar and rhetoric. Cicero gave voice to the individualistic point of view of old Roman education when he said: “Our ancestors did not wish that children should be educated by fixed rules, determined by the laws, publicly promulgated and made uniform for all” (ch-I-ref:5: p.46.)

The advent of Christianity necessarily introduced a new epoch in the tendency of education as well as in the general course of social evolution. Its fundamental principles, unity with the absolute, supreme, personality as the destiny and possibility of each individual, the realization of the kingdom of God, to be governed by justice, love, peace, and felicity as the common aim of the whole body of humanity, should have become the higher realization of the Greek ideals of life. But Christianity in its historic form, as an outgrowth from the Semites, promulgated by single-minded enthusiasts, was fated to conflict with Hellenic thought. It not only neglected the civic and economic life of the state, but condemned, as asceticism crept in, the perfection and enjoyment of earthly existence. The natural man was evil; passion made the body the source of sin. Even the improvement of intellect or taste was considered to be contrary to religion. Its God became deprived of all His human qualities or content, and was made an abstract, negative spirituality. The kingdom of God receded to the other world beyond the grave or to some imagined distance. It conceived everything human and natural as opposed to the divine and spiritual, and strove to crush the body that the soul might live. Thus instead of a new heaven and a new earth, the age of death and darkness came to be introduced into the European world.

Education in the Middle Ages was largely education through and for the Church. The reward of the victory of Christianity over the pagan world through that long-suffering struggle and martyrdom was the Church universal, enthroned above all other human institutions. The seat of divine authority, the ultimate standard of evaluation shifted from the state to the Church infallible. Schools were established, universities organized, but in them the young generation was trained to be better citizens of a future heavenly state or to serve ecclesiastic interests. Efficiency in social life or the qualities of individual personality as such were scarcely considered.

Outside the Church there was constant warfare within and among newly risen nations. Neither rulers nor the people themselves had time to give their attention to the advancement of culture. The education of the knights was essentially military; that of the masses, limited chiefly to the training naturally offered by home occupations and trades. The settlement of nations, the rise of free cities, more peace and prosperity, necessarily tended to arouse an interest in culture. Contact with the Hellenic and Eastern civilizations through the crusades, the discovery of America, the expansion of foreign trade, all could not but broaden the mental horizon and vitalize the soul. The dialectic education of scholasticism, although formal, had sharpened the reasoning powers of men. With a new explosion of self-consciousness and life impulse, Europe keenly realized the pressure of the Church, its dogmatism and asceticism. The revolt against its dogmatism was the Reformation, the revolt against its asceticism was Humanism.

The Humanistic movement started as the revival of the ancient classics. Tired of the dry, attenuated Latin of church scholasticism, the student wanted to return to the naïve, simple, yet beautiful literature of the old Roman and Hellenic masters. Weary of the sophistical interpretation and disputation of the Greek philosophers, he desired to drink directly from their untainted source.

This Renaissance, though mainly literary at its beginning, brought back the seemingly exterminated spirit and ideals of the ancient world, especially of Athens. Man, liberated from the bondage of monastic spirituality, returned to the human. The beauty and joy of life and the arts were again restored; learning came to be pursued for its own sake.

But the age of the Renaissance tended to exalt intellectual and æsthetic culture at the expense of the moral. The revival of Hellenism brought with it antireligious tendencies and threatened to bring to naught Europe’s labor of centuries to build up Christian character. This was rescued by the stronger sister movement of the Reformation, which united in it both the Hellenic and Christian spirit leading Christianity to its destined end—namely, to become a human religion. Unity of religion and life, heaven and earth, divine and human, now enters into the consciousness of the race. The dignity of individual conscience and reason, the equal destiny of all mankind without national, class, or sex discrimination, the future grandeur of the race and its earthly abode, begin to become the living faith of the West. Mediæval Christianity aimed to establish a spiritual kingdom beside and beyond the earthly one; modern Christianity aims at the gradual spiritualization of the earthly kingdom. Although the above revelation or message of Christianity was again submerged under the new scholasticism and ecclesiasticism into which Protestantism fell, the modern world has never lacked men of insight who, from time to time, have proclaimed it.

No great new movement in history can pass without having its influence in the field of education. The Reformation really marks the beginning of modern education in the West, though to the Catholic Church belongs the honor of having preserved through the dark ages the treasures of ancient culture which made the Renaissance possible. In it we see the basis and germs of the fundamental ideas and ideals which have governed the education of Christendom until to-day. Luther is naturally the greatest name in this movement and deserves to represent it in its educational as well as religious aspect. As Compayré says:

“The German reformer Luther is, of all his co-religionists, the one who has served the cause of elementary instruction with the most ardor. He not only addressed a pressing appeal to the ruling classes in behalf of founding schools for the people, but, by his influence methods of instruction were improved, and the educational spirit was renewed in accordance with the principles of Protestantism” (ch-I-ref:5: p. 114).

If Luther had done nothing else than translate the Bible into German, he would have been remembered as a great pedagogic figure. Through his translation the Bible became the text-book of the people, not only in religion and morality, but also in language study. His plain, refined style is said to have introduced a new era in the German language and worked toward the unification of the national speech. But he did more direct service for the cause of education. In 1519 he wrote a sermon on married life, in which he appeals to the parents’ sense of duty to educate their children. Home education should be the basis and preparation for school education. True piety, better Christian life can be hoped for only by beginning with the child. It is the duty of all parents to devote themselves to their children, and the neglect of this duty will be the heaviest sin. Children should be taught and led with reasonable words instead of blows and stripes. One must be an example to them by words, conduct, and life. They must be guarded from the weakness and effeminacy which comes through indulgence in worldly pleasures. Yet, on the other hand, asceticism in the education of children is to be avoided.

Home education, though fundamental, is not sufficient; for many parents lack the piety and learning, skill and art, time and means to enable them to lead their children; therefore we need schools and teachers. In his address to the magistrates and legislators, in which he urges them to establish and maintain Christian schools in each city for the education of all citizens regardless of rank and sex, Luther speaks as if he were proclaiming the oracle of God. He was obliged to speak because God opened his mouth, nay, God and Christ spoke through his mouth; education of youth was the fight against the devil; the cause of religion and education was one. He showed a high estimation of the teacher’s profession, saying:

“I tell you, in a word, that a diligent, devoted school-teacher, preceptor, or any person, no matter what is his title, who faithfully trains and teaches boys, can never receive an adequate reward, and no money is sufficient to pay the debt you owe him; so, too, said the pagan, Aristotle. Yet we treat them with contempt, as if they were of no account whatever; and all the time, we profess to be Christians. For my part, if I were compelled to leave off preaching and to enter some other vocation, I know not an office that would please me better than that of schoolmaster, or teacher of boys. For I am convinced that, next to preaching, this is the most useful, and greatly the best labor in all the world, and, in fact, I am sometimes in doubt which of the positions is the more honorable” (ch-I-ref:12: p. 414).

But turn your eyes upon the actual state of things, and see if schools and teachers are fulfilling their honorable missions. “Everywhere we have seen such teachers and masters, who knew nothing themselves and could teach nothing that was good and useful; they did not even know how to learn and to teach” (ch-I-ref:5: p. 117).

Luther’s innovation in education was to liberate children from this strait-jacketness of instruction and discipline, and to bring in the air of freedom, cheerfulness, broad-mindedness, and respect for the child’s growing personality. “It is dangerous to isolate the young. It is necessary, on the contrary, to allow young people to hear, see, learn all sorts of things, while all the time observing the restraints and rules of honor. Enjoyment and recreation are as necessary for children as food and drink” (ch-I-ref:5: p. 119). The individuality of the child should be respected and nourished. “A child intimidated by bad treatment is irresolute in all he does. He who has trembled before his parents will tremble all his life at the sound of a leaf which rustles in the wind” (ch-I-ref:5: p. 119). As to the subject-matter of instruction, religion, classical languages and Hebrew, history, music, and mathematics should be taught. Luther speaks slightingly of the mediæval learning of philosophy as “the devil’s rubbish,” which was “acquired with too great cost, labor, and harm,” and wanted to substitute for it the study of history, conceived as the source of the real knowledge of the world. He attaches also a high importance to music, as a means of emotional culture, even saying that “unless a schoolmaster know how to sing, I think him of no account” (ch-I-ref:5: p. 119). “Knightly sport” is to be encouraged as a means of physical culture. To remedy “the greatest evil in every place”—i.e., the lack of teachers—he emphasizes the urgent need of special training for them. The best of the pupils, boys and girls, are to be selected, kept a longer time in school, given special instructors, and libraries opened for their use. The professional training of teachers as well as the education of the people is the duty of the authorities.

Thus the Reformation represented by Luther was no less an educational than a religious movement. It awakened a sense of the worth of the individual; the longing for the perfection of personality in its all-sidedness, intellectual, moral, and physical, was aroused. It stirred the parental and official conscience to educate children and citizens. Schools, which as an institution were, hitherto, only a part of the ecclesiastical system, and chiefly as a means of training servants of the Church, now sprang up as a coördinate agency in the upbuilding of humanity. The chief aim of the new education was not in behalf of the ecclesiastic interests, nor the soul’s concern for heaven or hell, but it was to furnish a city with “instructed, reasonable, honorable, and well-trained citizens,” in which its prosperity, safety, and strength lie. It was for the need of the world, “to the end that men may govern the country properly, and that women may properly bring up their children, care for their domestics, and direct the affairs of their households” (ch-I-ref:5: p 115). If the Renaissance idea of education was aristocratic, the Reformation idea is democratic; if the characteristic of the former was literary, that of the latter is civico-economical. Born the son of a miner, living the life of the people, Luther could not think with philologists that the humanities alone could meet the whole educational need of common citizens.

He says: “I by no means approve those schools where a child was accustomed to pass twenty or thirty years in studying Donatus or Alexander without learning anything. Another world has dawned, in which things go differently. My opinion is that we must send the boys to school one or two hours a day, and have them learn a trade at home for the rest of the time. It is desirable that these two occupations march side by side” (ch-I-ref:5: pp. 117-118). The religious conception of Church education, the humanistic ideal of the Renaissance, the military and civic training of knighthood, the industrial claim of the home and trade, all find recognition and reconciliation in Luther’s view, and are established as the four pillars on which the educational temple of modern Christian citizenship rests.

Fifteen years after the death of Luther the world received into its lap another gifted child, this time to work out reformation in the field of science. The Reformation together with Humanism restored the ideal of the total man. But their intellectual outlook was still chiefly limited to the attainments of the ancient world. Therefore, they soon degenerated into a new scholasticism on the one hand, and a linguistic formalism on the other. Then came Francis Bacon to preach the gospel of knowledge, of true knowledge. For this “father of English philosophers” the aim of knowledge “is no mere felicity of speculation, but the real business and fortune of the human race.” Indeed, “men have entered into a desire of learning and knowledge sometimes from a natural curiosity and inquisitive appetite; sometimes to entertain their minds with variety and delight; sometimes for ornament and reputation, and sometimes to enable them to victory of wit and contradiction, and most times for lucre and profession” (ch-I-ref:2: p 42). This abuse of learning was the greatest evil of the mediæval and Renaissance scholarship. The vocation of scholars is “to give a true account of their gift of reason, to the benefit and use of men” (ch-I-ref:2: p 42). Knowledge must generate, bear fruit; her function is to satisfy the needs of human life, to increase men’s control over Nature, and to enrich and ennoble his enjoyments. This can be attained not by a mere mastery of vain words and letters, or of tricks of the syllogism, but only by humble, diligent, and methodical inquiries into the great “volume of God’s works.” “Man is but the servant and interpreter of nature: what he does and what he knows is only what he has observed of Nature’s order in fact and thought; beyond this he knows nothing and can do nothing. For the chain of causes cannot by any force be loosed or broken, nor can nature be commanded except by being obeyed. And so those twin objects, human knowledge and human power, do really meet in one; and it is from ignorance of causes that operation fails” (ch-I-ref:13: p. 48). The first-hand experience of living Nature and induction from it alone provide us real knowledge and truth, and nothing else. “It cannot be that axioms established by argumentation should avail for the discovery of new works; since the subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of argument. But axioms duly and orderly formed from particulars easily discover the way to new particulars, and thus render science active” (ch-I-ref:13: pp. 46-47). According to this standard of true knowledge, “all the received systems are but so many stage plays, representing worlds of their own creation after an unreal and scenic fashion” (ch-I-ref:13: pp. 56-57). Our age is far older than that of the ancient people. Why should we bear the bondage of immature, inexperienced minds? “The wisdom which we have derived principally from the Greeks is but like the boyhood of knowledge, and has the characteristic property of boys: it can talk, but it cannot generate; for it is fruitful of controversies, but barren of works” (ch-I-ref:13: p. 54). Turn your eyes from the antiquated record of the past to the infinite reality of living nature. The key to open its secret is in your hands. The sphere of conquest here is vast and inexhaustible; its pleasure is noble and insatiable. Thus rings out the scientific Sermon on the Mount. The real goal is shown, a broad new highway opened; science being vitalized by reunion with the infinite reality of living nature and the ever-progressive life of humanity marches to her never-ending conquest. Knowledge rescued from the depths of ignominy and impotence is raised to its heavenly seat; the ideal of omniscience, coupled with omnipotence, has ever since become the aspiration and motive power of the modern world. Although Bacon did not concern himself with the direct problems of education, a conception such as the above could not but introduce a new tendency into it. If we may call Luther the father of Protestant education, Bacon should be called the father of scientific education, both of which, when broadly interpreted, characterize the modern period of the Western education.

Bacon’s direct influence in the educational field naturally was to be exercised upon the higher institutions of learning. But the admittance of his ideas and spirit into them was a very slow and hard process. In the “advancement of learning” he advocated the founding of a real university, “left free to the arts and sciences at large,” devoted entirely to the free investigation and advancement of learning, without professional aim or any external restrictions. In the “New Atlantis,” his ideal state, an academy of science with its museum and laboratory, stands as the center. He also suggested a plan for the coöperation of all European universities. But the time was not ripe for all these ideas, nor have his visions yet been fully realized. A more immediate effect was the inspiration which his new gospel of learning and its principles have given to those through whom Europe first attained a definite theory of educational purpose and art, especially Comenius and Locke.

REFERENCES

1.Adamson, John William. Pioneers of Modern Education, 1600-1700. University Press, Cambridge, 1905. 285 pages.

2.Bacon, Francis (Viscount St. Albans). The Advancement of Learning. Third edition, and revised by W. A. Wright. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1885. 376 pages.

3.——The same. Book I, edited by Albert S. Cook. Ginn & Co., Boston, 1904. 145 pages.

4.——The New Atlantis. Edited by G. C. M. Smith. University Press, Cambridge, 1900. 72 pages.

5.Compayré, Jules Gabriel. History of Pedagogy. Translated, with an introduction, notes, and an index, by W. H. Payne. Heath & Co., Boston, 1899. 589 pages.

6.Davidson, Thomas. Aristotle and Ancient Educational Ideals. Scribner, New York, 1897. 256 pages.

7.Heman, Friedrich. Geschichte der neueren Pädagogik. Zickfeldt, Osterwieck, 1904. 436 pages.

8.Heubaum, Alfred. Geschichte des deutschen Bildungswesens seit der Mitte des siebzehnten Jahrhunderts. Vol. I. Bis zum Beginn der allgemeinen Unterrichtsreform unter Friedrich dem Grossen. Weidmann, Berlin, 1905. 402 pages.

9.Hodgson, Geraldine. Primitive Christian Education. T. Clark, Edinburgh, 1906. 287 pages.

10.Laurie, Simon Somerville. Studies in the History of Educational Opinion from the Renaissance. University Press, Cambridge, 1903. 261 pages.

11.Monroe, Paul. Source Book of the History of Education for the Greek and the Roman Period. Macmillan Co., London and New York, 1901. 515 pages.

12.——A Text-book in the History of Education. Macmillan Co., London and New York, 1905. 772 pages.

13.Munroe, James Phinney. The Educational Ideal: An Outline of its Growth in Modern Times. Heath & Co., Boston, 1896. 262 pages.

14.Raumer, Karl von. Geschichte der Pädagogik vom Wiederaufblühen klassischer Studien bis auf unsere Zeit. 5 vols. Bertelsmann, Gütersloh, 1882-1897.

15.Rein, Georg Wilhelm, editor: Encyklopädisches Handbuch der Pädagogik. 8 vols. Beyer, Langensalza, 1895-1906.

16.Scherer, Heinrich. Die Pädagogik in ihrer Entwicklung im Zusammenhange mit dem Kultur- und Geistesleben und ihrem Einfluss auf die Gestaltung des Erziehungs- und Bildungswesens. Vol. I. Die Pädagogik vor Pestalozzi. Brandstetter, Leipzig, 1897. 581 pages.

17.Schmid, Karl Adolf, editor: Geschichte der Erziehung vom Anfang an bis auf unsere Zeit. 5 vols. Cotta, Stuttgart, 1884-1902.

18.Spielmann, C. Christian. Die Meister der Pädagogik nach ihren Leben, ihren Werken und ihrer Bedeutung. Heufer, Neuwied, 1904-1905. 365 pages.

19.Ziegler, Theobald. Geschichte der Pädagogik mit besonderer Rücksicht auf das höhere Unterrichtswesen. Beck, München, 1895. 361 pages.

CHAPTER II.

JOHN AMOS COMENIUS
(1592-1670)

The movement for the new Christian education, identified with the Reformation, the effort to establish and spread the new realistic learning, represented by Bacon, were struggling against the inertia of prejudice and tradition when Comenius came to the world to unify these two tendencies and lay the foundations of the modern Protestant school, nay, even to build its framework. Born in a devout Moravian family, studying under the most advanced scholars in the most progressive universities of the time, becoming the pastor and leader of his church by vocation, the teacher and director of several schools by avocation, his external circumstances, together with his inborn disposition, made him “the greatest pedagogical writer of the seventeenth century.” In him the educational ideas and ideals of the age find the most comprehensive and systematic embodiment.

The great educational awakening of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was the demand for equal, universal enlightenment as opposed to class education; for the upbuilding of Christian manhood; for citizenship instead of purely monastic and humanistic training; for the introduction of method and system into school instruction to remedy the prevailing chaotic condition; for a natural method in discipline as opposed to harmful artificiality; for making the vernacular instead of the ancient classics the basis and means of learning. These demands found expression in the writings of such men as Luther and Bacon, and also Vives, Ratke, Rabelais, Campanella, Andreä, Alsted, etc. Comenius studied the writings of these men with his judicious and comprehensive mind and, aided by his direct experience, built upon this study that great system of pedagogy, which Professor Laurie of Edinburgh, speaks of as “the only thoroughgoing treatise on educational method that has yet appeared in the history of the world” (ch-II-ref:11: p. 153).

However much he may owe to his predecessors and contemporaries, he it was who gave a coherency and a larger relation to what was partially expressed by others; who carried into details and practical applications what before was treated only in a general manner.

To restore fallen humanity to the image of God was the first and last aim of education as conceived by him. Thus, education and religion were one for him, as they were to Luther. His philosophy of education is, in its fundamentals, really nothing else than the most intelligent pedagogical application of the Bible. It may be called the pedagogy of Protestant Christianity.

In the “Great Didactic,” Comenius begins by picturing in biblical terminology the destined glory of man. He is God’s likeness, God’s delight. For his use God designed the heaven, the earth, and all that is in them; to him alone God gave all those things in conjunction, which to the rest of creation He gave but singly—namely, Existence, Vitality, Sense, Reason. And to him, finally, God gave Himself in personal communion, joining his nature to His, for eternity. “Know therefore that thou art the corner-stone and epitome of my works, the representative of God among them, the crown of my glory” (ch-II-ref:2: p. 178).

Human life is a gradual, successive, and eternal development. “Whatever we are, do, think, speak, contrive, acquire, or possess, contains a principle of gradation, and, though we mount perpetually and attain higher grades, we still continue to advance and never reach the highest” (ch-II-ref:2: p. 180). The earth, therefore, must not be the end of our life, the final goal for which we strive, but only the beginning, the preparation, for an everlasting heaven where we find the fullness of all. The world is nothing but “our nursery,” “our school,” and “our workshop.” Accordingly, a purely secular education falls far short of its true function. We ought to prepare a child not only for this life, but for the life beyond. The inculcation of piety is thus the most important thing in education.

The perfection of all the faculties we have in us, which is the ultimate goal of man, and in which lies his highest felicity, can be viewed from three aspects: the perfection of knowledge, of power, of heart, which “are so joined together that they cannot be separated.” Perfection of knowledge consists in being acquainted with the properties of all things in the world, including the knowledge of man himself. By the perfection of power is meant the ability to have control over all things and over himself. The man of power directs everything to its legitimate end, and subjects it to man’s own use; he conducts himself royally—that is, “gravely and righteously among creatures.” The perfection of heart is piety; it aims to embody the perfection of Christ, the archetype of man.

Comenius believes that man’s original nature is good. There is, in every man, a tendency toward every perfection—an infinite possibility or a possibility of the infinite. However, man is born only with the potentiality, thus he has the possibility of degeneration as well as of perfection. Hence the necessity of human striving, of education. “The seeds of knowledge, of virtue, and of piety are naturally implanted in us; but the actual knowledge, virtue, and piety are not given. These must be acquired by prayer, by education, and by action” (ch-II-ref:2: p. 204). Every individual has the possibility, the right, and the duty to be a man, to realize his final destiny, as a rational creature, the lord of other creatures, the image of his creator; and “it is only by a proper education that he can become a man” (ch-II-ref:2: p. 204). From this it naturally follows that education, in its essentials, should be universal and equal for all, without regard to the difference between rich and poor, boys and girls, noble and humble, dull and intelligent.

Comenius shared, with most of the educational writers, ancient and modern, the view that education should begin as early as possible. He assigned six reasons for this: First, because we do not know when the child will be taken from his preparatory life on earth; second, shortness of time compared with the infiniteness of learning and manifoldness of duty to be prepared; third, because “it is the nature of everything that comes into being, that while tender it is easily bent and formed, but that when it has grown hard, it is not easy to alter”; fourth, God has granted man the years of youth, “unsuitable for everything but education,” which are much longer than in animals; fifth, the influence of early impressions is the most lasting and potent; sixth, the mind of man seeks constantly for some activity, and, “if not engaged with what is useful, it occupies with the vainest and even with harmful things,” of which the world is full. “If, then, each man have the welfare of his own children at heart, and if that of the human race be dear to the civil and ecclesiastical guardians of human affairs, let them hasten to make provision for timely planting, pruning, and watering of the plants of heaven, that these may be prudently formed to make prosperous advances in letters, virtue, and piety” (ch-II-ref:2: pp. 210-212).

The necessity of equal, universal education of the young calls for the universal establishment of schools. In the home lies the foundation of education, and parents are naturally to be the first teachers, but modern society requires more in the way of education than the home can provide. The advantages of the school over the home can be enumerated as follows:

1. “It is very seldom that parents have sufficient ability or sufficient leisure to teach their children,” and “this is a marvelous saving of labor, when one man, undisturbed by other claims on his attention, confines himself to one thing; in this way one man can be of use to many and many to one” (ch-II-ref:2: p. 215).

2. Group life affords many benefits and advantages of its own. “Better results and more pleasures are to be obtained when one pupil serves as an example and a stimulus for another” (ch-II-ref:2: p. 215). Emulation and imitation, which are strong instincts in children, can operate best when a certain equality of capacity and interest, and consequently easy mutual understanding, exist. In this sense children are the best instructors and trainers of children.

3. To secure the best development of the child, a place, specified for the sole and definite end, with an ample provision and a regulated environment, is needed. As young plants are transplanted from their seed beds into the orchards or garden, so children should, after being cherished in the maternal bosom, be delivered into the school, the soil specially prepared for them, in order to grow more vigorously and successfully.

Thus the school, with its specially prepared teachers and accommodations, with its ample mental nourishment, its pleasant, healthy, and stimulating environment, its regular systematic work, and equipment especially adapted to its ends, should become the center for the advancement and propagation of knowledge and the fittest soil for the growth of the young generation. In Comenius’s own words, “As workshops supply manufactured goods, churches supply piety, and law courts justice, why should not schools produce, purify, and multiply the light of wisdom, and distribute it to the whole body of human community?” (ch-II-ref:2: p. 216).

Comenius’s demand upon and hope in the school was great. The school that fulfils its function perfectly is “one which is a true forging-place of men; where the minds of those who learn are illuminated by the light of wisdom, so as to penetrate with ease all that is manifest and all that is secret, where the emotions and desires are brought into harmony with virtue, and where the heart is filled and permeated by divine love, so that all who are handed over to Christian schools to be imbued with true wisdom may be taught to live a heavenly life on earth; in a word, where all men are taught all things thoroughly” (ch-II-ref:2: p. 228).

With this ideal, the reformer naturally found that “hitherto there have been no perfect schools,” and the present state of things is most unsatisfactory. “The method used in instructing the young has generally been so severe that schools have been looked on as terrors for boys and shambles for their intellects, and the greater number of students, having contracted a dislike for learning and for books, have hastened away to the workshops of artificers or to some other occupation.... Piety and virtue, which form the most important element in education, were neglected more than anything else, ... so that for the most part, instead of tractable lambs, fiery wild asses and restive mules were produced; and instead of characters molded to virtue, nothing issued from the schools but a spurious veneer of morality, a fastidious and exotic clothing of culture, and eyes, hands, and feet trained to worldly vanities” (ch-II-ref:2: pp. 229-230).

Even in intellectual culture, which had been almost their sole concern, the result achieved is pitifully poor. “For five, ten, or more years they detained the mind over matters that could be mastered in one. What could have been gently instilled into the intellect, was violently impressed upon it, nay rather stuffed and flogged into it. What might have been placed before the mind plainly and lucidly, was treated of obscurely, perplexedly, and intricately, as if it were a complicated riddle. In addition, ... the intellect was scarcely ever nourished by the actual facts, but was filled with the husks of words, with a windy and parrot-like loquacity, and with the chaff of opinions” (ch-II-ref:2: pp. 230-231).

Consequently, Comenius proposed a thoroughgoing reform of the schools, to base them upon the Christian principle, and to introduce a change in subject-matter, discipline, and method of instruction. “All those subjects which are able to make a man wise, virtuous and pious” were to be taught; not Latin, as had been customary, but vernacular language should be the chief instrument of learning. “This education shall be conducted without blows, rigour, or compulsion, ... and in the most natural manner” (ch-II-ref:2: p. 233). The student “shall not merely read the opinions of others and grasp their meaning or commit them to memory and repeat them, but shall himself penetrate to the root of things and acquire the habit of genuinely understanding and making use of what he learns” (ch-II-ref:2: p. 234). As to method, the most easy, natural, economical, and efficient way of learning must be investigated and established.

Method is the great thing in the pedagogy of Comenius. To find out the universal rules which can be applied to all pupils in all cases was his chief task, and herein lies the main contribution he made to the subsequent progress of educational art. He says:

“The art of teaching, therefore, demands nothing more than the skilful arrangement of time, of the subjects taught, and of the method. As soon as we have succeeded in finding the proper method it will be no harder to teach school-boys, in any number desired, than with the help of the printing-press to cover a thousand sheets daily with the neatest writing, or with Archimedes’s machine to move houses, towers, and immense weights, or to cross the ocean in a ship, and journey to the New World. The whole process, too, will be as free from friction as is the movement of a clock whose motive power is supplied by the weights. It will be as pleasant to see education carried out on my plan as to look at an automatic machine of this kind, and the process will be as free from failure as are these mechanical contrivances when skilfully made” (ch-II-ref:2: pp. 248-249).

The form of argumentation by which Comenius endeavors to establish his methodology is quite mediæval and often ludicrous. It rests largely on the exaggerated, sometimes misapplied analogies from Nature and mechanics, and evidences from the Bible. But it also contains many pedagogical truths embodied in the schoolrooms of our day. To epitomize the general principles of his methodology, the process of teaching should begin with the most plastic mind of early childhood in slow progressive order, proceeding always from the general to the specific, from what is easy to what is more difficult, following the natural interests of the child, paying a due consideration to his age, mental capacity, and development; everything being taught first through the medium of the senses, a special emphasis being laid upon logical sequence and ideational correlation between the different subjects and different parts of the same subject; only those subjects that are of real use should be taken in hand, everything of little importance being invariably discarded, and the purpose and use of everything taught should be constantly kept in view. He advocates that everything should be taught according to one and the same method; there should be only one teacher in each school, or at any rate in each class; that only one author should be used for each subject studied, and the same exercise should be given the whole class.

The method of teaching arts, sciences, languages, morals, and instilling piety is each and severally discussed. But a large part of Comenius’s time and energy was devoted to the reform of language teaching and to the writing of text-books for it. And by this work alone he was known in Europe during nearly two hundred years of practical oblivion after his death.

With his methodization of the process of instruction necessarily went the systematizing of school organization. The entire educational system is graded by him as follows: I. The home as a preparatory school for infancy. II. The vernacular school for childhood. III. The Latin school or gymnasium for boyhood. IV. The university and travel for youth. He considers the first twenty-four years of human life as the period of growth and plasticity, and recognizes in it four distinct stages, each of which contains six years. In his idea of a mother-school he anticipates Froebel’s kindergarten, and in his sketch of the vernacular and Latin school we see the archetype of the modern graded school.

As a summary of his whole pedagogy nothing better can be offered than the title page of his work, which so well reflects the characteristics of his book and that of the age:

The Great Didactic

Setting forth

The Whole Art of Teaching
All Things to all Men

or

A Certain Inducement to found such Schools in all
the Parishes, Towns, and Villages of every
Christian Kingdom, that the entire
Youth of both Sexes, none
being excepted, shall

Quickly, Pleasantly, & Thoroughly

Become learned in the Sciences, pure in Morals,
trained to Piety, and in this manner
instructed in all things necessary
for the present and for
the future life,

in which, with respect to everything that is suggested,

Its Fundamental Principles are set forth from the
essential nature of matter,
Its Truth is proved by examples from the several
mechanical arts,
Its Order is clearly set forth in years, months, days,
and hours, and finally,
An easy and sure Method is shown by which it can
be pleasantly brought into existence.

Comenius has not lacked his admirers in every land. To-day he must especially appeal to the educational thinkers and administrators of the orthodox type of mind. But this great architectonic genius and scholarly reformer has naturally won the best recognition in Germany. Spielmann even goes so far in his admiration as to say:

“If all the pedagogical writings of all ages had been lost and the great didactic alone remained it would have sufficed as a basis for the later generation to build the science of education anew” (ch-II-ref:25: p. 28).

He might indeed be blamed for putting too much confidence in the power of school education, and laying too much emphasis on method and system with too little on the personal force of the educator. Yet he deserves our remembrance as one who has left us the most comprehensive system of pedagogy, in which one of the greatest civilizing agents, nay, probably even the greatest, in modern communities—the universal public school—is foreshadowed in its fundamentals and in its details. If Bacon, as the greatest apostle of the new learning, proclaimed the gospel of knowledge, Comenius, as the greatest apostle of the new education, proclaimed the gospel of the school. And as the former rescued knowledge from fossilization by uniting her with her true spouse, the reality of nature and life, so the latter vitalized the school by giving it its glorious function, the forging shop, the nursery garden of the human race. Through it not only do individuals become able to attain their destiny as individuals, but the solidity and prosperity of social institutions rest upon it.

The Reformation ideal finds its culmination in the educational scheme of Comenius. Erudition, which was formerly only the privilege of scholars; morality, which used to be required only from the so-called guardian or citizen class; piety, which was left to the priesthood—were now all made the common ideals for every individual, to be striven for without regard to sex, occupation, or rank.

REFERENCES

1.Adamson, John William. Pioneers of Modern Education, 1600-1700. University Press, Cambridge, 1905. 285 pages.

2.Comenius, John Amos. The Great Didactic. Translated, with introduction, biographical and historical, by M. W. Keatinge. Black, London, 1896. 468 pages.

3.——School of Infancy; an Essay on the Education of Youth during the First Six Years. Edited, with an introduction and notes, by W. S. Monroe. Heath & Co., Boston, 1896. 99 pages.

4.Compayré, Jules Gabriel. History of Pedagogy. Translated, with an introduction, notes, and index, by W. H. Payne. Heath & Co., Boston, 1899. 589 pages.

5.Hähner, H. Natur und Naturmässigkeit bei Comenius und Pestalozzi. Lamprecht, Chemnitz, 1890. 87 pages.

6.Heman, Friedrich. Geschichte der neueren Pädagogik. Zickfeldt, Osterwieck, 1904. 436 pages.

7.Heubaum, Alfred. Geschichte des deutschen Bildungswesens seit der Mitte des siebzehnten Jahrhunderts. Vol. I. Bis zum Beginn der allgemeinen Unterrichtsreform unter Friedrich dem Grossen. Weidmann, Berlin, 1905. 402 pages.

8.Hoffmeister, Hermann Wilhelm. Comenius und Pestalozzi als Begründer der Volkschule. Second revised edition. Klinkhardt, Leipzig, 1896. 97 pages.

9.Kerrl, Th. Johann Amos Comenius. Sein Leben, seine pädagogischen Schriften und seine Bedeutung. 4 vols. Schroebel, Halle a. Saale, 1904-1905. 389 pages.

10.Laurie, Simon Somerville. John Amos Comenius. Small, Boston, 1885. 229 pages.

11.——Studies in the History of Educational Opinions from the Renaissance. University Press, Cambridge, 1903. 261 pages.

12.Melchers, Karl. Comenius und Pestalozzi; eine vergleichende Betrachtung ihrer Grundideen. Schmidt, Bremen, 1896. 47 pages.

13.Möhrke, Max August Heinrich. Johann Amos Comenius und Johann Valentin Andreä. Glausch, Leipzig, 1904. 168 pages.

14.Monathefte der Comenius-gesellschaft. Comenius-gesellschaft. Charlottenburg, Berlin, 1892-1908.

15.Monroe, Paul. A Text-book in the History of Education. Macmillan & Co., London and New York, 1905. 772 pages.

16.Monroe, William Seymour. Comenius and the Beginning of Educational Reform. Scribner, New York, 1900. 184 pages.

17.Müller, Walter. Comenius, ein Systematiker in der Pädagogik. Bleyl & Kämmer, Dresden, 1887. 50 pages.

18.Munroe, James Phinney. The Educational Ideal: an Outline of Its Growth in Modern Times. Heath & Co., Boston, 1896. 262 pages.

19. Pappenheim, Eug. Amos Comenius, der Begründer der neueren Pädagogik. Ackermann, München, 1871. 66 pages.

20.Quick, Robert Hebert. Essays on Educational Reformers. Appleton, New York, 1890. 560 pages. The same. (International Education Series), 1903. 568 pages.

21.Raumer, Karl von. Geschichte der Pädagogik vom Wiederaufblühen klassischer Studien bis auf unsere Zeit. 5 vols. Bertelsmann, Gütersloh, 1882-1897. Vols. I and III.

22.Rein, Georg Wilhelm. Encyklopädisches Handbuch der Pädagogik. 8 vols. Beyer, Langensalza, 1895-1906. Vol. I.

23.Scherer, Heinrich. Die Pädagogik in ihrer Entwicklung im Zusammenhange mit dem Kultur- und Geistesleben und ihrem Einfluss auf die Gestaltung des Erziehungs- und Bildungswesens. Vol. I. Die Pädagogik vor Pestalozzi. Brandstetter, Leipzig, 1897. 581 pages.

24.Schmid, Karl Adolf, editor. Geschichte der Erziehung vom Anfang an bis auf unsere Zeit. 5 vols. Cotta, Stuttgart, 1884-1903. Vol. III.

25.Spielmann, C. Christian. Die Meister der Pädagogik nach ihren Leben, ihren Werken, und ihrer Bedeutung. Heufer, Neuwied, 1904-1905. 361 pages. Part II.

26.Witte, J. Johann Amos Comenius in seiner kulturgeschichtlichen Stellung und seiner historischen Bedeutung für die Entwicklung des Schulwesens, im Besonderen, der Volkschule. Andreæ, Ruhrort, 1892. 51 pages.

27.Ziegler, Theobald. Geschichte der Pädagogik mit besonderer Rücksicht auf das höhere Unterrichtswesen. Beck, München, 1895. 361 pages.

CHAPTER III.

JOHN LOCKE
(1632-1704)

When the second greatest educational work in the seventeenth century appeared in 1693, the world was only a generation and a half older than when it saw the “Great Didactic.” While we find in Comenius a strange mixture of mediæval and modern thinking, Locke’s “Some Thoughts concerning Education” reflects entirely modern conceptions and tendencies. But the differences between the two works are not wholly due to the difference of the times; they are due more to that of the men themselves and their nationalities.

Though born a Slav, Comenius represents, in his personality and pedagogy, the idealistic and theorizing genius of the German nation. Locke, on the contrary, is a typical Englishman, and perfectly embodies the practical genius of that people. Compare the titles of the two books referred to above. How elaborate and ornate is the one and how homely the other! One might compare the former to a great piece of architecture, built up stone by stone with exactness of sequence and plan. Every detail is manifestly studied and follows a scheme previously laid out. The latter, on the contrary, is like a painting, or a work of artisanship, if you please. There is the design, unity and harmony, but these lie in the artist’s experience or mental make-up, and develop themselves as he moves his hand. Comenius’s pedagogy starts with the highest ideal of humanity, and then proceeds to consider how each and all can be made to conform to it. His plans and practical recommendations are also, in general, more of deductions from his basal hypothesis or philosophy than inductions from the considerations of the actual conditions and problems. With Locke the procedure is very different: a particular boy concerning whose education he was consulted is the starting-point. This boy has to grow up in a particular age, environment, and social class, and must be fitted to all these actual conditions. Not the ultimate end of the race, but the particular destiny of a real boy, his mentality, the best educative forces conducing to the possibly perfect fulfillment of his destiny, are to be the chief considerations. Comenius was a practical as well as theoretical reformer in education, but he was, above all, a scholarly priest, probably the best type that his age could produce. Locke was a great original thinker, the father of English psychology. But he was, essentially, and in its highest sense, a man of the world. In spite of his physical weakness, which hindered him from an active participation in the social and political affairs of his country, he was always concerned and identified with them. Thus the Christian citizenship at which he aimed was not a gazing from the stepladder of this earthly life toward the distant vision of heavenly perfection, but a vigorous, efficient, working and living with others as a child of this world. There is no bold brilliancy in his educational thoughts, but they are full of living truths which come only from the actual broad experience of life, and so can be applied to real life. There is in them no soaring transcendentalism. Yet if we intelligently follow his leadership, we shall find that it does not lack a glow of idealism which can illumine our earthly path. It is a sound philosophy of a sound personality who has seen the wide living world with his own eyes, and expressed his views with the scrupulous conscientiousness and the sincerity of conviction—a perfect product of great common sense. Leibniz, the great German philosopher, who recognized Locke’s Essay on “Human Understanding,” as “one of the most beautiful and most esteemed work” of his time, was disposed to rate his “Thoughts on Education” still higher. Even to-day, after we have become familiar with a host of great and modern thinkers, he finds such an admirer as Professor Laurie, of Edinburgh, who thinks “that no educational writer surpasses him.” Rousseau’s indebtedness to him is a well-known fact, and through Rousseau his influence extends to the whole continental development of educational thought down to the present day. As to the wide and deep effect which his thought directly exerted upon England there can be no question. Oscar Browning, of Cambridge, believes that Locke’s ideas “determine the character of our most characteristic educational institution, the English public school” (ch-III-ref:2: p. 118). And yet Locke had little interest in the public school of his day. England produced in him her ideal type of a gentleman, and he, as the incarnation of her genius, has formed the gentlemen of England.

Thus, the two greatest educational writers of the seventeenth century, standing at the fountainhead of the pedagogical stream of the modern era, present a very interesting contrast, which is not insignificant in its effects. If one is the harbinger of the idealistic and the theorizing pedagogy of the German type, the other is the champion of the realistic and empirical school of the English type. A religious tendency predominates in the former, a secular tendency in the latter. If Comenius may be called the pedagogue of public education, Locke is to be called that of private education. In the former, the emphasis is on the order, system, and method; in the latter, the stress is laid on the personal influence of the educator. While in the former, instruction is the main thing; in the latter, discipline and training are essential.

If we are justified in thinking that the intellectual side of the Renaissance attained its true destiny in the Baconian conception of science and its principles, so we might say with equal validity that the practical genius of the ancient Greeks and Romans blossomed again in Locke in the new soil of Christian consciousness. In spite of his sharing with Bacon a strong intolerance of the prevailing humanistic, classical education, it is evident that he imbibed deeply the spirit of ancient culture. He once admitted that “amongst the Grecians is to be found the original, as it were, and foundation of all that learning which we have in this part of the world,” and “no man,” he held, “can pass for a scholar that is ignorant of the Greek tongue” (ch-III-ref:7: p. 170). Thus, Sparta’s example of building up a vigorous physique and character in her youth through hard discipline, of inculcating wisdom through free conversation with older people, Pythagoras’s teaching of the harmony of body and soul, Socrates’s fidelity to truth and unbiased attitude of mind, Plato’s exaltation of virtue above all things, Aristotle’s ideal of a perfectly balanced life, regulated by reason, the Roman fidelity, patriotism, and statesmanship,—these together with the true spirit of Christianity flowed into his life and into his philosophy of education. Locke had, like every other reformer, his predecessors, such as Rabelais and Montaigne. But what was in them, mainly mockery and ridicule of the current education, became in Locke more positive and more comprehensive assertion. His philosophy of education was grounded on his new empirical psychology, which was, after Bacon, the next great stimulus to the intellectual activity of the world.

With the Montaignean dictum: “A sound mind in a sound body,” Locke begins his Thoughts on Education. This is, he says, “a short but full description of a happy state in this world—he that has these two, has little more to wish for; and he that wants either of them, will be but little the better for anything else” (ch-III-ref:7: p. 1). For Locke, the art of education was synonymous with the art of hygiene in its broadest sense—i. e., the formation and the maintenance of a healthful life, mental and moral as well as physical. How can we form such a healthful life? His answer is simple: By accustoming ourselves to a healthy mode of living. Habituation is the keynote of his whole pedagogy.

Although the human body was conceived by him still as “the clay cottage” of the mind, yet he wanted us to understand “how necessary Health is to our business and happiness, and how requisite a strong constitution, able to endure hardship and fatigue” (ch-III-ref:7: p. 2). So he began his treatise with the physical care of the child. A simple, rigorous life was his ideal, and so he prescribed the following rules for children: Plenty of open air, of exercise, and of sleep; plain diet, no wine or strong drink, and very little or no drugs; not too warm or straight clothing; the head and feet especially to be kept cold, and the feet to be accustomed by exposure to wetness. Locke studied medicine, and once practiced it with much success. And the hygienic rules above cited, which were the result of his own experience and experimentation, introduced almost a revolution in the physical bringing up of children. We see how subsequent writers, like Rousseau and Kant, reflect his thoughts.

His ideas of mental training rest on his theory of the mind. According to him, the mind of a new-born child is a tabula rasa: there is nothing innate in it; experience is what makes a mind. Every sensation one receives or every act one does, however small and insignificant it may seem, leaves some impression upon it, and contributes not only to the constitution of its content, but also to the formation of a definite tendency. He recognized the important rôle played by the unconscious or automatic part of the mind in our actual life, which is nothing more than an aggregate or a system of various habits. Volition has but little power against it; it works more “constantly and with greater facility than reason, which, when we have most need of it, is seldom fairly consulted and more rarely obeyed” (ch-III-ref:7: p. 91). Habit formation is, therefore, the great thing in education. The significance of any act of a child, of any educational process, is to be measured only by what kind of habit it is likely to lead to.

Although he compared children’s minds to water which we can easily turn this way or that, or to wax upon which we can impress any figure as we like, yet he meant to illustrate by this simply the extreme plasticity and flexibility of childhood. He was not blind to the great individual differences, and was perfectly aware that “there are possibly scarce two children who can be conducted by exactly the same method” (ch-III-ref:7: p. 187). Moreover, he says: “We must not hope wholly to change their original tempers, nor make the gay pensive and grave, nor the melancholy sportive, without spoiling them; God has stamped certain characters upon men’s minds which, like their shapes, may perhaps be a little mended, but can hardly be totally alter’d and transformed into the contrary” (ch-III-ref:7: p. 40). The uniformatization of method, then, is a crime of educational art instead of its aim. The only common rule to be fixed is not to have any definite rule, but to find out about every child, what his temperament, inclinations, defects are, and apply methods or treatment that are “adapted to his capacity” and “suited to his natural genius and constitution.”

In discussing the process of discipline, he first makes a plea for the free expression of the play instinct. “This gamesome humour,” he says, “which is wisely adapted by Nature to their age and temper should rather be encourag’d to keep up their spirits, and improve strength and health, than curb’d or restrain’d” (ch-III-ref:7: p. 38). A “misapply’d and useless correction” in this case may serve “only to spoil the temper both of body and of mind.” Our hope of education will be gone if we kill this tendency to spontaneous activity at its growth. For here is just the point of grasp by which alone we can lead children anywhere we desire. “The chief art of the educator is to make all that they have to do sport and play, too.” (ch-III-ref:7: p. 38).

Shall we then put no restraint whatever upon their conduct? No, far from that. Locke insists that even “the plays and diversions of children should be directed towards good and useful habits or else they will introduce ill ones” (ch-III-ref:7: p. 113). He demands a stern and rigorous discipline, and accuses parents of weakening their little ones by too much fondling. Children ought not to be allowed to satisfy a craving which comes from their whims and fancies and not from their natural wants. They ought to learn the control of their passions and appetites from their cradles, and so be kept in absolute subjection to the parents’ authority while their own reason is not yet developed. Their instinctive sense of awe should be utilized and obedience be made implicit and natural. But as they grow up, more liberty should be allowed, and friendliness, love, and even respect should take the place of authority.

Nevertheless, Locke does not believe in severe punishment. “The usual lazy and short way by chastisement and rod,” he thinks, encourages “our natural propensity to indulge in corporeal and present pleasure and to avoid pain at any cost,” instead of conducing to its mastery, and “thereby strengthens that in us which is the root from whence spring all vicious actions, and the irregularities of life” (ch-III-ref:7: p. 30). Again, “such a sort of slavish Discipline makes a slavish Temper” (ch-III-ref:7: p. 31). It creates a hypocrite who dissembles obedience, yet with his natural inclination only heightened and increased on account of external suppression. It creates “a low-spirited, moped creature, who, however, with his unnatural sobriety may please silly people, who commend tame inactive children, because they make no noise, nor give them any trouble; yet, at last, will probably prove as uncomfortable a thing to his friends, as he will be all his life as useless a thing to himself and others” (ch-III-ref:7: p. 31). It severs a child from the parent or the teacher who administers it, and causes disgust for work when applied for its enforcement. But in case of lying and obstinacy, which he considered as the two grave moral faults issuing from the conscious volition of the child, Locke allows and even advises us to resort to severe measures, in order to check them at their first manifestation. Here the rod should be heavy and unswerving, and not laid down until it has brought the child’s will into a complete subjugation. But he thinks that if we keep our strict hand constantly over the unnatural desires of the child, from its cradle, and at the same time give a full freedom to its natural wants and activities, we shall seldom find an occasion which calls for the rod.

Material rewards are equally condemned by Locke as the physical punishment. He admits, however, that pain and pleasure, reward and punishment, are “the only motives to a rational creature,” “the spur and reins whereby all mankind are set to work and guided.” “Remove hope and fear, and there is an end of all discipline” (ch-III-ref:7: p. 33). What he wished, was to accustom children to connect their hope and fear, pain and pleasure, with proper objects, in such a way as not to form those habits which are detrimental to their future happiness and virtue. There is a force or motive power in human life equally strong or even stronger than material, physical pain and pleasure. It is the sense of honor, the desire for esteem and the hate of disgrace. This shall be used as the lever to move the young. “Make his mind as sensible of credit and shame as may be; and when you have done that, you have put a principle into him which will influence his actions when you are not by; to which the fear of a little smart of a rod is not comparable; and which will be the proper stock whereon afterwards to graft the true principles of morality and religion” (ch-III-ref:7: p. 177). If you succeed in this, “by all arts imaginable,” “the business is done and the difficulty is over” (ch-III-ref:7: p. 34).

Locke does not believe in “charging children’s memories upon all occasions with Rules and precepts, which they often do not understand, and constantly so soon forget as given” (ch-III-ref:7: p. 38). Mere admonition or verbal instruction cannot teach what long experience and broad generalization alone taught the race. Even commanding is more effective than teaching. But the lesson by example, learning by imitation, is the method he recommends. “The tincture of company sinks deeper than the outside; and possibly, if a true estimate were made of the morality and religions of the world, we should find that the far greater part of mankind received even those opinions and ceremonies they would die for, rather from the fashions of their countries, and the constant practice of those about them than from any conviction of their reasons” (ch-III-ref:7: p. 128). If this is true of those in whom reason is already developed, still more so with children. So, the self-discipline of parents themselves, the most careful choice of tutor, friends, nurse, governess, and servants, are spoken of by Locke as a matter of the first importance. Nobody has felt the great significance of environment in education deeper than Locke. He says:

“Having named Company, I am almost ready to throw away my pen and trouble you no further on this subject: For, since that does more than all precepts, rules, and instructions, methinks it is almost wholly in vain to make a long discourse of other things, and to talk of that almost to no purpose” (ch-III-ref:7: p. 45).

The main aim of education for Locke is character-building, since he conceived virtue as “the first and most necessary of those endowments that belong to a man or a gentleman.” Next to virtue, wisdom is the most necessary quality for a man. Wisdom means “a man’s managing his business ably and with foresight in this world.” And since “this is the product of a good natural temper, application of mind, and experience together,” we cannot teach it to children. “To accustom a child to have true notions of things, and not to be satisfied till he has them; to raise his mind to great and worthy thoughts, and to keep him at a distance from falsehood and cunning, which has always a broad mixture of falsehood in it, is the fittest preparation of a child for wisdom” (ch-III-ref:7: pp. 119-120). The rest is “to be learned from time, experience and observation, and an acquaintance with men.” Let him inform his mind by engaging in conversation with “men of parts and breeding,” as soon as he is capable of benefitting by it, and send him to travel when he reaches mature adolescence.

The third important quality is good breeding. “The happiness that all men so steadily pursue consisting in pleasure—he that knows how to make those he converses with easy, without debasing himself to low and servile flattery, has found the true art of living in the world, and being both welcomed and valued everywhere” (ch-III-ref:7: p. 124). The aim of good breeding is to avoid a sheepish bashfulness on the one hand, and a misbecoming negligence and disrespect on the other; to cultivate a modest but assured, courteous yet not mean attitude of mind and outward demeanor accompanying it, this is “a great skill which good sense, reason, and good company can only reach.” Here, again, rules and exhortation avail little, unless good examples are shown. “Be as busy as you like with discourses of Civility to your son, such as is his company, such will be his manners” (ch-III-ref:7 p. 125). But young children should not be too much interfered with as to the outward manners; carelessness and clumsiness are natural to them, and age will cure them, if you only “teach them humility and to be good-natured,” and always choose for them good company. Dancing should be taught as soon as they are capable of learning it, for “nothing appears to me to give children so much becoming confidence and behavior, and so to raise them to the conversation of those above their age, as Dancing” (ch-III-ref:7: p. 42). To give a “freedom and ease to all the motions of the body” is the main thing in dancing. “One that teaches not this is worse than none at all: natural unfashionableness being much better than apish affected postures; and I think it much more passable to put off the hat and make a leg like an honest country gentleman than like an ill-fashioned dancing master. For as for the jigging part and the figures of dances, I count that little or nothing further than as it tends to perfect graceful carriage” (ch-III-ref:7: p. 174).

Learning is the last and least concern in Locke’s philosophy of education. It is, he recognizes, a great help both to virtue and wisdom in all well-disposed minds; but “in others not so disposed, it helps them only to be the most foolish or worse men.” When Locke saw “what ado is made about a little Latin and Greek, how many years are spent in it, and what a noise and business it makes to no purpose,” he could not but despise it, and say: “A great part of 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 disparagement to himself or prejudice to his affairs” (ch-III-ref:7: p. 74). “Learning,” he declares, “must be had, but in the second place, as subservient to greater qualities.... Place him (your child) in hands where you may, as much as possible, secure his innocence, cherish and nurse up the good, and gently correct and weed out any bad inclinations, and settle in him good habits. This is the main point, and this being provided for, learning may be had into the bargain” (ch-III-ref:7: pp. 128-129).

In learning, too, acquirement of habits is the chief educational process. Not so much to supply ready-made knowledge nor to impart the teacher’s own ideas, as to implant, by practice, a proper habit of reading, thinking, observing, and doing is the goal to be striven for. The educator must see to the constant and correct exercise of the powers to be developed. But premature use or overexercise is as detrimental to the vigorous development of the mind as neglect or too little exercise. “The mind, by being engaged in a task beyond its strength, like the body strained by lifting at a weight too heavy, has often its force broken, and thereby gets an unaptness or an aversion to any vigorous attempt ever after” (ch-III-ref:8: pp. 87-88). Children’s natural weakness of mind should be understood and not taken for their willful fault. Healthful activity of mind is the thing to be secured, and for this the following principles are laid down by Locke, which we may regard as the laws of hygiene of attention and association:

1. Keep up the natural tendency of children to free, spontaneous activity; if they lack this, awaken it. Introduce them to something, anything, which they can do with pleasure and enthusiasm. “None of the things they are to learn should ever be made a burden, or imposed upon them as a Task. Whatever is so proposed, presently becomes irksome” (ch-III-ref:7: p. 52), and they will form an habitual prejudice against it. This manifestation of spontaneous activity has its ebb and flow; so catch the proper moment as well as the proper subject for setting them to work.

2. Cherish the curiosity or natural inquisitiveness of children and give it encouragement. However foolish and trifling their questions may appear to you, do not forget that for them these questions are matters of great moment. Treat them as “a stranger in an unknown land,” and thus lead them to useful knowledge that they should know. Knowledge grows by constant quest, and thus only.

3. The wandering mind and the fleeting thought are the result of the natural constitution of childhood. It is the law of mental economy, especially dominant in children, that “their thoughts should be perpetually shifting from what disgusts them, and seek better entertainment in more pleasing objects” (ch-III-ref:7: p. 143). A frequent change of subject, introduction of some new, strange objects, making instruction interesting, and thus holding the involuntary attention, are therefore necessary in teaching children.

4. Children’s minds are strongly susceptible to emotional disturbances. “Passionate words or blows from the tutor fill the child’s mind with terror and affrightment, which immediately takes it wholly up, and leaves no room for other impressions” (ch-III-ref:7: p. 143). Therefore, “keep the mind in an easy, calm temper, when you would have it receive your instructions or any increase of knowledge. It is as impossible to draw fair and regular characters on a trembling mind as on a shaking paper” (ch-III-ref:7: p. 143).

5. However great the part which involuntary attention plays in the process of learning, the cultivation of the power of voluntary attention should not be neglected. Children should be habituated to the voluntary direction or control of attention “by trying them sometimes, when they are by laziness unbent, or by avocation bent another way, and endeavoring to make them buckle to the thing proposed” (ch-III-ref:7: p. 54). Some bodily labor which requires a constant vigilance and application of mind is recommended as a remedy for a diffused attention. The work interest stands to the voluntary attention in the same relation as the play interest to the involuntary attention. So, the former should be stimulated by letting the child see “by what he has learned, that he can do something which he could not do before; something, which gives him some power and real advantage above others who are ignorant of it” (ch-III-ref:7: p. 144).

6. We find in our mind often an association of ideas which is accidental and arbitrary in its origin, but once being established is almost inseparable and imperative. This wrong association “has such an influence, and is of so great force to set us awry in our action, as well moral as natural, passions, reasonings, and notions themselves, that perhaps there is not any one thing that deserves more to be looked after” (ch-III-ref:9: vol. ii, Book II, chapter 33, § 9). To prevent such erroneous associations in the mind of children, the strict order of learning should be observed. “Give them first one simple idea, and see that they take it right, and perfectly comprehend it, before you go any further; and then add some other simple idea which lies next in your way to what you aim at; and so proceeding by gentle and insensible steps, children without confusion and amazement will have their understandings opened and their thoughts extended farther than could have been expected” (ch-III-ref:7: p. 158).

Mathematics is recommended as a help to the training of reasoning power, for a mathematical demonstration represents the coherent process of reasoning. As for logic, he thinks with Bacon that it, “catching at what it cannot reach, has served to confirm and establish errors, rather than to open a way to truth” (ch-III-ref:8: p. 19).

No general improvement of memory is affected by any usual method of “committing to memory,” or “learning by heart.” For in his psychology (ch-III-ref:9: vol. ii, Book II, chapter xxxiii, xxxix; vol. i, Book II, chapter x) our memory of ideas or impressions depends upon the strength of power to hold them in mind—namely, attention, on the one hand, and upon that of the power to retain and recall them, on the other. Yet the intensity and duration of attention is largely determined by interest, and the retentive power is owing to our constitution, and therefore beyond education. Thus he says: “What the mind is intent upon and careful of, that it remembers best, ... to which if method and order be joined, all is done, I think, that can be for the help of a weak memory; and he that will take any other way to do it, especially that of charging it with a train of other people’s words, which he that learns cares not for, will, I guess, scarce find the profit answer half the time and pains employed in it.” For memory is not a power that is transferable from one thing to another. “The learning pages of Latin by heart, no more fits the memory for retention of anything else, than the graving of one sentence in lead makes it the more capable of retaining firmly any other characters” (ch-III-ref:7: pp. 154-155). Improvement of memory can come only through the formation of habits of fixating attention and of orderly association.

Thus, to sum up, learning by self-active, pleasurable exercise of mental powers, directed in an orderly manner and constantly repeated, is the fundamental principle of intellectual education.

Although learning was a matter of secondary importance in Locke’s plan for the education of a “young gentleman,” the curriculum he proposed was as rich as that of Comenius, and the practical suggestions he gives as to the teaching of each subject are of much worth. The subject-matter comprises: reading, writing, drawing, shorthand, French, Latin, geography, arithmetic, chronology, history, geometry, astronomy, anatomy, ethics, law, English grammar, rhetoric taught in a practical way, letter-writing, natural philosophy containing biblical history, and physics. Gardening, carpentry, turning, varnishing, graving, metal and jeweler’s work, and other manual occupations are recommended as healthful diversions. Bookkeeping also makes a part of a gentleman’s useful accomplishments. He recommends dancing and wrestling, but depreciates music, painting, fencing, and riding, from one reason or another. The main difference between Locke and Comenius lies in that, while one considers knowledge and information in themselves of great value, as deserving the dignity of man, the other values these rather for their influence on the efficiency and happiness of actual life. Comenius is often called the father of realistic pedagogy, but in my opinion his ideals of education and curriculum are still largely humanistic and even scholastic. It is in Locke that we see the complete victory of realism. Bacon’s influence upon Comenius was mainly in his ideal of universal knowledge. But the real spirit of the new scientific learning found its true supporter in Locke. Comenius drew his philosophical arguments for education from the Bible and from the analogy of Nature. But by Locke pedagogy was put upon a scientific basis—namely, physiology and psychology.

At the opening of the chapter, I contrasted Locke as the pedagogue of private education with Comenius as that of public education. Comenius aimed at the enlightenment of the masses, so the machinery of school was necessarily of high importance; hence the dictum: “Good teacher, good books, good method.” Locke, on the other hand, had in view the perfect bringing up of an individual; consequently, a good home with a good tutor was naturally esteemed above everything else. The advantage of group education lies, according to him, in that it will make a boy “bolder, and better able to bustle and shift among boys of his own age; and the emulation of school-fellows often puts life and industry into young lads” (ch-III-ref:7: p. 46). And the main disadvantage of home education lies in that it makes a youth more ignorant of the world; “wanting there change of company, and being used constantly to the same faces, he will, when he comes abroad, be a sheepish or conceited creature” (ch-III-ref:7: p. 46). But these shortcomings can be remedied by providing him good company at home and by later traveling. As for the inculcation of virtues and manners, home is decidedly the better place.

“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 a hundred scholars under his eye any longer than they are in the 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 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 every one’s particular defects and wrong inclinations) when the lad was to be left to himself, or the prevailing infection of his fellows, the greatest part of the four and twenty hours”.

“What qualities are ordinarily to be got from such a troop of play-fellows as schools usually assemble together from parents of all kinds, that a father should so much covet, is hard to divine” (ch-III-ref:7: pp. 48-49).

Thus we see that while Comenius pointed to an ideal school and preached its gospel, Locke, by showing us the defects of the school, persuades us to flee into his idealized home. The actual condition of the average home and the increasing need of modern society makes the school indispensable, in spite of its imperfections as an educational institution. Nevertheless, it is well for us always to keep our eyes open to the defects and dangers of mass education.

REFERENCES

1.Bourne, Henry Richard Fox. The Life of John Locke. 2 vols. Harper, New York, 1876.

2.Browning, Oscar. An Introduction to the History of Educational Theories. Kellogg, New York, 1880. 237 pages.

3.Compayré, Jules Gabriel. History of Pedagogy. Translated, with an introduction, notes, and an index, by W. H. Payne. Heath & Co., Boston, 1899. 598 pages.

4.Heman, Friedrich. Geschichte der neueren Pädagogik. Zickfeldt, Osterwieck, 1904. 436 pages.

5.Heubaum, Alfred. Geschichte der deutschen Bildungswesens seit der Mitte der siebzehnten Jahrhunderts. Vol. I. Bis zum Beginn der allgemeinen Unterrichtsreform unter Friedrich dem Grossen. Weidmann, Berlin, 1905. 402 pages.

6.Laurie, Simon Somerville. Studies in the History of Educational Opinions from the Renaissance. University Press, Cambridge, 1903. 261 pages.

7.Locke, John. Some Thoughts Concerning Education. With introduction and notes by R. H. Quick. University Press, Cambridge. Second edition, 1889. 240 pages.

8.——On the Conduct of the Understanding. Maynard, New York, 1901. 132 pages.

9.——An Essay on the Human Understanding. 3 vols. M. Tegg, London, 1832.

10.Monroe, Paul. A Text-book in the History of Education. Macmillan Co., London and New York, 1905. 772 pages.

11.Munroe, James Phinney. The Educational Ideal: an Outline of its Growth in Modern Times. Heath & Co., Boston, 1896. 262 pages.

12.Quick, Robert Hebert. Essays on Educational Reformers. Appleton, New York, 1890. 560 pages. The same. (International Education Series), 1903. 562 pages.

13.Raumer, Karl von. Geschichte der Pädagogik vom Wiederaufblühen klassischer Studien bis auf unsere Zeit. 5 vols. Bertelsmann, Gütersloh, 1882-1897.

14.Rein, Georg Wilhelm, editor. Encyklopädisches Handbuch der Pädagogik. 8 vols. Beyer, Langensalza, 1895-1906. Vol. IV.

15.Scherer, Heinrich. Die Pädagogik in ihrer Entwicklung im Zusammenhange mit dem Kultur- und Geistesleben und ihrem Einfluss auf die Gestaltung des Erziehungs- und Bildungswesens. Vol. I. Die Pädagogik vor Pestalozzi. Brandstetter, Leipzig, 1897. 581 pages.

16.Schmid, Karl Adolph, editor. Geschichte der Erziehung vom Anfang an bis auf unsere Zeit. 5 vols. Cotta, Stuttgart, 1884-1902. Vol. IV. Parts I and II.

17.Spielmann, C. Christian. Die Meister der Pädagogik nach ihren Leben, ihren Werken, und ihrer Bedeutung. Heufer, Neuwied, 1904-1905. 365 pages. Part II.

18.Wilke, Georg. Die Hauptberührungs- und Unterscheidungspunkte der Erziehungsgedanken John Locke’s und J. J. Rousseau’s. Scheinfeld, Erlangen, 1898. 67 pages.

CHAPTER IV.

JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU
(1712-1778)

The limitation of the Lockean philosophy of education is the limitation of his personality. His practical, utilitarian, and rationalistic pedagogy may be good for making an efficient and respectable member of society, but cannot meet the demands of the whole human soul. Fortunately his pedagogy found its successor in just the right kind of man. What Nature spared in this English gentleman she bestowed luxuriantly upon the French artist.

In Rousseau we strike the prodigy of the pedagogic world. Such a personality is rare, and Nature will probably not produce another Rousseau. He was a man of no schooling and no discipline. His life was, in a sense, a life of vagabondage and of abandonment. He was, in the eye of Carlyle, “a morbid, excitable, spasmodic man,” whose motive principle was “a mean hunger,” whose faults and miseries are summarized by the single word, egoism. But it was to this egoist, this sensualist, that Madame de Staël attributes the honor of having inspired women to virtue as no other man ever did. And it was to this uneducated vagabond that the Western world owes the revolution in its politics and thought.

The Puritan prophet counted Rousseau among his heroes in spite of his constitutional hate of the man, granting to him this one virtue—the heroism of intense sincerity. I would add to this another characteristic which makes him a genius, the intrinsic beauty and wealth of his emotional nature. He was a Frenchman in whose veins ran the blood of a Swiss mountaineer. In short, he was a bold incarnation of the artistic spirit. Absolute independence, freedom, and satisfaction of all that is instinctive and spontaneous, this was the claim of his personality. But this, we know, is too beautiful a dream to be realized in the actual world of ours. Thus his early life of idyllic intoxication in the beauty of Nature and human sentiments was soon shattered by the cruel hand of social conventions and prosaic actuality: seeing the sacredness of instinctive nature everywhere trampled down by corrupted passions and vanities on the one hand, and by sophisticated refinement and cold ratiocination on the other, he raised the voice of protest against what they called culture and civilization, and made a plea for the entire reorganization of human society and of the race itself. Freedom from pedantry of superficial learning and accomplishment, from the hypocrisy of conventional morality, manners, and religion, from slavery to all artificialities and externalities, the restoration of man from his accessory life to his fundamental being, this is the center of his whole philosophy, which began in his negative answer to the question presented by the French Academy, “whether the progress of sciences and arts has contributed to the corruption or the purification of morality,” and culminates in his greatest work, “Émile,” in which he sets forth what he conceives as the only salvation of the corrupted race. “Émile” is the boldest assertion of this boldest child of Nature, and in the influence it has exercised upon the course of human thoughts and events we see the wonder of genius, and thus it will remain one of the rarest treasures in the educational literature of mankind. This book is, in the words of Niemeyer, like “a meteor which may blind and mislead a man, but at the same time can illumine regions into which the ordinary eye can only seldom penetrate.” Even Thomas Davidson, who shows little sympathy and poor appreciation of Rousseau, is obliged to acknowledge that “it has been given to few men to exert, with their thought, an influence so deep and pervasive as that of Rousseau,” and he traces the way in which this influence extended to “all departments of human activity, philosophy, science, religion, ethics, art, politics, economics, and pedagogy” (ch-IV-ref:3: p. 224). Especially in regard to the last department, with which we are now concerned, we could truly say with Oscar Browning: “He stands astride across the field of education. Nothing comes after him which is not affected by him” (ch-IV-ref:1: p. 153). So I might well add here that every one of us who is actually drinking from the stream which flowed down from him ought for once to go directly to its very source, and receive its refreshing benediction, which, in the phrase of John Morley, “admitted floods of light and air into tightly closed nurseries and schoolrooms” (ch-IV-ref:8: ii, p. 249).

Return to Nature! was the war cry of Rousseauean pedagogy as it was that of his whole life and philosophy. Here is his often quoted passage with which he opens his proclamation of war against the conventional attitude of education:

“All things are good as they come out of the hand of their Creator, but everything degenerates in the hand of man.... He is not content with anything in its natural state, not even with his own species. His very offspring must be trained up for him, like a horse in the menagerie, and be taught to grow after his own fancy, like a tree in his garden” (ch-IV-ref:17: i, p. 7).

This may sound to some like an advocacy of laissez faire principle. But the very word Nature presents an ideal, and to return to it or to preserve it, there is the need of educative effort. For:

“Should a man in a state of society be given up from the cradle to his own notions and conduct, he would certainly turn out the most preposterous of human beings.... His humanity would resemble a shrub, growing by accident in the highway, which would soon be destroyed by the casual injuries it must receive from the frequent passenger” (ch-IV-ref:17: i, pp. 7-8).

To preserve and develop “the natural man in a state of society” (ch-IV-ref:17: i, p. 337) is the aim of education. By “natural” he does not necessarily mean primitive and savage traits of man only, but all those tendencies, dispositions, qualities, which are inherent, essential, and universal to all mankind, whether inborn or developed in life and society. He writes:

“After taking a comparative view of as many ranks and degrees of people as I have met with during a whole life spent in observing them, I have thrown aside as artificial all the peculiarities of particular nations, ranks, and conditions; and have regarded those things only as incontestably belonging to man which are common to men of all countries, ages, and circumstances of life” (ch-IV-ref:17: ii, p. 79).

From this view follows, however, the elevation of the generic fundamental traits of man which express themselves in his instincts, sentiments, intuitions, and common sense, accompanied by the depreciation of the individual mental superstructure, which is seen in our reason, learning, artistic accomplishments, etc. Thus, to interpret in modern terms, the development of the generic psychophysical organism is the essential task of the education of the young as understood by Rousseau.

There are three agents of education—Nature, men, and circumstances. “The constitutional exertion of our organs and faculties is the education of nature: the uses we are taught to make of that exertion constitute 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 circumstances” (ch-IV-ref:17: i, p. 10). Of these, the first does not depend on ourselves, the second depends on us, and the third is under our power of control to a certain extent. So in order to secure the harmony of these three it is to the first that we must adjust the two others. Therefore, Nature—i. e., the law of the psychophysical organism of the child itself—must be the true nurse and trainer of the child. The function of an educator is simply to administer her oracle.

Then let us hear some of the oracles of Nature: First of all: “Nature requires children to be children before they are men”; and “by endeavoring to pervert this order we produce forward fruits, that have neither maturity nor taste, and will not fail soon to wither or corrupt” (ch-IV-ref:17: i, p. 108). Beware of forcing upon the child any adult standard, for “every age, every state of life has its peculiar degrees of perfection, a kind of maturity peculiar to itself” (ch-IV-ref:17: i, p. 246). The end of life is in itself; our aim is to live our life to the full; and this is happiness. “To live is not merely to breathe; it is to act, to make a proper use of our organs, our senses, our faculties, and of all those parts of the human frame which contribute to the consciousness of our existence. The man who has lived most is not he who has survived the greatest number of years, but he who has experienced most of life. A man may be buried at a hundred years of age who died in his cradle. Such a one would have been a gainer by dying young, at least if he had lived, in our sense of the word, till the time of his decease” (ch-IV-ref:17: i, pp. 18-19). Therefore, let the child live its own present life, which is the only reality to him; “let us promote the happiness of man in every stage of life.”

From this viewpoint Rousseau directs his indignation upon the current mode of education. He says:

“What can we think, then, of that barbarous method of education, by which the present is sacrificed to an uncertain future, by which a child is laid under every kind of restraint, and is made miserable, by way of preparing him for we know not what pretended happiness, which there is reason to believe he may never live to enjoy? Supposing it not unreasonable in its design, how can we see, without indignation, the unhappy innocents subjected to a yoke of insupportable rigor and condemned like galley-slaves to continual labor, without being assured that such mortifications and restrictions will ever be of any service to them? The age of cheerfulness and gayety is spent in the midst of tears, punishments, threats, and slavery” (ch-IV-ref:17: i, pp. 85-86).

Liberty for all their healthful activities and enjoyments prompted and dictated by Nature, this is the fundamental Rousseauean dictum.

Another collateral principle set up by Rousseau, the full significance of which is only lately beginning to be realized, is that of education by inaction, by delay. He says:

“May I venture here to lay down the greatest, most important, and most useful rule of education? It is this, not to gain time, but to lose it.... We should not tamper with the mind till it has acquired all its faculties; for it is impossible it should perceive the light we hold out to it while it is blind.”

“Let the infancy of children therefore have time to ripen. In short, whatever instruction is necessary for them, take care not to give it them to-day, if it may be deferred without danger till to-morrow” (ch-IV-ref:17: i, pp. 114-116).

Do not imagine that there is no education when we ourselves do not instruct or train a child. “Before he can speak, before he can understand, he is already instructed. Experience is the forerunner of precept” (ch-IV-ref:17: i, p. 57). There is little danger in intrusting a child’s growth to the hand of Nature, and “so long as we know not how to proceed, wisdom consists in remaining inactive” (ch-IV-ref:17: iii, p. 172). Thus he opposes teaching a child a multiplicity of things. Ignorance is better than imbibing superficial knowledge and false ideas. He also rallies the encyclopedists of his day, who were “enamored by the charms of universal knowledge,” and likens them to “a child gathering shells on the seashore. He first loads himself indiscriminately with as many as he can carry; when, tempted by others of a gayer appearance, he throws the first away, taking and rejecting till fatigued and bewildered in his choice, he has thrown all away, and returns home without a single shell” (ch-IV-ref:17: i, p. 270). There are so many things in the world which we all need not or should not know. Ignorance is as much virtue as knowledge. Elimination is probably as necessary for the true advancement of science and humanity as accumulation.

But the knowledge he so much depreciates and the ignorance he thus advocates in children refer chiefly to words and books. According to him, the only true knowledge is that direct experience of reality which comes through the exercise of our organs and faculties; it is action that really instructs us. In his opinion:

“The multiplicity of books is destructive of science. Imagining the theory we have read in authors to be sufficient, we think ourselves excused from the trouble of learning the practice. Too much reading only encourages presumption and ignorance.... Such a multitude of books makes us forget the volume of the world” (ch-IV-ref:17: iii, pp. 188-189).

Naturally he makes mockery of the naturalists who “study natural history in their cabinets,” and would let his child Émile have “a cabinet much better furnished than that of crowned heads—the whole globe.” Teach the child with objects, by its own experience of them; never substitute the shadow unless where it is impossible to exhibit the substance; this is his general rule of instruction.

The great psychological discovery proclaimed by Rousseau is that the child lives in a totally different world from that of grown-up people, that “childhood has its manner of seeing, perceiving, and thinking, peculiar to itself” (ch-IV-ref:17: i, p. 108). He says:

“We never know how to suppose ourselves in the place of children; we never enter into their manner of thinking. On the contrary, we attribute to them our ideas; and pursuing our own method of argumentation, fill their heads, even while we are discussing incontestable truths, with extravagance and error” (ch-IV-ref:17: i, p. 268).

No writer has ever before entered so deeply into the child-soul, and many facts first discovered by his wonderful power of observation are borne out by the more recent systematic studies. He is entitled to the name of the discoverer of childhood, and can be called the forerunner of child-study.

Another great discovery made by Rousseau, which is related to the above, is that there are certain definite stages in the natural development of the child to which modes of education should correspond. True, Comenius divided the whole educative period, which, in his conception, covers the period of physical growth, into four, and assigned for each of them a different institution. But his gradation was made rather artificially and arbitrarily, while Rousseau’s division was based on his careful observation of the actual evolution of the child’s body and mind, the correctness of which is rather surprising in the light of modern science.

The first epoch of human life begins with birth and ends with the time when the infant begins to eat and to walk. In this stage the principle of educating by inaction, on the part of the educator, by leaving the child to its natural development, is to be strictly observed. Absolute freedom should be granted to the child’s growing physical being. He also made a strong plea for the personal care of the child by the mother, which is said to have created a fashion among aristocratic mothers of the day, of carrying their nurslings even to balls and parties.

“Other women, nay brutes, might afford it the milk which she refuses; but the solicitude, the tenderness of a mother cannot be supplied.... Would you have mankind return all to their natural duties, begin with the mothers of families; you will be astonished at the change this will produce. Almost every kind of depravation flows successively from this source; the moral order of things is broken, the natural quiet is subverted in our hearts; home is less cheerful and engaging; the affecting sight of a rising family no more attaches the husband nor attracts the eyes of the stranger; the mother is less truly respectable whose children are not about her; families are no longer places of residence; habit no longer enforces the ties of blood; there are no fathers, no mothers, children, brothers, nor sisters; they hardly know, how should they love, each other? Each cares for no one but himself; and when home affords only a melancholy solitude, it is natural for us to seek diversion elsewhere” (ch-IV-ref:17: i, pp. 24-25).

This impeachment made upon the depraved condition of the aristocratic home in France of his day fortunately sounds to us somewhat remote, but the appeal he made to the fathers is still to the point for our own generation.

“A father, in begetting and providing for his children, has in that discharged but a third part of his obligations. He owes a being to his species, social beings to society, and citizens to the state. Everyone who is capable of paying this triple debt and refuses is, in that respect, criminal; and perhaps is more so when he pays it by halves. He who is incapable of performing the duties of a father has no right to be one. Neither poverty nor business nor personal importance can dispense with parents nursing and educating their children” (ch-IV-ref:17: i, pp. 31-32).

Although it is our duty to assist infants and supply their deficiencies, since they are yet physical weaklings, yet “every assistance afforded them should be confined to real utility, without administering anything to the indulgence of their caprice or unreasonable humors” (ch-IV-ref:17: i, p. 70). We must carefully study the meaning of their inarticulate speech and gestures, in order to distinguish between their natural wants and whimsical claims. The principle of the whole matter is “to give children more real liberty and less command; to leave them more to do of themselves than to require of others” (ch-IV-ref:17: i, p. 70). Thus they shall learn to confine their desires to their abilities, and harmony shall be established between the want and the power to satisfy it, the disparity of which is the source of all human miseries. He also speaks of the uselessness and harmfulness of providing elaborate toys, and forcing speech too early upon the child.

Now we come to what he calls the age of puerility, extending from the advent of speech to the dawn of puberty. “His memory extends the sense of his identity to every moment of his existence; he becomes always one and the same person, and of course already susceptible of happiness or misery. From this time therefore he must be considered as a moral being” (ch-IV-ref:17: i, p. 85). If the preceding stage was the period of education by natural growth, this one is the period of training, but without instruction. His sensory-motor being is at its greatest activity, with the least activity in the thinking self. It is, therefore, preëminently the age for habit formation. Our principle still should be “to lose time,” so far as the inculcation of knowledge or ideas is concerned. “Teach nothing if you can help it” is to be the motto. Action is the monitor of the child at this age; our business is simply to guide it without the air of restraint. To those who are alarmed at this idea Rousseau says:

“Is it nothing, then, to spend his time in freedom and happiness? Dancing, playing, and running about all day, is this doing nothing? Depend on it, he will never be so fully employed again during life” (ch-IV-ref:17: i, p. 142).

He compares the child whose undeveloped intellect is taxed in order to make the most of its time to one who, in his eagerness for work, determines never to go to sleep. “Infancy is the sleep of Reason” (ch-IV-ref:17: i, p. 143); by depriving her of it, you thrust her into the arms of death.

“The apparent facility with which children seem to learn, operates greatly to their prejudice and, though we do not observe it, is a plain proof that they learn nothing.... A child retains the words, but the ideas accompanying them are reflected back again; those who hear him repeat, may understand what he means; but he himself knows nothing of the matter” (ch-IV-ref:17: i, p. 143).

“What, then, does it signify to imprint on their minds a catalogue of signs which to them represent nothing?... In the very first unintelligible sentence with which a child sits down satisfied, in the very first thing he takes upon trust, or learns from others, without being himself convinced of its utility, he loses part of his understanding; and he may figure long in the eyes of fools before he will be able to repair a considerable loss” (ch-IV-ref:17: i, p. 152).

And since “no science consists in the knowledge of words, so there is no study proper for children” (ch-IV-ref:17: i, p. 152). Rousseau’s pupil, Émile, “will hardly know what a book is at twelve years of age” (ch-IV-ref:17: i, p. 162). In his opinion, “reading is a vexation to children; ... it is good for nothing, but to disgust and fatigue them till they see its use” (ch-IV-ref:17: i, p. 162). As for writing, he says he is ashamed of condescending to discuss such a trifling subject. On the other hand, the acquisition power of which children are possessed can be fully engaged in other things than studying books. Instead of beginning by teaching the child how to read and write according to the time-honored custom of his day, Rousseau would give it as much opportunity to gather, correct, and broaden sense experience as possible.

“Everything they see or hear appears striking, and they try to commit it to memory. A child keeps in his mind a register of the actions and conversation of those who are about him; every scene he is engaged in is a book, from which he insensibly enriches his memory, treasuring up his store till time will ripen his judgment and turn it to profit. It is in the choice of these scenes and objects, in the care of presenting those constantly to his view with which he ought to be familiar and in hiding from him such as are improper, that the true art of cultivating this primary faculty of a child consists. By such means also it is that we should endeavor to form that magazine of knowledge which should serve for his education in youth, and to regulate his conduct afterwards. This method, it is true, is not productive of little prodigies of learning, nor does it tend to enhance the character of governess or preceptor; but it is the way to form robust and judicious men, persons sound in body and mind, who, without being admired while children, know how to make themselves respected when grown-up” (ch-IV-ref:17: i, pp. 153-154). “During the time that their supple and delicate organs are adapted to making experiments on bodies while their senses are as yet exempt from illusions; this is the interval in which we should exercise both the one and the other in their proper functions; this is the time to teach children the perceptible relations of things. As everything that enters into human understanding is introduced by the senses, the first kind of ratiocination in man is a kind of sensitive reasoning; and this serves as the basis of his intellectual reason. Our first instructors in philosophy are our feet, hands, and eyes. In substituting books in their place we do not learn to reason, but to content ourselves with the reasoning of others; we learn indeed to believe a great deal, but to know nothing” (ch-IV-ref:17: i, pp. 180-181).

If in the former period the educator simply ministered to the call of the child’s organism, in this second period he adjusts the environment to it. The close relation between the muscular and mental development is a great discovery of modern science. Yet with what an intuition of genius Rousseau has already seen this! He writes:

“It is a wretched mistake to think the exercise of the body prejudicial to the operations of the mind; as if the action of both were incompatible, or that the one could not always direct the other” (ch-IV-ref:17: i, p. 166).

“In proportion as the sensitive becomes an active being, he acquires a discernment proportional to his corporeal abilities; when he possesses more of the latter, also, than are necessary for his preservation, it is with that redundancy, and not before, that he displays those speculative faculties which are adapted to the employment of such abilities to other purposes” (ch-IV-ref:17: i, p. 165).

Moreover, “our limbs and our organs ... are the instruments of our intelligence; and in order to make the best use of these instruments, it is necessary that the body furnishing them should be robust and healthy” (ch-IV-ref:17: i, p. 181).

Therefore, Rousseau advocates the natural motor training which children receive in their free outdoor play as the most effective and solid form of intellectual culture. It not only secures the mental vigor, but also extends the sphere of our experience and knowledge: “it teaches us to become acquainted with the proper exertion of our forces, the relation our bodies bear to those which surround us, the use of those natural implements which are within our reach, and which are adapted to our organs” (ch-IV-ref:17: i, p. 179). Besides, free play is a good, if not the best, emotional culture we can give a young child, because the harmony of heart comes from the balance between desires and capacity to satisfy them, and in the full exercise of his instinctive healthful activities, this is vouchsafed.

In this way a full-grown child is built up—not young professors and old children, of which we have so many; indeed, too many. He does not represent a perfection of manhood, but of childhood, which is a totally different thing.

“His figure, attitude, and countenance speak assurance and contentment; his face is the picture of health; his firm step gives him an air of strength and vigor; his complexion, delicate without being pale and wan, has nothing in it of effeminate softness, the sun and the wind having already given to his skin the honorable tint of his sex; his features, though still plump, begin to show some distinguishing marks of physiognomy; his eyes, as yet unanimated by the glow of sentiment, have all their natural serenity; they are not grown dull and heavy from care and sorrow, nor have incessant tears made furrows in his cheeks. On the contrary, you may see, in his alert but steady motions, the vivacity of his age, the firmness of his independence, and the experience he has gained from the many and various exercises to which he has been accustomed. He has an open and liberal mien, without the least air of insolence or vanity; as he has not been kept poring over his books, his looks are not directed downward, nor is there any occasion to bid him hold up his head, neither fear nor shame ever made him hang it down” (ch-IV-ref:17: i, p. 249).

As to his intellect:

“His ideas, it is true, are confined, but clear; if he knows nothing by rote, he knows a great deal by experience. If he has read less than other children in printed volumes, he has read much more in the volume of nature. His understanding does not lie on his tongue, but in his brain; he has less memory than judgment; he can speak only one language, but then he understands what he says, and though he may not talk of things so well as others, he will do them much better” (ch-IV-ref:17: i, p. 250).

He is not a shadowy reflection of printed words and external authorities, but a whole-hearted expression of life and soul.

“Whether he is at work or at play, he knows no difference; both are alike to him; his diversions are his business. In everything he does, he is gayly interested, and pleasingly at liberty; displaying at once the turn of his genius and the compass of his knowledge” (ch-IV-ref:17: i, p. 253).

Till the age of puberty, the whole course of child life was “one continuous series of imbecility” (ch-IV-ref:17: i, p. 256). His strength was deficient to meet all the wants and necessities arising from his inner impulse. It was, on the whole, the period of accumulation of energy. Now follows that of its superabundance and overflowing. The abilities he possesses exceed his wants. “Considered as a man, he is very weak, but as a child, he is abundantly strong.” This period of early adolescence “contains the most precious moments of his life—moments never to return, few and transitory, hence the more precious” (ch-IV-ref:16: i, p. 258).

He is now first freed from the necessities of the immediate present, and can look for other things than those pertaining to self-preservation. Consequently, “he should throw ... the superfluity of his present being into his future existence. The robust child should provide for the subsistence of the feeble man; ... to appropriate his acquisitions to himself, he
will secure them in the strength and dexterity of his own arms, and in the capacity of his own head. This, therefore, is the time for employment, for instruction, for study” (ch-IV-ref:17: i, p. 259). During the preceding period we had to lose time. “The case is now altered, and we have not time sufficient for everything that might be useful.” The moment of emotional storm is approaching; “the term of impassionate intelligence is short and transitory.” Yet art is long. The principle, therefore, should be not to make the child “an adept in the sciences, but to give him a taste for them, and point out the method of improving it” (ch-IV-ref:17: i, p. 270). As to the subjects of study and their order, the standard must be our natural inclination and interest. And, according to Rousseau, our intellectual curiosity and efforts as well as physical activities are prompted by our fundamental instinct: the constant pursuit of happiness and avoidance of unhappiness. “Our innate desire of happiness, and the impossibility of fully gratifying that desire, are the cause of our constant researches after new expedients to contribute to that end” (ch-IV-ref:17: i, p. 261). And with the development of the organism, with the increase of its powers and desires, the sphere of its intellectual interest expands. “During our infant state of weakness and incapacity, all our thoughts, influenced by self-preservation, are confined within ourselves. On the contrary, in a more advanced age, as our abilities increase, the desire of improving our existence carries us out of ourselves, and our ideas extend to the utmost limits. As the intellectual world, however, is as yet unknown to us, our thoughts cannot extend further than we can see; but our comprehension dilates itself with the bounds of the space” (ch-IV-ref:17: i, p. 202). This is the age we have now reached. So the first science to be taught shall be physics, in its widest sense—the study of the phenomena of Nature.

As to the method of teaching natural sciences, Rousseau was the first who truly and fully embodied the Baconian principle in pedagogy. His way was to let a child-study the concrete, living nature, with his own eyes and hands, under the guidance of an expert, who understands the child nature as well as the objective nature. Although these ideas may be considered impractical and one-sided, they, nevertheless, sound with a good ring, in this present age, when science instruction has sunk into a second scholasticism and verbalism. Let me quote a few passages:

“In the first place, you are to consider how seldom it is proper for you to propose what he is to learn; it is his place to desire to know, to seek for, to discover it: it is yours artfully to excite his desire, to place the object within his reach, and furnish him with the means of attaining it” (ch-IV-ref:17: i, pp. 285-286).

“Direct the attention of your pupil to the phenomena of nature, and you will soon awaken his curiosity; but to keep that curiosity alive, you must be in no haste to satisfy it. Put questions to him adapted to his capacity, and leave him to resolve them. Let him take nothing on trust from his preceptor, but on his own comprehension and conviction: he should not learn, but invent the sciences. If you ever substitute authority in the place of argument, he will reason no longer; he will be ever afterwards bandied like a shuttlecock between the opinions of others” (ch-IV-ref:17: i, p. 263).

“The mere speculative part of science is by no means adapted to children, even when they approach adolescence;.... In your researches into the laws of nature, begin always with the most common and obvious phenomena, accustoming your pupil to look upon them always as mere facts” (ch-IV-ref:17: i, pp. 280-281).

The following passage because of its recognition of a much neglected principle deserves to be hung upon the wall of every schoolroom:

“Among the many admirable methods taken to abridge the study of the sciences, we are in great want of one to make us learn with difficulty” (ch-IV-ref:17: i, p. 280).

The fundamental cause of the superficiality and ineffectiveness of our school instruction lies in our mistaken desire to teach as many things as possible in as short a time as possible. This leads to the insistence on a precocious application to the studies beyond children’s interest and experience. And we complacently believe that we can make them understand these by the abundance of explanation on our part. But this helps not a whit. In the words of Rousseau:

“I do not at all admire explanatory discourses; young people give little attention to them, and never retain them in their memory. The things themselves are the best explanations. I can never enough repeat it, that we make words of too much consequence; with our prating modes of education, we make nothing but praters” (ch-IV-ref:17: i, p. 286).

Introduction of work interest—i. e., the motive of utility—belongs to this stage. “As soon as we are so far advanced as to give our pupil an idea of the word useful, we have attained a considerable influence over his future conduct, this term being very striking, provided the sense annexed to it be adapted to his years, and he see clearly its relation to his present welfare.” Remember that the utility must always be considered from the child’s point of view, not from ours. “A child knows he is designed to grow up to manhood; all the ideas he can form of that state will be to him so many opportunities of instruction; but as for those which are above his capacity to comprehend, it is better he should remain in absolute ignorance of them” (ch-IV-ref:17: i, p. 284).

Rousseau thought that the teaching of history and morality had no place in the education of early adolescents; their interest is in the objects of Nature, but not in men and society.

Being thus educated at the end of early adolescence,

“Émile has but little knowledge, but what he has is truly his own.... He possesses a universal capacity, not in point of actual knowledge, but in the faculties of acquiring it; an open, intelligent genius, adapted to everything, and, as Montaigne says, if not instructed, capable of receiving instruction” (ch-IV-ref:17: i, pp. 341-342).

This is, according to Rousseau, by far a better equipment for a boy than the smattering of multiple knowledge with the sense of saturation. In point of morality he is still nothing more than an animal following his natural instincts and impulses, which, not being spoiled by our artificiality, are healthful, and will build up themselves, as his age matures, into harmonious sentiments.

Now we come to the period of storm and stress, “the presumptive period,” the educational significance of which is so great, yet hitherto has been so little considered.

“As the roaring of the sea precedes the tempest, so the murmuring of the passions portends this stormy revolution. The foaming surge foretells the approach of danger. A change of disposition, frequent starts, and a continual agitation of mind, render the pupil intractable. He becomes deaf to the voice of his preceptor; like a lion in his fury, he disdains his guide, and will no longer submit to be governed.”

“These moral indications of changing dispositions are accompanied by a visible alteration in the person. His features assume a character; then the soft down upon his chin begins to gather strength. His voice is lost between hoarseness and squeaking: for being neither man nor boy, he has the tone of neither. His eyes, those organs of the mind, hitherto inexpressive, learn to speak; animated with a lively flame, their looks, though more expressive, are yet pure and innocent; but they have lost their primitive dullness and insipidity. He already feels their power of expression,... He perceives his sensibility before he knows what he feels; he is restless without knowing the cause of his disquietude” (ch-IV-ref:17: ii, p. 2).

Here commences the second birth of man. “At this stage man is truly born to live, and enters into full possession of the power of human nature” (ch-IV-ref:17: ii, p. 3). This dawning of the sexual life is the birth of the social self: man’s moral relations now truly begin. Up to this time self-love was the only real motive of his life, but now love of another self comes in, and if it is directed well, this will extend to wider and wider range. The time is reached when one’s study should be man and human society; when youth should be initiated into the world of his fellow beings; when moral instruction proper should begin; when religion can be taught effectively. Rousseau’s insight into the infant mind was wonderful; still deeper is his understanding of adolescent psychology. He would be immortal even if he left us nothing but just this part of his “Émile.” Many pedagogues would allow themselves to be led by Nature, so long as they are treating with young children, but as soon as they reach the age of puberty or adolescence they leave her or else loosen their responsibility to their pupil. Rousseau, on the contrary, would stick more to the laws of Mother Nature, and take the more responsibility upon his shoulders. He says: “Our care hitherto has been little more than children’s play; it now becomes of real importance. This era, where common education ends, is properly the time where ours should begin” (ch-IV-ref:17: ii, p. 3). What unites man to man is firstly his heart’s need of companions. “All his connections with his species, all the affections of his soul, are born with this sensation. His first passion soon ferments the other into being” (ch-IV-ref:17: ii, p. 7). Then, secondly, it is one’s sense of weakness, his insufficiency, our common misery, that render him social, incline his heart to humanity. Lastly, emotion and imagination are closely connected, and the rise in emotional life stimulates the power to realize other’s sufferings and joys—another connecting link of mankind. Until we come to the age of adolescence these elements are all lacking in the child. But, now, with the sudden outburst of emotions, moral education is not only possible, but most ardently needed.

“To excite and nourish this growing sensibility, to guide or follow it in its natural propensity, it will be necessary to throw such objects in the way of our young pupil as will most effectually dilate his heart, extend it to other beings, and separate him from himself; to hide carefully from his view those objects which, on the contrary, tend to contract the heart, and compress the spring of human selfishness; in other terms, to inspire him with goodness, humanity, compassion, benevolence, and all the soft attractive passions which are so pleasing to mankind; and to stifle envy, hatred, and all those cruel and inhuman appetites, which, if I may be allowed the phrase, render sensibility not only null, but negative, becoming the torment of those who possess them” (ch-IV-ref:17: ii, p. 22).

The pomp and luxury of rank, class, and wealth, “the charms of public entertainments, polite circles, and brilliant assemblies,” tend to sow the seeds of pride, vanity, and envy, and give a man a superficial view of life and human felicity. These are not the places for youth. If we come across the splendor of the rich and fortunate, show him the other aspect of their existence. Let him learn all the vicissitudes of fortune. Teach him to separate appearance from reality, the accidental from the inherent; to put no value on birth, rank, or riches, but estimate and respect man as man. The contact with the life of the common people is more educative than the society of the rich and high classes. For the former presents the truer picture of humanity, with its toils and sufferings. It, at the same time, cultivates in him the sense of contentment with his lot and compassion with others. By thus directing the newly arisen impulse of love into a broader channel, we may hope to “blunt the dangerous edge of inclination and divert the attention of nature while we follow her dictates” (ch-IV-ref:17: ii, p. 37).

Sex pedagogy, which has lately come to be one of the burning questions in education, already received full attention from Rousseau. “A total ignorance of certain things,” he thinks, “were perhaps the most to be wished; but children should learn betimes what it is impossible always to conceal from them.” Avoid any words or conduct before them, which might become the cause of their curiosity. When their curiosity about the matter is premature or not genuine, you may impose silence upon them with safety. It is much better than telling a falsehood. “Your conduct with regard to your pupil greatly depends on his particular situation; the people by whom he is surrounded, and many other circumstances. It is of importance to leave nothing to chance; and if you are not positively certain that you can keep him ignorant of the difference of sex till the age of sixteen, be careful to let him know it before the age of ten” (ch-IV-ref:17: ii, p. 11). But when he reaches the age of sixteen or so, “make no scruple to instruct him in those dangerous mysteries, which you so long and so carefully concealed from his sight” (ch-IV-ref:17: ii, p. 204). Your instruction must “be concise, serious, and determined, without seeming to hesitate” (ch-IV-ref:17: ii, p. 11). Of course, strict truth must be told and at the same time the matter impressed upon him as the most sacred thing.

As for the measures to retard the progress of Nature in him, books, solitude, idleness, a sedentary and effeminate life, the company of young people is to be avoided. The city is not a proper abode for many plain reasons, so the boy should be taken out into the country. “He must have some new exercise, which shall engage him by its novelty, keep him fully employed, and administer to his pleasure and diversion” (ch-IV-ref:17: ii, p. 207).

However, as age advances there will come a time when these negative means no longer work. Then must positive measures be taken in order to lead the youth to the proper road of sex relation. “The passions can never be mastered but by themselves: by their empire you must combat their tyranny.” So Rousseau would flatter now, instead of suppress, this noble passion in his pupil, and endeavor to make its fire burn pure. “By rendering him sensible of the charms which a union of hearts adds to the allurement of sense, I shall give him a disrelish to debauchery, and render him wise, by inspiring him with love” (ch-IV-ref:17: ii, p. 221). Then, after preparing him by the formation, in his mind, of the picture of an ideal girlhood or womanhood, we lead him to the society of the other sex, to the life of courtship, which is a great education in itself.

The interest in the world is now keen; the judgment and discretion are fairly matured. The youth can go into it with much benefit and little danger, if his previous training has been successful. The study of history and biography will now give him also a knowledge of human nature.

Rousseau’s pupil Émile finds his angel in Sophia, who is by no means “such a model of perfection as nowhere exists,” but an innocent healthy country girl, “with such defects as shall hit his taste, shall please him, and help to correct his own” (ch-IV-ref:17: ii, p. 225). While courting Sophia, Émile learns a trade, mingles with the common people, and extends his service to those who need it. By this means not only his feelings, which are now intensified and deepened, expand to all humanity, but he also learns the psychology of unsophisticated souls, the sociology of real life, the vital problems of civics and economics. He conceives such social service as a great educational means for later adolescence. And striking it is that Rousseau so perfectly anticipated the essential principles of social-settlement work in the following passages:

“The practice of the social virtues roots the love of humanity in the bottom of our hearts. By doing good actions we become good ourselves; I know of no method more certain. Employ your pupil in every good action within his power; teach him to consider the interest of the indigent as his own; let him not only assist them with his purse, but with his care; he must protect them and dedicate his person and time to their service” (ch-IV-ref:17: ii, pp. 70-71).

“His active beneficence produces a knowledge which, with a more obdurate heart, he would have acquired much later, or perhaps not at all. If discord reigns among his companions, he endeavors to reconcile them; if he sees his fellow-creatures in affliction, he inquires into the cause; if the wretched groan under the oppression of the great and powerful, he will not rest till he has detected the iniquity of the oppressor” (ch-IV-ref:17: ii, p. 73).

“Thus interested in the welfare of his fellow-creatures, he will soon learn to estimate their actions, their tastes, their pleasures, and in general to fix a truer value on what will promote or destroy human felicity than those who know no interest separate from their own, and who act only for themselves” (ch-IV-ref:17: ii, p. 75).

Comenius already stood for education according to Nature; in Locke the conception developed and became more psychological. But with the former, the child was subjected to the Bible; with the latter, to the present society; it was in the “Naturevangelium der Erziehung” of Rousseau that the nature of the child was entirely liberated from every bondage, and made the sole guidance for education. His pedagogy rested on his observational psychology, and his psychology had a basis in biology. The body was not for him as it was for his predecessors, a mere “clay cottage” for the mind. But the soul and life were one. Man as a unified psychological organism was the conception on which his pedagogy rested.

Some one has said that Romanticism is the vacation of philosophy. We may also say that it is a rejuvenation, a revitalization of philosophy. No matter what our opinions are, it would do us all great good to take a vacation, if you please, and take fresh air, in this great gospel of educational Romanticism, especially when we reflect that our education has been so long under control of the pedagogic theories made by scholars whose interest and viewpoint always smell of the air of their study rooms. Man does not live by brain alone; he lives more by action and by heart. This discovery we owe to the great book of prophecies left by the greatest vagabond the world of letters has ever crowned with honor, Jean Jacques Rousseau.

REFERENCES

1.Browning, Oscar. An Introduction to the History of Educational Theories. Kellogg, New York, 1880. 237 pages.

2.Compayré, Jules Gabriel. History of Pedagogy. Translated, with an introduction, notes, and an index, by W. H. Payne. Heath & Co., Boston, 1899. 598 pages.

3.Davidson, Thomas. Rousseau and Education According to Nature. Scribner, New York, 1898. 253 pages.

4.Giraldin, Saint-Marc. J. J. Rousseau, sa vie et ses ouvrages. 2 vols. Charpentier, Paris, 1875.

5.Heman, Friedrich. Geschichte der neueren Pädagogik. Zickfeldt, Osterwieck, 1904. 436 pages.

6.Lemaitre, Jules. J. J. Rousseau. Calmann-Levy, Paris, 1807. 360 pages.

7.Monroe, Paul. A Text-book in the History of Education. Macmillan Co., London and New York, 1905. 772 pages.

8.Morley, John. Rousseau. 2 vols. Chapman, London, 1873.

9.Munroe, James Phinney. The Educational Ideal: an Outline of its Growth in Modern Times. Heath & Co., Boston, 1896. 262 pages.

10.Quick, Robert Hebert. Essays on Educational Reformers. Appleton, New York, 1890. 560 pages. The same (International Education Series), 1903. 568 pages.

11.Raumer, Karl von. Geschichte der Pädagogik vom Wiederaufblühen klassischer Studien bis auf unsere Zeit. 5 vols. Bertelsmann, Gütersloh, 1882-1897. Vols. III and IV. Parts I and II.

12.Rein, Georg Wilhelm, editor. Encyklopädisches Handbuch der Pädagogik. 8 vols. Beyer, Langensalza, 1895-1906. Vol. VI.

13.Rousseau, Jean Jacques. Œuvres complètes. 13 vols. Hachette, Paris, 1886-1903.

14.——Émile, ou de l’éducation. Nouvelle edition. Garnier, Paris, 1904. 638 pages.

15.——Émile; or Concerning Education. Extracts concerning the Principal Elements of Pedagogy found in the First Three Books. With Introduction and Notes by Jules Steeg. Translated by Eleanor Worthington. Heath & Co., Boston, 1888. 157 pages.

16.——Émile; or Treatise on Education. Abridged, translated, and annotated by W. H. Payne. Appleton, New York, 1893. 363 pages. (International Education Series.)

17.——Emilius. 3 vols. A. Donaldson, Edinburgh, 1768.

18.——Emilius. Translated by Eloisa. 4 vols. Second edition. Becke & de Hondt, London, 1763.

19.Schaumann, Gustav. Religion und religiöse Erziehung bei Rousseau. Siegismund, Leipzig, 18—. 80 pages (Päd. Sammelmappe, 181 Heft.)

20.Scherer, Heinrich. Die Pädagogik in ihrer Entwicklung im Zusammenhange mit dem Kultur- und Geistesleben und ihrem Einfluss auf die Gestaltung des Erziehungs- und Bildungswesens. Vol. I. Die Pädagogik vor Pestalozzi. Brandstetter, Leipzig, 1897. 581 pages.

21.Schmid, Karl Adolf, editor. Geschichte der Erziehung vom Anfang an bis auf unsere Zeit. 5 vols. Cotta, Stuttgart, 1884-1902. Vol. IV, Parts I and II.

22.Schneider, Karl. Rousseau und Pestalozzi, der Idealismus auf deutschen und auf französischen Boden. Fifth edition. Gärtner, Berlin, 1895. 63 pages.

23.Spielmann, C. Christian. Die Meister der Pädagogik nach ihren Leben, ihren Werken und ihrer Bedeutung. Heufer, Neuwied, 1904-1905, 365 pages. Part IV.

24.Spitzner, R. A. Natur und Naturmässigkeit bei J. J. Rousseau. Frommann, Jena, 1891. 103 pages.

25.Ziegler, Theobald. Geschichte der Pädagogik mit besonderer Rücksicht auf das höhere Unterrichtswesen. Beck; München, 1895. 361 pages.

CHAPTER V.

BASEDOW AND KANT
Johann Bernard Basedow
(1723-1790)

The revolutionary ideas contained in Rousseau’s works shook the whole social structure of France so violently that his educational theories were unable to make any systematic and lasting impression. It was the neighboring Germans who received them as the fire for their rising aspiration and the antidote for the existing evils in the field of education. At the head of this new educational movement in Germany under the Rousseauean influence stands Johann Bernard Basedow.

There is almost nothing in Basedow’s fundamental ideas of education which was not said by his three great predecessors and La Chalotais. But while these men were too much ahead of their time, Basedow, with his shrewd perception, saw the practical needs and tendencies of the age, to which he knew how to accommodate himself. Moreover, he, with his strong, though unstable, energy of will and indefatigable fighting spirit, could accomplish what scholarly Comenius, modest Locke, or the visionary Rousseau could not. He blazed the way for the march of realistic and naturalistic pedagogy against the tenacious resistance of traditional forces, and “succeeded in effecting a complete change in the whole nature of education and instruction in Germany” (ch-V-ref:8: p. 580). The establishment of the Philanthropium in 1774, which was continued by Wolke, Salis, Bahrdt, Trapp, Campe, Rochow, Salzmann, and others, heralds the dawn of new education in Teutonic countries. If Basedow was not great as an educator or an original thinker, he was, in the best sense, one of the greatest educational politicians or agitators we have had in the history of the world.

In the “Philalethie,” one of his earlier works, he already raises the voice of protest against the ineffective, futile, and one-sided education of his day. “Are not there too many doctors?” he writes. “How many of the professors, doctors, or masters will make themselves more useful by working with their hands, by becoming turners, etc.? It is certain that parents push their children too much to the scholarly studies, when the children would do much better to learn commerce, surgery, book trade, fine arts, and especially agriculture.” Again he sneers in the vein of Montaigne at “the learned men who are praised for the dissertations on Virgil and Homer, Corneille and Racine, etc., but who neglect to be good husbands, to be good friends, and to perform well their duties,” and accuses the mistaken purpose and method of learning which “prevents one from living with the people” (ch-V-ref:9: pp. 190-191).

He proclaims that the “chief purpose of education should be to prepare the child for a useful, public-spirited and happy life” (ch-V-ref:5: p. 42). To secure one’s own happy existence and to promote the general good of mankind is the end of individual life. By the happiness of an individual he understands a self-contented, cheerful existence, with a “sound mind in a sound body.” Not mere knowledge or accomplishment, but efficiency and virtue, power and character, are the essential things in a man. So, instruction, though important, occupies only a secondary place; the training, the formation of manhood, by inculcating good habits and dispositions, by guarding against the establishing of bad ones, is the first and chief task of education. In this respects Basedow is entirely Lockean. Requirement of absolute obedience for younger children, appeals to the sense of honor as the chief educative motive, are also common in both.

In the initiation of children to language study through play and playthings, in the abundant use of pictures, models, globes, etc., as the handmaid of verbal teaching, in the introduction of more realistic studies and manual activities, in the encouragement of physical culture, he again follows Locke’s suggestions, but carried them into details and elaborations in the practice in his institution. The emphasis laid on the physical culture in the Philanthropium especially became an incentive and model to others; Jahn, the father of German gymnastics, is numbered among those who have been inspired by Basedow.

In writing a text-book for children, comprising elementary knowledge of everything that ought to be known, Basedow took as his model Comenius’s “Orbis Pictus.” His didactics of language owes much to Comenius as well as to Locke. And in “The Book of Methods for Fathers and Mothers of Families and for the People” he foreshadows Pestalozzi. He believed with Comenius that the remedy for a large part of educational evils lies in “good teachers and good books.” So, besides the text-books, there should be an abundance of supplementary reading for the children and reference books for the teacher; school libraries should be established for the use of both. Institutions should be established for the professional training of teachers, with the model schools attached. In fact, the Philanthropium made the beginning of the normal school in its modern sense, and the flourishing age of juvenile literature came as the result of Basedow’s teachings.

The natural development of the child into an ideal citizen, through a free life of frolic and unrestrained pleasurable learning and occupations, was the central idea of Basedowean education. Rousseau’s motto, “The child for the child,” was not well understood by him or did not appeal to him. The chief inspiration he drew from the French Romanticist was the principle, “the child as the child.” And the child, in his understanding, was essentially a gayety-seeking, pleasure-seeking, noisy, restless creature. “Children are fond of movement and noise” (ch-V-ref:7: p. 23). This was the major premise of his didactic. But utility was another central principle which he shared with all French and English empiricists. And his conception of utility was more like Locke’s than Rousseau’s, namely, that viewed from the standpoint of society and the adult life. The child ought to learn everything useful for becoming an efficient, patriotic member of society—those things alone which are useful. This is the minor premise of his didactic. Now, what conclusions can he draw from these two premises? How a child could be built up to the requirements of adult life without acting against his child nature, how he could be taught everything necessary to make a useful citizen without restraining his playful instincts, this was the problem he tried to solve in his philanthropic institute. The invention of many devices and schemes—all manner of educational machinery was the result. And though he often carried things too far and left several trivial contrivances which have made him a laughing-stock of contemporary and subsequent critics, yet his historic merit as an ingenious inventor of many useful and commendable methods, systems, and plans is certainly undeniable. Moreover, by this ingenuity he exemplified how Lockean and Rousseauean ideals could be made practicable, and how they could be introduced systematically into group education. With all his shortcomings he is entitled to be numbered among the most influential educational reformers and the great promoters of human weal.

Immanuel Kant
(1724-1804)

If Basedow was the first great apostle of “the nature evangelism of education” in the practical world, Rousseau finds in Kant “his most illustrious disciple” among scholars. Kant was not only greatly influenced by Rousseau in his educational ideas, but even in his conceptions of morality, religion, and anthropology. Kant also put himself among the conspicuous thinkers of the age, like Goethe, Mendelssohn, Lavater, as an ardent admirer and indorser of Basedow’s Philanthropium, which he deemed an excellent experiment, opening a new way to the progress of educational art. But as Basedow had already modified Rousseau’s naturalistic pedagogy, so our Scotch-German philosopher, whose life was perfectly regulated by reason, also departed widely from the French Romanticist. Nay, the two are opposite in many respects. The rationalistic element is so prominently developed in Kant’s pedagogy that the Rousseauean characteristics are almost effaced. Kant learned much from Rousseau, but he was not, after all, his disciple in its true sense.

The founder of that gigantic system, which is said to have determined the general course of philosophic thought of the nineteenth century, has not left us any systematic theory of education. We have only a glimpse of his educational views in his “Lecture Notes on Pedagogy,” which were collected and arranged by one of his students, Theodor Rink. The grand conception of humanity, the large view of education was worthy of this father of German idealistic philosophy, but he does not always soar in the world of these great ideas; he condescends to come down to the world of actuality and discuss the details of educational practice in a Lockean manner. His lectures exhibit a mixture of the two tendencies: English Empiricism on the one hand and German Idealism on the other, and these tendencies, we find, also characterize his whole system of philosophy. Exaltation of reason, of inner freedom, and of moral dignity run through whole pages of his lecture notes, as in all his critical writings.

Education, Kant conceives as the humanization of mankind, through the coeffort of all members of society. “Man is the only creature that must be educated” (1: p. 101), because there is in him immense possibility which is not yet developed, and a grand destiny for him, which is not yet attained. Of the universal good and the perfection of humanity, which is to be the destiny of man, we have not yet reached a full and clear conception. Hence, education is the greatest and yet the hardest problem to which man can devote himself. “No individual man, no matter what degree of culture may be reached by his pupils, can insure their attaining their destiny. To succeed in this, not the work of a few individuals only is necessary, but that of the whole human race” (ch-V-ref:2: p. 10); because man lives in society, and on society, too; and any individual would never be able to realize a perfect manhood unless society or the race became perfect. Education must be, thus, the cosmopolitan process, in order to fulfill its aim. Then consider education as an art. “What a vast culture and experience does not this conception presuppose!” It can only become perfect through the practice of many generations, and advance by slow degrees, for “insight depends on education, and education in its turn depends on insight” (ch-V-ref:2: pp. 11-12). “Our only hope is that each generation, provided with the knowledge of the foregoing one, is able, more and more, to bring about an education which shall develop man’s natural gifts in their due proportion and relation to their end, and thus advance the whole human race toward its destiny” (ch-V-ref:2: pp. 10-11).

With this grand aim and task in view, education should not be left to the home nor to rulers. For “parents usually educate their children merely in such a manner that, however bad the world may be, they may adapt themselves to its present conditions,” or “make their way in the world,” and “sovereigns look upon their subjects merely as tools for their purposes,” neither have they the universal good so much in view as the well-being of the state; while the child should be educated not according to the present, but for the better future state of the human race—i. e., the ideal of humanity and its destiny (ch-V-ref:2: pp. 14-15). The rulers may help or lighten the task of education with influence or money; but the practice of education ought to depend entirely upon the judgment of the most enlightened experts, who best represent the highest attainment of the age.

Education consists in care, discipline, and culture, including instruction. The necessity of care arises from the insufficiency of man’s instincts for his self-preservation; the necessity of the discipline and instruction arises from man’s capability to rise above his instincts. The chief function of care is the prevention of the harmful uses by children of their natural powers; its nature should be largely negative on the part of educators. “We have not to add anything to the provision of Nature, but merely to see that such provision is duly carried out. If any addition to this is necessary on our part, it must be the process of hardening the child” (ch-V-ref:2: p. 39). All artificial contrivances are more harmful than beneficial for his healthy growth. Therefore keep his freedom and only prevent his forming effeminate habits.

By discipline “we must understand that influence which is always restraining our animal nature from getting the better of our manhood, either in the individual as such, or in man as a member of society. Discipline, then, is merely restraining unruliness” (ch-V-ref:2: p. 18). Reason, not instinct, determines good conduct. But, since man comes into the world with undeveloped reason “in the first period of childhood, the child must learn submissive and positive obedience” (ch-V-ref:2: p. 26). “The love of freedom is naturally so strong in man that when once he has grown accustomed to freedom, he will sacrifice everything for its sake. For this very reason discipline must be brought into play very early; for when this has not been done it is difficult to alter character later in life” (ch-V-ref:2: p. 4). Neglect of culture can be remedied later in life, but neglect or mistake in discipline never.

Kant’s view on care and discipline, in its general character and details, very much reminds us of that of Locke. Kant is peculiarly empirical here in his procedure, and his protest against playing with and flattering the child, against indiscriminate punishment, his plea for the freedom of children’s bodily activities, for early inculcation of self-restraint and obedience, for gaining the child’s confidence and respect, his opinion in regard to manners, and children’s crying, his advocation of the hardening process, all seem to be the repetitions of Locke in a modified language. In regard to habit formation, the two writers seem to differ from each other, for Kant repeatedly opposes the formation or fostering of any habits in children. He says: “The more habits a man allows himself to form, the less free and independent he becomes; ... for whatever he has been accustomed to early in life always retains a certain attraction for him in after-life” (ch-V-ref:2: p. 45). But if we read his lines a little more carefully we find this opposition more apparent than real. One emphasizes the establishing of good habits while the other lays stress on the prevention of the formation of harmful habits. Whether Kant ever read Locke’s “Thoughts on Education,” and was thus influenced by him or not, I am unable to ascertain. This great similarity may come from their common experience in tutorship. Or we might attribute it largely to the influence he received from Rousseau and Basedow, and not directly to that of Locke.

Care and discipline were in Kant’s view essentially negative functions. The positive side of education he calls culture. It includes the physical, mental, and moral training. It is the building up or the unfolding of naturally endowed faculties of man by their exercise. Instruction is sometimes necessary, but it is only as an aid to the self-activity of the child. Children should be provided with ample opportunities for such exercise.

What should be observed in physical culture relates either to the exercise of voluntary movements or of the organs of sense. As to the motor training, the first condition is that “the child should always help himself” (ch-V-ref:2: p. 60). Strength and skill, quickness and self-reliance are thus developed. He recognizes a coördinate relation between the sense and muscle. Touching upon the psychology and pedagogy of various outdoor games common among children, he recommends those games as the best which “unite the development of skill with the exercise of the senses.” Moreover, these games entered upon by the children serve them as an unconscious training for self-denial, hardship, privations, and the habit of constant occupation, and, besides, have a beneficial bearing on their social life. “A lively boy will sooner become a good man than a conceited and priggish lad” (ch-V-ref:2: p. 64). He also drops a line on the task of gymnastics, saying that since they are merely intended to direct Nature, we must not aim at artificial grace nor the perfection of performance. Thus, Kant not only shows his broad pedagogical view in advocating children’s games for the culture of the senses and muscles, but anticipates one of the great discoveries of modern psychology—the mentality of the muscles.

In mental culture we can distinguish two kinds: one “free,” the other “scholastic.” By free culture children’s natural learning by their spontaneous activities is meant; it is, so to speak, a play, a pastime, or an occupation in leisure. It goes on all the time, without our interference; our function is simply to observe and guide it properly. Scholastic culture, on the other hand, constitutes work, business, or an occupation by compulsion. “In work, the occupation is not pleasant in itself, but it is undertaken for the sake of the end in view.... It is of great importance that children should learn to work. Man is the only animal who is obliged to work. He must go through a long apprenticeship before he can enjoy anything for his own sustenance” (ch-V-ref:2: pp. 68-69). And it is in man’s nature that he wants occupation, even though it involves a certain amount of restraint. Therefore, Kant disagrees with Basedow’s view “that children should be allowed to learn everything, as it were, in play.” Play and work should go together, and the school is intended for the cultivation of the work interest and work-habit.

The principal rule of mental culture is that “no mental faculty is to be cultivated by itself, but always in relation to others,” inferior faculties only with a view to the superior (ch-V-ref:2: p. 70-71). The superior mental faculties are, according to Kant, understanding, judgment, and reason. By understanding, he means the knowledge of the general; by judgment, the application of the general to the particular; by reason, the power of understanding the connection between the general and the particular. Memory and imagination as lower faculties should only serve these higher ones. Culture includes instruction and teaching, but its chief aim should be not to impart knowledge, but to train general and particular faculties. The various subjects of the curriculum are to be simply means for mental gymnastics, but not the ends in themselves. “It is culture which brings out ability. Ability is the possession of a faculty which is capable of being adapted to various ends” (ch-V-ref:2: p. 19).

To mental culture the inculcation of prudence and civility should be added, for by this man is made fit to live in harmony with society at large. But “the moralization of humanity” is the highest aim of education. According to Kant, “We live in the epoch of disciplining, culturing, and civilizing, but we are still a long way off from the epoch of moralizing” (ch-V-ref:1: p. 124). Discipline is negative; it is the prevention of evil tendencies and of defective growth. Moral culture is positive; it is the inculcation of principles, the shaping of the manner of thinking. It is not mere formation of good manners or habits, but the establishment of character.

Character consists in firmness of purpose and the power to realize it, persistency in the choice of one aim or object, and the renunciation of hindering desires and inclinations. Character is the result of such consistency in the exercise of inner freedom of will. Sudden conversion cannot transform a man’s personality from a vicious to a virtuous one, nor can any artificial, external means, such as mortifications, fastings, pilgrimages, and the like. A man who acts without settled principles, with no uniformity, has no character. A man may have a good heart and no character, because he is dependent upon impulses, and does not act according to maxims. Firmness and unity of principles are essential to character. So, he says: “First form character, then a good character.”

A good character consists in the readiness to act according to moral principles, which the inner reason gives us as necessary and universal laws. The youth, therefore, must be taught to honor reason, and be allowed to exercise his inner freedom of personality. But in the case of younger children things are different. Reason is not yet developed in them, so they must first begin by following the external reason exercised for them—namely, they must be accustomed to give prompt obedience to the objective laws assigned by parents or schools. And although willing obedience is desirable and important, even “absolute” obedience is necessary to prepare the child “for the fulfilment of laws that he will have to obey later, as a citizen, even though he may not like them” (ch-V-ref:2: p. 86). Of course, it goes without saying, that these laws assigned by teachers or parents should always represent the universal laws, not their caprice or arbitrary will. Kant is not so rigorous in regard to the moral education of children as he is in his moral metaphysics. He admits a place for “inclination,” and permits use to be made of children’s instinct of fear. Yet he still makes a plea for the inculcation of the sense of duty, saying: “Even though a child should not be able to see the reason of a duty, it is nevertheless better that certain things should be prescribed to him in this way; for, after all, a child will always be able to see that he has certain duties as a child, while it will be more difficult for him to see that he has certain duties as a human being” (ch-V-ref:2: p. 87). The duties they have to perform must be placed, as far as possible, by examples and rules.

According to Kant, the child’s duty toward himself consists in “being conscious that man possesses a certain dignity, which ennobles him above all other creatures,” and in “so acting as not to violate in his own person this dignity of mankind” (ch-V-ref:2: p. 101). Uncleanness, lying, and the like should be most effectively taught as unbecoming to mankind and degrading to oneself, and at the critical period of adolescence, the idea of dignity of man can alone suffice to keep young men in bound. The child’s duty toward others consists in the recognition of the dignity of mankind in the personality of others—namely, in justice. “A child should learn early to reverence and respect the rights of others, and we must be careful to see that his reverence is realized in his actions” (ch-V-ref:2: p. 102). Generosity is a virtue beyond the child’s comprehension and power. As to benevolence, it is well to arouse the sympathies of children, “not so much to feel for the sorrows of others as to a sense of their duty to help them” (ch-V-ref:2: p. 104). Children ought to be prevented from contracting a habit of sentimental, maudlin, sympathy, which is really nothing else than the delicacy of sensitiveness, and is “an evil, consisting as it does merely in lamenting over a thing” (ch-V-ref:2: p. 97).

We must avoid exciting emulation, envy, or pride in a child by comparing his work with that of others. He ought only to compare himself with the conceptions of reason, or with the standard of moral perfection. Yet, on the other hand, frankness and unassuming confidence is a desirable virtue to be cultivated, which will “enable him to exhibit his talent in a becoming manner.”

Kant recommends as a means of cultivating children’s moral ideas the use of a catechism, which “should contain, in popular form, every day questions of right and wrong.” For youth, the Socratic method is recommended as cultivating best the moral as well as logical reason.

Early adolescence receives special consideration from him. He saw, with Rousseau, a peculiar educational need of the period.

“Nature has spread a certain veil of secrecy over this subject, as if it were something unseemly for man, and merely an animal need in man. She has, however, sought to unite it, as far as possible, with every kind of morality” (ch-V-ref:2: p. 115).

Sex-consciousness is the natural result of physiological growth. “Thus it is impossible to keep the youth in ignorance and the innocence which belongs to ignorance. By silence, the evil is but increased. We must speak openly, clearly, and definitely with the youth. We must allow that it is a delicate point, for we cannot look upon it as a subject for open conversation; but if we enter with sympathy into his impulses all will go well” (ch-V-ref:2: p. 116). We must guard the youth from the unnatural vices common among them and also from too early marriage. We must cultivate in them a proper respect for the other sex, and the true conception of a happy marriage.

At this time the youth begins to be conscious of the distinction of rank and the inequality of men. “As a child he must not be allowed to notice this.” As a youth, “the consciousness of the equality of men together with their civil inequality may be taught him little by little” (ch-V-ref:2: p. 119). Interest in others and in the progress of the world should now be encouraged. Kant’s cosmopolitanism here flashes forth:

“Children should be made acquainted with this interest, so that it may give warmth to their hearts. They should learn to rejoice at the world’s progress, although it may not be to their own advantage or to that of their country” (ch-V-ref:2: p. 121).

Morality and religion were for Kant one and inseparable at bottom. Religion is nothing else than “the consciousness of all our duties as divine commands.” Or it is “the law in us in so far as it derives emphasis from a Lawgiver and Judge above us” (ch-V-ref:2: p. 111). Morality is the realization of duties from the consciousness of the inner law. The relation of our actions to this inner law we call conscience. “The reproaches of conscience will be without effect if it be not considered as the representative of God, who has His lofty seat above us, but who has also established a tribunal in us” (ch-V-ref:1: p. 215). On the other hand, if religion is not joined with a moral conscientiousness, it is of no effect. The rationalism of the eighteenth century did not recognize, or rather did not justify, the æsthetic side of religion. So Kant thought all religious acts without morality “a superstitious worship.” Religious education is nothing more or less than the inculcation of the consciousness of the inner law and the Lawgiver. As to the common usages of worship, the more ignorant the child is the better. “This much is certain,” he says, “that, could it be brought about that children should never witness a single act of veneration to God, never even hear the name of God spoken, it might then be the right order of things to teach them first about ends and aims, and of what concerns mankind; to sharpen their judgment; to instruct them in the order and beauty of the works of Nature; then to add a wider knowledge of the structure of the universe; and then only might be revealed to them for the first time the idea of a Supreme Being—a Lawgiver” (ch-V-ref:2: pp. 109-110). But the actual condition of society necessitates our taking a short-cut and giving early instruction to the child in the right ideas of religion.

This is done, Kant believes, by pointing to God through moral consciousness within the child and through the teleology in Nature without. Lead him to the understanding “that there is a law of duty which is not the same as ease, utility, or other consideration of the kind, but something universal, which is not governed by the caprice of men” (ch-V-ref:2: pp. 110-111), and he will come to be conscious of the presence of something in us, which is above us, above human creation. Show him “how everything is disposed for the preservation of the species and their equilibrium, but at the same time with consideration in the long run for man, that he may attain happiness” (ch-V-ref:2: p. 111), and he will see the existence of the universal law, which governs the world, yet is intimately related to himself. Kant thought these two as the only ways to reach the idea of God. One is the evidence of Practical Reason, the other the proof of the heart (Herzensbeweis). But here again in religious education he shows his indulgence to children, for he says:

“The idea of God might first be taught by analogy with that of a father under whose care we are placed, and in this way we may with advantage point out to the child the unity of men as represented by one family” (ch-V-ref:2: p. 111).

And the Christian pulpit has followed his advice. We can summarize his ideals of moral and religious education in his own words as follows:

“Everything in education depends upon establishing correct principles, and leading children to understand and accept them. They must learn to substitute the abhorrence of what is revolting and absurd, for hatred; the fear of their conscience, for the fear of man and divine punishment; self-respect and inward dignity, for the opinions of men; the inner value of actions, for words and mere impulses; understanding, for feeling; and joyousness and piety with good humour, for a morose, timid, and gloomy devotion” (ch-V-ref:2: pp. 108-109).

Ziegler, in his “History of Pedagogy,” epitomizes Kant’s most important influence on the general trend of thought as the remodeling of our concept of the universe, the introduction of exact and critical thinking, the exaltation of mathematical instruction, the substitution of morality of conscience for the morality of eudemonism or prudence, the last-mentioned being probably the greatest and most lasting one. Ziegler tells us further that “the categorical imperative” has since become “the steel and iron in our blood” (ch-V-ref:18: p. 282), and that the German victory in the war for independence owes its debt above all others to Kant and Fichte. As to his position in the history of pedagogy itself, we may say, with Dr. Ernst Temming, that “the German Rationalistic Pedagogy (Aufklärungspädagogik) found in Kant both its founder and undaunted representative” (ch-V-ref:17: p. 4). Like Locke in England and Rousseau in France, he, with Basedow in Germany, can be said to have firmly established education on the human basis, making moral culture independent of positive Christianity, and religion subordinate to education. Moreover, by proclaiming from the honored chair of Königsberg University his grand concept of the education of humanity, he gave to the contemporary and subsequent generations of scholars a stimulus to take up pedagogy as a work worthy of philosophers.

REFERENCES

1.Buchner, Edward Franklin. The Educational Theory of Immanuel Kant. (Translation of “Ueber Pädagogik” and fragmental remarks on education by Kant.) Lippincott, Philadelphia and London, 1904. 309 pages.

2.Churton, Annette. Kant on Education. (Translation of “Ueber Pädagogik.”) Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., London, 1899. 121 pages.

3.Duproix, Paul. Kant et Fichte et le problème de l’éducation. Second edition. Alcan, Paris, 1897. 260 pages.

4.Garbovicianu, Petru. Die Didaktik Basedow’s im Vergleiche zur Didaktik des Comenius. Bucarest, Leipzig, 1887. 82 pages.

5.Göring, Hugo. Ausgewählte Schriften, mit Basedow’s Biographie. Beyer, Langensalza, 1880. 519 pages.

6.Heman, Friedrich. Geschichte der neueren Pädagogik. Zickfeldt, Osterwieck, 1904. 436 pages.

7.Lang, Ossian H. Basedow: His Educational Work and Principles. Kellogg, New York, 1891. 29 pages.

8.Monroe, Paul. A Text-book in the History of Education. Macmillan & Co., New York and London, 1905. 772 pages.

9.Pinloche, Joachim Auguste. La Réforme de l’éducation en Allemagne au Dixhuitième Siècle, Basedow et le Philanthropinisme. Colin, Paris, 1889. 397 pages.

10.Quick, Robert Hebert. Essays on Educational Reformers. Appleton, New York, 1890. 560 pages. The same (International Education Series), 1903. 568 pages.

11.Raumer, Karl von. Geschichte der Pädagogik vom Wiederaufblühen klassischer Studien bis auf unsere Zeit. 5 vols. Bertelsmann, Gütersloh, 1882-1897.

12. Rein, Georg Wilhelm, editor. Encyklopädisches Handbuch der Pädagogik. 8 vols. Beyer, Langensalza, 1895-1906. Vol. VI.

13. Scherer, Heinrich. Die Pädagogik in ihrer Entwicklung im Zusammenhange mit dem Kultur- und Geistesleben und ihrem Einfluss auf die Gestaltung des Erziehungs- und Bildungswesens. Vol. I. Die Pädagogik vor Pestalozzi. Brandstetter, Leipzig, 1897. 581 pages.

14.Schmid, Karl Adolf, editor. Geschichte der Erziehung vom Anfang an bis auf unsere Zeit. 5 vols. Cotta, Stuttgart, 1884-1902. Vols. IV and V.

15.Spielmann, C. Christian. Die Meister der Pädagogik nach ihren Leben, ihren Werken und ihrer Bedeutung. Heufer, Neuwied, 1904-1905. 365 pages. Part X.

16.Strümpell, Ludwig H. Die Pädagogik Kant’s und Fichte’s. Pädagogischen Abhandlungen. Part II. Diechert, Leipzig, 1894.

17.Temming, Ernst. Beitrag zur Darstellung und Kritik der moralischen Bildungslehre Kant’s. Vieweg, Braunschweig, 1892. 55 pages.

18.Ziegler, Theobald. Geschichte der Pädagogik mit besonderer Rücksicht auf das höhere Unterrichtswesen. Beck, München, 1895. 361 pages.

CHAPTER VI.

HEINRICH PESTALOZZI
(1746-1826)

It was on January 14, 1789, in the desolate town of Stanz, “alone, destitute of all tools of teaching, alone!—superintendent, bursar, steward, and even maidservant, in a half-ruined house—surrounded by ignorance, disease, and unwonted things of all kinds,” that a fantastic Swiss began his career of “schoolmaster.” He had in his charge a group of orphan children, which “increased by degrees to eighty; all of different ages, some of good origin, others from the ranks of beggary, and all, with a few exceptions, wholly ignorant” (ch-VI-ref:13: p. 186). As his faithful disciple Krüsi tells us, “in the matter of ordinary acquirements and methods of teaching he was inferior to any good village dominie” (ch-VI-ref:13: p. 188, footnote). Without steadiness, without patience, without order, without art of speech, without clearness of thought, all that he possessed was the burning, self-forgetting enthusiasm of a loving heart, “die Vaterkraft meines Herzens.” “What a task,” he says, “imagine it; to elevate these children. What a task!” But he “attempted it, and stood in their midst, uttered various sounds and made them imitate them.” Lo! what was the response that came to this seemingly nonsensical teaching? “Whoever saw it was struck with the effect,” he writes later. “Truly it was a meteor that flashes through the air and vanishes. No one understood its nature. I did not understand it myself. It was the result of a simple psychological idea which had been revealed to inward consciousness, but which I myself was far from clearly understanding” (ch-VI-ref:13: p. 186). Is not this the beginning whereby “the laughing-stock of the passer-by,” “a straw not fit to sustain a cat,” became the corner-stone of modern elementary education? If one looks for an example in which the singleness of a noble purpose and the purity of a loving zeal alone could accomplish a great thing in the world, he will probably find no better one than that of Pestalozzi. Indeed, there is no more interesting and inspiring, though pathetic life, than that of this “greatest pedagogical genius who has ever lived,” as Ziegler calls him. It is a living drama, in which a new spirit of the age, or rather a new prophecy, struggles to realize itself, through the fetters of misunderstanding, the opposition of tradition, and the blows of adverse fate.

Pestalozzi was, before all, a social reformer. His pedagogy was a part of his social philosophy, or rather the last fruit of his fervent efforts for the betterment of his people and country. Having been brought up in poverty and among the poor, he was well acquainted with the actual life of the country people. The inborn tenderness of his heart, ennobled by the influence of both his devout mother and uncle, deepened by the constant appeal of the helplessness about him, could not but be touched by the sight of the mass of humanity which was without right, without comfort and even without necessities of life. “Dear people, I will help you up!” was the utterance that came already from the lips of his boyhood. And he confesses in his later age: “Ever since my youthful days, the course of my feelings, rolled on like a mighty stream, was directed to this one point; namely, to stop the sources of that misery in which I saw the people around me immersed” (ch-VI-ref:1: p. 671).

First, his childhood fancy was attracted by the good example of his uncle, and he wanted to follow his footsteps as a village pastor. While a student of theology at Zürich, he came under the influence of Rousseau, and was animated by an intense reformatory spirit. His immediate plan was to become a defender of the people’s rights as a lawyer. Then, finding his unfitness for the profession, he turned to agriculture, through which he intended to realize his philanthropic educational dream, according to Rousseauean principles. An orphanage which he established on his farm having a mill connected with it, Paul Monroe thinks, was probably the first “industrial school for poor children.” After having met with a succession of failures, ending in utter financial ruin, he turned “schoolmaster,” first at Stanz, then at Burgdorf, lastly at Yverdun. He organized an institute for female teachers. He became the trainer of educators who came from different parts of Europe and America to learn his spirit and method. Yverdun became the Mecca of pedagogues. Meanwhile he wrote extensively, not only on education, but on politics, finance, jurisprudence, prison systems and punishment, military affairs, industrial questions, and social problems, such as infanticide, home, and the church. But through all changes in his plans, circumstances, and activities, his central purpose remained the same—namely, the elevation of humanity working from within and from below. The poor, the destitute, the weak were always the dearest objects to his heart.

His pedagogy was by no means a studied one, like that of Comenius or Herbart. He is said to be the most unlettered of the great educational writers. But the true spirit and genius of the educator, which is more precious than everything else, was his possession. And with Pauline enthusiasm that “I am cursed if I do not work for these little ones of our poor fellow-creatures,” he simply threw himself single-heartedly into the task of their education. Thus his whole educational career was a series of experiments, and his pedagogy is its record.

If Rousseau’s plea was for the freedom of the “natural man” from the yoke of the artificialities of existing society, Pestalozzi’s was for the recognition of the divinity in the breast of even the humblest of humanity and its rescue from death. The worth of the poor and little was once proclaimed by the Founder of the religion of the universal brotherhood. But the gospel had been long forgotten until it was reproclaimed by the greatest lover of mankind whom the world has ever seen since Jesus of Nazareth. He is called by Mager the “Kant of pedagogy and didactics,” but I would rather name him “the Messiah of modern education.” And if Comenius’s philosophy of education was the perfect embodiment of the biblical Christianity of the seventeenth century, Pestalozzi was the burnt offering which the new humanized Christianity of the nineteenth century made at the altar of humanity.

“All the pure and beneficent powers of humanity,” writes Pestalozzi, “are neither the product of art nor the results of chance. They are really a natural possession of every man. Their development is a universal human need” (ch-VI-ref:4: p. 122). Yet how this need has hitherto been unrecognized and neglected, especially for the lower strata of society! And this is the source of such a deplorable inequality and consequent instability in our social structure. The true remedy would come not through charity nor through revolution, but only through technical, intellectual, and moral elevation of the great neglected mass by education. This was not a mere theory or an ideal conception for him, but a working principle. See what confidence and hope he put into the divine possibility of destitute children, and with what love and reverence he protected their sanctity.

“Children, your good fortune is great. At a time when the great majority of children go on in neglect and abandonment, with only want for their teacher, and their passions for their guides; in days when so many, so innumerably many, better and more fortunate children, suffering under a combination of harshness, violence, and bad guidance, diverted from the paths of Nature, not educated, but trained only to a one-sided, empty show of knowledge and equally one-sided pretense and fashion of practical efficiency, and thus offered up to the world; in such a time, you are not given over to abandonment and neglect; ... nor are the dubious impulses of passion used in your training. Among us, neither vanity nor fear, neither honor nor shame, neither reward nor punishment, as they are elsewhere almost universally used, purposely and as a part of the method, are used to show you the path in which you are to go. The divine nature which is in you is counted holy in you. You are among us what the divine nature within you and without you summon you to be. We oppose no vile force against your gifts or your tendencies; we constrain them not,—we only develop them. We do not instil into you what is ours, what exists in us as corrupted by ourselves; we develop in you what remains uncorrupted within yourselves. Among us, you are not under the misfortune of seeing your whole being, your whole humanity, subordinated, and thus sacrificed to the training of some single power, some single view of your nature.... O God, No! What I seek is to elevate human nature to its highest, its noblest; and this I seek to do by love. Only in the holy power of love do I recognize the basis of the development of my race to whatever of the divine and eternal lies within its nature” (ch-VI-ref:1: p. 713).

This quotation from his address delivered on New Year’s day of 1809 gives us the essence of his philosophy of education. To bring about the natural, harmonious development of all the powers, faculties, and qualities, which are potential in every human being, is the aim of education. The key to open up these treasures of human, therefore divine, nature is the most human, the most divine, power of love and devotion.

Now let us examine more closely and minutely the meaning contained in this fundamental concept of his, which, thus stated, seems nothing new or striking, but if truly understood and applied would cause an entire revolution even in the education of our present day.

First, what does Pestalozzi understand by the “natural” development? “There is an impulse in every capacity of human nature, which compels its development from lifeless inactivity into a developed power” (ch-VI-ref:1: p. 738). This impulse leads each one of our powers to a spontaneous activity or exercise, and Nature develops it by “the single method of its own activity.” This natural, organic unfolding of life, with its multiple activities, is necessarily harmonious when unhindered by human artifices or unfavorable environment. We must guard this natural harmony of human nature, upon which the peace and happiness of our individual and social life rest.

“No one faculty in the human child must be treated with exclusive or indiscriminate attention, for their co-agency alone can ensure a successful development of the whole being.” “Every one-sided development of our powers is untrue and unnatural; it is only apparent cultivation, ... and not human culture itself” (ch-VI-ref:1: pp. 736, 737).

Pestalozzi is not only antagonistic to that kind of education which “has an external, limited end of culture, of morality, of social efficiency in view, and wants to fit the child to this,” but he opposes that type of pedagogue who requires the child to conform to a plasterlike model of a perfected man. Each particular child is always the end, the object, the standard.

“Whatever, therefore, man may attempt to do by his tuition, he can do no more than assist in the effort which the child makes for his own development. To do this so that the impressions made upon him may always be commensurate to the growth and character of the faculties already unfolded, and at the same time, in harmony with them, is the great secret of education. The knowledge to which the child is to be led by instruction must, therefore, necessarily be subjected to a certain order of succession, the beginning of which must be adapted to the first unfolding of his powers, and the progress kept exactly parallel to that of his development” (ch-VI-ref:11: p. 611).

This method of leading or assisting the child along the course of his successive developmental stages in a natural, progressive order is what he terms “psychologizing education,” and this was the central problem of his whole experimentation, so far as the individual child was concerned. The discovery of his famous “Method of Elementary Instruction” was the fruit of his lifelong endeavor toward this end, but he considered his achievement only as a beginning.

Pestalozzi, in his advocacy of the natural, psychological method, seems to be echoing the voice of one who said: “Return to Nature, to human nature, to child nature!” But he goes deeper than Rousseau in his insight into child nature. While Rousseau pictured the natural growth of the child in an imaginary life, isolated from every human institution, Pestalozzi placed the child in his natural environment—namely, in the home under the loving care of parents. In the eyes of both, the course of Nature was divine and inviolable. But while Rousseau sought Nature’s work in the wilderness, Pestalozzi saw it in the home life. It is not physical nature, but a well-ordered home that can become the true cradle and workshop of human nature. Indeed, there has probably never been a thinker who emphasized the divine significance of home and mother so strongly as did Pestalozzi. His method of elementary instruction came from the study of child life in the home, and was first intended for home education. He was never tired of repeating that “a man’s domestic relations are the first and most important of his nature” (ch-VI-ref:4: p. 77). He earnestly endeavored to convince the world that “it is the domestic virtues which determine the happiness of a nation,” and that “the home is the true basis of the education of humanity.” According to him, it is only to supplement the absence of proper home education that schools are needed; home ought to have been the educational institution for children. So he speaks in “Christopher and Alice” through the mouth of the good servant, Josiah:

“It is well that there are schools; and God forbid that I should be ungrateful for any good that they have done to us. But with all this I think that he must be a fool who, having plenty at home, runs about begging; and that is the very thing which our village folk do, by forgetting all the good lessons which they might teach their children at home, and instead thereof sending them every day to gather up the dry crumbs which are to be got in our miserable schools” (ch-VI-ref:1: pp. 665-666).

Again he says in his address on his seventy-third birthday:

“The greatest evil of our time, and the greatest and almost insurmountable obstacle to the operation of any thorough means is this, that the fathers and mothers of our time have almost universally lost the consciousness that they can do anything—everything—for the education of their children. This great falling away from their faith, of fathers and mothers, is the universal source of the superficial character of our means of education.... Fathers and mothers must, above all, learn to feel vividly how great an advantage—as intrusted by God and their own conscience with the duty of educating their own children—they enjoy over any others to be employed as assistants therein. And, for like reasons, it is indispensable that there should be a general public recognition of the fact that a child who has lost father and mother is still a poor, unfortunate orphan, even though his guardian can employ the first among all masters of education in the world to teach him” (ch-VI-ref:1: p. 716).

Then, where lies the source of the peculiar educative power of the home? We have seen before that the art of education consists in ministering an intelligent, loving help to the natural unfolding of the child’s powers. But this term “loving help” is really too weak, prosaic, and conventionalized to express its deep meaning. It is more than mere kindness, mere effort of good will, or sentimental affection that is meant. It is giving one’s whole self, giving one’s essence over into another’s to be absorbed there, and to become a new power. To use Pestalozzi’s own metaphor, it is like the sun whose light and warmth silently penetrate to the soil, and in whose light and warmth the plants grow, bud, and blossom, unconscious of its influence. This kind of loving help can the mother alone supply to her own children, by virtue of the natural endowment of a maternal heart, “the most gentle and the most intrepid power in the whole system of Nature” (ch-VI-ref:1: p. 735).

Love is understanding: a dutiful mother will easily “learn to distinguish and direct each faculty before it appears in a state of development sufficient to evidence its own existence” (ch-VI-ref:1: p. 736)—the principal qualification for an educator. Love is educative in the etymological sense of the word: it brings out what there is in the child into self-expression. A loving mother is able “to open children’s hearts, and their mouths, and to draw forth their understandings, as it were, from the hindermost corner” (ch-VI-ref:1: p. 667)—the true tact of education. Pestalozzi compares the method of the ordinary schoolmaster with what he believes to be the method of maternal instinct in the following words:

“The teacher starts usually from objects, you from the child himself. The teacher connects his instruction with what he knows, in order to teach the child; you know in the presence of your child nothing else than himself and connect everything with his instincts and impulses. The teacher has a form of instruction to which he subjects the child; you subject your course of instruction to the child and surrender it to him, when you teach, as you surrender yourself to him. With the teacher, everything comes from the understanding, with you all gushes out from the fullness of heart. The child is childlike toward you, because you behave motherlike toward him; the more you are motherlike, the more childlike he is” (ch-VI-ref:16: x, p. 145).

Pestalozzi expresses his righteous indignation toward the schoolmaster’s fondness for the everlasting disciplining, drilling, mechanism, which only thwart the natural free development of tender minds.

“The schoolmaster seems as if he were made on purpose to shut up children’s mouths and hearts, and to bury their good understanding ever so deep under ground. That is the reason why healthy and cheerful children, whose hearts are full of joy and gladness, hardly ever like school. Those that show best at school are the children of whining hypocrites, or of conceited parish officers; stupid dunces, who have no pleasure with other children; these are the bright ornaments of schoolrooms, who hold up their heads among the other children like the wooden king in the nine-pins among his eight fellows. But if there is a boy who has too much good sense to keep his eyes, for hours together, fixed upon a dozen letters which he hates; or a merry girl, who, while the schoolmaster discourses of spiritual life, plays with her little hands all manner of temporal fun under the desk; the schoolmaster, in his wisdom, settles that these are goats who care not for their everlasting salvation” (ch-VI-ref:1: p. 667).

Yet, a greater, nay the greatest thing that the maternal love, and it alone, can accomplish is to sow the living seed of moral sentiments, to lay the solid basis of character, in the soul of the child. He says:

“The only sure foundation upon which we must build, for institutions, for popular education, national culture, and the elevation of the poor, is the parental heart, which, by means of the innocence, truth, power, and purity of its love kindles in the children the belief in love” (ch-VI-ref:1: p. 715).

For “the child at his mother’s breast is already receiving the first impressions of love and gratitude”; and there is moral instruction in the morsel of bread he receives from his father’s hand. According to Pestalozzi, “morality is nothing but a result of the development in the child of these first sentiments of love and gratitude” (ch-VI-ref:4: p. 92).

Another advantage of the home is the education which children get from their participation in the domestic occupation of their parents.

“For this work is necessarily what the parents understand best, what most absorbs their attention, and what they are most competent to teach. But even if this were not so, work undertaken to supply real needs would be just as truly the surest foundation of a good education” (ch-VI-ref:4: p. 92).

Again:

“To engage the attention of the child, to exercise his judgment, to open his heart to noble sentiments, is, I think, the chief end of education; and how can this end be reached so surely as by training the child as early as possible in the various daily duties of domestic life?” (ch-VI-ref:4: p. 92).

Industry in the factory or school does not provide the continuous and manifold changes of work, the motivation from the real needs of life which the child shares with the rest of the family, the stimulus of parental love, and the impulsion from the child’s own filial feeling, which home occupation does.

Moreover, home presents real human life in its closest relations to the child, so that he naturally and unconsciously learns its facts and laws. Human relations are again more natural, true, and perfect in the home than anywhere else; thus the child can develop his human qualities here better than anywhere else. Therefore, “as a general rule, art and books would not replace it in any way. The best story, the most touching picture the child finds in a book, is but a sort of dream for him, something unreal, and in a sense untrue; whereas what takes place before his eyes, in his own house, is associated with a thousand similar occurrences, with all his own experience as well as that of his parents and neighbours, and brings him without fail to a true knowledge of men, and develops in him a thoroughly observant mind” (ch-VI-ref:4: p. 93).

Lastly, home is in itself a completed whole, a microcosmos of the larger social life, while school or the factory is not. Home is the only place where the child can live a real, organic life. And we can find a true unity and harmony, which is dynamic and progressive only in an organic life. Therefore, “it is only in the holiness of home that the equal development of all the human faculties can be directed, managed, and assured; and it is from this point that educational efforts must be conducted, if education, as a national affair, is to have a real reference to the wants of the people, and is to cause, by its influence, the coinciding of external human knowledge, power, and motives with the internal, everlasting, divine essence of our nature” (ch-VI-ref:1: p. 715).

This, then, is the war cry of Pestalozzian reform: the education of the child for the home, in the home, through the home, and by the home. The child should be educated to be a dutiful and efficient member of the family, or he cannot become a dutiful and efficient member of society.

Social reform must begin with the reconstruction of the home life of the people. Not “go back to Nature!” but “go back to the home!” Not to build a new society on the absolutely free, independent, natural man, but on the work-loving, man-loving, God-loving, unsophisticatedly developed, social man, or rather home man. For Pestalozzi, the only hope for the elevation of all mankind was in the regeneration of the home and perfection of home education. His idea of elementary education started from this view. “Leonard and Gertrude” was written as an appeal to parents, to awaken them to the sense of the most sacred duty intrusted to them and of the grandest privilege given to them. “How Gertrude Taught Her Children” was to be a guide to mothers for instructing their children at home. His method of elementary instruction was to provide the simplest and easiest way of teaching available to every mother. Lastly, in the “Swan Song” he formulated the principles by which home education should follow or assist the course of natural development of the child. In this, one of his last writings, he says: “At first I desired nothing else, but merely sought to render the ordinary means of instruction for the people so simple as to permit of their being employed in every family” (ch-VI-ref:4: p. 375). But while he was experimenting, in the education of those destitute and neglected children, to whom he was a “father” rather than a master, the ardent necessity of school reform at large was impressed upon him.

“Everywhere the course pursued was in direct opposition to that of Nature, everywhere the flesh predominated over the spirit, and the divine element was ignored; everywhere selfishness and the passions were made the motives of actions, and everywhere mechanical habits took the place of intelligent spontaneity” (ch-VI-ref:4: p. 377).

The basic principle upon which he wanted every educator to work was: “Endeavour, first to broaden your children’s sympathies, and, by satisfying their daily needs, to bring love and kindness into such unceasing contact with their impressions and activity, that these sentiments may be engrafted in their hearts; then try to give them such judgment and tact as will enable them to make a wise, sure, and abundant use of these virtues in the circle which surrounds them” (ch-VI-ref:4: p. 157). This is, according to his insight, the principle of parental education unconsciously going on in the home, and the school must be a copy of the home in its spirit and method, if it is at all to have a real and vital influence upon the child.

Pestalozzi traces in the “Swan Song” how the seeds of love, of confidence, of gratitude, of brotherly feeling, of patience, of obedience, and of the sense of duty unfolds in the heart of the child, through the tender and discreet care of the mother, and by means of family intercourse. He also shows how, out of these instinctive domestic affections, religious sentiments are born in the human soul. “It is life that educates,” and this is life’s method of moral culture.

“On the intellectual side, it is again life that educates; for life develops, in turn, the power of receiving impressions, the power of speaking, and the power of thinking.” Let us see how these are developed. “The power of receiving impressions by observations and experience furnishes the child with ideas and sentiments” (ch-VI-ref:4: p. 378). This power, which Pestalozzi calls “Anschauung,” is the starting-point of all intellectual activities. “These impressions excite and animate in the mind its inherent principle of self-development.” Therefore, “with perception comes the necessity for expression, and naturally the first attempts of the child are imitative, but the greatest need is that of human speech,” which is “an extension of the power thought” (ch-VI-ref:1: p. 739). The desire and capacity for speech is parallel to the development of vocal organs and acquirements of knowledge through perception. “The power to speak does not proceed from the knowledge of language, it is rather the knowledge of language which proceeds from the power to speak.” Language is a vital mental power only when it has grown out of the child’s own life. But forcing the language from outside upon the child “neither develops the powers of the mind nor produces anything but an empty verbiage” (ch-VI-ref:1: pp. 378-379). Nevertheless, “Art ... can greatly relieve the tedium of Nature’s methods in teaching the child to speak, and education must investigate the means, and present an orderly succession of exercises adapted to that end.” For instance, “the mother must allow the charms of seeing, hearing, feeling, and tasting to have full play in the child. These sense impressions will awaken the desire to give them expression, that is, to speak. The mother continually varies her tones, speaking now loudly, now softly, sometimes singing, and sometimes laughing, so as to awaken the desire to imitate. The sense of sight must also be enlisted by exhibiting different objects and associating the impressions with fitting words. Each object should be presented in the greatest possible variety of relations and positions, and care should be taken that each impression, matured in the child’s mind through perception, is properly expressed” (ch-VI-ref:1: pp. 739-740). In this way the vocal organs are to be trained, a good command of words is to be given, and the power of expressing related ideas to be cultivated.

“Now when a child’s sense impressions have resulted in clear and settled ideas, when he can express these ideas in speech, he feels the need of examining, separating, and comparing them; this is a pleasure to which life itself invites him, and in which he finds the surest aid for the development of his judgment and power of thinking.” Education at all times has aimed to encourage, facilitate, and strengthen this development. Yet it has failed miserably, because “it has paid little heed to the laws of Nature and of life.” Pestalozzi condemns the usual method of “putting before the child a mass of ready-made judgments that his memory alone has been able to grasp, and which, instead of strengthening his thought, have allowed it to wither in inactivity.” He also makes light of logic, which, to his conception, is “a system, more subtle than clear, of the eternal rules which regulate human thought; rules, however, which are but a closed book for the child who does not yet possess the power of thinking” (ch-VI-ref:4: p. 379). What he himself proposes as the best gymnastics for the child’s thinking power is what he calls exercises in number and form. As singing is introduced for the training of the speech faculty, arithmetic, geometry, drawing, writing are introduced for the training of the power of thought. “But,” he says, “if the study of number and form is to have any real educational value, it must consist not in shortened, mechanical methods, but in a series of exercises so well graduated that the child may take pleasure in the study, and succeed in it; that his thinking powers may be always active; that his judgments may be really his own, and that all he does must be closely connected with his real life” (ch-VI-ref:4: pp. 379-380). Thus, to summarize, language (including sounds, words, connected ideas), number, and form are to be the three essential means of intellectual culture, or the three fundamental elements of mental upbuilding, and “it is the business of education to present these elements to the child’s mind in the simplest possible manner, and in psychological and progressive order.”

In regard to manual skill, again, “it is in the conditions and needs of actual life, and in the heart of the family, that the child must first learn how to use and improve his powers” (ch-VI-ref:4: p. 380). The work, when separated from life, is a mere mechanism. Therefore, “the exercises intended to develop the industrial and artistic powers must also be determined by the general circumstances of the child’s life” (ch-VI-ref:4: p. 380). The principle of elementary education applies to the manual powers as well as to the mental and moral: “It encourages the child’s activity from the very first; it leads him to produce results which are really his own, and it gives him at the same time both the power and the will to rise without slavishly copying others” (ch-VI-ref:4: p. 380). Further, for industrial skill “to be completely useful, it must be the outcome of the harmonious development of heart, mind, and body” (ch-VI-ref:4: p. 374). For, what is skill but “the facile and artful expression of what is conceived in the mind?” And without perfection of heart, “the highest development of intellect, art, or industry brings no rest, but leaves the man full of trouble, uneasiness, and discontent” (ch-VI-ref:4: p. 375). Therefore, to bring about the subordination of the physical powers to the moral and intellectual powers is the essential work of education. This due subordination of the lower to the higher elements of human nature, in which the harmony of life consists, is naturally found in “a well-regulated and industrious family life.” So here, again, the school must learn from the home.

Pestalozzi’s exaltation of home education is certainly a great rebellion against scholastic and academic training. No less revolutionary is his advocacy of industrial education as the only real education for the mass of people. Hitherto, education was conceived from the standpoint of aristocracy, or purely from the abstract ideal of perfected man in a perfected society. But now “the fatherland must learn to educate her poor as the poor” (ch-VI-ref:16: xii, p. 513). The child of poverty should not be educated to an unpractical and unhappy man who cannot fulfil the task or duty which his particular circumstances and position require of him. First, “he must learn to know, handle, and use those things on which his bread and his quiet will depend through life” (ch-VI-ref:1: p. 666). To give the power to support himself and his family is the first remedy for the misery and slavery of the poor: “He is without rights, because he has no gain,” and “the poor man is poor mostly because he is not trained to earn his wants” (ch-VI-ref:16: iii, p. 247). So the first school which he established at Neuhof was intended to be an industrial school, embracing agriculture, manufacture, and commerce. This ended in financial ruin before his plan was fully executed, but he reflects in his later life upon this school as if it were a lost child, and says: “It is true that, with all the experience of after-life, I have found but little reason to modify the views I then entertained” (ch-VI-ref:1: p. 671).

Comenius and Locke both introduced manual work into their curriculum, but without intending that it should be of much practical use in later life. Neither did Basedow emphasize the vocational aspect. Locke, indeed, had an unrealized plan for establishing a “working school” for the poor. Still, it was to be nothing more than the combination of a common workshop and a day nursery. We owe to Pestalozzi the first definite conception of an industrial education and its noble philosophy.

The first aim of an industrial education is of course vocational: the inculcation of skill in productive labor. But it is more than this: it is the mental and moral culture as well. Racially and individually, industrial labor is “the true and holy and eternal means of combining the whole range of our powers into one common power, the power of manhood.” It compels our mind to “an unbroken attention, carefulness, and deliberateness—the fundamental educational basis of all thinking”; it necessitates in us the belief in the truth and immutability of natural laws. So he proclaims: “It is the essence of the true art of human education to transform various works and branches of industry into the means of human culture” (ch-VI-ref:16: x, p. 357), and “for the laboring man, the sufficient and efficient cultivation of his senses and limbs to the service of all of what constitutes the blessings of his life, is the stepladder, by which he is called to climb up to the right thinking that would make him happy in his positions and relations.” This, then, is the other great Pestalozzian motto: Education through and for work.

Of the tributes paid to the merits of Pestalozzi there is no end, and rightly so. Karl Schneider testifies that “not only a new form was introduced by him into the school instruction of Germany, but that her people have come to look upon the work of education as a national affair is due to him and his disciples” (ch-VI-ref:25: p. 59). But his influence extends far beyond his fatherland and his adopted country. And through all the civilized world “the ideas which he set forth are now through pain and struggle endeavoring to get themselves realized” (ch-VI-ref:22: p. 58). If Comenius gave us the universal school in form, Pestalozzi put the soul into it. Locke was the pedagogue of the gentlemen, Basedow of the bourgeois. But Pestalozzi, as Harnisch well said, was “a people’s pedagogue, a people’s prophet” (ch-VI-ref:27: p. 42), and “with a higher light in the head and more warmth in the heart than the world was wont to have” proclaimed the education of the masses for the masses. Truly, as Fichte said, “his love was so blessed to him that he found more than he sought” (ch-VI-ref:26: p. 245). In trying to save the poor, neglected mass of his country he gave the world “the only remedy for the entire body of humanity”—the spirit and principles of vitalized and vitalizing, of humanized and humanizing education.

REFERENCES

1.Barnard, Henry. Pestalozzi and His Educational System. Bardeen, Syracuse, N. Y., 1906. 751 pages.

2.Boardman, J. H. Educational Ideas of Froebel and Pestalozzi. Second edition. Normal Press, London, 190-. 76 pages. (Normal Tutorial Series.)

3.Compayré, Jules Gabriel. History of Pedagogy. Translated, with an introduction, notes, and an index, by W. H. Payne. Heath & Co., Boston, 1903. 598 pages.

4.Guimps, Roger Baron de. Pestalozzi, His Life and Work. Translated by J. Russell. Appleton, New York, 1890. 438 pages. (International Education Series.)

5.Heim, ——. Die soziale Anschauungen Pestalozzi’s. Agentur des Rauhen Hauses, Hamburg, 1896. 22 pages.

6.Heman, Friedrich. Geschichte der neueren Pädagogik. Zickfeldt, Osterwieck, 1904. 436 pages.

7.Hérisson, F. Pestalozzi, Élève de J. J. Rousseau. Delagrave, Paris, 1886. 246 pages.

8.Hoffmeister, Hermann Wilhelm. Comenius und Pestalozzi als Begründer der Volkschule. Second edition. Klinkhardt, Leipzig, 1896. 97 pages.

9.Mann, T. Die soziale Grundlage von Pestalozzi’s Pädagogik. Beyer, Langensalza, 1896. 18 pages.

10.Melchers, Karl. Comenius und Pestalozzi, ein vergleichende Betrachtung ihrer pädagogischen Grundideen. Schmidt, Bremen, 1896. 47 pages.

11.Monroe, Paul. A Text-book in the History of Education. Macmillan Co., London and New York, 1907. 772 pages.

12.Monroe, William Seymour. History of the Pestalozzian Movement in the United States. Bardeen, Syracuse, N. Y., 1907. 244 pages.

13.Munroe, James Phinney. The Educational Ideal: an Outline of its Growth in Modern Times. Heath & Co., Boston, 1896. 262 pages.

14.Natrop, Paul. Pestalozzi’s Ideen über Arbeiterbildung und soziale Frage. Salzer, Heilbronn, 1894. 34 pages.

15.——Herbart, Pestalozzi und die heutigen Aufgaben der Erziehungslehre. Frommann, Stuttgart, 1899. 151 pages.

16.Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich. Sämtliche Werke. 12 vols. C. Seyffarth, Liegnitz, 1889-1902.

17.——Leonard and Gertrude. Translated and abridged by Eva Channing. Heath & Co., Boston, 1889. 181 pages.

18.Pinloche, Joachim Auguste. Pestalozzi and the Foundation of the Modern Elementary School. Scribner, New York, 1901. 306 pages.

19.Quick, Robert Hebert. Essays on Educational Reformers. Appleton, New York, 1890. 560 pages. Same. (International Education Series), 1903. 568 pages.

20.Raumer, Karl von. Geschichte der Pädagogik vom Wiederaufblühen klassischer Studien bis auf unsere Zeit. 5 vols. Bertelsmann, Gütersloh, 1882-1897.

21.Rein, Georg Wilhelm, editor. Encyklopädisches Handbuch der Pädagogik. 8 vols. Beyer, Langensalza, 1895-1906. Vol. V.

22.Reinhardt, A. J. Outline of the History of Education. Kellogg, New York, 1891. 77 pages.

23.Scherer, Heinrich. Die Pädagogik in ihrer Entwicklung im Zusammenhange mit dem Kultur- und Geistesleben und ihrem Einfluss auf die Gestaltung des Erziehungs- und Bildungswesens. Vol. II. Die Pädagogik als Wissenschaft von Pestalozzi bis zur Gegenwart. 3 parts. Brandstetter, Leipzig, 1897-1908.

24.Schmid, Karl Adolf, editor. Geschichte der Erziehung vom Anfang an bis auf unsere Zeit. 5 vols. Cotta, Stuttgart, 1884-1902. Vol. IV, Part II.

25.Schneider, Karl. Rousseau und Pestalozzi; der Idealismus auf deutschen und auf französischen Boden. Fifth edition. Gärtner, Berlin, 1895. 63 pages.

26.Seyffarth, L. W. J. H. Pestalozzi, nach seinem Leben und aus seinen Schriften dargestellt. Eighth edition. Siegismund, Leipzig, 1904. 254 pages.

27.——Pestalozzi, in seiner weltgeschichtlichen Bedeutung. C. Seyffarth; Liegnitz, 1896. 59 pages.

28.Spielmann, C. Christian. Die Meister der Pädagogik nach ihren Leben, ihren Werken und ihrer Bedeutung. Heufer, Neuwied, 1904-1905. 356 pages. Part V.

29.Wiget, Theobald. Pestalozzi und Herbart. Bleyl, Dresden, 1891. 140 pages.

30.Ziegler, Theobald. Geschichte der Pädagogik mit besonderer Rücksicht auf das höhere Unterrichtswesen. Beck, München, 1895. 361 pages.

CHAPTER VII.

JOHANN GOTTLIEB FICHTE
(1762-1814)

Fichte considered himself the true interpreter and successor of the Königsberg philosopher. This is by no means saying that he was the best expositor of the latter’s theories. The Kantian philosophy worked a total revolution in his conception of the universe and life; and it was his determination to interpret to the world that philosophy that inspired him to the career of a scholar. He received the Kantian philosophy, so to speak, into his soul, and when he put it forth it was transformed in turn into the cast of his own personality. Kant was essentially a man of intellect, of thought, while Fichte was a man of enthusiasm, of action. So, in Kant, reason forms the world out of the chaos of impressions; in Fichte, everything, objective as well as subjective, is the progressive creation of the ego. If philosophy was in Kant the critical method of thought, it is in Fichte the setting forth of a grand conception of the world and life: it really became a preaching and prophecy. The transcendental idealism of Kant culminated with Fichte in a sort of religion, which he proclaimed his whole life through with the fire of a devoted missionary and the force of a mighty army.

This vitalization of Kantian idealism through Fichte has also taken place in the field of education. The perfection, and, above all, the moralization of humanity, was in Kant a cosmopolitan ideal, which was to be realized step by step, generation by generation, through a cosmopolitan process. It was through Fichte that this somewhat far-off and ethereal ideal was made an actual and immediate object of national aspiration for the German people. He was probably the first philosopher who gave us a broad and lofty conception of national education or the nationalization of education.

This nationalization of education means the education of a nation by the nation. Each individual is to participate in the work and enjoy the benefit of education, by which Fichte understands the progressive perfection of humanity through the advancement and propagation of culture. The state is no longer to be merely a military, political, and economic institution, but also a cultural one. To look after the cultural interests of the community should be its most important function. Fichte’s idea of national education is, therefore, very different from the old classical ideal of state education, which aimed chiefly at making efficient and faithful citizens for its political and military prosperity. And Fichte believed, with patriotic faith, that the Germans were the only people in the world who were able to grasp and realize this grand ideal, and that through them alone could come the elevation and ennoblement of mankind. Yet, what was the actual condition of this chosen people?

The German federation went to pieces under the iron heel of the mighty Napoleon; the last hope of the people fled with the capture of Jena; the final crash came with the peace of Tilsit, “the most disgraceful and bitterest treaty Germany ever made.” During this great national crisis the cosmopolitan Goethe and Hegel were quietly engaged in their writings, and most of the scholars of the land were simply trembling before the invading force, while the people were weakly preparing to bear the yoke of slavery. Into this wilderness of general depression and humiliation there came a voice which thundered upon the ears of all the citizens of Germany:

“Conquered now we are; yet, whether we are also going to be disgraced—yes, disgraced with right, whether we would or not, in addition to all other losses, even lose honor, this is still to be decided by ourselves. The fight with arms is over, but now comes, let us hope, the new fight of principles, of morals, of character” (ch-VII-ref:3: p. 470).

Thus our philosopher prophet calls forth in his famous “Addresses to the German Nation,” which flowed from his mouth with fiery eloquence, such as Germany had not heard since Luther. The great aim of his speech was to awaken the people and strengthen them for this new war of the remaking of the whole nation, upon which the existence of Germany depended. Yet, with what a wonderful conviction and with what a poetic vision did he speak of his people’s victory in this coming war.

“The morning twilight of the new world has already dawned and gilded the top of the hill, and foreshadows the day which is to come” (ch-VII-ref:3: p. 279)

was the message he wanted to convey to the bruised and stricken land. Characterizing his speeches says Barnard:

“Never were a people called upon to arouse themselves to a nobler enterprise, and never was such a summons pealed forth in tones of more manly and spirit-stirring energy” (ch-VII-ref:1: p. 146).

If Luther awakened Germany to a sense of the dignity of individuality, it was through Fichte that she came to the consciousness of her national dignity and mission. Awakened by Luther, she led Europe in the reformation of religion; awakened by Fichte, she has come to lead the world in the advancement of culture and education.

Let us now proceed to the examination of his ideal of “new education,” which alone, he thought, would save the country from degradation and ruin. When we think of the particular circumstances of his time and the fundamental characteristics of his personality, it is quite natural that the first aim of the new education was to make, above all, an independent ego, a self-active, self-determinate, creative personality, the master of himself and environment. He writes in his “Aphorisms on Education”:

“To educate a man means to give him opportunities to make himself the complete master and ruler of his whole faculties.—The question is not what he learns, but what he is. If one actually is a reasonable and self-active being in every respect he will always with facility make himself such, as under the circumstances he should be” (ch-VII-ref:4: p. 353).

How can such a stable, unchangeable, personality be produced, which will always remain such, and can never be otherwise? Not by trusting to chance, but through a necessary law which works surely and infallibly. And what will this necessary law be? He answers: “Love, love of self-activity, love of the ideal world, love of universal moral law.” Will determines action, and love determines will. Love is, therefore, the only unfailing motive of all life activities. So, in order to produce a self-active being, the love of self-activity for its own sake must be cultivated and established in the child. The initiative activity on the part of the pupil should be cherished and promoted by every possible means. This is the first and principal task of educational art.

But we must always keep fresh the energy of this self-activity. How can this be done? Not by a constant spur from outside, but only by its own neverceasing, orderly progression or its inner evolution. This progressive unfolding of self-activity is secured by the power of aspiration toward an ever-progressive ideal. This ideal cannot be given by others, but it should be the creation of the pupils’ own will. There is, in everyone’s breast, an instinct toward perfection or a love of the highest good. This instinct should be cultivated and strengthened in the child. When it is strong, it necessarily drives him to create in his mind a certain state of things which does not exist in actuality, but which is the prototype of reality. Here lies the everlasting fountain source for a new higher activity. And the child learns by his immediate experience the evolution of the spiritual activity in him, the universal and necessary law, by means of which the actual state of things is eternally realized in the world. This is a higher kind of knowledge than that of mere actuality or a dead record of the past. In fact, soaring into the vast regions of ideals is better beloved by the youth than memorizing mere names and dates.

Even from the standpoint of mere acquisition, the awakening of self-activity is a more important thing than the imparting of knowledge. For learning is simply a mode of activity, and by establishing the love of activity for its own sake in the mind of the child, we also establish the love of learning for learning’s sake. This, and this alone, is the lifelong spring of all knowledge. By the self-active learning which comes from pure love, one learns more, and more securely than by being taught receptively. Mechanical and passive learning destroys the very source of knowledge by killing the child’s self-activity, and, moreover, by introducing alien motives for his activity, implants the root of weakness and uncertainty of character.

Fichte was a great admirer of Pestalozzi. He was captivated by the educational zeal and the pedagogic principles of the Swiss reformer, and recommended them as the true foundation upon which the new education of the German nation should be laid. Kant indorsed Basedow’s experimental efforts in the philanthropic institute; but Fichte preached the gospel of the Swiss “fanatic.” Historians are inclined to count this as the most important merit of Fichte in the history of education. For it contributed greatly to the influx of the Pestalozzian tide into Germany, especially into Prussia, and thus led to the most flourishing age of pedagogical writers, and to inscribing the motto of universal education on the national flag of the country. We might say that it is due largely to Fichte that the great Swiss educator has become an adopted son of Prussia, and what he intended for the elevation of the Helvetian poor has become the inspiration of elementary education for all the nations on the globe.

But in a few points Fichte did not agree with Pestalozzi. One is in regard to the position of reading and writing in the education of the masses: Pestalozzi cherished, so thought Fichte, too innocent a belief in the tradition of ages, in that he set up these two as though they were the end and goal of instruction, when, in fact, they have hitherto been the very instruments to enwrap men in the mist and the shadow of learned ignorance, and to make them over-intelligent. They take men away from the immediate perception to the mere symbol, from the concentration of mind to its diffusion. Instruction in letters and words, therefore, is not only unessential for the education of the people at large, but even harmful.

In the second place, Fichte did not quite agree with Pestalozzi in the method of sense-education. The Pestalozzian idea of the A. B. C. of perception is a praiseworthy one, but it cannot be attained through words. Fichte asks: “How can a child obtain the knowledge of his body without having first learned to use it?” According to Fichte’s theory of knowledge, self-activity precedes every content of consciousness, and the vague feeling or sensation of this primordial, subjective activity is the first beginning of our knowledge. Consequently, “the true foundation of instruction and knowledge must be, to use the Pestalozzian expression, the A. B. C. of sensation” (ch-VII-ref:3: p. 407). The child is to learn to clearly perceive and distinguish the various sensations which he experiences, and to express them, each in distinction from others. Impressions at first produce a chaos in the infant, but by learning to discriminate them he comes to perceive the objects impressed upon him: thus from the A. B. C. of sensation he is led to the A. B. C. of perception. Language should not be imparted from outside as a mere symbol, but should develop in the child as the progressively differentiating expression of his inner self or subjective experience. In this way knowledge and speech become living things and parts of the child’s own being.

Together with these there must be training in the A. B. C. of bodily faculty—i. e., motor activity. Pestalozzi calls attention to this training, but the plan for it has not yet been fundamentally and systematically worked out. “To do this, it needs a man who is equally well acquainted with the anatomy of the human body and scientific mechanics, combining with these a high degree of philosophical insight” (ch-VII-ref:3: p. 410). By such a man alone, the complete method, not only of maintaining, but also of strengthening and elevating health, the beauty of body, and the vitality of mind can be devised. Fichte emphasizes “the unnegligibility of this factor for an education that pretends to form the whole man, and which is especially intended for a nation whose independence is to be regained and maintained” (ch-VII-ref:3: pp. 410-411). His suggestion was taken up by Jahn and his followers, and the German gymnastics arose in an endeavor to realize this hope, which has not only played a not inconsiderable part in the independence and uplifting of his people, but has been a great incentive to a world-wide movement toward a systematic building up of the perfect physique which alone can be the temple of the perfect soul.

Thus “the training of the child to clarify first his sensations, then his perceptions, together with an orderly motor culture of his body, are the first essentials of the new education of the German nation” (ch-VII-ref:3: p. 411). But the second yet more important factor is moral education.

Fichte, in his “Characteristics of the Present Age,” characterized the spirit of the age as self-seeking, eudemonistic individualism, and saw the root of its final depravity and sinfulness in this erroneous, self-destructive principle of social life. Nay, the defeat and subjugation of the German nation by a foreign power is due to this egoistic individualism. Its independence will be lost forever unless the moral principle of the people is fundamentally changed. In the moral regeneration of the people alone lies the hope of Germany.

According to Fichte, the child naturally has respect for the right, the good, and the true. “The basis of all moral education is to know and firmly presume that there is such an instinct in the child, so that its manifestation may be recognized and developed higher and higher, through proper stimulation and the presentation of materials to satisfy it” (ch-VII-ref:3: p. 417). Express instruction, admonition, and consciously directed and purposive discipline have no place; nay, such a course will only “kill the inner moral sense and form the heartless hypocrite” (ch-VII-ref:4: p. 358). In the hidden depth of the child’s own heart, without being self-conscious, must morality spring forth by itself and gradually grow up and irradiate, as external relations increase and become clearer to him. This should be so and will be so, without any purposive interference from outside at all, so long as only pure, good examples surround the child, and all the bad, mean, and low ones are kept far from his eyes. “Beside this protective care, an educator has only to set forth a few self-evident and easily observable positive rules—such as, not to tell a lie, not speak or act voluntarily against one’s own conscience.” Conscience, the inner voice of conscience—here the universal laws of the moral world reveal themselves. Act always according to your conscience—this is the golden rule of morality.

“According to all experience, this law takes hold upon the child’s mind with a wonderful power; it elevates him, gives him an internal stronghold, and becomes for him an inexhaustible fountain of inner integrity, which is the mother of all virtues, and which, being once acquired, one will never fall into a helpless depravity” (ch-VII-ref:4: pp. 358-359).

Fichte follows his master in saying that we have to perform duty simply because it is duty, and not from any calculation of personal pleasure. But he would not exclude from morality all feeling elements, as Kant did. For Kant, even liking or inclination of heart was a motive extraneous and even antagonistic to true morality. Fichte, on the contrary, thinks that we ought to advance in our morality so as to love the good from our innermost, necessary inclination or disposition. This alone will be the sure and stable basis of virtue and character. Instinct had no place in Kantian ethics; all must have come from reason—i. e., the enlightened will. But Fichte recognizes the existence of the moral instinct, and wants simply to develop it. Spontaneity and habituation were despised by Kant as mere mechanism unworthy of a rational creature, but for Fichte these are the highest goal of morality. Here, freedom and necessity are one; ought is must. The aim of moral education is to establish firmly the inner necessity of morality, in the depths of the ego, so that the will wishes only the good and right, and cannot wish anything but the good and right.

Considered in its social relation, “the root of all morality is self-mastery, the conquering of the individual self, the subordination of one’s self-seeking instincts under the idea of the whole” (ch-VII-ref:3: p. 417). How can this social consciousness be cultivated? Not by precepts, catechism, nor discipline, but by providing the child an environment in which he will spontaneously live, learn, love, and accustom himself to a perfect, organic mode of life. Consequently, Fichte proposes his plan of an educational community. This man of will, who aimed, first of all, to form a strong and noble will in the soul of the new generation, unlike that man of heart, who wanted to cultivate a pure, simple, and loving heart in degraded and neglected humanity, insisted on the entire separation of children from their home. For, “the pressure and care of daily occurrences, the parents’ petty exaction and eagerness for gain which attach to the home, especially of the working classes, will necessarily distract and hinder the child from making a free flight into the world of thought” (ch-VII-ref:3: pp. 406-407). He is, moreover, to be separated from society at large, which is, at present, fundamentally corrupted, and to reform which is the aim of the new education. So the whole new generation is to be secluded in an independent institution or community, entirely of their own and for themselves, therein to grow up, under the sole sway of the new education, into the ideal citizens of the coming ideal state. This community is to rest on the principles of self-activity and cooperation, instead of passive slavishness and egoistic individualism. Let us see more in detail what was the nature of Fichte’s proposed institution.

It is in its general character more a sort of children’s communistic colony than a school. It is to embody the ideal of a perfect social organism.

“The organization must be so regulated that an individual shall not be simply subordinated to the whole, but he shall be enabled to act and work for the whole.—It should be a fundamental rule of the organization that everyone who excels in any line should help in teaching others, and share in various responsibilities; that everyone who finds the way for any improvement, or understands first and most clearly the things presented by the teacher, should carry them on with his own labor; that everyone should satisfy these demands voluntarily and not from compulsion; that he should expect no reward, for it must be the ruling spirit of the community that each does simply his own duty and enjoys purely the pleasure of doing and working for the whole, and succeeding in the work which falls in his lot” (ch-VII-ref:3: 294-295).

The organization is to be not only a cultural community, but also an industrial and economic one. “Besides the mental development in learning there should be bodily exercise, and mechanized yet spiritualized labor of farming and varied manual work carried on” (ch-VII-ref:3: p. 294). “Learning and work should go together” was his motto (ch-VII-ref:3: p. 423).

The institution is to be self-supporting; at least, should appear so to the pupils.

“No article of food or clothing nor any implement, so far as possible, should be used which is not produced or manufactured in it. If its finance needs help from outside, it should be only in the form of objects of Nature.... For this independence and self-sufficiency of the whole each individual works with all his might, without settling any account with the institution, and without making any claim for his personal possession. Each is aware that he is entirely responsible to the whole, and enjoys or suffers only with the whole. By this means the honorable independence of state and family, of which he should one day become a member, will be secured; by this means the relation of the individual to these institutions will be comprehended in a living manner, and take root in his very soul, never to effaced” (ch-VII-ref:3: p. 425).

In this “Economic Education” the child acquires his vocational training through his economic activities, and his vocational training under these systematized and regulated conditions provides him, at the same time, a mental and moral culture. He is equipped with the fundamental knowledge of, and skill in, various branches of productive industry. In him the love of self-activity, of work, of study are established. He is habituated to the living laws of coöperative social life. “Such a child alone will be the one whom the educator can safely send out into society as its true citizen. Such will be the limit which an education can demand from any child in the name of the world.”

Fichte stands for the coeducation of the sexes; since “the separation of sexes in a special institution for each would be unreasonable, and destroy many essentials of education for the complete man.” In his proposed institution the subjects of instruction are to be the same for both sexes, while the distinction is to be made as to the kind of work. The most important thing is that “both should learn early to recognize and love the common humanity in the other, and make friends among the opposite sex as well as those of their own before attention is directed to the sex difference.” Moreover, “the mutual relation of both sexes in one whole will develop within the institution and in the mind of children manly protection on the one hand, and loving assistance on the other” (ch-VII-ref:3: p. 422).

Here ends the education of the child as the future citizen of the world. But there is still another and a higher thing, which can, in special cases, be done by the educator of the people. He may lead the child to a life higher than that of this visible world. This life in religion is the deeply-seated source of true morality. “The child of the new education is not only a member of human society in this visible world, and for a short span of life, but he also is, and will no doubt recognize himself to be, a link in the eternal chain of the spiritual life in general. One who has penetrated the whole essence of his being and recognized the ethical world which has never existed, yet eternally should be, will also recognize or produce in his thought the transcendental world-order, which eternally exists” (ch-VII-ref:3: p. 297). He shall come to seek such a world of ideas and ideals, and live in it, as his only real life, light, and blessing, considering all else as mere death, darkness, and misery. This life in the transcendental world—namely, religion—is not a life beyond the grave, but is life immanent in our earthly existence and extending to eternity.

“To find heaven right on this earth, and let it flow perpetually in his daily work; to implant and to cultivate the immortal in the mortal itself—not merely in the mystical and unintelligible way, but in the visible way—this is a natural and ever-working instinct of man, which is absent only under the pressure of necessity” (ch-VII-ref:3: p. 376).

To develop this instinct in the child, and lead him to the ever higher life of true religion, is the last task of the new education.

The above is a brief sketch of Fichte’s plan of the new education for the people, by means of which he hoped to revive and regenerate the sunken and ruined nation. Fichte, like Rousseau and Pestalozzi, sanguinely had confidence in the power of a new form of education to bring about an immediate reconstruction of the existing society, against which they each raised the voice of protest. But while Rousseau wanted to build a new society on the basis of his new natural man, who is to be educated solely through the nature of his individual self, and Pestalozzi of his new home man, who shall essentially grow up in and through the normal home, for Fichte, the foundation of the new nation rested on the new social man, who is trained in, through, and to an ideal social life specially provided to secure his best growth.

However, his hope for Germany was much larger than the mere restoration of her independence and solidarity. It was his firm conviction that his people, as the parent stock of the Teutonic race, with an original language and a passionate idealism, should and will lead the whole world in the progress of science and culture. And with this vision, he conceived a new plan for a special scholarly education, which we find as radical as his scheme for the common people’s education. He presents to us two totally different forms of education—an extremely anti-academic education for the common people and a highly academic education for the intellectual classes.

The intellectual classes comprise those whose vocation is to be the leaders of the race in its upward and forward march. They are represented by the rulers, legislators, administrators, academic teachers, scientific writers, artists, and preachers. We may divide them into two categories: those who strive to elevate society into an ideal condition which is realizable at the present time, and others who always seek after a better, higher, and clearer ideal, and to impart it to the contemporary and succeeding generations. The function of the latter is the enrichment and enlargement of the domain of culture; that of the former is the realization of the cultural ideals already attained in the world of actuality, which can be fulfilled perfectly only when one has acquired it in his own person. Therefore, according to Fichte, rulers and statesmen must be scholars and must have received thorough academic training. To see the scholar at the head of every department of national activity was his dream. What kind of being, then, should this glorified scholar be?

He is to inspire and guide an ever-progressing movement of mankind toward freedom from the bondage of Nature, of ignorance, and of barbarism, toward its ever-increasing self-activity and supremacy. He must rouse men to the feeling of their true wants and make them acquainted with the means of satisfying these. “He sees not merely the present, he sees also the future; he sees not merely the point which humanity now occupies, but also that to which it must next advance.” He must endeavor to have the most widely extended survey of the actual advancement of culture, and to extend its domain further. And since “the ultimate purpose of each individual man, as well as of all society, and consequently of all the labors of the scholar in society, is the moral elevation of all men ... he ought to exhibit in himself the highest grade of moral culture then possible” (ch-VII-ref:5: pp. 191-193).

To make the university “the free nurse, in every sense and in its widest meaning,” of such scholarship was the essential aim, for which Fichte made the plan for the national university which was soon to be established in Berlin.

This academic training was to be special and universal at the same time. It is special in admitting “only those who show the special endowment for learning, and conspicuous inclination to the world of ideas,” yet is universal in taking in “everyone who shows the qualifications, without making any exception or having any regard to the distinctions of parentage.” It was to be supported and conducted by the hand of the nation, “for scholarship is not for one’s individual satisfaction, and every talent for it is an invaluable property of a nation” (ch-VII-ref:3: p. 426). The student should be freed from every outside care by means of a sufficient support for the present, and the guarantee of a proper position in the future. On the other hand, he should be completely secluded from all other activities and distractions of life in order to devote his whole soul to his purpose.

The child destined to be a scholar is, in his early years, to be educated differently from others. Thus, in the general scheme of the people’s education, the time which is spent by others in their economic activities is to be devoted in his case to the intellectual work of self-active learning and solitary thinking, although he shares with the rest in bodily exercises and in acquiring a general knowledge of various industries. For him the study of language and acquiring the power of speech is necessary and important. The classics, especially Greek, should come earlier than the modern languages, because Fichte thought the former have more unity and harmony between the form and the content than have the latter, thus favoring the development of vital speech-power in the child.

A university is “the school for the art of scientific use of intellect.” To implant the lofty sense of academic dignity, to cultivate the unceasing love for higher culture, to train the power of independent creative thinking, are the essential things aimed at. Here the student educates himself, professors being nothing but his assistants or else elder fellow-scholars. Lectures should be given, both in spirit and content, as a form of answer to the questions previously raised by the student, or as the presentation of a new problem which shall be the topic of the next hour. Besides the lecture, the following practices are recommended:

1. “Examina.”—These are not given for testing how far the student can reproduce what he has read or heard, but for inducing him to make the questions presented by his learned master the premises from which to deduce his own answers.

2. “Conversatoria,” in which the student asks questions freely, and the master requestions upon them—a sort of Socratic dialogue.

3. Written research work assigned to the student on a certain problem. The advanced student is encouraged to offer it to himself and also to others. Then, since books constitute the main resource of accumulated knowledge, the student should be taught and accustomed to use them methodically and skilfully. Thus everything goes simply to arouse the self-activity of the student, and to provide the materials for it.

On the part of the academic teacher the university is not to be looked upon as the place for merely communicating book contents in a slightly modified form; the university stands for the advancement of science and the scientific spirit; not mere repetition nor a little trimming up of the old and known, but the bringing forth of the new, and the extension of the frontier of knowledge. The academic teacher must always be an investigator and producer. Fichte advises that no one should stay in that calling “in which the fountain of youth does not still flow on with an unimpaired vigor.” “Let him,” he says, “faithfully intrust himself to its current so long as it will bear him forward; when it leaves him, then let him be content to retire from this ever-shifting scene of onward movement—let him separate the dead from the living” (ch-VII-ref:5: p. 307). Readiness of communication, on the one hand, and plasticity to foreign modes of thought and new ideas, on the other, is required of him.

Fichte’s schemes both for popular education and the university were too Utopian to be immediately adopted. Actual reforms were carried out by those of more practical talents, and according to more practical conceptions. But the world is now coming to realize the worth of the vision embodied in his “economic” or “citizenship” education; and as to his high academic ideal, it has gradually won the victory in the most advanced universities of to-day.

REFERENCES

1.Barnard, Henry. Pestalozzi and His Educational System. Bardeen, Syracuse, N. Y., 1906. 751 pages.

2.Duproix, Paul. Kant et Fichte et le Problème de l’Education. Second edition. Alcan, Paris, 1897. 260 pages.

3.Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. Reden an die deutsche Nation. Sämtliche Werke. 8 vols. Veit, Berlin, 1845-1846. Vol. VII, pp. 259-499.

4.——Aphorismen über Erziehung aus dem Jahre, 1804. Sämtliche Werke. Vol. VIII, pp. 353-360.

5.——Vocation of the Scholar. On the Nature of the Scholar. Popular Works of J. G. Fichte. 2 vols. Trübner, London, 1889. Vol. I, pp. 149-317.

6.——Deducirter Plan zu Berlin zu errichtenden höheren Lehranstalt. Sämtliche Werke. Vol. VIII, pp. 97-219.

7.Gutmann, S. Hirsch. J. G. Fichte’s soziale Pädagogik. Scheitlin, Bern, 1907. 100 pages.

8.Heman, Friedrich. Geschichte der neueren Pädagogik. Zickfeldt, Osterwieck, 1904. 436 pages.

9.Keferstein, Horst. J. G. Fichte’s pädagogische Schriften und Ideen. Richler, Wien, 1883. 238 pages.

10.Rein, Georg Wilhelm, editor. Encyklopädisches Handbuch der Pädagogik. 8 vols. Beyer, Langensalza, 1895-1906. Vol. II.

11.Scherer, Heinrich. Die Pädagogik in ihrer Entwicklung im Zusammenhange mit dem Kultur- und Geistesleben und ihrem Einfluss auf die Gestaltung des Erziehungs- und Bildungswesens. Vol. II. Die Pädagogik als Wissenschaft von Pestalozzi bis zu Gegenwart. 3 parts. Brandstetter, Leipzig, 1897-1908.

12.Sieler, Albien. Darstellung der Volkschulpädagogik. J. G. Fichte’s im Zusammenhange mit ihren individuellen, historischen und philosophischen Voraussetzungen. Siegismund, Leipzig, 1895. 75 pages.

13.Strümpell, Ludwig H. Die Pädagogik Kant’s und Fichte’s. Pädagogische Abhandlungen. Diechert, Leipzig, 1894. Part II.

14.Ziegler, Theobald. Geschichte der Pädagogik mit besonderer Rücksicht auf das höhere Unterrichtswesen. Beck, München, 1895. 361 pages.

CHAPTER VIII.

FRIEDRICH FROEBEL
(1782-1852)

James Munroe writes in his “The Educational Ideal”: “Practical yet dreamy, scientific yet credulous, analytic yet mystical, filled with fancies, symbols, extravagances, exuberant in thought and speech, the new-born German nation was like a child, with a child’s surplus of strength, a child’s ill-balanced imagination, a child’s elastic vision, limited to self, yet with a sudden illuminating glimpse into eternity. Froebel was the embodiment of this Zeitgeist, this exaggeration of yearning, this overestimate of self-promise, this glamour of existence, which characterized the Germany of sixty years ago” (ch-VIII-ref:15: p. 198). He was born the son of a pious, rigorous, and active orthodox Lutheran minister, who “never succeeded in understanding this troublesome, dreamy, and neglected child” (ch-VIII-ref:2: p. 7). Having lost his mother some four months after his birth, and having had an unkind stepmother, a mother’s love and care were practically unknown to him. Thus, as he writes, “unceasing self-contemplation, self-analysis, and self-education have been the fundamental characteristics of my life from the very first and have remained so until these later days” (ch-VIII-ref:7: p. 11). These circumstances of his age and his own childhood not only give us the key to his whole life, but also to his whole philosophy. His precocious and all-pervading religiosity, his passionate affection for Nature, were simply natural. From a lifeless and affectionless home he fled to the bosom of animated Nature, and thus to his mystic pantheism. He writes, in his recollections, of one of the incidents of his early childhood:

“I now had what I needed: to the Church was added the Nature-Temple; to the religious Christian life, the life of Nature; to the passionate discord of human life, the tranquil peace of plants. From that time it was as if I held the clew of Ariadne to guide me through the labyrinth of life. From that time humanity and Nature, the life of the soul and the life of the flower, were closely knit together in my mind; and I can still see my hazel buds, like angels, opening for me the great God’s temple of Nature” (ch-VIII-ref:7: p. 12).

His craze for unity we can largely explain as the result of the longing of his restless soul and hungry heart for peace. Naturally he found a predetermined fascination in Schelling’s “Identity Philosophy,” in which the subjective and the objective worlds are identified in one principle. On the other hand, self-analysis necessarily leads one to the desire of self-perfection and self-education; thus his incessant thirst for “higher culture.” So it came that “I carried my own world within me, and it was that for which I cared and which I cherished” (ch-VIII-ref:7: p. 107).

One thing saved him from falling into a life of pure reflection. It was the early habit of engaging in manual occupations around the home. This he was partly forced to do in accordance with the wish of his rigorous father, but he did it also from his own inclination. In fact, this was another refuge for him. Probably his restless soul, oppressed by the indifference and misapprehension of his parents, as also by isolation from his playmates, herein found its free expression.

Thus, religion, Nature, and manual work were the three great agents of his own education, which he later believed also to be the essential for all others. He calls the love of Nature, the instinct of workmanship, and religious feeling “the primitive and natural inclinations of every human being” (ch-VIII-ref:7: p. 5). And all these were for him the manifestations of a restless, incessant desire and endeavor for unity and harmony, which he asserts is “the basis of all genuinely human development and cultivation.”

“The Education of Man,” the most important of his writings, opens with the following passage:

“In all things there lives and reigns an eternal law.... This all-controlling law is necessarily based on an all-pervading, energetic, living, self-conscious, and hence, eternal unity.... This unity is God. All things live and have their being in and through the Divine Unity, in and through God.... It is the destiny and lifework of all things to unfold their essence, ... and, therefore, the Divine Unity itself” (ch-VIII-ref:5: pp. 1-2).

Thus, according to Froebel, a living, energetic, self-conscious unity is both the metaphysical reality and the human ideal, and “Education consists in leading man to, ... pure and unsullied consciousness and free representation of the inner law of Divine Unity, and in teaching him ways and means thereto” (ch-VIII-ref:5: p. 2). From the Living Unity of all existence, the living Unity of every human being is self-evident. And here lies the real foundation stone of his philosophy of education. He writes in his autobiography: “Mankind as a whole, as one great Unity, had now become my quickening thought. I kept this conception constantly before my mind” (ch-VIII-ref:7: p. 84). So each new-born child not only “should be viewed and treated as a manifestation of the Divine Spirit in human form,” but, “as a necessary essential member of humanity,” he should be viewed and treated “in his obvious and living relations to the present, past, and future development of humanity, in order to bring the education of the child into harmony with the past, present, and future development of humanity and of the race” (ch-VIII-ref:5: pp. 16-17).

The germ of the evolutionary idea had already been floating in the air of the pedagogical world; we see it in Rousseau, in Kant, in Pestalozzi, but it found its richest soil in the mind of our incessant self-educator. Humanity, he says:

“... should, therefore, be looked upon not as perfected and developed, not as fixed and stationary, but as steadily and progressively growing, in a state of ever living development, ever ascending from one stage of culture to another toward its aim, which partakes of the infinite and eternal. It is unspeakably pernicious to look upon the development of humanity as stationary and completed, and to see in its present phases simply repetitions and greater generalizations of itself. For the child, as well as every successive generation, becomes thereby exclusively imitative, an external dead copy—as it were, a cast of the preceding one—and not a living ideal for its stage of development, which it had attained in human development as a whole, to serve future generations in all time to come. Indeed, each successive generation and each successive individual human being, inasmuch as he would understand the past and present, must pass through all preceding phases of human development and culture, and this should not be done in the way of dead imitation or mere copying, but in the way of living, spontaneous self-activity. Every human being should realize in him these phases spontaneously and freely.... For in every human being ... there lies and lives humanity as a whole; but in each one it is realized and expressed in a wholly particular, peculiar, personal, unique manner” (ch-VIII-ref:5: pp. 17-18).

Only this large and comprehensive view of man “can enable true genuine education to thrive, blossom, bear fruit, and ripen.” Now, then, the destiny of the child as a member of the family and of humanity is to unfold and realize in him the tendencies and forces of the family and of humanity as a whole, in their harmony, all-sidedness, and purity. The parental character, “their intellectual and emotional drift, which, indeed, may as yet lie dormant in both of them as mere tendencies and energies,” are to harmonize in his development and culture. “The natural and the divine, the terrestrial and the celestial, the finite and the infinite,” are to be realized in him “in harmony and unison.” This will be done “if each unfolds and realizes his own essence as perfectly, purely, and universally as possible; and, on the other hand, as much as possible in accordance with his own individuality and personality.” Therefore, no constraint nor too much assistance should be given. “The child should learn early how to find in himself the center and fulcrum of all his powers and members, to seek his support in this, and, resting therein, to move freely and be active, to grasp and to hold with his own hands, to stand and walk on his own feet, to find and observe with his own eyes, to use his members symmetrically and equally” (ch-VIII-ref:5: pp. 19-21). Thus, in the “free, all-sided use” of one’s powers, in the self-active, unhindered unfolding of every potentiality, Froebel saw the equal fulfillment of all the claims both of individuality and of humanity.

Rousseau fought against sacrificing the present for the future; Froebel made it clear that the perfect fulfillment of the present is, at the same time, the guarantee of the future. He says:

“The vigorous and complete development and cultivation of each successive stage depends on the vigorous, complete, and characteristic development of each and all preceding stages of life!... The child, the boy, the man, indeed, should know no other endeavor but to be at every stage of development wholly what this stage calls for. Then will each successive stage spring like a new shoot from a healthy bud, and at each successive stage he will with the same endeavor again accomplish the requirements of this stage” (ch-VIII-ref:5: pp. 28-30).

For Rousseau the developmental stages in the child’s life were somewhat like a succession of changes; Froebel conceived them as the gradual unfolding of the one organic principle which underlies all manifestations of physical and mental life. So for Froebel very many things in the life of childhood are symbolic and point to the higher possibilities of manhood, and he saw, in thus viewing the matter, our best guidance for directing the child in his destiny.

“How salutary would it be for parents and child, for their present and future, if the parents believed in this symbolism of childhood and boyhood, if they heeded the child’s life in reference to this. It would unite parents and children by a new living tie. It would establish a new living connection between their present and future life” (ch-VIII-ref:5: pp. 18-19).

But

“To see and respect in the child and boy the germ and promise of the coming youth and man is very different from considering and treating him as if he were already a man; very different from asking the child or boy to show himself a youth or a man; to feel, to think, and conduct himself as a youth or man” (ch-VIII-ref:5: p. 29).

Then what are the nature and requirements of each successive stage? Froebel teaches us that the child is the only teacher as to his nature and requirements. Go and observe him, then you will learn, is his motto. But his own child psychology was as much the product of self-introspection as of objective observation. He read his own mentality into every child. Yet we cannot but discern the gems of immortal insight shining from among the rubbish of obsolete speculation and magnified symbolism.

Infancy is God in slumber. The eyes of consciousness have not yet opened. “The external world comes to the child at first out of its void—as it were, in misty, formless indistinctness, in chaotic confusion—even the child and the outer world merge into each other” (ch-VIII-ref:5: p. 40). Senses and limbs are the organs by which we determine the nature and relationship of external objects. Yet, “at this stage of development the young, growing human being cares for the use of his body, his senses, his limbs, merely for the sake of their use and practice, but not for the sake of the results of their use.” He simply “plays with his limbs—his hands, his fingers, his lips, his tongue, his feet, as well as the expression of his eyes and face” (ch-VIII-ref:5: p. 48). Therefore education at this stage is merely to offer to him various objects to “secure occupation for the senses and mind,” and to prevent mental enervation and weakness.

Development of the speech function marks an epoch. “With language, the expression and representation of the internal begin; with language, organization, or a differentiation with reference to ends and means, sets in.” Speech for an infant is the immediate expression of his being. “He does not, as yet, know or view it as having a being of its own. Like his arm, his eye, his tongue, it is one with him, and he is unconscious of its existence.” Mental education now begins when this instinct of self-expression manifests itself and instruction of an informal type is now in order. “The child at this stage should see all things rightly and accurately, and should designate them rightly and accurately, definitely and clearly, and this applies to things and objects themselves, as well as to their nature and properties. He should properly designate the relations of objects in space and time, as well as with one another; give each its proper name or word, and utter each word in itself clearly and distinctly, according to its constituent vocal elements” (ch-VIII-ref:5: p. 50-51).

Play is another form of self-expression. It is “the highest phase of child development—of human development at this period; for it is self-active representation of the inner—representation of the inner from inner necessity and impulse.” Indeed, play is the corner-stone of the kindergarten, and no one had before shown the inherent value of play to child life in such strong and beautiful words as did Froebel.

“Play is the purest, most spiritual activity of man at this stage, and, at the same time, typical of human life as a whole—of the inner hidden natural life in man and all things. It gives joy, freedom, contentment, inner and outer rest, peace with the world.” “Cultivate and foster it, O mother!” exclaims he; “protect and guard it, O father!” For “the plays of childhood are the germinal leaves of all later life, and a child that plays thoroughly, with self-active determination, perseveringly until physical fatigue forbids, will surely be a thorough, determined man, capable of self-sacrifice for the promotion of the welfare of himself and others. Is not the most beautiful expression of child life at this time, a playing child—a child wholly absorbed in his play—a child that has fallen asleep while so absorbed?” (ch-VIII-ref:5: pp. 54-55).

Thus “play and speech constitute the element in which the child lives,” and he animates the whole world, organic and inorganic, with his newly awakened soul, full of self-expressing activity.

“The child at this stage imparts to each thing the faculties of life, feeling, and speech. Of everything, he imagines it can hear. Because the child himself begins to represent his inner being outwardly, he imputes the same activity to all about him, to the pebble and chip of wood, to the plant, the flower, and the animal” (ch-VIII-ref:5: p. 54).

In the emphasis Froebel laid on this animistic or anthropomorphic communion of the child with Nature lies another great merit.

Rhythm as an important educational factor of early childhood is another discovery of his. Froebel sees the natural operation of this in the mother’s dandling of the child up and down on her hand or arm in rhythmic movements and with rhythmic sounds. He writes:

“An early pure development of rhythmic movement would prove most wholesome in the succeeding life periods of the human being. We rob ourselves as educators, and we still rob the child as pupil by discontinuing so soon the development of rhythmic movements in early education.... Much willfulness, impropriety, and coarseness would be taken out of his life, his movements, and actions. He would secure more firmness and moderation, more harmony; and, later on, there would be developed in him a higher appreciation of Nature and art, of music and poetry” (ch-VIII-ref:5: pp. 70-71).

He goes even so far as to say that “for early youth, language representation should assume a rhythmic form, for this is its first form in the early youth of mankind.” He thinks that “all primitive language expressions, as representations of active inner and outer life, are necessarily rhythmic,” and “the loss of this has deprived him and mankind as a whole of one of the foremost, most primitive, and most natural means of elevation” (ch-VIII-ref:5: p. 218).

Drawing as a means of the child’s self-expression, his natural language, is yet another discovery of Froebel. He says:

“The faculty of drawing is, therefore, as much innate in the child, in man, as is the faculty of speech, and demands its development and cultivation as imperatively as the latter; experience shows this clearly in the child’s love for drawing, in the child’s instinctive desire for drawing.” “The word and drawing belong together inseparably, as light and shadow”; they are “mutually explanatory and complementary; for neither one is, by itself, exhaustive and sufficient with reference to the object represented” (5: p. 79).

His observation of the development of this drawing instinct in the child is keen and suggestive.

“Give the child a bit of chalk or the like, and soon a new creation will stand before him and you. Let the father, too, in a few lines sketch a man, a horse. This man of lines, this horse of lines, will give the child more joy than an actual man, an actual horse would do” (ch-VIII-ref:5: p. 77).

This linear representation of objects

“opens to the child on the threshold of boyhood a new world in various directions. Not only can he represent the outer world in reduced measure, and thus comprehend it more easily with his eyes; not only can he reproduce outwardly what lives in his mind as a reminiscence or new association, but the knowledge of a wholly invisible world, the world of forces, has its tenderest rootlets right here” (ch-VIII-ref:5: p. 76).

The beneficial effects of drawing are “more than I can enumerate—a clear conception of forms, the power to represent the forms independently, the fixing of the forms as such, strengthening and practice of the arm and hand”; it “increases knowledge, awakens the judgment and reflection, which avoids so many blunders, and which, in a natural way, cannot be aroused too soon” (ch-VIII-ref:5: pp. 76-79).

Counting is also looked upon by Froebel as an instinct springing from the nature of the child—“an essential need of his inner being, a certain yearning of his spirit which should be given due expression” (ch-VIII-ref:5: p. 80). “Mathematics is,” he thinks, “neither foreign to actual life nor something deduced from life; it is the expression of life as such: therefore its nature may be studied in life, and life may be studied with its help” (ch-VIII-ref:5: p. 206). Therefore the conception of number should not be forced in abstract form. It originates from the reappearance of similar objects, and, according to Froebel, “the drawing of the object leads to the discovery of number” (ch-VIII-ref:5: p. 80).

As to the child’s participation in the domestic activities, Froebel lays great stress upon this since he regards it as a great source of knowledge, the basis of the family and social bond, the soil in which the habit of work and industry grows. Do not impose any domestic or professional tasks upon the child for the sake of the results, but allow his meddling with them for the sake of the activity in itself.

“The child—your child, ye fathers—feels this so intensely, so vividly, that he follows you wherever you are, wherever you go, in whatever you do. Do not harshly repel him; show no impatience about his ever-recurring questions. Every harshly repelling word crushes a bud or shoot of his tree of life. Do not, however, tell him in words much more than he could find himself without your words.... To have found one fourth of the answer by his own effort is of more value and importance to the child than it is to half hear and half understand it in the words of another; for this causes mental indolence. Do not, therefore, always answer your children’s questions at once and directly; but as soon as they have gathered sufficient strength and experience, furnish them with the means to find them answers in the sphere of their own knowledge” (ch-VIII-ref:5: pp. 86-87).

This early childhood is essentially the period of growth, of life, of nursing, and thus its education is the duty of parents. A child’s life at this stage is already rich and real; our task is “to guard, nurse, and develop the inner germ of his life” by quickening all his powers and natural gifts and to enable all his members and organs to fulfil the requirements of these. Many “suppose the child to be empty, wish to inoculate him with life, make him as empty as they think him to be, and deprive him of life, as it were” (ch-VIII-ref:5: p. 70).

Now we come to another epoch of childhood, which Froebel calls the stage of boyhood. The preceding period was “preëminently the period of development of the faculty of speech” (ch-VIII-ref:5: p. 90). Whatever the child perceived was designated by the word. It was the period for naming.

“Every object, everything became such, as it were, only through the word; before it had been named, although the child might have seemed to see it with the outer eyes, it had no existence for the child. The name, as it were, created the thing for the child; hence, the name and the things seemed to be one.”

But now sets in the separation between speech and the speaking subject, the name and the object; language at last “is externalized and materialized in signs and writing, and begins to be considered as something actually corporeal” (ch-VIII-ref:5: pp. 91-93). This new period, thinks Froebel, is preëminently the period for learning, for schooling, for instruction proper. In the preceding stage everything was considered as the expression of the child’s own being; the spontaneous activity springing from his inner life was the starting-point and center of his education; its process was the externalization of the internal. That process is now reversed; it is the internalization of the external; we start from the outer world and unite with it in the inner world of the child.

“The consideration and treatment of individual and particular things, as such, and in their inner bearings and relationships, constitute the essential character and work of instruction.... This instruction is conducted not so much in accordance with the nature of man as in accordance with the fixed, definite, clear laws that lie in the nature of things, and more particularly the laws to which man and things are equally subjected.... This implies knowledge, insight, a conscious and comprehensive view of the field.... With this period school begins for him, be it in the home or out of it, and taught by the father, members of the family, or a teacher. School, then, means here by no means the schoolroom or school-keeping, but the conscious communication of knowledge, for a definite purpose and in definite inner connection” (ch-VIII-ref:5: pp. 94-95).

By this it seems clear that Froebel distinguished the character and function of the school from those of the kindergarten. He explicitly states this in one of his letters (ch-VIII-ref:2: p. 155).

But the education of the efferent side of the human soul should never be neglected. It is the inner life of a man, and its development and cultivation must “constitute an unbroken whole, steadily and continuously progressing, gradually ascending.” It begins with “the feeling of community awakened in the infant, becomes in the child impulse, inclination; these lead to the formation of the disposition and of the heart and arouse in the boy his intellect and will” (ch-VIII-ref:5: pp. 95-96). Now “to give firmness to the will, to quicken it, and make it pure, strong, and enduring, in a life of pure humanity, is the chief concern, the main object in the guidance of the boy.” To attain this aim “the starting-point of all mental activity in the boy should be energetic and sound; the source whence it flows, pure, clear, and ever-flowing; the direction simple, definite; the object fixed, clear, living and life-giving, elevating, worthy of effort, worthy of the destiny and the mission of man, worthy of his essential nature, and tending to develop it, and give it full expression.” But the source of the will is in the disposition and heart. Therefore “instruction and example alone and in themselves are not sufficient; they must meet a good, pure heart”; “activity and firmness of the will rest upon the activity and firmness of the feelings and heart.” This latter is best secured in the child by “the complete enjoyment of play,” yet above all by participation in the domestic life.

“Family life alone secures the development and cultivation of a good heart and of a thoughtful, gentle disposition in their full intensity and vigor, also incomparably important for every period of growth, nay, even for the whole life of man” (ch-VIII-ref:5: pp. 96-97).

Now in the period of boyhood the child’s play should become vigorous and even venturesome. “He never evades an obstacle, a difficulty, nay, he seeks it.” “Hence the daring and venturesome feats of boyhood; the exploration of caves and ravines; the climbing of trees and mountains; the reaching of heights and depths; the roaming through fields and forests” (ch-VIII-ref:5: p. 102). And every adventure widens his scope of life, means to him “the discovery of a new world.” Athletic games and sports are recommended by Froebel as a means of character-building as well as physical exercise, but the excursion was a chief educational feature of his institute at Keilhau; he thought that every teacher ought to conduct an excursion party at least once a week.

As to participation in the domestic occupations, it should become wider and more real than before. In the former period it was mere imitation, but now it is a voluntary share; formerly it was a part of play, but now it begins to become work. “What formerly the child did only for the sake of the activity, the boy does now for the sake of the results or products of his activity; the child’s instinct of activity has, in the boy, become a formative instinct, and this occupies the whole outward life, the outward manifestation of boy-life in this period” (ch-VIII-ref:5: p. 99). This creative instinct is, for Froebel, the pledge of the divine essence of the human soul, and its exercise secures the child the best development of his spirituality and the highest felicity.

“We become truly Godlike in diligence and industry, in working and doing, which are accompanied by the clear perception, or even by the vaguest feeling, that we thereby represent the inner in the outer; that we give body to spirit, and form to thought; that we render visible the invisible; that we impart an outward, finite, transient being to life in the spirit. Through this Godlikeness we rise more and more to a true knowledge of God, to insight into His Spirit; and thus, inwardly and outwardly, God comes ever nearer to us. Therefore, Jesus so truly says in this connection of the poor, 'Theirs is the kingdom of heaven’ if they could but see and know it and practice it in diligence and industry, in productive and creative work. Of children, too, is the kingdom of heaven; for, unchecked by the presumption and conceit of adults, they yield themselves in childlike trust and cheerfulness to their formative and creative instincts” (ch-VIII-ref:5: p. 31).

Froebel pictures what a variety of materials a country home presents for the strengthening and developing of this instinct, and how these various occupations again stimulate our intellectual activity.

“The son accompanies his father everywhere—to the field and to the garden, to the shop and to the counting house, to the forest and to the meadow; in the care of domestic animals and in the making of small articles of household furniture; in the splitting, sawing, and piling of the wood; in all the work his father’s trade or calling involves. Question upon question comes from the lips of the boy thirsting for knowledge—How? Why? When? What for? Of what?—and every somewhat satisfactory answer opens a new world to the boy” (ch-VIII-ref:5: pp. 101-102).

Froebel’s insight is confirmed by modern child-study, as in many other points, in the emphasis which he laid on stories, legends, and fairy tales as necessary food for a boy’s inner being. He says:

“There is developed in the boy at this age the desire and craving for tales, for legends, for all kinds of stories, and later on for historical accounts. This craving, especially in its first appearance, is very intense; so much so that, when others fail to gratify it, the boys seek to gratify it themselves, particularly on days of leisure and in times when the regular employments of the day are ended” (ch-VIII-ref:5: pp. 115-116).

He thinks that this is the dawn of historical interest, the longing to know the past, and he notices the strange or almost mystic harmony or communion between the figures and events in these stories of the past and the children’s own inner thoughts and feelings.

Another side of the boy’s story interest is his anthropomorphism. This has already existed during the earlier period, but it develops with the growth of the child’s soul. Froebel says:

“There is developed in him the intense desire for fables and fairy tales which impart language and reason to speechless things—the one within and the other beyond the limits of human relations and human, earthly phenomena of life.... If here, too, the boy’s desire is not or cannot be gratified by his attendants he will spontaneously hit upon the invention and presentation of fairy tales and fables, and either work them out in his own mind alone or entertain his companions with them” (ch-VIII-ref:5: pp. 116-117).

Boyhood is preëminently the age of day-dreams and story-telling. Again, boyhood is the period of song. The juvenile flow of the life tide finds its outlet in the living waves of rhythm.

“How the serene, happy boy of this age rejoices in song! He feels, as it were, a new, true, life in song. It is the sense of growing power that in his wandering from the valley to the hill and from hill to hill, pours forth the joyous songs from his throat” (ch-VIII-ref:5: p. 118).

Songs are enjoyed by him when put into the mouths of others, because they express the stirring of his own soul in the way he wishes.

“Whatever his mind vaguely apprehends fills his heart with joy and pleasure, as the sense of the power and the feeling of spring, he would fain express in words; but he feels himself unable to do so. He seeks for words, and as he cannot yet find them in himself, he rejoices intensely to hear them from others” (ch-VIII-ref:5: p. 117).

As to the subsequent stages of human life, Froebel never fulfilled his promise to write about them. The attention and efforts of his later years were entirely concerned with a plan for the education of early childhood. And thus he is remembered and is to be remembered forever as the founder of the kindergarten system. The idea of the kindergarten rests on the belief that on the complete unfolding of the inner power of childhood in its all-sidedness, on the full gratification of its peculiar needs and requirements, depends the normal development of boyhood, of youth, of man—the entire destiny of human life. This has been recognized by every educator, but never before so keenly and clearly as by Froebel. Moreover, for Rousseau, early childhood was looked upon as purely a physical stage, when education should be purely negative. “Stand aside and let Nature herself work” was his motto. But Froebel saw plenty of room here for human coöperation with the working of Nature. Not “Stand aside,” but “Come, let us live with and for our children,” was what he exclaimed (ch-VIII-ref:5: p. 89). He saw that the school cannot do much with the spoiled and neglected child sent from the imperfect home, and that the present home does not well understand nor provide sufficiently for the nature and requirements of the child’s soul as well as body. Thus he proclaimed: “All school education was yet without a proper initial foundation, and that, therefore, until the education of the nursery was reformed, nothing solid and worthy could be attained” (ch-VIII-ref:2: p. 35). The kindergarten movement was originally a movement for nursery reform. It was intended to show mothers an ideal nursery, and also to supplement, where needed, the work of the home. It is evident that he had a sort of education of parents in view when he first started the kindergarten. “He repeated this again and again,” Baroness von Marenholz-Bülow, the champion of the kindergarten movement, tells us. “'The destiny of nations lies far more in the hands of women—the mothers—than in the possessors of power, or of those innovators who for the most part do not understand themselves. We must cultivate women who are the educators of the human race, else the new generation cannot accomplish its task.’ This was almost always the sum of his discourse” (ch-VIII-ref:14: p. 4). Certainly his kindergarten was set as the model for mothers to copy in their homes. We find the following passage in one of his letters:

“Let young women go there and see the development of child life going on before their eyes, noticing and understanding the laws and working of it.” “There is little hope for improvement until mothers will begin to educate themselves. Let them attend kindergarten and study the system themselves” (ch-VIII-ref:8: p. 64).

He did “not call this by the name usually given to similar institutions, that is, Infant Schools, because it is not to be a school, for the children in it will not be schooled, but freely developed” (ch-VIII-ref:2: p. 33). To use his favorite allegory, children are to be in it like plants, and the attendants are like the gardeners. The character of the kindergarten was essentially to be distinct from that of the school. Yet in the initial motive and conception of the kindergarten there lies the elements which allow his followers to make the two different interpretations of the nature of the kindergarten. One is to consider it simply as the place “to provide a condition of life for childhood that renders it pure and beautiful,” as Herr von Arnswald tells us—“a social nursery par excellence.” He says:

“The gifts and games were offered by Froebel for the purpose of satisfying and directing the spontaneous impulse to work, but not as a sort of nourishment to feed the mind of the child. He preferred open pasture to stable feeding. In other words, the direction, 'Come, let us live for our children,’ does not mean that we shall teach children by playing, but that we shall play with them in a sensible way. According to this view the original idea of the kindergarten can and should be realized in every family. It is not enough for parents, that have neither sense nor inclination to assimilate the principle of the Froebel system, to send their children to the kindergarten for no other purpose than that of keeping the little ones from home.... The transformation of the kindergarten into a children’s refuge with the appearance of a school would surely be a crime against the nature of the child” (ch-VIII-ref:8: pp. 23-24).

He even goes so far as to say:

“That a child, when watched over and cared for sympathetically, will develop more rapidly, may be an effect, but it is not the end of the kindergarten” (ch-VIII-ref:8: p. 23).

The other interpretation is represented by Arnold H. Heinemann. He says: “It was his intention to make the kindergarten not only a, but the sole, 'preparatory institution for the public school’” (ch-VIII-ref:8: p. 27). An English writer, Boardman, counts among the advantages of the kindergarten that it “increases their (the children’s) aptitude for the studies of later school life,” and that it “fosters a liking for school work.” According to him, everything should be disciplinary, educative, and carried out with “direct aim toward intellectual, moral, and physical development,” through “the strictly correct mode of procedure.” He understands that:

“Unlike Pestalozzi, who believed the mother to be the chief agent in directing the child’s education, Froebel considered that the mother should partially relinquish the charge of the child at three years of age, delivering him over more or less to the society of others, who would exert a somewhat different, though still beneficial influence over his character, by which means also his limited sphere of experience would be gradually extended, and scope given for daily strengthening his mental and physical powers” (ch-VIII-ref:1: p. 40).

That both these interpretations contain a partial truth is clear from the following quotation from Froebel’s “Prospectus of an Institution for the Training of Nurses and Educators of Children.” He states:

“The institution intends to render generally accessible an education in agreement with the nature of the child and of man, and satisfying the demands of the age, and to show how such an education can be carried on in the family. This can only be done by preparing young ladies for the business of nursing, developing, and educating a child from its birth until it can go to school. The course will also qualify its pupil to prepare children for the first grade of the elementary course of the public school” (ch-VIII-ref:8: pp. 71-72).

Further, he writes:

“A complete preparation for bringing up and educating children ought to make the pupil theoretically and practically conversant with all the requirements of the child concerning its bodily (dietetic) and mental (pedagogic) needs from the cradle to school age. But that is not enough: the normal school pupil ought also to be enabled to impart a good preparation for the first grade of the elementary classes of the public school” (ch-VIII-ref:8: p. 74).

These “child nurses” and “child guides” were to go out as professional women, and “provide kindergarten training within the family” as mother’s helpers. “But since every family cannot afford to do this individually, it should be carried out as a problem of general coöperation, to be solved by and for all the people.” In his invitation to form a “General German Educational Union,” Froebel had spoken as follows: “The improvements of education ought to begin in the home circle, starting with the groundwork necessary for every education, namely, the careful development of children previous to their reception into the public school,” and “when kindergarten training is not within reach, the union ought to devise means for procuring the necessary help for the introduction of such training into the family circle or otherwise” (ch-VIII-ref:8: p. 39). But, under the circumstances of the age, and in the course of time, the domestic aspect of the kindergarten receded into the background, and the institutional aspect developed, with its natural consequence of systematization and formalization.

The original spirit of the kindergarten training was the careful fostering and the full gratification of all the instinctive, spontaneous activities of the child’s body and soul. The free and complete unfolding and development of his life and being was its sole aim. All the plays and occupations of the child were considered simply as the free, spontaneous expression of his instinctive activities, springing from the necessity of his inner being—the externalization of the internal. But, gradually and unconsciously, the means and inventions to supply the demands of this child nature became end in themselves; the plays and occupations became the instruction and the schooling; it came to be that the child was treated as if he lived in order to learn these things; the “gifts,” which were invented only as one of thousands of means to aid the child’s development, came to be almost the whole business of the kindergarten. Let it liberate itself from “the increasing worship of the baggages of his pedagogy,” and return to the never-dying spirit of its originator. “Let us learn from our children. Let us give heed to the gentle admonitions of their life, to the silent demands of their minds” (ch-VIII-ref:5: p. 89).

As to the estimation of Froebel’s pedagogy there is a great disparity of opinions. James Munroe thinks that, “without being a psychologist, he gave a psychologic twist to all his theories, and complacently esteemed his will-o’-the-wisp of fancy to be the beacon lights of progress” (ch-VIII-ref:15: p. 200). Compayré’s criticism is no less unfavorable when he says: “An impartial and thorough study of Froebel’s work will abate rather than encourage this excessive infatuation and this somewhat artificial enthusiasm.” In his opinion, “like most of the Germans of this century, he has ventured on the conception of a nebulous philosophy, and, following the steps of Hegel, he has too often deserted the route of observation and experiment, to strike out into metaphysical divigations.” “But,” he adds, “his practical work is worth more than his writings, and he cannot be denied the glory of having been a bold and happy innovator in the field of early education” (ch-VIII-ref:4: p. 447). Quick considers his “Education of Man” as “a book with seven seals,” and confesses that “at times he goes entirely out of sight, and whether the words we hear are the expression of deep truth or have absolutely no meaning at all, I for my part am at times totally unable to determine” (ch-VIII-ref:17: p. 397). Yet he says: “All the best tendencies of modern thought on education seem to me to culminate in what was said and done by Friedrich Froebel, and I have little doubt that he has shown the right road for future advance” (ch-VIII-ref:17: p. 384). G. Stanley Hall, whose educational ideas have much in common with Froebel, says: “His was one of the deepest, truest, and most intuitive of minds,” and “his heart was one of the most devoted to be found in the whole history of education” (ch-VIII-ref:11: p. 579). But he regrets that “unfortunately his schematizations and applications were not only premature but overdone.” Froebel, as a man and a thinker, was a mystic, a pantheistic or theosophic mystic; in his training and vocation he had been a civil engineer before he became a teacher. This strange combination is reflected upon his kindergarten pedagogy, ingenious schemes and devices dignified by esoteric speculations. Yet behind these unworthy “pedagogic scarecrows” one cannot but discern the immortal starlight of his genius brightening the highway of future education.

The great idea of developmental stages introduced into the educational world by Comenius was chiefly in the line of instruction, and rather artificial. Rousseau’s great genius made it more vital and real, but he viewed it chiefly from the standpoint of training. Froebel took a more comprehensive and philosophical view of the matter, and combined the tendencies of both. And while the Frenchman excels in his treatment after the age of the teens, the German confines his study to the age of childhood, best supplementing the former. Rousseau as a Romanticist, unfettered by the conventions of society, called to us: “Give back to the child its world.” Froebel, whose childhood was a life misunderstood and mistreated, says: “Find the child’s soul and restore it to him.” Pestalozzi wanted to restore home to the child and make it its school. Froebel wanted to make it the ideal nursery by organizing all the educative forces in and around it into a unity or system. Pestalozzi tried to systematize the groundwork of sense-education, Froebel that of instinct-cultivation. For Pestalozzi the domestic life was the chief agent of the child’s natural development; Froebel added to it free play in the lap of nature. For Pestalozzi, education was the development of man by the exercise of his powers; for Froebel it was the unfolding of the germinal spirit by self-active creation. Fichte’s creative soul formed the cosmos within itself; it was mainly the creation of the world of ideas; but Froebel’s produces its creation in the world of objects. Pestalozzi became an educator by the way of a social reformer; Froebel, by the way of a teacher. The former aimed to unite education with society; the latter aimed to unite instruction with education. Pestalozzi’s heart throbbed for degraded humanity as a whole, and wanted to make out of it a people with economic independence, political equality, enlightened intellect, and pure, loving, and pious heart; Froebel’s eyes penetrated to the ungratified longings of an individual soul, not understood even by itself, and “sought to give to man himself” (ch-VIII-ref:7: p. 49) by leading him to what his inner nature craves to be. If Pestalozzi was the greater educator, Froebel was the greater teacher.

To leave these summary comparisons, Froebel is the best and truest successor of Pestalozzi, the more so from the very fact that he differed from the latter in many respects. By his clearer and more comprehensive understanding of the child’s nature and wants, by his enlarging the means to meet these, by his extending the scope and stage of educability of the child, he best complements the work begun by his predecessor. We may say with Carl Cassau: “He has regained for the child its paradise, and thus crowned the work of Pestalozzi” (ch-VIII-ref:18: p. 464).

REFERENCES

1.Boardman, J. H. Educational Ideas of Froebel and Pestalozzi. Second edition. Normal Press, London. (Normal Tutorial Series.) 190-. 76 pages.

2.Bowen, Herbert Courthope. Froebel and Education by Self-Activity. Scribner, New York, 1897. 209 pages.

3.Cole, P. R. Herbart and Froebel: an Attempt at Synthesis. Teacher’s College, Columbia University, New York, 1907. 116 pages.

4.Compayré, Jules Gabriel. History of Pedagogy. Translated, with an introduction, notes, and an index, by W. H. Payne. Heath & Co., Boston, 1903. 597 pages.

5.Froebel, Friedrich Wilhelm August. Education of Man. Translated and annotated by W. H. Hailman. (International Education Series.) Appleton, New York, 1887. 332 pages.

6.——Mother Songs, Games, and Stories. Translated by Francis and Emily Lord, containing original illustrations and the music. New and revised edition. Rice, London, 1890. 36 + 212 + 75 pages.

7.——Autobiography. Translated and annotated by E. Michaelis and H. K. Moore. Bardeen, Syracuse, N. Y., 1889. 167 pages.

8.——Letters. Edited by A. E. Heinemann. Lee & Shepard, Boston, 1903. 182 pages.

9.——Letters on the Kindergarten. Edited and annotated by E. Michaelis and H. K. Moore. Sonnenschein, London, 1891. 331 pages.

10.——Pedagogics of the Kindergarten; or His Ideas Concerning the Play and the Playthings of the Child. Translated by Josephine Jarvis. Appleton, New York, 1895. 37 + 337 pages. (International Education Series.)

11.Hall, Granville Stanley. Some Defects of the Kindergarten in America. Forum, January, 1900. Vol. XXVIII, pp. 579-591.

12.Hanschmann, Alexander Bruno. Friedrich Froebel, die Entwicklung seiner Erziehungsidee in seinem Leben. Bacmeister, Eisenach, 1874. 480 pages.

13.MacVannel, John Angus. The Educational Theories of Herbart and Froebel. Teacher’s College, Columbia University, New York, 1906. 120 pages.

14.Marenholz-Bülow, Bertha Maria. Reminiscences of Friedrich Froebel. Translated by Mrs. Horace Mann. With a sketch of the life of Friedrich Froebel by Emily Schirreff. Lee & Shepard, Boston; Dillingham, New York, 1895. 359 pages.

15.Munroe, James Phinney. The Educational Ideal: an Outline of its Growth in Modern Times. Heath & Co., Boston, 1896. 262 pages.

16.Portugall, Adele von. Friedrich Froebel, sein Leben und Wirken. Teubner, Leipzig, 1905. 154 pages.

17.Quick, Robert Hebert. Essays on Educational Reformers. Appleton, New York, 1890. 560 pages. The same (International Education Series), 1903. 568 pages.

18.Rein, Georg Wilhelm. Encyklopädisches Handbuch der Pädagogik. 8 vols. Beyer, Langensalza, 1895-1906. Vol. II.

19.Scherer, Heinrich. Die Pädagogik in ihrer Entwicklung im Zusammenhange mit dem Kultur- und Geistesleben und ihrem Einfluss auf die Gestaltung des Erziehungs- und Bildungswesens. Vol. II. Die Pädagogik als Wissenschaft von Pestalozzi bis zur Gegenwart. 3 parts. Brandstetter, Leipzig, 1897-1908.

20.Schmid, Karl Adolf. Geschichte der Erziehung vom Anfang an bis auf unsere Zeit. 5 vols. Cotta, Stuttgart, 1884-1902. Vol. III.

CHAPTER IX.

JOHANN FRIEDRICH HERBART
(1776-1841)

Pestalozzi found the most original successor of his educational reform in the intuitive mind of Froebel; the work of education as a benevolent and intelligent assistance to the natural evolution of the child-soul was carried on further by the latter. But the successor most competent to systematize and complete his pedagogical ideas was found in the analytical mind of Herbart; Pestalozzi’s innovations in the field of elementary instruction underwent a careful working over by this keen and comprehensive intellect of thorough academic training. To bring about psychological unity and sequence in school instruction was one of the life aims of Froebel, but he stopped short at the kindergarten, and, moreover, left us no scientific theory. Herbart, on the contrary, not only aimed at the same, but worked out a system on the broadest scientific and philosophic basis which his age permitted him. According to Herbart, “to discover this sequence is Pestalozzi’s chief effort and likewise my own great ideal.” He found the solution in the principle of the A. B. C. of perception, “that grand idea of its discoverer, the noble Pestalozzi,” as he called it. But “Pestalozzi has only worked out the application of the principle within the narrow sphere of elementary instruction. It belongs, in truth, to education as a whole, though it needs for that a further development” (ch-IX-ref:6: p. 178). This Pestalozzian principle, interpreted by Herbart, probably means the systematic building up of the entire mental mechanism of the pupil from its simplest and fundamental elements or constituents, in the necessary psychological order and with mathematical exactness.

These two German educators, Froebel and Herbart, who both may be called the contemporary disciples of the great Swiss reformer, have much in common in their pedagogical ideas, but they were totally different in temperament, training, metaphysical conceptions, and practical careers. They do not seem even to have known each other. Herbart reminds me, more than anyone else, of Kant, of whom he was a great admirer and to whom he seems to owe much. In his rather stoical physiognomy, in his perfect poise and well-balanced personality, in his sharp analytic intellect, in his instinct for schematic systematization and elaboration, in his comprehensive, all-sided view of problems, in his scholarly sincerity, in his combination of speculativeness and empiricism, of theoretical and practical interest, he is the second Kant in the history of philosophy. There is a still more interesting comparison. As Kant endeavored to clear away all the one-sided dogmatic views of preceding metaphysics by the standard of his analytic epistemology and to establish in their place a new system of philosophy, upon the unshakable basis of the a priori categories of knowledge, so Herbart tried the same in the field of pedagogy, using his analytical psychology as the dissecting knife for the “vulgar” theories of his forerunners and the basis of his own “scientific” pedagogy. “The a priori possibility of all the activities of the human mind” shows him the only means of promoting the aims and removing the hindrances of education. All the educational ideals, theories, and practices, however beautiful and ingenious they sound, must be judged by this standard. If Kant’s philosophy is the critical philosophy, Herbart’s pedagogy is the critical pedagogy. And if Kant, coming after Rousseau, succeeded in opening a new era in the schoolmen’s philosophy, so Herbart was an epoch-maker in the history of the schoolmen’s pedagogy. But the name of the father of modern education will ever remain Pestalozzi, as the honor of the creator of modern tendencies of thought will be conferred upon Rousseau instead of Kant, if one looks at things from a broad, human, cultural standpoint rather than the narrow, academic one.

Kant saw the necessity and possibility of scientific pedagogy, and had an unrealized dream of establishing a pedagogical system as the culmination of all the philosophical branches. This, Herbart worked at with painstaking effort, and thought he succeeded in it. Professor Rein is justified in saying that, “without doubt, Herbart, among all German philosophers, made the greatest and most thorough investigation in this field.... He is the only one among the original thinkers of modern times who not merely casually touched, but directed the whole force of his theoretical and practical knowledge upon the question of pedagogy” (ch-IX-ref:16: p. 462). Kant recommends, in his pedagogical lectures, the establishment of experimental schools for the advancement of educational art. Herbart realized the idea by organizing a pedagogical seminary with a practice school in connection with the University of Königsberg, where he was invited in 1809 to fill the chair once occupied by Kant, and long desired by him. And to-day we see, thanks to this impetus, similar institutes established in many German universities.

A German writer has called Pestalozzi the Kant of pedagogy and didactics, but to me no one seems better to suit the name than our philosopher-pedagogist. But we must not overlook an important difference which exists between the two philosophers: Kant stood more under the influence of natural science, while Herbart remained more under the influence of the classics. So the former is the more naturalistic, and the latter more humanistic, in his educational standpoint. This may be partly due to the difference of the times in which they lived, partly to that of their training, and also of their personalities. While they resemble each other in their intellectuality, there seems to be more iron in Kant and more warmth in Herbart; certainly the latter had more appreciation of the æsthetic aspect of things than the former.

No education without instruction, no instruction without education, is the keynote of the whole Herbartian pedagogy. From Locke down, the essential trend of educational reforms has been in the direction of exalting discipline and training, natural growth and experience, thrusting instruction into the background. Not knowledge, not intellect, but the virtues, character, will, heart, man himself, was the fundamental aim of education, and instruction was accounted as only contributing to it in a secondary or tertiary way. Herbart agreed with his predecessors in seeing the main purpose of education in the formation of character; but, according to him, instruction was the chief means for attaining this end, and consequently it was the essential business of educators. To him, “to present the whole treasure of accumulated research in a concentrated form to the youthful generation is the highest service which mankind at any period of his existence can render to his successors” (ch-IX-ref:9: p. 81). And herein lies the inspiration of the teacher’s calling. However, he regained this importance for the function of instruction by giving it a higher meaning than the mere imparting of miscellaneous knowledge. In order to see this we must go a little into his psychology, upon which his pedagogy rests.

The new departure which Herbart made in psychology was that he dispersed the ghost of “faculties,” which had been attributed to an entity called soul, and substituted in its place the manifold images or representations as the phenomena of our psychic life. He argues: “It is an error indeed to look upon the human soul as an aggregate of all sorts of faculties” (ch-IX-ref:8: p. 15). And to reduce these to one and the same active principle is to make the theory still worse. “The soul is a simple essence, not merely without parts, but also without any kind of multiplicity in its quality” (ch-IX-ref:11: p. 119).

“The soul has no innate dispositions (Anlage), nor faculties (Vermögen) whatever, either for the purpose of receiving or for the purpose of producing. It is, therefore, no tabula rasa in the sense that impressions foreign to itself may be made upon it; moreover, in the sense indicated by Leibnitz, it is not a substance which includes within itself original self-activity. It has originally neither concepts nor feelings nor desires. It knows nothing of itself and nothing of other things; also in it lie no forms of perception and thought, no laws of willing and action, and not even a remote predisposition to any of these” (ch-IX-ref:11: p. 120).

As to the metaphysical question, “What is the soul in its essence?” Herbart endeavors to give no answer. It “is totally unknown, and will forever remain so. It is as little an object of speculative as of empirical psychology” (ch-IX-ref:11: p. 120).

Now, soul is entirely deprived of all content, qualities, attributes, and tendencies, and reduced to a sort of mathematical point, or something like the Kantian Ding-an-sich. It is a “Real,” he says. But its entity is equal to nonentity. A way is opened when he tells that there is one original power possessed by the soul. This is the reaction to external stimuli, or the power of “self-preservation,” as he calls it. By this reaction representations are produced, and when once produced they stay in the mind, ready to be reproduced and develop through the process of mutual interaction into concepts and higher forms of thought.

Thus, representations or ideas constitute the primary content of soul. However, from the contrast or counter reactions of these ideas there result secondary states, which are what we call feelings or volitions. These three phases of our soul life—ideation, feeling, and volition—“are constantly to be found in combination,” and they are together “in a constant change.” The “heart (Gemüth), however, has its source in the mind—in other words, feeling and desiring are conditions, and for the most part changeable conditions of concepts” (ch-IX-ref:11: p. 26). The fundamental points in all this are that a soul is what it itself builds up by experience, namely, by its relation to external stimuli; that ideas constitute the primary and constant part of the soul, while feeling and volition are only the outcome of the various relations between these ideas.

Now the ultimate aim of education is the formation of character. Character means the stability of will, or “the inner freedom” of will. When will always chooses the good by its self-determination it is said to have freedom. This means that each individual act of willing works in harmony with the already existing system of wills; and in the full attainment of this freedom or harmony lies the perfection of will or character; morality means our striving toward this perfection. But, according to Herbart, the source of will is the idea. “The circle of thought contains the store of that which by degrees can mount by the steps of interest to desire, and then by means of action to volition.... The whole inner activity, indeed, has its abode in the circle of thought. Here is found the initiative life, the primal energy; ... Clearness, association, system, and method must rule here” (ch-IX-ref:9: p. 213) in order to secure a free, easy, energetic, and steady activity of the will; and since meagerness of the store of ideas means meagerness of interests, of motives, consequently, of the directions of will activity, we must endeavor to enrich the circle of thought as well as to make it clear and coherent. The help we extend to this enrichment and systematization of ideas we call instruction. Our ideas come from two main sources—experience of the objective world and human intercourse. From the former develops the “empirical,” the “speculative,” and the æsthetic interests; from the latter the “sympathetic,” the social, and the religious interests. These are six divisions of interest, according to Herbart. All of these interests must be aroused and harmoniously developed in order that the child may have a rich and coherent circle of thought. This is called, in the Herbartian terminology, “many-sidedness of interest.” Many-sided interest prevents one from falling into egoism; it provides the basis for social bond and cooperation. By having a wide range of motives, and consequently a balance of the will, one will find in it a “protection in the future from the yoke of the desires and the passions. It will arm him against fortune’s changes, and will make life worth living, even when a cruel fate has robbed him of his dearest. It will guard him from all errors which spring from idleness, and will provide him with a new calling when the old has been closed to him. It will raise him to the level from which earthly possessions and the successes of worldly efforts seem but accidents which cannot touch the true self, for above them stands the moral character, grand and free” (ch-IX-ref:6: p. 96). Thus, as the end of education is character, so the direct aim of instruction is many-sided interest. Consequently, instruction should be, first of all, manifold, and not one-sided. “Every avenue of approach should be thrown open.” The apperceptive capacity of the child should be moved in all directions. Of course we must accommodate the subject-matter to the great variety of endowments the child presents. “Yet while instruction must thus be differentiated, it should not be made so special as to cultivate only the more prominent gifts; otherwise the pupil’s less vigorous mental faculties would be wholly neglected and perhaps suppressed” (ch-IX-ref:8: p. 42).

Instruction should always follow the gradual progress of interest in the pupil. A new apperception, a new interest is invariably to be grafted upon the already existing ones. “When interest has not been aroused, compulsory acquisition is not only worthless, leading as it does to soulless, mechanical activity, but positively injurious, because it vitiates the pupils’ mental aptitude and disposition” (ch-IX-ref:8: p. 290). Not mastery of a certain skill or thoroughness in any one of the branches of knowledge, but fondness for these, accompanied by the desire to further them, is the main thing, especially in the early stages of instruction. “Interest means self-activity. The demand for a many-sided interest is, therefore, a demand for a many-sided self-activity” (ch-IX-ref:8: p. 60). Herbart condemns the “a priori assumptions that certain subjects must be taught.” “The intellectual self-activity of the pupil,” this is the end of “educative instruction.” “This, and not mere knowledge, any more than utility, determines the point of view with regard to the instruction material” (ch-IX-ref:8: p. 97).

Attention is another aspect of interest. It “may be broadly defined as an attitude of mind in which there is readiness to form new ideas” (ch-IX-ref:8: p. 62). There are two kinds of attention—voluntary or forced, and involuntary or spontaneous. The latter is “far more desirable and fruitful,” for “forced attention does not suffice for instruction, even though it may be had through disciplinary measures” (ch-IX-ref:8: p. 135). The involuntary attention is again divided into the primitive and the apperceiving. “Primitive or original attention depends primarily upon the strength of the sense impressions,” and the pleasure it affords (ch-IX-ref:8: p. 64). This signifies the same thing as momentary interest. We must secure this in order to render instruction effective. “Tediousness is the greatest sin of instruction” (ch-IX-ref:5: p. 82). Apperceiving attention feeds on the primitive attention; it is the outcome of cultivated or permanent interest, and the expression of our whole accumulated experience of the world and life.

The function of instruction is, we have been told, to systematize the child’s thought as well as to enrich it. We are not only to pile up the materials in his mind, but to construct them into a solid, planful structure. Facts need a methodical treatment, Herbart claims, in order that they may ever enlarge the scope of our mental activity. This process of methodical treatment is called by the Herbartians “the formal steps of instruction.” The perception or the idea of a thing must be first made clear, then associated with the perception or the idea of other things; thirdly, systematized with the whole previous experience or stock of knowledge; and, lastly, made a living knowledge by practical application.

In the process of instruction we may distinguish three modes or phases—the purely presentative, the analytic, and the synthetic instruction. The purely preservative or descriptive method aims to produce results akin to an extension of the pupils’ range of actual experience. Although it can only be applied to concrete matters, “skill in this direction is the surest means of securing interest.” Free oral presentation produces an effect that reading never does. To secure success in this, “a cultivated style of speaking,” “adaptation of the vocabulary employed, both to the subject-matter and to the intelligence of the pupils, and adjustment of the phraseology to the pupils’ stage of culture” and careful preparation are essential requisites. The aim “should be to make the pupil realize events and objects as vividly as if they were actually present to his eye and ear” (ch-IX-ref:8: pp. 107-108). But without previous experience, or at least a sufficient basis for imaginative construction on the part of pupils, this would naturally fail. Therefore we must endeavor to enlarge his apperceptive mass by the aid of frequent excursions, by plentiful exhibitions of objects and pictures, by giving the child a wide acquaintance with sense material.

Children in their natural experience or learning gather only a crude mass of facts, resulting often in a chaotic apprehension. These facts, therefore, must be worked over and rearranged in their minds in order to become true knowledge. The instruction which aims at this is called “Analytic” instruction. It is “awakening attention and reflection through instruction, or exercise in thinking”; it is a sort of mental cud of the whole stock of children’s direct and reproduced experience. It consists in pointing out the main facts of a given whole, their relations, the size, form, weight, number, attributes, uses of things, in comparing, discriminating, generalizing, and classifying them; and it may further involve the consideration of natural or artificial origin and development of things.

“Analytic instruction” must depend on the materials already existing in the pupil’s mind, and is thus limited by them. These are, of course, insufficient for the rearing of his mental structure which may serve his varied life-purposes. Something new and strange must be brought in from outside his immediate environment. This is the function of “synthetic instruction.” The quarry from which the materials come is coextensive with the cultural history of the human race, including the whole stock of literature and science. Synthetic instruction is thus cultural instruction per se. It “builds with its own stones,” the teacher himself determining directly the sequence and grouping of parts of the lesson. Although interest partly depends on the native capacity and inclination of the pupils, yet the choice of the subject-matter and the manner of its presentation can to a large extent determine it. “Synthetic instruction must offer subjects capable of arousing lasting and spontaneously radiating interest.... The first place belongs rather to those studies which appeal to the mind in a variety of ways and are capable of stimulating each pupil according to his individuality. For such subjects ample time must be allowed; they must be made the object of prolonged diligent effort” (ch-IX-ref:8: p. 127). For the treatment of the subject the general order is, of course, “the easy before the difficult, or, more specifically, that which prepares the way, before that which cannot be firmly grasped without preliminary knowledge”; things naturally must be brought down within the reach of the pupils’ understanding, yet not made so easy as to exclude effort on his part.

But Herbart shows his genuine pedagogic insight in warning against a too strict adherence to logical sequence, or a too exacting insistence upon perfect mastery in preliminary knowledge, as “equivalent to scaring away interest.” He says:

“To make the road so level as to do away entirely with the necessity for occasional leaps, means to provide for the convenience of the teacher rather than for that of the pupils. The young love to climb and jump; they do not take kindly to an absolutely level path” (ch-IX-ref:8: p. 128).

Eager as he was in his advocacy of methodical instruction, yet he did not overlook the greater importance of the pupil’s interest in the content of subject-matter taught. After calling cursory reading the worst method of beginning the study of languages, he adds:

“Even cursory reading, however, produces good results under one condition, namely, the existence of a lively interest in the contents” (ch-IX-ref:8: p. 132).

As Herbart’s desire and attempt to bring about sequence and order in instruction became schematized by some of his followers, the most prominent of whom are Ziller and Rein, into “formal steps,” so his endeavor to introduce unity and harmony into education was attenuated by them into the doctrines of “culture stages” and “concentration center.” The doctrine of “culture stages” is stated by Ziller as follows:

“The mental development of the child corresponds, in general, to the chief phases in the development of mankind. It therefore cannot be better furthered than when he receives his mental nourishment from the general development of culture as it is found in literature and history. Every pupil should accordingly pass successively through each of the chief epochs of the general mental development of mankind suitable to his stage of development. The material of instruction, therefore, should be drawn from the thought material of that stage of historical development in culture which runs parallel with the present mental state of the pupil” (ch-IX-ref:6: p. 122).

In accordance with this theory, Ziller selected the following topics which, he thought, would fit respectively the developmental stages of children in the eight years of the school course: (1) Epic fairy tales, (2) Robinson Crusoe, (3) History of the Patriarchs, (4) Judges in Israel, (5) Kings in Israel, (6) Life of Christ, (7) History of the Apostles, (8) History of the Reformation. And parallel to the history of the Israelites, literature taken from German history was to be taught. Not being satisfied with this artificial matching and grading, Ziller wanted further to make the above-mentioned materials the center of all instruction, connecting with them the teaching not only of language, but of arithmetic, drawing, geography, and science. With Professor Rein this idea was more reasonably modified. He also uses these historical-humanistic studies as the “concentration-center,” but other materials are only to be coördinated with them so far as possible, not entirely absorbed into them.

Instruction, although it is the main part of education, must be assisted by two other functions in order to be effective; namely, government and discipline. The function of government is to keep the pupils in order, in quiet, and in abeyance to the will of the teacher. It is mere, though necessary, preparation for instruction and discipline. It concerns itself only with the present of the pupil, while instruction and discipline look to his future. Government involves keeping children in constant occupation suitable to their age and individuality, supervision, with numerous commands and prohibitions, and certain rewards and punishments.

Instruction aims at the formation of character through the formation of a system of sound judgments and clear insights, which motivate the good will. It is discipline that completes the work of instruction by the habituation of the will in the direction of virtue. Its task is to harmonize and unify the manifold acts of will by subordinating single momentary volitions to the moral ego which is gradually to be formed in the mind of the child. As the object of instruction is to give moral illumination to the will, so that of discipline is to develop “moral strength of character.” Discipline is distinguished from government by its being chiefly concerned with inner volition, while the latter mainly deals with outward action. So it is not applied, like government, by enforcement, but consists in reciprocal personal reaction between the teacher and the pupil. Without the voluntary reaction or willing coöperation on the part of the latter, discipline is futile. Certain personal attitudes, sympathy and helpfulness on the part of the teacher, confidence and dependence on the part of the pupil, are the first requisites of training.

Thus we see that Herbart brought about, in his own way, a reconciliation between the exclusive resort to formal discipline in contempt of instruction, by means of which the source of rich and refined motives is supplied, and the over-exaltation of impartment of knowledge to the neglect of training, by which alone it becomes power and life—giving also a due importance to the preliminary and supporting function of supervision or government. In instruction itself, also, the two opposite tendencies, the humanistic and the empirical, find a higher unity. The humanistic school claimed the knowledge stored in the history and literature of the race alone as worth imparting, while the empirical asserted that the knowledge coming from immediate personal experience alone deserves the name. Herbart takes individual experience as the leading-string of instruction, and unites with it the experience of the whole human race, incorporated in culture and science.

In regard to the relation of the state and the home as educational agencies, again, he gives a harmony to the one-sided views held by his predecessors by making clear the particular positions occupied by both. The state requires from its citizens their social and professional efficiency. Hence it gives the best possible education to them to produce this efficiency. Thus, the advancement of technical knowledge and the multiplication of specialized scholarships are well secured in the hand of the state. But it is not concerned so much with the particular needs, nor the proportional development of the individual as an individual, as with his serviceability to itself in his particular line or sphere of work. “The state applies its test to what can be tested, to the outward side of conduct and of knowledge. It does not penetrate the inner life. Teachers in public schools cannot penetrate much farther; they, too, are more concerned with the sum total of the knowledge imparted by them, than with the individual and the way in which he relates his knowledge to himself” (ch-IX-ref:8: p. 318).

“The family, on the other hand, interested as it is in the individual, must take the pedagogical point of view, according to which every human being is to realize the best of which he is capable. It is essential that families should grasp this distinction and accordingly, concern themselves not with the greatness of particular achievements, but with the totality of culture possible for the individual” (ch-IX-ref:8: pp. 289-290). As to moral discipline, the very nature of family organism requires it to go deeper than the state does or ever can. “It is obvious, therefore, that moral education will always remain essentially a home task, and that the institutions of the state are to be resorted to for educative purposes only with a view to supplementing the home.” However, the family as it is has its drawbacks. Its life “is very often too busy, too full of care, or too noisy for that rigor which is undeniably required both for instruction and for morality. Luxury and want alike harbor dangers for youth. Consequently families lean on the state for support more than they ought” (ch-IX-ref:8: p. 318).

So Herbart advocates that, “as much as possible, education must return to the family,” provided “that sound pedagogical views have been arrived at in the home and that the place is not occupied by absurd whims or half knowledge” (ch-IX-ref:8: pp. 319-320). For the present the work of education should be carried on by the harmonious coöperation of the state and the family, the school and the home. Private institutions have their special place as the best experimental station for the art of education, when provided with a picked set of pupils and teachers and well-regulated environment.

“With the exception of Pestalozzi,” says Spielmann, “Herbart has exercised the most important influence upon pedagogy.” Pestalozzi gave the first impetus to “psychologizing” the process of education; Herbart, continuing this movement, tried to make a science of it, and became the father of the great school of pedagogy which bears his name, and is represented by such renowned pedagogues as Mager, Strümpell, Story, Waitz, von Sallwürk, Ziller, Vogt, Willmann, Rein, Just, Dörffell, Frölich, Leutz, Frieck, and Helm. No academic pedagogy probably has exerted such a wide and systematic influence upon the field of education, especially of school instruction, as the Herbartian school has. No such technicality and doctrination has, with the probable exception of the Froebelian pedagogy among kindergartners, ever so ruled the thought and practice of school teachers. Yet it has received at the same time a strong and healthy opposition, chiefly directed against its overdone methodization and schematization carried on by his disciples rather than by Herbart himself. “Return to Pestalozzi,” is the cry we have been hearing in some quarters from German pedagogues. But though for the impartial learner no system of pedagogy is absolutely binding authority, yet at the same time every original thinker is to be our teacher, guide, and benefactor. When we go back directly to him we find him speaking with the living power of his personal experience and insight; it is the blind followers who kill him by idolizing him.

Herbart indeed advocated making a scientific pedagogy the basis of the practice of education. Yet he admits that “long will it be before we have it, longer still before we can expect it from teachers.” Moreover, even when this is reached, “it can never be a substitute for observation of the pupil; the individual can only be discovered, not deduced” (ch-IX-ref:9: p. 83). As to his own system of pedagogy, it certainly “affords an opportunity for estimating the breadth and the sphere of education and the vastness of problems lying before it” (ch-IX-ref:9: p. 77), and also for seeing the exceeding complexity of every apparently simple matter in it. He and his school unquestionably deserve an important place in the history of pedagogy. But we must remember that psychology, which is, according to him, the foundation of pedagogy, has made progress by leaps and bounds since his day; that the social conditions and needs also have seen a considerable change. Therefore, to those who are disposed to linger at the starting-point of the great road opened by him, instead of marching on along it with the same eagerness and pioneering spirit which inspired Herbart himself, we offer the words which he wrote to Herr von Steiger in reference to “the most abiding of all the rules I send you”: “Remember, you must not be in the least slavishly bound by them; I mean them rather as hints” (ch-IX-ref:9: p. 8).

REFERENCES

1.Achelis, Thomas. Die Wandlungen der Pädagogik im 19. Jahrhundert. Cronbach, Berlin, 1901. 204 pages.

2.Adams, John. The Herbartian Psychology Applied to Education. Being a series of essays applying the psychology of Johann Friedrich Herbart. Ibister, London, 1897. 279 pages.

3.Böhmel, Otto. Der principielle Gegensatz in den pädagogischen Anschauungen Kant’s und Herbart’s. Koch, Marburg, 1891. 31 pages.

4.De Garmo, Charles. Herbart and the Herbartians. Scribner, New York, 1895. 268 pages.

5.Engel, Moriz Emil. Grundsätze der Erziehung und des Unterrichts nach Herbart, Ziller und A. Diesterweg. Weidmann, Berlin, 1887. 176 pages.

6.Felkin, Henry M. and Mrs. E. An Introduction to Herbart’s Science and Practice of Education. Heath & Co., Boston, 1900. 193 pages.

7.Heman, Friedrich. Geschichte der neueren Pädagogik. Zickfeldt, Osterwieck, 1904. 436 pages.

8.Herbart, Johann Friedrich. Outlines of Educational Doctrines. Translated by A. F. Lange, annotated by C. De Garmo. Macmillan Co., London and New York, 1901. 334 pages.

9.——The Science of Education. Translated by Felkin. Sonnenschein, London, 1892. 268 pages.

10.——The Application of Psychology to the Science of Education. Translated and edited by B. C. Mulliner. Scribner, New York, 1898. 231 pages.

11.——Text-book in Psychology. Translated by M. K. Smith. Appleton, New York, 1894. 200 pages. (International Education Series.)

12.——A. B. C. of Sense Perception and Minor Pedagogical Works. Translated with introduction, notes, and commentary by W. J. Eckoff. Appleton, New York, 1896. 288 pages. (International Education Series.)

13.——Letters and Lectures on Education. Translated and edited by H. M. and Mrs. E. Felkin. Sonnenschein, London, 1901. 295 pages.

14.Lang, Ossian, H. Outlines of Herbart’s Pedagogics; with Biographical Introduction. Kellogg, New York, 1894. 72 pages.

15.Rein, Georg Wilhelm. Outlines of Pedagogics. Translated by C. C. and J. J. Van Liew. Sonnenschein, London, 1893. 199 pages.

16.——Encyklopädisches Handbuch der Pädagogik. 8 vols. Beyer, Langensalza, 1895-1906. Vol. III.

17.Sallwürk, Ernst von. Gesinnungsunterricht und Kulturgeschichte; zu pädagogischen Kritik. Beyer, Langensalza, 1887. 103 pages.

18.Scherer, Heinrich. Die Pädagogik in ihrer Entwicklung im Zusammenhange mit dem Kultur- und Geistesleben und ihrem Einfluss auf die Gestaltung des Erziehungs- und Bildungswesens. Vol. II. Die Pädagogik als Wissenschaft von Pestalozzi bis zur Gegenwart. 3 parts. Brandstetter, Leipzig, 1897-1908.

19.Schmid, Karl Adolf. Geschichte der Erziehung vom Anfang an bis auf unsere Zeit. 5 vols. Cotta, Stuttgart, 1884-1902. Vol. IV. Part II.

20.Spielmann, C. Christian. Die Meister der Pädagogik nach ihren Leben, ihren Werken und ihrer Bedeutung. Heufer, Neuwied, 1904-1905. 365 pages. Part VI.

21.Strümpell, Ludwig H. Das System der Pädagogik Herbart’s. Part III. Pädagogische Abhandlungen. Dichert, Leipzig, 1894.

22.Wiget, Theodor. Die formalen Stufen des Unterrichts; eine Einführung in die Schriften Zillers. Seventh edition. Rich, Chur., 1901. 117 pages.

23.Ziegler, Theobald. Geschichte der Pädagogik mit besonderer Rücksicht auf das höhere Unterrichtswesen. Beck, München, 1895. 361 pages.

CHAPTER X.

HERBERT SPENCER
(1820-1903)

Spencer introduces no new ideas into the history of pedagogy. His treatise is little more than a new version of the Rousseauean and Pestalozzian ideas. But foreign ideas, as such, seldom penetrate the English soil, and the Anglo-Saxon mind naturally rebels against a man of Rousseau’s type. Thus the realistic, psychological tendencies in education which had been conquering the Continent needed their English translator. He was found in the person of the greatest English philosopher of the nineteenth century. What Rousseau grasped by the bold flight of his poetic genius, Spencer brought down to the earthly level by scientific evidence and arguments; what Pestalozzi uttered in the inspiration of his prophetic vision, Spencer reiterated in the words of common sense. Thus the Anglo-Saxon world listened to the messages of the two great continental prophets through the voice of the apostle of her own production. So it came about that the pedagogical stream which had taken its rise in the island empire through Bacon and Locke, and flowed out into the Continent, becoming ever deeper and deeper, now streamed back to its original source.

Nevertheless, Spencer was by no means an expounder of foreign thoughts in the ordinary sense of the term; he was the last man for that. “He was at no time a great reader. The influence of other thinkers did not come to him through books, but their ideas were picked up by the wayside, so to speak, or rather imbibed from the air in which they floated, without his being aware of it” (ch-X-ref:5: p. 210). He was one of the most independent and original thinkers; he was so aloof and isolated from the preceding and current history of thought that his critics account this the weakness of his philosophy in general. Yet if he was independent of the history of thought embodied in books, he was not and could not be so of its living current. We see a new widening of scientific outlook and a great upheaval of the realistic spirit in the first half of the nineteenth century, of which England was again, as three centuries before, the harbinger. This new Zeitgeist of the nineteenth century England was provided with a mouthpiece in this independent, “fully self-governed and habitually self-sufficing,” self-educated philosopher. He it was that in the nineteenth century England wielded the first axe to break down her most obstinate conservatism in the field of education. True, he was not the only one to be called for this work, but his blows were the boldest and the most systematic.

Spencer’s first attack was directed against the fortress of the exalted “classics” or “cultural studies.” The positive aspect of this was the claim for a higher, nay, the highest place for science in the school curriculum. This battle had, indeed, been waged since the time of Bacon, but the development of the new sciences had only made the English schools close their gates tighter. “Science was tabooed in most schools and frowned upon in innumerable pulpits.” “The attitude of the universities toward natural science has been that of contemptuous nonrecognition. College authorities have long resisted, either actively or passively, the making of physiology, chemistry, geology, etc., subjects of examination” (ch-X-ref:9: p. 375). Here came Spencer, the nonconformist of nonconformists, and poured cold water over the long-established dignity of “the education of the gentleman,” saying:

“Men dress their children’s minds as they do their bodies, in the prevailing fashion. As the Orinoco Indian puts on his paint before leaving his hut, not with a view to any direct benefit, but because he would be ashamed to be seen without; so a boy’s drilling in Latin and Greek is insisted upon, not because of their intrinsic value, but that he may not be disgraced by being found ignorant of them—that he may have 'the education of a gentleman’—the badge marking a certain social position, and bringing a consequent respect.... Not what knowledge is of most real worth, is the consideration; but what will bring most applause, honor, respect—what will most conduce to social position and influence—what will be most imposing. As, through life, not what we are, but what we shall be thought, is the question, so in education the question is not the intrinsic value of knowledge so much as its extrinsic effects on others” (ch-X-ref:7: pp. 23-26).

Thus Spencer proposes the determination of the comparative, intrinsic value of different kinds of studies as the matter of first importance in putting education on a surer foundation. “This is,” he says, “the question of questions, which it is high time we discussed in some methodical way.” “What is the use of it?” was the question repeatedly raised by every educational reformer from Bacon down. But Spencer would settle the question once for all in the light of a standard which should be rationally established as universal and necessary. What, then, is this standard?

Any value of an object which is intrinsic is determined by its bearing upon our life. Life—this is the ultimate test to which all must appeal either directly or indirectly. Anything which does not serve our individual and social life has no value whatever. “How to live” is the fundamental problem for us all. Every special problem of mankind is comprised in this one problem.

“In what way to treat the body; in what way to treat the mind; in what way to manage our affairs; in what way to bring up a family; in what way to behave as a citizen; in what way to utilize all the sources of happiness which Nature supplies—how to use all our faculties to the greatest advantage of ourselves and others—how to live completely? And this being the greatest thing needful for us to learn, is by consequence the great thing which education has to teach. To prepare us for complete living is the function which education has to discharge; and the only rational mode of judging of any educational course is to judge in what degree it discharges such function” (ch-X-ref:7: pp. 30-31).

Human life is constituted of various activities which can be classified into:

“1. Those activities which directly minister to self-preservation; 2. Those which by securing necessaries of life indirectly minister to self-preservation; 3. Those which have for their end the rearing and discipline of offspring; 4. Those which are involved in the maintenance of proper social and political relations; 5. Those miscellaneous activities which make-up the leisure part of life, devoted to the gratification of the tastes and feelings” (ch-X-ref:7: p. 32).

The above stand, considered from the biological and anthropological point of view, “in something like their true order of subordination.”

Spencer takes each of these departments of human activities one by one and tries to convince us of how necessary is the knowledge of hygiene and physiology for our self-preservation; nothing less than that of mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, and social sciences for our economic activities; that of physiology, hygiene, psychology, anthropology, and pedagogy for the performance of the parental function; that of sociology, which, according to him, must comprise a study of the laws of social organism, as well as its description in its political, economical, religious, social, and cultural growth, for the fulfilment of the duties of citizenship. Even in the domain of our æsthetic life, he thinks, a systematized knowledge of facts and laws concerning natural and psychic worlds will increase the power of both æsthetic production and enjoyment.

Then Spencer turns to the value of the sciences for the training of the mental powers. First of all he refers us to “the beautiful economy of Nature,” according to which “everywhere throughout creation we find faculties developed through the performance of those functions which it is their office to perform; not through the performance of artificial exercises devised to fit them for these functions” (ch-X-ref:7: pp. 84-85). So we may be certain a priori, he thinks, that also in education the acquirement of the valuable facts must involve the best mental exercise. Then he shows us, taking up different sciences one by one, how, through the systematic pursuance of the facts and laws of Nature and life which they present, we are better trained in our power of memory, of judgment, of reasoning, in our moral character, and even in our religious sentiments, than through linguistic studies, which largely consist, in fact, of “lexicons and grammars.”

Spencer’s next plea is for a freer education, as opposed to the prevailing one of coercion. The nineteenth century was the age for the triumph of individual freedom. The infallible authority of the Church, of monarchs, of the head of the family, were thrown down, one after another, through revolution and through development. Society became free and democratic in its every phase and department. Thus it was quite natural that the systematic revaluation of educational spirit and method, on the basis of changed conditions of society, should be reiterated by him in whom the individualism of the nineteenth-century culminates in respect to personality as well as philosophy. Liberty for the nature of the educated, for his spontaneous activities and enjoyments, encouragement of his self-instruction and independent thinking; none of the unnecessary and harmful restraints, authoritative commands and rote learning—this must be the principle of reform toward “modern modes of culture corresponding to our more liberal religious and political institutions.” Indeed, the above is nothing but the principle advocated so forcibly by Rousseau and Pestalozzi. The ice was already broken by them, and on the Continent, especially in Germany, their followers marched on far along the opened course. But England needed an apostle of her own before she would accept this gospel of psychological naturalism. And what had appeared in Rousseau as educational Romanticism, and in Pestalozzi as educational Humanitarianism, took in Spencer the form of what we might call educational Liberalism and Evolutionism. In his emotional motive, Spencer’s theory is based on his political Liberalism; in his intellectual ground, on his conception of psychic and social evolution. He writes:

“Thus, then, we are on the highway toward the doctrine, long ago enunciated by Pestalozzi, that alike in its order and in its methods, education must conform to the natural process of mental evolution—that there is a certain sequence in which the faculties spontaneously develop, and a certain kind of knowledge which each requires during its development; and that it is for us to ascertain this sequence and supply this knowledge” (ch-X-ref:7: p. 110).

Success in every educational effort depends upon “rendering our measures subservient to that spontaneous unfolding which all minds go through in their progress to maturity” (ch-X-ref:7: p. 111). This natural sequence in the spontaneous unfolding of faculties Pestalozzi endeavored to find empirically in observing the individual minds of children. Spencer, on the contrary, would search for it in the course of the race development. This idea of general parallelism between the development of the individual and the race had already been held by Rousseau and the Herbartians. But Spencer seems to be ignorant of this: he only cites Comte as having reached the same view, in believing “that, rightly conducted, the education of the individual must have a certain correspondence with the evolution of the race.” The fundamental principle of Spencerian education is to “carry each child’s mind through a process like that which the mind of humanity at large has gone through.” The principle rests on two grounds: one is the law of hereditary transmission of acquired tendencies or qualities, and the other the necessary relationships, common to all ages, between the mind and its objects. From the former “it follows that if there be an order in which the human race has mastered its various kinds of knowledge, there will arise in every child an aptitude to acquire these kinds of knowledge in the same order. So that, even if the order were intrinsically indifferent, it would facilitate education to lead the individual mind through the steps traversed by the general mind.” The latter teaches us that the order of racial development has not been intrinsically indifferent, but “was in its main outlines a necessary one”; that “as the mind of humanity, placed in the midst of the phenomena and striving to comprehend them, has, after endless comparisons, speculations, experiments, and theories, reached its present knowledge of each subject by a specific route, it may rationally be inferred that the relationship between the mind and phenomena is such as to prevent this knowledge from being reached in any other route; and that, as each child’s mind stands in the same relationship to phenomena, they can be accessible to it only through the same route” (ch-X-ref:7: p. 123). Thus, according to Spencer, anthropology or developmental sociology as well as psychology are necessary bases for education, for lack of which our school curricula are burdened with useless learning.

“Humanity has progressed solely by self-instruction,” so we must develop ourselves also by self-education. This is the central plea of our self-made philosopher. He writes:

“Those who have been brought up under the ordinary school drill, and have carried away with them the idea that education is practicable only in that style, will think it hopeless to make children their own teachers. If, however, they will call to mind that the all-important knowledge of surrounding objects which a child gets in its early years is got without help—if they will remember that the child is self-taught in the use of its mother tongue; if they will estimate the amount of that experience of life, that out-of-school wisdom, which every boy gathers for himself; if they will mark the unusual intelligence of the uncared-for London gamin, as shown in all the directions in which his faculties have been tasked; if further, they will think how many minds have struggled up unaided not only through the mysteries of our irrationally planned curriculum, but through hosts of other obstacles besides—they will find it a not unreasonable conclusion, that if the subject be put before him in right order and right form, any pupil of ordinary capacity will surmount his successive difficulties with but little assistance” (ch-X-ref:7: p. 125).

Thus, his much-quoted phrase:

“Children should be led to make their own investigations and to draw their own inferences. They should be told as little as possible, and induced to discover as much as possible” (ch-X-ref:7: p. 124).

From this point of view the rejection of hasty and indiscriminate book instruction is simply a necessary consequence.

Interest is to be the guide and criterion of all instruction or culture.

“A child’s intellectual instincts are more trustworthy than our reasonings. In respect to the knowing faculties, we may confidentially trust in the general law, that under normal conditions, healthful action is pleasurable, while action that gives pain is not healthful” (ch-X-ref:7: p. 127).

The result of thus making education a process of self-instruction will, moreover, be to form a never-dying habit of progressive self-culture, to cultivate courage in attacking difficulties, patient concentration of attention, perseverance through failure, to give a good temper, cheerfulness, and confidence, instead of a permanent moroseness, timidity, and even depression; to establish a friendly, trustful, and consequently influential relationship between the teacher and the pupil.

Here we need not stop to point out how thoroughgoing a Rousseauean is Spencer in his view of intellectual training. He is equally, if not more so, in his conception of the fundamental principles of moral culture. Only the English Empiricist does not agree with the French Romanticist in believing in the original goodness or innocence of the child; nor can he idealize, with the Swiss enthusiast, the educational capability of parental love; nor does he expect, with the German idealist-patriot, to be able to produce a new species of humanity out of the present imperfect society by the single instrument of a perfect system of education. According to him, “no system of moral culture can forthwith make children altogether what they should be; ... even were there a system that would do this, existing parents are too imperfect to carry it out; and even could such a system be successfully carried out, its results would be disastrously incongruous with the present state of society” (ch-X-ref:7: p. 171). Progress of the social organism necessarily must be organic and evolutionary; the improvement of family discipline must go together with that of every other institution of society. Yet this does not prevent us from “elaborating and recommending methods that are in advance of time.”

The human race has learned rightness or wrongness of conduct by its total consequences, immediate and remote. “The happiness or misery caused by it are the ultimate standards by which all men judge of behavior” (ch-X-ref:7: p. 174). So in the case of individuals, their moral insight can only be truly developed by their experiencing the full bearing of each particular line of conduct. “Proper conduct in life is much better guaranteed when the good and evil consequences of actions are rationally understood, than when they are merely believed on authority” (ch-X-ref:7: p. 185). The function of parents as “ministers and interpreters of Nature” is to see that nothing more nor less than the full weight of the true, natural consequences of their children’s conduct should be always experienced by them.

“It is a vice of the common system of artificial rewards and punishments, long since noticed by the clear-sighted, that by substituting for the natural results of misbehavior certain threatened tasks or castigations it produced a radically wrong standard of moral guidance. Having throughout infancy and boyhood always regarded parental or tutorial displeasure as the result of a forbidden action, the youth has gained an established association of ideas between such action and such displeasure, as cause and effect; and consequently, when parents and tutors have abdicated, and their displeasure is not to be feared, the restraint on a forbidden action is in great measure removed; the true restraints, the natural reactions, having yet to be learned by sad experience” (ch-X-ref:7: pp. 185-186).

In minor rules of moral training, too, Spencer follows Rousseau. In his warning against the unwisdom of setting up a high standard for children, which invites the detrimental results of moral precosity; against the overregulation and constant admonition, which produces nothing but “hothouse virtue” and “a chronic domestic irritation”; in his advocacy of a due authority maintained with decision of character and consistency of judgment, and the like, we have the reverberation from “Émile.”

The aim of moral discipline, according to Spencer, is not so much to turn out an obedient, well-behaved individual, as to produce “a self-governing being,” which democratic society most needs. As to its agent, he, without raising a question, intrusts the task solely to the parents. At the same time, however, he wants to impress upon them the extreme complexity and difficulty of the task, and the consequent need of knowledge and self-culture, as well as vigilance, patience, and ingenuity.

Spencer was one among the prophets who proclaimed the morality of hygiene, which now has become a commonplace matter. He writes:

“Few seem conscious that there is such a thing as a physical morality.... Disorders entailed by disobedience to Nature’s dictates they regard simply as grievances, not as the effects of a conduct more or less flagitious. Though the evil consequences inflicted on their dependents and on future generations are often as great as those caused by crime; yet they do not think themselves in any degree criminal.... The fact is that all breaches of the laws of health are physical sins. When this is generally seen, then, and perhaps not till then, will the physical training of the young receive all the attention it deserves” (ch-X-ref:7: pp. 282-283).

We should never forget that man is an animal. “The first requisite to success in life is to be a good animal, and to be a nation of good animals is the first condition to national prosperity” (ch-X-ref:7: p. 222).

In regard to the physical care of the child, Spencer is, unlike his older compatriot Locke, an Epicurean, the scientific Epicurean, if you please. He preaches the gospel of high feeding, of ample clothing, and opposes strongly overeducation. The fundamental principle is that “in proportion as growth and organization are incomplete, much must be given and little required.” Spencer calls our present system of overeducation vicious—“vicious, as giving knowledge that will soon be forgotten; vicious, as producing a disgust for knowledge; vicious, as neglecting that organization of knowledge which is more important than its acquisition; vicious, as weakening or destroying that energy without which a trained intellect is useless; vicious, as entailing that ill-health for which even success would not compensate, and which makes failure doubly bitter” (ch-X-ref:7: p. 278).

As to physical exercises, Spencer hated gymnastics. It is merely “better than nothing”; it is the practice originated by warfare, which has “remained congruous only with the militant type of society”; it is simply the introduction of one artificiality to remedy the evils of another; namely, the suppression of free, spontaneous play. It being formal, and necessarily much less varied than plays and sports, taxes heavily special parts of the body, and thus causes a quicker fatigue and disproportionate development; being forced, it lacks the spontaneous interest and accompanying pleasures, which serve as the most healthful tonic for recreation and invigoration of our physical organism; and when carried to excess it may develop an abnormal power of muscles only at the cost of constitutional deterioration.

Spencer was probably among the first who advocated the essential need of free outdoor games for girls as much as for boys, saying: “Whoever forbids them forbids the divinely appointed means of physical development” (ch-X-ref:7: p. 258). He asks:

“Why this astonishing difference? Is it that the constitution of a girl differs so entirely from that of a boy as not to need these active exercises? Is it that a girl has none of the promptings to vociferous play by which boys are impelled? Or is it that, while in boys these promptings are to be regarded as securing that bodily activity without which there cannot be adequate development, their sisters’ nature has been given to them for no purpose whatever—unless it be for the vexations of schoolmistresses” (ch-X-ref:7: p. 254).

He thinks that the fear that unrestrained plays form unladylike habits and manners is groundless.

“For if the sportive activity allowed to boys does not prevent them from growing up into gentlemen, why should a like sportive activity allowed to girls prevent them from growing up into ladies?... How absurd is the supposition that the womanly instincts would not assert themselves but for the rigorous discipline of schoolmistresses!” (ch-X-ref:7: pp. 255-256).

Spencer, with his “constitutional disregard of authority,” and with his personal experience of self-culture, is systematically opposed to the policy of state education. In his mind, systematic school education was synonymous with artificial culture and coercive discipline. The most serious defect of it, however, is its necessary tendency toward overintellectualization. And the current, undue exaltation of academic training is based on the overestimation of the rôle of intellect at the cost of our emotional nature.

“Sensations and emotions are parts of consciousness, and so far from being its minor components, they are its major components.... Like respirations and winkings of the eyes, their unceasingness makes us oblivious of them. Yet every instant emotions are present. No movement is made but what is preceded by a prompting feeling as well as a prompting thought.... The emotions are master, the intellect is the servant. The guidance of our acts through perception and reason has for its end the satisfaction of feelings, which at once prompt the acts and yield the energy for performance of the acts” (ch-X-ref:10: pp. 36-38).

But overemphasis on academic training, which is necessarily artificial and intellectual, also tends to the neglect of emotional elements even in art, whose proper domain is emotion. “Not the arousing of certain sentiments, but the communication of certain ideas is thus represented as the poet’s office.” “It is not enough for a picture to gratify the æsthetic perceptions or raise pleasurable emotions” (ch-X-ref:10: pp. 44-45). The drama or music is valued on the basis of its serviceability to moral instruction or intellectual enlightenment, while the primary and all-sufficient purpose of art is pleasure.

From this dislike of academic education, his opposition to compulsory universalizing of this form of training by the power of authority is only natural. His plea is for an educational individualism, that each member of society should be “left to do his best for himself and children.” It rests upon his two fundamental conceptions in regard to the social organism. First, that the “social organism grows”; it is not artificially formed. Secondly, that the law of its growth is a progressive individualization. If his argument is now behind the times, it is not without much historical interest for us. For he is the best representative of that educational conservatism which has long withstood, in Great Britain and America, the modern tide of state education which started from Germany. Moreover, it is still a strong voice deserving attention as a warning against the dangers and defects of state education. The contention of the state educationists, as Spencer understands, is that parents, and especially those whose children most need instructing, lack knowledge and judgment in the matter of education. But Spencer thinks that the implication that “the interest and judgment of a government are insufficient security” is “a very questionable assumption.” The government’s interest, according to him, would necessarily tend to conservatism, and likewise the school-teacher’s interest, while a true education must always be a revolutionary force of society—“always fitting men for higher things, and unfitting them for things as they are” (ch-X-ref:9: p. 373).

The state educationists ignore the educational significance of the natural relationships between parent and children. “In these strong affections and mutual dependencies observers believed they saw an admirably arranged chain of influences, calculated to secure the mental and physical development of successive generations; and in the simplicity of their faith had concluded that these divinely appointed means were fully sufficient for this purpose.” But, according to them, “this combination of affections and interests was not provided for such a purpose, or what is the same thing, that it has no purpose at all. And so, in default of any natural provision for supplying the exigency, legislators exhibit to us the design and specification for a state machine, made up of masters, ushers, inspectors, and councils, to be worked by a due proportion of taxes, and to be plentifully supplied with raw material, in the shape of little boys and girls, out of which it is to grind a population of well-trained men and women, who shall be 'useful members of the community’” (ch-X-ref:9: pp. 366-367). They forget that “educational systems, like political and other institutions, are generally as good as the state of human nature permits,” and that no hasty reform in education, which is not coördinated with that of other departments of life and the general elevation of the whole social organism, can succeed. Any attempt at uniformatization, at the present stage of progress, of educational system by an authoritative hand would bring more harm than benefit. For “were we in possession of the true method, divergence from it would, of course, be prejudicial; but the true method having to be found, the efforts of numerous independent seekers carrying out their researches in different directions constitute a better agency for finding it than any that could be devised” (ch-X-ref:7: p. 101).

Moreover, the use and function of government is, according to Spencer, only negative. “To the bad, it is essential; to the good, not. It is the check which national wickedness makes to itself, and exists only to the same degree.” So the extension of government authority or interference is rather a retrogression of society. “As civilization advances does the government decay,” and ought to decay (ch-X-ref:9: p. 25).

Therefore, he concludes, let the spread of enlightenment be free and spontaneous. “If supply and demand are allowed free play in the intellectual sphere as in the economic sphere, ... education must conduce to social stability as well as to the other benefits. For if those of the lower ranks are left to get culture for their children as best they may, just as they are left to get food and clothing for them, it must follow that the children of the superior will be advantaged: the thrifty parents, the energetic, and those with a high sense of responsibility will buy education for their children to a greater extent than will the improvident and the idle. And if character is inherited, then the average result must be that the children of the superior will prosper and increase more than the children of the inferior. There will be a multiplication of the fittest instead of a multiplication of the unfittest” (ch-X-ref:10: pp. 92-93).

Spencer’s treatise on “Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical,” in which most of his pedagogical views are given, though a mere collection of occasional magazine articles, is nevertheless a work into which he put his heart and soul. When it appeared in 1860, in book form, it carried his fame for the first time into the wide region of the world; it has been translated into thirteen languages; in England and America it has been used as a text-book, forming until recently an important basis of popular pedagogic ideas. Probably no educational treatise written in English has exerted a wider influence than Spencer’s, and in spite of its obvious one-sidedness, it is certainly one of the greatest works which has appeared in the pedagogic world on Anglo-Saxon soil.

REFERENCES

1.Compayré, Jules Gabriel. History of Pedagogy. Translated, with an introduction, notes, and an index, by W. H. Payne. Heath & Co., Boston, 1903. 598 pages.

2.——Herbert Spencer et l’Education Scientifique. Delaplane, Paris, 1901. 116 pages.

3.Duncan, David. Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer. Appleton, New York, 1908. 2 vols.

4.Gaupp, Otto. Herbert Spencer. Frommann, Stuttgart, 1897. 160 pages. (Frommann’s Klassiker der Philosophie.)

5.Royce, Josiah. Herbert Spencer, an Estimate and a Review by Josiah Royce; together with a chapter of personal reminiscences by James Collier. Fox, Duffield & Co., New York, 1904. 234 pages.

6.Quick, Robert Hebert. Essays on Educational Reformers. Appleton, New York, 1890. 560 pages. The same (International Education Series), 1903. 568 pages.

7.Spencer, Herbert. Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical. Appleton, New York, 1900. 301 pages.

8.——Philosophy of Style. Appleton, New York, 1901. 55 pages.

9.——Social Statistics. Appleton, New York, 1882. 523 pages.

10.——Facts and Comments. Appleton, New York, 1902. 292 pages.

11.——An Autobiography. Appleton, New York, 1904. 2 vols.

12.Herbert Spencer. A Symposium by Harris, Cook, Sutton, Winship, Rose. Proceedings of National Education Association, 1904. pp. 214-231.

CHAPTER XI.

GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL
(1770-1831)

Hegel never actually wrote or lectured on education as such, although, according to Rosenkranz, he intended to write what he significantly called “Staatspädagogik.” This slowly matured genius, whose interest was speculative more than practical, died too young to fulfill this design. He had no pedagogic impulse such as is seen in Fichte or Herbart. He was to the end essentially a learner rather than a teacher, notwithstanding the fact that his whole life was spent in educational work of various kinds. Nevertheless, he could not help but be touched by the intense pedagogical spirit of his age. The collection of his ideas on the problem of education, drawn from scattered sources, was published in 1853 by one of his disciples, G. Thaulow. The collaboration of them into a system on the basis of his philosophy was made by his most faithful follower, K. Rosenkranz, whose work, “Pedagogy as a System,” has had until recently a considerable influence in the educational world.

Hegel was born the son of a government official and brought up in a home which was in “direct and varied relation with many persons of high official rank.” He did not, like Pestalozzi, share the lot of the common herd. Nor did he taste such hardships of fate as did Fichte. He lived, as a child, as a university student, as a family tutor, as a school man, as a university professor, ever in the air of officialdom and aristocracy.

Moreover, we are told that youth had but a short duration for him. In his student days at Tübingen he gained the nickname of “the old man.” Rousseau had once charmed the young Hegel, as he did every youth of his time; Schelling had fascinated him; Fichte had inspired him with enthusiasm; but Hegel outgrew quickly and abandoned all these romantic tendencies. Heinrich Hotho, one of his pupils, writes in his recollections:

“He was bitter against the demagogues who were ever seeking 'new things’ in statecraft. Against the caprice of personal opinion, subjective fancy, arbitrary passion, he set himself, seeking to do away with these from youth up, and to put in their place—to do away by putting in their place—a just appreciation of the real, the lawful, the substantial. The senses, sentiments, impulses, wishes, and will were to be brought into free harmony with the necessary and rational, and their accord made habitual” (ch-XI-ref:3: p. 98).

Most geniuses are “youth, intensified, and prolonged,” but Hegel shows his genius in maturity of insight and judgment. Not the fire of prophetic spirit, not the flashes of poetic intuitions, but a proportioned completeness of catholicism and classicism constituted the type of his mental greatness.

Solger, visiting Hegel at the beginning of his Berlin career, writes to Tieck: “I was curious to see what impression the good Hegel would make here. No one talks of him, for he is quiet and busy” (ch-XI-ref:3: p. 78). Yes, “quiet and busy”—this characterizes his mental as well as public life. Nothing like revelation, inspiration, sudden intuition, but only a long, painstaking, methodical reasoning brought him truths. Not only each of his thoughts, but also each of his phrases and words he determined by laborious weighing and balancing. He despised the mere expression of immediate feelings as a pseudo-philosophy, smacking of the Romantic school. For him, “philosophy was to express 'with colorless words’ (mit dürren Worten) the clear, crystalline outlines of thought—the cool judgment of the spirit” (ch-XI-ref:3: p. 39).

Thus, according to his own characterization of the four traditional classifications of temperament, he belongs preëminently to the phlegmatic. His mind is objective, with little subjectivity; more historical than prophetic, more discursive than intuitive, more inclined to systematization than reformation, more conservative than destructive.

This is Hegel. And in him Germany found a great counteracting agency against the sweeping movement of educational reform, engendered by the romantic and revolutionary spirit of the age. In this regard Hegel reminds us of Herbart. The dawn of the new Germany needed such prophetic men as Pestalozzi and Fichte, but her pacification and solidarity required a more constructive genius. Pestalozzi and Fichte stood as the champions of National Education. Hegel, “the official philosopher,” as he is often called, would become the advocate of “State Pedagogy.”

Hegel’s philosophy has been called the Objective Absolute Idealism as opposed to the Subjective Absolute Idealism of Fichte, and the Logical Pantheism as opposed to the Alogical Pantheism of Schopenhauer. The logically minded Hegel saw methodical progressions of thought going on everywhere in the life of nature and humanity. The universal Essence or the Absolute was to him the mind, the intellect, or the reason. Every existence or phenomenon is the manifestation of the eternal unfolding of the Divine Reason. Everything in the world is “becoming,” is in the process of evolution; this “becoming” is the only actuality and life. This eternally progressive world-process is the education of universal beings by and through the Logos or the self-education of God. Man takes part in the world-process of education, and realizes in himself the end of this evolution by becoming a free, self-conscious spirit—God attaining in him the consciousness of Himself.

The human share and endeavor in the universal “becoming,” or the evolution of the Logos in mankind, constitutes the history of the race. Human history is, in general, the process of the liberation of spirit or reason from its bondage—from all external and debasing powers. By these not only political, social, and family despotism are meant, but also one’s own passions, natural desires, inclinations, willfulness, arbitrariness, etc. For freedom does not consist in licentiousness; it is the unbounded self-activity of the Spirit according to its own law. This law is given by reason. Thus freedom can be regarded as lawful action according to rational insight. Therefore the universal realization of self-conscious reason and freedom of the spiritual nature is the teleology of human history. Education from this standpoint means the progressive perfection of humanity from a naïve, unconscious, primitive state of spirit or reason through the hard discipline of slavery and bondage to the consciousness and exercise of its freedom.

To share in this progressive perfection of the race and contribute to its promotion is the destiny of individuals. The connection between the culture of the race and the development of the individual is very close. The latter can only grow in the breast of the former. And the culmination of this close relationship between the whole and its part is the state. It is the most highly developed and compact form of society. History is the objectified, realized humanity, and its attainments are embodied in the institutional life of the state. The individual must take part in this life of the state and “live in the spirit of the nation.” This is the free relation of give and take. But the child cannot by himself enter into the free mutual relation of give and take with society. He is not only incapable of giving his part to society, but also of taking his share from it. Some one else must do this for him. To do this is the duty of parents and teachers, and the art of fulfilling this duty is education in its narrow sense.

For Hegel the child is no angelic being. Innocence as such has no moral value, so far as it is ignorance of the bad and rests on the lack of desire by which the bad can take place. Nor does he recognize the morality of instincts and impulses. Moral freedom is won “through the stern strife against the naïve subjectivity of life, against the immediateness of arbitrary desire and passion” (ch-XI-ref:3: p. 109). Childhood in itself has no value for Hegel. It is not as it was for Rousseau and Froebel, a state to be lived out, but a state to be outgrown. “The child has a right to be educated,” only because it has the destiny to become a man, and yet it is not and does not become so by mere natural development.

“Education is the art of making men moral. It regards man as natural, and points out how he may be born anew—how his first nature may be changed to a second spiritual nature” (ch-XI-ref:3: p. 107). Morality means the mastery of reason over natural desires and inclinations. The child’s undeveloped reason must be, at first, subjected to the developed reason, which is “manifested in the will of his parents, in the knowledge of his teachers, and in the surrounding world.” His growing self must be set in the larger life of the whole, in which mature reason, mature will, mature morality are realized.

“Education may be defined as the visible, progressive transcending of the negative or subjective. For the child, as the form of the potentiality of a moral individual, is a subjective and negative being. His becoming a man is the outgrowing this form; and his education is the discipline or process by which this is done. To gain this positive and essential character he first must be nourished at the breast of the universally moral; he must live as a stranger in the absolute institution of that morality; he must make more and more of it his own, and finally pass over into the universal spirit. It is evident from this that the effort to be virtuous, to obtain absolute morality through education, is not at all a striving after an individual and separate morality. Indeed, such an effort after a positive morality peculiarly one’s own, would be vain and in itself impossible” (ch-XI-ref:3: p. 107).

The educator, then, is no longer to be a mere jealous guardian of Nature’s own developing and educating process, but he is the conscious delegate of the mature generation or the state, whose office is to unite and subordinate the child to the general culture already acquired by them in the course of evolution.

Hegel’s pedagogical ideas are best seen in his delineation of the “ages of man,” which Thaulow calls “an epitome of all pedagogy.”

“The development of the normal human being is made up of a series of processes. These change in accordance with the changing relation of the individual to the race and to the external world” (ch-XI-ref:3: p. 118).

He divides childhood into three—including the fetus, four—stages. But, since the “child before birth has no peculiar individuality, none related in a particular way to particular objects,” there is no education proper here. “At birth it passes from vegetative to animal existence.” He has the most finely organized, infinitely adaptable body of all animals. The growth is not only quantitative, but qualitative. And together with its physical growth goes the mental development, this first stage of infant life being “the time in which the human being learns most. Now the child is made a confidant of all the senses. The outer world becomes a reality to him. He advances from sensation to perception.... He projects his world about himself” (ch-XI-ref:3: pp. 119-120). “The transition stage from infancy to boyhood has the following characteristics: The child’s activity is directed more and more upon the outer world; and along with his sense of the reality of the outer world he begins to be a real person, and to feel himself as such. This feeling is joined with the practical tendency to make all sorts of experiments upon his surroundings. For this practical activity, the child is fitted by the coming of his teeth, by his learning to stand, walk, and speak” (ch-XI-ref:3: pp. 120-121). Standing is the first requirement by the exercise of volition. But “a still freer relation to the outer world is attained by man through his power of walking.” The development of speech, on the other hand, enables him to grasp things in generalized concepts. It also leads him to the consciousness of his own constant and total subject—to the “comprehension of his ego.” The conscious independence of self from the nonself now dawns. “This dawning independence first expresses itself in play with material objects.” Hegel, however, does not like to linger long here, and hastens to the next stage, boyhood, which constitutes “the passage of the child from play to serious study.”

“In this transition stage children begin to be full of curiosity. They especially delight in stories. They seek rare and strange ideas. Above all is the awakening feeling that they are not yet what they are to be, and the ardent wish to become like the grown-up people about them. Out of this springs the child’s desire to imitate” (ch-XI-ref:3: p. 121).

Now the child must be taught. This “feeling of dissatisfaction with himself as he is,” this “personal aspiration for full development,” this “wish to be 'big’” is “the lever to be grasped by education.” Therefore he condemns “the play education” which “meets children at a low level,” which “looks upon what is childish as already something of value in itself alone,” which, “attempting to make the incompleteness of childhood seem as something complete, and to make the children satisfied with it, casts down and tramples upon their own true better wants.... It puts both itself and what is serious into a puerile form, for which the children themselves feel contempt.” It also “may have throughout the whole life of the pupil the baneful result of making him account everything cheap.” Consequently, in learning, the child should not be left to its own inclination or to anything like its spontaneous interest. “What the boy is to learn must be set before him by authority and example.” This is more according to his own nature, because his ideal at this stage does not appear in any general or abstract form, but is always represented by particular grown-up persons (ch-XI-ref:3: pp. 121-122, 146-147).

In the Fichtean pedagogy the boy was encouraged to self-active learning and thinking. But in the Hegelian pedagogy he is to be essentially receptive. To talk to the boy about original thinking or independent study is pure nonsense or tends to cultivate precocity. There is no instruction without prescription. “Thought at the beginning, like the will, should be obedient”; “willingness to yield one’s ideas is the first necessity for a learner.” Thus: “The tendency of youth to independent reflection or reasoning is one-sided. It should be indulged in as little as possible.... For the chief end of education is to do away with these personal ideas, thoughts, reflections of youth, and their utterance. If the tendency toward self-reasoning be unchecked, there is no discipline or order in thought, no coherent and consequent knowledge” (ch-XI-ref:3: pp. 140-141). Truth means objectivity. “We often say that the understanding is developed by questioning, objecting, responding, etc. But, in truth, the mind is not developed by these; it is only made superficial. The inner nature of a man is broadened by culture, and given him as a possession through self-restraint. Thought is enriched, and the mind vitalized, by silence” (ch-XI-ref:3: p. 140). Silence (ἐχημυθία), the word borrowed from Pythagoras, is the watchword of his instruction. Let us examine a little more fully the content of this word. To say that it is a deepened receptivity, an anticipatory interest, a worked out objectiveness of mind, a self-forgetful absorption in matters presented, a preparedness to react promptly in coming impressions, would be mere tautology. In other words, it is nothing else than the height of disinterested attention. Attention as understood by Hegel always involves voluntary control.

“It demands effort when one wishes to grasp one object rather than another, to abstract himself from the thousand things moving through his mind, from his other interests, and even from his own person; and repressing the tendency to hasty judgment, to give himself up wholly to the object” (ch-XI-ref:3: p. 139).

From the emphasis laid on the receptivity, on strict obedience to prescription, follows the emphasis upon order, regularity, and punctuality, as the first requisites in instruction.

“There can be nothing worse than the evil of procrastination, of the putting off or shirking of work, so that it is not pursued in all earnestness and in an unchangeable order. What is undertaken to be done at a set time should be accomplished as surely as the sun rises” (ch-XI-ref:3: p. 138).

With such an emphasis on receptivity one can easily imagine how Hegel would regard the function of memory in learning. Although he thought it the most difficult point in psychology “to state exactly the place and significance of memory and its organic connection with thought,” it was conceived as somehow opposed to subjectivity and reflection. “Consciously or unconsciously it is ever in use.... It is busy filling the soul with pure existences of outer space” (ch-XI-ref:3: p. 135); “it is mechanization of intelligence.” Thus better memory in youth than in old age had, for Hegel, a certain teleological significance, and great minds have generally good memories.

However, even for Hegel, receptive learning is not the ultimate end, but is only propedeutic.

“It is most important to lead the boy from the state of mere receptivity to that of personal effort. For learning, which is mere taking in and remembering, is a very small part of education” (ch-XI-ref:3: p. 144).

Again:

“If learning were to be limited to a mere taking in, its results would be little better than writing upon the water, for it is not mere receiving, but the self-activity of grasping, and the power to put in use, that alone make knowledge our possession” (ch-XI-ref:3: p. 141).

As to the comparative importance of various branches of study, Hegel, as a champion of the New Humanism, opposed “the effort of making mathematical exercises the chief subject of education” (as the followers of Kant and Pestalozzi tried to do), considering it as “putting the mind upon a rack in order to evolve a perfect machine,” as “making the mind empty and dull” (ch-XI-ref:3: pp. 154-155). Against mere realistic study of natural science he exalted the value of the classics, considering the classical worlds as the second paradise of the human race, “the paradise of the spiritual man, who in his beautiful spontaneity, freedom, depth, and joyousness stepped forth as a bridegroom from his chamber”; praising their masterpieces as “the spiritual bath, the profane baptism, which gives the soul its earliest and most lasting taste for things of beauty and of knowledge” (ch-XI-ref:3: p. 157).

As a means of cultivating abstract thinking—i. e., the power of understanding and reasoning—Hegel exalts again, in opposition to the preceding reformers, the study of logic and grammar, especially the grammar of the ancient languages. “The value of grammatical study,” he asserts, “can scarcely be overestimated, for it forms the beginning of logical culture, a fact, however, that appears to be almost overlooked.” He does not even hesitate to say that “careful grammatical study is one of the most noble and universal means of culture” (ch-XI-ref:3: pp. 155-156). Various branches of philosophy, including the elements of religion, law, ethics, and psychology, are also prescribed for the gymnasium. Voice culture, public speaking, and the art of reading are mentioned as the important factors in education. Instruction in military drill is strongly advocated, as training alertness and exact ideo-motor reaction; and consequently as “the most direct way of counteracting a lazy absent-mindedness”; as the common ground of pursuit which “best serves in leveling the partition wall that we build around our callings”; finally and preëminently as “a reminder that every man, whatever his position, should be ready to defend his fatherland and his prince” (ch-XI-ref:3: pp. 153-154).

In the notion of the school, too, Hegel takes us back to the official and orthodox standpoint. It is simply preparation for the future life of the matured man. It is a mere organ through which the essentials of the acquired culture of the race are bequeathed to the new generation. Nothing more can or should be hoped from it. “The sciences are not enlarged by the school.... Its knowledge is old property of the race. The work of the school has not its perfect end in itself. It lays but the foundation for the possibility of other work, that of real performance.... This preparation, this culture, can never be 'finished.’ Only a certain stage of it may be attained” (ch-XI-ref:3: p. 147).

School is not, like a Froebelian kindergarten, the children’s own world. “It educates the individual to participate in the world life”; it is “a secluded inner preparation.” This secluded period of mere apprenticeship not only lacks such organic relation to the larger life of the community or the warm, intimate air of family life, as the school in the Pestalozzian conception, but it lacks, unlike the people’s school of Fichte’s ideal, even its own completeness and independence. Hegel complacently admits that “school life is dispassionate; it lacks the higher interest and earnestness of real life.” But, just the same, it is the necessary and best preparation for life. He disapproves “the maxim that children are early to be brought out into society.” For “men of world-wide fame have come from the narrow gate of the monastery; while, on the contrary, men who have grown-up amid all the externalities of life unfold little fruit of inner worth” (ch-XI-ref:3: pp. 147-149).

If silence was the first requisite of learning, so obedience is that of morality.

“Obedience is the beginning of all wisdom. For by this the boy’s will is brought under the reasonable will imposed from without. The boy’s will is not yet fledged, not truly independent and free. It has not learned to see the true, the objective, which makes for righteousness. If children are permitted to follow their impulses, if their self-will is unwisely yielded to, a most ugly habit of stubborn willfulness is formed” (ch-XI-ref:3: p. 122).

If our rationalistic philosopher does not put any faith in the natural impulses of the child, he makes equally little of the child’s individuality. He writes:

“The peculiarities of man must not be rated too highly. The assertion that a teacher must carefully adjust himself to the individuality of his pupil so as to develop it—this assertion is empty. The teacher has no time for that. The individuality of the children is met in the family. But with the school begins a life in accord with a general order, after general rules for all. In school the spirit must be brought to lay aside the peculiarities, it must know and will the universal” (ch-XI-ref:3: pp. 113-114).

The individual experience or consciousness never wholly reveals the full content of the spiritual development or culture attained by the race or the universal soul. The individual soul must, therefore, be fed by the content of the racial soul in order to attain its fullness. This, for Hegel, is done through the spoken word or writing. For him, not the senses or personal experience, as the empiricists claimed, but speech is the organ of learning. The letters of alphabets are the beginning of instruction proper, and, “in general, speech is that airy element, that material immateriality by means of which the widening knowledge of the child is lifted more and more above the material and particular to the universal, and so to thought” (ch-XI-ref:3: p. 123). This importance of instruction through speech in education applies also to morality and religion. Unless we teach, the boy, left to himself, would naturally gather erroneous and imperfect notions of things and their relations. Therefore we need an early instruction in morality and religion. Against the Rousseauean idea that children “cannot understand them, and can gather from them only words for memory,” Hegel asserts that they are “well understood by the child, by the boy, by the youth, in proportion to their age.” Again:

“Our whole life is nothing else than a growing comprehension of their range and significance. We see them exemplified in ever new cases, and our knowledge of their many-sided meanings develops. In fact, were we to put off the teaching of these moral ideas until a man is able to grasp their whole meaning, very few persons need be taught, and these not much before the end of life” (ch-XI-ref:3: pp. 117-118).

Hegel had to say with Pestalozzi that “the feeling of immediate unity with the parents is the spiritual milk upon which the children thrive”; that “the mother should be the chief influence in early education, for morality must be instilled into the child with his earliest perceptions”; that she is entitled to this by her love, which alone “flows with the whole current of her being.” This “is her highest earthly vocation, in which her natural character and her holiest calling are united” (ch-XI-ref:3: pp. 145-146). Yet the parents are not the all-sufficient agents for the education of the child: the school must also have its part. As the parents have the duty and right of educating it as a member of the family, so the state has its duty and right of educating it as a member of society.

Now, to return to Hegel’s delineation of the stages of man, the next stage is youth, which begins with puberty. Here “the life of the race begins to stir within him and to seek satisfaction” (ch-XI-ref:3: p. 124). The accompanying phenomena are the sudden growth and intensification of all his emotions and sentiments,—æsthetic, religious, and social. “Particularly in youth do we feel ourselves related and in sympathy with all nature. We and things about us seem alive with one soul. We have a feeling of the world soul, of the oneness of spirit and nature, and of the spirituality of nature” (ch-XI-ref:3: p. 150).

As to personal relations, “friendship like that of Achilles and Patroclus, or like that still closer friendship of Orestes and Pylades, is chiefly the privilege of youth” (ch-XI-ref:3: p. 151). Youth, with its heightened sentimentality accompanied by the growing sense of the independence of self, is preëminently the age of subjective idealism. “His ideal no longer appears to him, as to the boy, in some person, but is held by him as a universal, independent of such individuality. But to the youth this ideal still has a more or less subjective form, be it an ideal of love and friendship or one of general ambition” (ch-XI-ref:3: p. 124). In this lies the hope, inspiration, and power of the youth, but at the same time his weakness, discouragement, and despair. “The form of the ideal inspires the youth’s energy so that he dreams that he is called and fitted to make the world over, or at least to turn it back to its right course. The young man’s aspiring eye does not see that the substantial universal contained in his ideal is already being evolved and realized in the world. What is realized by the universal seems to him far below the ideal. Accordingly he feels that the world misunderstands both his ideal and himself. Thus the peace in which the child lived with the world is broken for the youth. Because of this turning to the ideal the youth seems to have a nobler outlook and greater unselfishness than the man, who is interested in his personal temporal affairs. But it must be remembered that the man is not bound up in his personal inclinations and subjective opinions, nor is he engaged solely in his personal advancement, but is one with the reasonable realities about him and is active in the world’s behalf” (ch-XI-ref:3: pp. 124-125). This is the stage of objective idealism.

For Fichte, the creation of the ideal world by the power of the subjective will, and the reshaping of actuality according to it, was the noblest and highest destiny of man. But, according to Hegel, this is only a transient phase of the youth, which he must outgrow, if his growth is normal and unhindered. “The youth should shed his horns and adjust himself, with his wishes and plans, to the actual and rational relationships about him” (ch-XI-ref:3: p. 151). This transition from the subjective, abstract idealism of youth to the objective, concrete idealism of manhood is often a painful process, and in many cases leads one to an abject pessimism. “The later it is experienced the worse are its symptoms.... He cannot conquer his repugnance to the actual, and so finds himself relatively incapable, and may easily become so altogether.” If, then, a man is not to succumb to the iron law of actuality, he must recognize its independence and rationality. “He must submit to the condition it imposes, and win from it, though it seems to say him nay, what he will” (ch-XI-ref:3: p. 125).

Thus the young man, finally coming down from his Utopian heaven, “enters partnership with the world, and wins for himself adequate standing room.” Although he gives up “his plan of making the world anew,” still “there is room for honorable, far-reaching, creative activity.” For the objective world with which he now identifies himself is a life process, ever renewing itself and ever advancing. “The man’s work is a part of this renewal and advancement. He grows more and more at one with his objective relationships. He becomes accustomed to his work.... In time he becomes perfectly at home in his calling, and gives himself wholly to it. The essential in all the phases of his business becomes a matter of course. Only the individual, the nonessential, presents to him any novelty” (ch-XI-ref:3: pp. 126-127).

We might deduce from this that manhood is the age for specialization, for discovery and invention, and a man’s development should be in the progressive specialization of his vocation. But Hegel, whose eye is always directed to “the universal,” stops short at its attainment. In the engagement in and the mastery of a vocation man completes himself, fully realizes his personality. “He is then at one with himself, with his environment, with his sphere. He is universal, a whole” (ch-XI-ref:3: p. 153). “The antithesis between the subject and its object” being done away with, “the interest in the latter is lost.” “Thus a man enters old age not only by the running down of the vitality of his physical organism, but also by the crystallizing of the spiritual life into habits” (ch-XI-ref:3: p. 127). But there is one virtue left to old age, that is “to point out the way to the young” by the lessons of his past experience, in the memory of which he now lives.

The Hegelian pedagogy may be called the orthodoxy of education. Like his philosophy, the central conception of which is expressed in the famous dictum, “all that is rational is actual; all that is actual is rational,” it is the strongest defense of existing institutions; it justifies all the traditional principles and methods of education and gives them a rational ground. As conservatism is the self-preservation of every social institution, Hegelianism enjoyed the natural result of being welcomed by officialdom as the safest pedagogy to adopt. We need in society both the visionary idealist and the cold calculator, youthful enthusiasm and matured judgment. Although we must not forget that there often lies a great danger in the very soundness and all-roundness of opinions or precocious senility—a greater danger than the youthful one-sidedness—Hegel will remain as he was, a beneficial counteracting influence against the rashness and heat of a youthful age, a voice calling halt to look back to the already attained values, in the blind pursuit of the anticipated unknown quantity.

REFERENCES

1.Bryant, William Mackendree. Hegel’s Educational Ideas. Werner School Book Co., New York, 1896. 214 pages.

2.Entner, Paul. Hegel’s Ansichten über Erziehung im Zusammenhange mit seiner Philosophie dargestellt. XV. Jahres-Bericht der 1. städtlichen Realschule. Hille, Dresden, 1905. 77 pages.

3.Luqueer, Frederic Ludlow. Hegel as Educator. (Columbia University Dissertation). Macmillan Co., New York, 1896. 185 pages.

4.Raumer, Karl von. Geschichte der Pädagogik vom Wiederaufblühen klassischer Studien bis auf unsere Zeit. 5 vols. Bertelsmann, Gütersloh, 1882-1897.

5.Rein, Georg Wilhelm, editor. Encyklopädisches Handbuch der Pädagogik. 8 vols. Beyer, Langensalza, 1895-1906. Vol. III.

6.Rosenkranz, Johann Karl Friedrich. Philosophy of Education. Translated by A. C. Brackett. Second edition, revised and enlarged. Appleton, New York, 1903. 292 pages.

7.Ziegler, Theobald. Geschichte der Pädagogik mit besonderer Rücksicht auf das höhere Unterrichtswesen. Beck, München, 1895. 361 pages.

CHAPTER XII.

W. T. HARRIS AND G. STANLEY HALL

William Torrey Harris
(1835- )

In a country like America, where people have flocked from all corners of the world, each with his own ideas, beliefs, and ambitions, it is natural that the main concern of the leaders hitherto should have been the unity and solidarity of the social structure. How to produce self-governing yet law-abiding citizens in a free republic that has had no choice of the materials, seems to have been the educational problem from the legislative standpoint. There has probably been more necessity for counteracting new “isms” and reforms than encouraging them. Just here the Hegelian pedagogy has an application, and it has, in fact, well-nigh penetrated, through Dr. Harris, into the great machinery of the public school.

That Dr. Harris is a most faithful disciple of Hegel no one, including himself, will deny. If we are justified in calling Spencer the English interpreter of Rousseauean pedagogy, we may call Dr. Harris the American apostle of Hegelian pedagogy.

With the Hegelian philosophy of history on his banner Dr. Harris stands, amidst all skeptics and reactionaries against the present civilization, as its bold and even conventional advocate. This civilization is the highest actual manifestation of the world-spirit or Logos; so every individual must be educated for and through it. Social institutions in which civilization is incorporated are to be the chief agents of education. These social institutions are family, school, church, and state. But the education of the family is essentially physical and very limited; and, on the other hand, the educational influence of the state is exerted mainly through the school. So the school and the church are the main educational agencies, the former ministering to the secular and the latter to the religious needs.

According to Dr. Harris, the function of the school is “to correlate the child with the civilization into which he is born.” “The branches to be studied, and the extent to which they are studied, will be determined mainly by the demands of one’s civilization. These will prescribe what is most useful to make the individual acquainted with physical nature and with human nature so as to fit him as an individual to perform his duties in the several institutions—family, civil society, the state, and the church” (ch-XII(WTH)-ref:1: pp. 232-233). These also will determine what interests in the child should be cultivated and what interests be checked. To make the child’s nature or its own spontaneous interest our guidance and standard is the suicide of education. For “man reveals his true nature not as a child, but as a mature man and woman in the process of making world history. In the world history human nature is revealed in its height and depth” (ch-XII(WTH)-ref:14: p. 492). Naturally it follows that psychology should hold only a subordinate place for the art or science of education, and “no philosophy of education is fundamental until it is based on sociology.” Prescription is thus the great word in Dr. Harris’s pedagogy, which he never tires of repeating. “The problem of prescription,” he says, “is the profoundest and most important one in education, and without its solution we continually drift in the eddies of fruitless experiments and waste the energies and possibilities of the rising generation” (ch-XII(WTH)-ref:5: p. 131).

Of course Dr. Harris would not, in the face of the modern consciousness of individual freedom, advocate the tyranny of autocratic prescription. Here he met an antimony of civilization and consequently of education.

“When we reflect that prescription comes in from the side of realized reason, and consists in regulations found to be rational by the experience of mankind and embodied in the institutions of civilization, we must be convinced of the utter hopelessness of eliminating this element from life.... On the other hand, that self-activity or spontaneity, freedom of thought, the realization of directive intelligence in each and every individual—that this shall prevail more and more, is our deepest national conviction” (ch-XII(WTH)-ref:5: pp. 141-142).

The antinomy is solved by Dr. Harris in the Hegelian way. At first these two “are opposed, and mutually limit each other; where one begins the other ends.” However, “a mandate prescribed loses its external, mechanical side just as soon as its necessary ground is seen and comprehended” (ch-XII(WTH)-ref:5: p. 142).

To speak of the child’s instincts and natural powers as if they were divine and all-sufficient in themselves is allowed only in poetry. “The child begins life a savage, ignorant of civilization.” His impulses and caprices have to be subjected to the reason of the matured spirit, and his mind, empty of experience, has to be filled with the wisdom of the race. “He must be taught everything: how to take care of his person, how to behave in the presence of others, how to do his work in the world and earn an honest living, how to observe and how to think. He has to learn the view of the world which civilization has attained.” The good mother is she who is “always alert to see to it that her child learns to inhibit—learns self-control or self-restraint.” “Her chief work is inhibiting this or that, and educating the child into the practice of inhibiting constantly.” For “out of one thousand things he may do, nine hundred and ninety-nine are improper to be done, and he must refuse to adopt them. Passing by all these, he must do only the one thing proper” (ch-XII(WTH)-ref:6: pp. 2-3).

The child who, under this maternal discipline, has acquired “a bundle of personal habits and the use of language to communicate ideas and receive them,” is taken next to the hand of the school-teacher. His work is the continuation of that of the mother, and still preëminently is in “the domain of prescription.” “The special work of the school in the great process of education is that of giving the youth letters and civil manners” (ch-XII(WTH)-ref:6: p. 4). By “civil manners,” “the habits of acting according to the broad forms and conventionalities of rational existence” are meant. These habits are not born with the child, they are no innate inheritance that he brings with him into the world, but have to be acquired by him. So the educator is not to minister to the nature of the child, but to repress it. With all his vigilance and self-control the teacher “applies a firm, steady pressure to the material under his charge and molds it into form” (ch-XII(WTH)-ref:5: p. 128).

Family life can teach many good habits to the child, but it cannot initiate him into social life quite as well as the school can. In order to become a social man he must be educated out of the “clan feeling” into civil relation. The school furnishes the best training for this: for its order “presupposes independent interests combined with a common interest,” and “the school pupil must learn how to behave towards independent equals and towards those established in authority over him, not by nature, like his father and mother, but by civic ordinances appointed by his teachers” (6: p. 4). Then the implicit observance of order, without which no function of school can be performed, inculcates such virtues as regularity, punctuality, and silence, the last mentioned of which Dr. Harris thinks to be the basis for the culture of internality or reflection—the soil in which thought grows. Moreover, the systematic work required in the school cultivates many valuable virtues. He says: “Is there any better training yet devised to educate youth into industry and its concomitants of sincerity, earnestness, simplicity, perseverance, patience, faithfulness, and reliability, than the school method of requiring work in definite amounts and at definite times and of an approved quality?” (ch-XII(WTH)-ref:7: pp. 36-37). These mechanical or semimechanical duties which school life imposes upon the pupils “constitute an elementary training in morals without which it is exceedingly difficult to build up any superstructure of moral character whatever,” and “are just what is required to adapt the man to combine with his fellow man” (ch-XII(WTH)-ref:6: p. 5). Moral education, therefore, must begin with these and “develop gradually out of this stage toward that of individual responsibility.”

In regard to the intellectual side of education, too, Dr. Harris gives his defense to its traditional form. In his view, learning proper is nothing else but the learning of books. The printed page is “an instrumentality of intercommunication,” the storehouse of race experience, the immortalized form of civilization. Thus training in letters naturally should form the center of instruction in the elementary school. Reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, history, and grammar are the first studies of the school, which have the sanction of tradition and have stood the test of time. Natural science, vocal music, drawing, gymnastics, and the like may be introduced only as subordinate subjects. As to the disciplinary value of manual training Dr. Harris is skeptical. Its possible use he recognizes only as a preparation for productive industry. However, for this purpose he does not see the wisdom or need of teaching it in the school. For, “if youth can be taught to bring their powers to bear on such subjects as arithmetic, grammar, history, and literature, they certainly can with ease give their mind to any form of manual training or the work of external observation, because the greater includes the less, and the studies of pure science are far more difficult to carry on than studies in applied science” (ch-XII(WTH)-ref:6: p. 16). Thus he disposes of the question of pure “cultural” training versus “practical” training by saying: “Cultivate the humanities first, and afterwards the industrial faculties” (ch-XII(WTH)-ref:6: p. 20). Dr. Harris does not see the inherent worth of elementary education nor glorify its function, as Pestalozzi or Froebel did. For him it is confessedly a “defective sort of education.” Not only the knowledge it conveys is superficial and scanty, but the method of instruction and training is “necessarily crude and inadequate.” To speak of the spontaneous learning of the child is nonsense. In the language of Dr. Harris, everything must be “served up” to him, and this in a “fragmentary manner.” This, however, is “not an objectionable feature”; “or if it is to be regarded as an evil, it is at least a necessary evil” (ch-XII(WTH)-ref:5: pp. 144-145). It is in the second stage of intellectual culture that larger facts are given in a systematic form and mutual correlation; that the pupil’s own observation, reflection, and “organic thinking” are encouraged and required. In a still higher stage—i. e., in the university—original investigation and independent thinking will have become its characteristic features. Dr. Harris fears that these higher forms of education, which he terms “the system of education by insight,” would foster an excessive conceit of self unless it is built on the safe foundations of what he calls “the education of authority,” or “the education by means of memory.” “There is this danger,” he thinks, “in the system of education by insight, if begun too early, that the individual tends to become so self-conceited with what he considers knowledge gotten by his own personal thought and research, that he drifts toward empty agnosticism with the casting overboard of all authority” (ch-XII(WTH)-ref:4: p. 271).

Dr. Harris rests his defense of conservatism on the ground of national psychology, saying that the pedagogy of a people is to be based on the knowledge of their special aptitudes and “the consequent necessity of inhibiting excesses.” According to him, the pedagogy emphasizing the pupil’s self-activity is for the quiet, obedient, and knowledge-loving Germans, and not for those vigorous nationalities which “love adventure and the exercise of the will power far more than they love science.” American children need rather the curbing and directing of self-activity, of which they have enough without encouragement. Consequently, discipline and drill, more than instruction, forms the essential feature of their education. Recitation and the text-book method is more fit for them than the oral method; because the Anglo-Saxon teacher is to devote most of his time and energy to the government and discipline of his class, and, besides, recitation and the text-book method have many advantages peculiar to them. The advantages of the text-book method are enumerated as follows:

“It has the advantage of making one independent of his teacher; you can take your book wherever you please. You cannot do that with the great lecturer, neither can you question him as you can the book, nor can you select the time for hearing the great teacher talk as you can for reading the book. And it is true that nearly all the great teachers have embodied their ideas in books. The greatest danger of text-book education is verbatim, parrot-like recitation; but even here from the poorest text-book a great deal of knowledge can be gleaned. Then there is the alertness which in any large class will necessarily be engendered by an intelligent understanding and criticism of the results arrived at by different pupils in discussing a certain piece of work given in his own words. And then there is the advantage to be found in the fact that with the text-book the child can be busy by itself” (ch-XII(WTH)-ref:4. p. 272).

As to an estimate of Dr. Harris’s pedagogy little can be said beside what has been said in respect to that of Hegel; only Dr. Harris goes further than his master in outspoken advocacy of conservatism and conventionalism. As a successful administrator he did a great deal for the educational advancement of this country. His pedagogy also has been an influential and acceptable one. But it seems to me that the America for which his pedagogy was formulated is fast passing. For the America of to-day, mere internal unity and solidarity is no longer the chief object of national aspiration. She who now is striving for world supremacy in every direction, with reasonable hope and confidence, needs, and in fact already has, a new pedagogy.

Granville Stanley Hall
(1846- )

The new pedagogy which is gaining an increasing predominance is yet a movement rather than a system. Although it is now entering its productive and constructive stage, the light which it has hitherto thrown upon educational work has been largely in the way of prophecy, insight, and suggestions rather than a well-ordered philosophy, with rules and methods. From Comenius down every great renovation in our educational ideas and methods has been either caused or effected by an ever fuller grasp of the nature of childhood and youth, to serve which is the task of education. With Comenius and other pedagogical writers who followed him, however, the study was individual, and knowledge remained at best intuition. Limited observations were too often made the basis of sweeping and one-sided generalizations. The systematizations attempted were mainly in the direction of deductive doctrination, but not of inductive synthesis of facts. These facts cannot be gathered and established from any individual experiences, however true and penetrating they may be, but only from the universal experience and experiments of the race, past and present. For the inductive synthesis of all the facts concerning the nature of childhood and youth, which can possibly be gathered and established from all sources, we are indebted to the so-called child-study movement. It calls to its aid animal psychology, anthropology, and medical science as well as all the branches of human psychology and physiology. It not only avails itself of the anthology of folklore, myths, nursery stories, and even superstitions, but also of the experience and observation of individuals, great and small. The uniqueness of the movement consists not only “in the new direction and focalization of many scientific departments and methods upon one object, some of which have never before had even this bond of union,” but also in the intimate contact, understanding, and mutual helpfulness into which it has brought experts and laymen, academic investigators, and practical workers. As the originator and the foremost leader of this movement stands Dr. Hall. In him America has first produced a pedagogic writer whose originality is peculiarly her own, and whose influence has extended far beyond the borders of the land. The new pedagogic movement which Dr. Hall represents has a philosophic basis in “genetic psychology,” which sees the essence of psyche in its process of becoming. It has been subject to the course of evolution as organic matters have been. The human soul is merely a sort of “a species or a stage of evolution” in the soul kingdom; it is “one of the many types in the world,” and “at best it may be a transition from a lower to a higher race to be evolved later” (ch-XII(GSH)-ref:1: vol. ii, p. 62). So our soul life extends far back to the beginning of organic life, and inherits in its pedigree the stored results of prehuman and human experience. Education is to unfold all these latencies in the individual and the race to their maximal maturity and strength. As a process considered as internally taking place, it is nothing else than human evolution; as a force or forces tending to growth, it is “almost as broad as what biology calls environment”—a much wider conception than instruction and discipline.

According to the genetic view of soul, consciousness is a late product in the evolution of the soul kingdom, and thus constitutes only a small and yet unstable upper story of our psychic structure. Thus we must seek “the bearer of mental heredity” in the larger and older basal structure of the soul, namely, in the motor habits, feelings, instincts, impulses, and intuitions—which constitute the unconscious part of our soul. It follows, then, that to secure a full and unhindered unfolding of this unconscious basal part of our soul is the first concern of education. Unless built on this foundation rock, which is coextensive with the history of animal and human evolution, the superstructure will not stand firm and secure. So Dr. Hall stands as a vigorous protestant against the ultra-intellectualistic tendency of prevailing education which neglects the culture of motor habits, of instincts, and of emotions and pleads for the cultivation of the heart as well as the head.

First, he is an ardent apostle of the education of and through muscle, the growing recognition of which has been one of the most conspicuous and hopeful tendencies of educational progress in recent years. “Muscles are the vehicles of habituation, imitation, obedience, character, and even of manners and customs.... Skill, endurance, and perseverance may almost be called muscular virtues, and fatigue, velleity, caprice, ennui, restlessness, lack of control, and poise, muscular faults” (ch-XII(GSH)-ref:1: vol. i, p. 132). Thus the basis of character building must be laid in motor training; will culture is essentially muscle culture. Yet muscles are not only the organs of will, but also of feeling and thought. Throughout animal and human evolution, the development of intelligence went together with that of the structure and function of muscles, and every change in our emotional life is accompanied by change in internal or external muscles of the body.

The first care in muscle culture must be to secure abundance and diversity of kinetic energy. “Here, as everywhere, the rule holds that powers themselves must be unfolded before the ability to check or even use them can develop” (ch-XII(GSH)-ref:1: vol. i, p. 161). The vigorous spontaneity of sporadic movements in young children should be cherished instead of suppressed. The coördination of these purposeless activities into higher compounds of habits should come only slowly and gradually, or else it will cause either atrophy or disease of motor function. The natural evolutionary course of muscular development has been from the fundamental to the accessory; and early childhood is the period for the development of larger basal muscles. Any fine work requiring accuracy, taxing the tiny accessory muscles, either of the eyes, of the tongue, or of the fingers should not be exacted. Training of the accessory muscles ought to come between the ages of eight and twelve. This is preëminently the period for drill, for mechanization.

Puberty is the stage of ill-balanced transition. The motor coördinations are lost for a moment, all the ways of awkwardness, mannerisms, and semi-imperative acts manifest themselves as a result. “This is again the age of the basal—e. g., hill-climbing muscles of leg and back and shoulder work, and of the yet more fundamental heart, lung, and chest muscles” (ch-XII(GSH)-ref:1: vol. i, p. 165). As during early childhood, now the danger is overemphasis upon the activities of accessory muscles and overprecision. Now, again, book-studies, class-lessons may become an evil. They constitute “not a liberal, power-generating, but a highly and prematurely specialized, narrowing and weakening education, unless offset by safeguards better than any system of gymnastics, which is at best artificial and exaggerated” (ch-XII(GSH)-ref:1: vol. i, p. 165).

For Dr. Hall, play presents the ideal type of exercise; he, like Froebel, spares no words of praise for its merits. According to him, in play we unconsciously rehearse the motor experience of the race. The motor habits won by the long history of toil and pain, elaborated in the life-and-death struggle for existence, now reappear in us by impulse, as spontaneity and joy. And “pleasure is always exactly proportional to the directness and force of the current of heredity” (ch-XII(GSH)-ref:1: vol. i, p. 206). It is, therefore, his opinion that we should direct the exercise of the young to these old basal activities handed down from the distant past, which have built up the intellect and character as well as the physique of the race, rather than insist upon those arbitrary systems and methods invented to form a symmetrical body according to our ideas. He thinks that “education perhaps should really begin with directing childish sports aright” (ch-XII(GSH)-ref:1: vol. i, p. 231).

Dr. Hall sees in industrial training a motor education of more psychic impulsion and generic ground than pure manual training artificially designed. Adolescence is the golden period for it. “Industry has determined the nature and trend of muscular development and youth who have pets, till the soil, build, manufacture, use tools, and master elementary processes and skills, are most truly repeating the history of the race. This, too, lays the best foundation for intellectual careers. The study of pure science as well as a higher technology follows rather than precedes this” (ch-XII(GSH)-ref:1: vol. i, p. 174). The danger here that should be guarded against is its tendency to narrow exclusiveness and too early specialization. Health and free development of body as well as of mind are apt to be sacrificed. However, utility is naturally its essential aim, and maximal efficiency of productive power is the standard of success; it ought to fit the pupil for the struggle of life. Such “struggle-for-lifeurs,” sturdy in arms and spirit, not “flabby, undeveloped, anæmic, easy-living city youth,” is the demand of modern America. Real industrial training is a man-making education.

Thus, according to Dr. Hall, character is to be built not upon Herbart’s coherent and compact system of ideas, but upon vigorous, well-developed, and perfectly coördinated muscles. However, this is not, of course, the whole of moral training. Will is to be made moral, not only to be strong and healthy. This moralization of will is the task of discipline.

Not unlike Dr. Harris, but more in the spirit of the father of English pedagogy, he posits that about the only duty of small children is habitual and prompt obedience. Nothing like the reasoning ground of conduct, or the free self-determination of will, for them; the extent of authority felt, revered, and depended upon is the measure of success. He thinks that “if our love is deep, obedience is an instinct if not a religion” for the child: “as the plant grows toward light, so they unfold in the direction of our wishes, felt as by divination” (ch-XII(GSH)-ref:2: p. 332).

Dr. Hall sees in the present trend of education more danger of becoming oversentimental than of falling into brutality; so he recommends “drastic reconstructions” of will, when habituation does not, as should be expected, run smoothly. He likens the corporal punishment to a sword in its scabbard: “it may be reserved, but should not get so rusted that it cannot be drawn on occasion”; and believes that “will culture for boys is rarely as thorough as it should be without more or less flogging” (ch-XII(GSH)-ref:2: pp. 338-339).

External authority, however, must find response in the intellectual motivation of the child as it grows, else it can avail but little educationally. “The various stimuli of discipline are to enforce the higher though weaker insights which the child has already unfolded, rather than to engraft entirely unintuited good,” and “we must not forget that even morality is relative, and is one thing for adults and quite often another for children” (ch-XII(GSH)-ref:2: p. 335).

The transition from the morality of authority and coercion to that of reason and free will may be bridged by simple, practical instructions. These are to be given in the form of a few well-chosen mottoes, proverbs, maxims, always clear cut, copiously illustrated, and well familiarized. Philosophic morality should be deprecated both for children and teachers. Every road of human activity leads to the great Rome of character. For Dr. Hall, “the highest and also immediate practical method of moral training” lies in intellectual work, concentrated, sustained, and inspirited. Mental work, in order to be serviceable to the production of healthy manhood, should be “a series of acts, or living thoughts and not words.” The lack of volitional initiative and reaction in the current form of mental training has caused “the general paralysis of cultured intellect.” Learning should be changed from a mere reception, as it is now, into the putting forth of self-activity. “It is the way and not the goal, the work and not the product, the acquiring and not the acquisition, that educates will and character” (ch-XII(GSH)-ref:2: p. 346). Then the spirit of thoroughness is the requisite for the intellectual training that at the same time trains the will. “Smattering is dissipation of energy. Only great, concentrated and prolonged efforts in one direction really train the mind, because only they train the will beneath it” (ch-XII(GSH)-ref:2: p. 349). This is one of the educative forces of specialization.

To turn now to intellectual culture. In Dr. Hall’s opinion, the school stands essentially for the prolongation of human infancy and adolescence, and not so much for the initiation of the immature generation into the world of grown-ups; it means “the perpetuation of the primæval paradise created before the struggle for existence began” (ch-XII(GSH)-ref:8: p. 475).

From this viewpoint the kindergarten needs reconstruction. Here “a pound of health, growth, heredity is worth a ton of instruction.... Now the body needs most attention and the soul least” (ch-XII(GSH)-ref:8: p. 476). Not in the oversystematized and oversymbolized “occupations” and “games,” but in free, natural play children must have their true life. “Imitation should have a far larger scope” than at present, and precocious exercise of reasoning and thinking a less. “Part of the cult here should be idleness and the intermediate state of reverie” (ch-XII(GSH)-ref:8: p. 476).

At eight or nine the child enters a new period, lasting until puberty. The bodily growth is relatively at rest, but vitality, activity, and the power to resist disease and fatigue show an enormous increase. The age of reason is only dawning, and imitation is yet a strong motive power. “Demonstrate, show, envisage,” and not “explain” is to be the motto. “Children comprehend much and very rapidly if we can only refrain from explaining, but this slows down intuition, tends to make casuists and prigs, and to enfeeble the ultimate vigor of reason. It is the age of little method and much matter” (ch-XII(GSH)-ref:1: vol. ii, p. 452). A beginning in the fundamentals of all learning and skill which need technicalities is to be made; constant drill in these will form a stable automatic basis of mind. The qualities required of the teacher here are not so much those of the instructor as of “the captain of the boy’s gang.” He or she is to be able to lead, drive, and discipline more than to teach “the human colt, which is by nature in some sense the wildest of all wild animals.”

But with the teens there must come a total change in the mode of education. “Powers and faculties, essentially nonexistent before, are now born, and of all the older impulses and instincts some are reënforced and greatly developed, while others are subdued, so that new relations are established and the ego finds a new center” (ch-XII(GSH)-ref:1: vol. ii, p. 70). The child in the preceding period was well adjusted to his environment; his development was proportionate and relatively slow; and he lived content with himself in his own child world. He thus “represents probably an old and relatively perfected stage of race maturity”; which “stands for a long-continued one, a terminal stage of human development at some post-simian point” (ch-XII(GSH)-ref:1: vol. ii, p. 71). But with the advent of adolescence, this peaceful, primeval paradise is lost forever. The youth with its all-sided mobilization and with its intense enthusiasm enters into the conquest of a higher kingdom of manhood. The individual is now recapitulating a long viaticum of ascent which the race had to make with heat and ferment, with fight and defeat, before it evolved its historic stage of civilization. “Early adolescence is thus the infancy of man’s higher nature, when he receives from the great all-mother his last capital of energy and evolutionary momentum” (ch-XII(GSH)-ref:1: vol. ii, p. 71). “It is the most critical stage of life, because failure to mount almost always means retrogression, degeneracy, or fall” (ch-XII(GSH)-ref:1: vol. ii, p. 72). Indeed, one of the greatest problems of civilization, therefore of education, is how to make “the earlier stages of adolescence ever surer and safer, and its later possibilities ever greater and prolonged.”

Coercion and prescription can be no longer imposed without serious injuries. “Individuality must have a longer tether” (ch-XII(GSH)-ref:1: vol. ii, p. 453). This is preeminently the period of variation, which means nothing else than evolution. Each of the impulses, instincts, and dispositions, which represent the voices of bygone generations, shall have a free struggle for expression. “Its function is to stimulate the next higher power that can only thus be provoked to development, in order to direct, repress, or supersede it.” So-called lower faculties or instincts, if artificially and prematurely suppressed, may “break out well on in adult life, falsetto notes mingling with manly base as strange puerilities” (ch-XII(GSH)-ref:1: vol. ii, pp. 89-90).

The educator is now essentially to be a teacher, not a drillmaster; he must know plenty and teach plenty; he must be generous and indulgent in his giving, and not exacting in requiring returns from the pupil. “The teacher’s cue is now to graft the soul all over with buds and scions, and not to try to gather a harvest” (ch-XII(GSH)-ref:8: p. 485). Recitation and examination methods are harmful both to the intellect and the will. Morselizing the knowledge and insisting upon methodical steps starve the adolescent soul, which, being “all insight and receptivity,” wants to devour great wholes.

Dr. Hall makes an ardent plea for the independence of the high school from the control of the higher institutions, making it “the peoples’ college,” complete in itself. It stands to meet peculiar needs of the unique stage of life, with a distinct function of its own. It “should primarily fit for nothing, but exploit and develop to the utmost all the powers” (ch-XII(GSH)-ref:1: vol. ii, p. 525).

The nineteenth year in boys marks an epoch. It is a time for adjustment and rest after the rank growth. It is a period of systematic rounding up, following the all-sided mobilization. The liberal education of the college is provided here, for those who are favored by circumstances. It is to be an essentially cultural and humanistic institution, broadly propædeutic and preparatory to the career of mature manhood. Therefore, college “should stand for extensive more than intensive study.... It implies knowing something of everything more than everything of something” (ch-XII(GSH)-ref:1: vol. ii, p. 528). Not scientific or professional acquirement, still less mastery, but training and discipline of mind is the aim. The teacher “should address his efforts more to the upper and less to the lower half of his class, forage widely and incessantly, and bring everything within reach in his field to them.... Mental awakening should be his goal, and he should inspire them to read for pleasure, for the only real measure of culture is the number and kinds of things done for the love of them.... The test of success here is the number of interests and the intensity of curiosity aroused far more than the size of the body of knowledge laid away in the memory” (ch-XII(GSH)-ref:1: vol. ii, p. 530).

As to university education, the fundamental notions of Dr. Hall are a clearer and more definite statement of those of Bacon and Fichte, which the modern advancement of science and his own experience as a university president have enabled him to make. The university stands chiefly for specialization in scholarship. Its inspiration is the conquest of truth, extension of the domain of human knowledge, and consequently of human power. Its education is in and for and by a free, though at first guided and assisted, investigation. Not merely accumulating what has already been found and refined, but digging out yet undiscovered mines of facts and laws, is its chief task. The university in this sense is the culmination of adolescent education. It cultivates in the youth the creative ability which does not, like the mere carrying capacity, weigh down the possessor; the sense of I-can-do-something-important, which gives one confidence, and poise, an enthusiasm which is not fanatic, a genuine attitude of respect, even of reverence for the efforts of all seekers for truth. It calls forth “truthfulness, integrity, morality in every direction, self-sacrifice, and what perhaps includes them all, enthusiasm for the highest ideals of living and thinking,” by laying demands upon these best qualities in man’s character.

The right of a larger manhood has been the claim of all the educational reformers deserving the name. The unfolding of the total man has been their repeated assertion. But they have always fallen into one or another form of one-sidedness—mainly on account of their narrow conception of the human soul. Here comes another renovator with his “new psychology,” which he believes “will surely take the place of the older concepts of soul, as the theory of evolution has taken the place of those of life,” and claims for it the potency of bringing about a total reconstruction of our educational spirit and methods. His own pedagogy is a still incomplete, unfinished, and ever-enlarging construction. But he opens the way for the philosophy of education, which is to be “one with that of history and of life,” and predicts with the zeal and vision of a prophet its future position:

“If evolution is true, the time will come, as certainly as the sun will rise to-morrow, when it (pedagogy) will be the basis of a new harmony, unity, and organization of the sciences, and instead of being the Cinderella in their circle, it will supply the criterion by which they are all judged; it will grade and evaluate each product of culture” (ch-XII(GSH)-ref:4: p. 383).

REFERENCES

1.Harris, William Torrey. Report of the Subcommittee on the Correlation of Studies in Elementary Education. Educational Review, Vol. IX, March, 1895, pp. 230-289.

2.——Social Culture in the Form of Education and Religion. Proceedings of International Congress of Arts and Sciences. Houghton & Mifflin Co., New York and Boston, 1907. Vol. VIII, pp. 1-16.

3.——Psychologic Foundations of Education; an Attempt to Show the Genesis of the Higher Faculties of the Mind. (International Education Series.) Appleton, New York, 1894. 400 pages.

4.——Lectures on the Philosophy of Education. Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science. Supplementary notes. Eleventh series, 1893, pp. 269-277.

5.——Prescription, its Province in Education. Proceedings of American Institute of Instruction, 1871, pp. 127-151.

6.——Vocation versus Culture. Proceedings of American Institute of Instruction, 1891, pp. 1-20.

7.——Moral Education in the Common Schools. Proceedings of American Institute of Instruction, 1884. Lectures, pp. 29-46.

8.——The Relation of School Discipline to Moral Education. Herbartian Year Book, No. 3, 1897, pp. 58-72.

9.——Relation of Women to the Trades and Professions. Educational Review, October, 1900, Vol. XX, pp. 217-229.

10.——The Use of Higher Education. Educational Review, September, 1898, Vol. XVI, pp. 147-161.

11.——Educational Policy for Our New Possessions. Educational Review, September, 1899, Vol. XVIII, pp. 105-118.

12.——The Future of the Normal School. Educational Review, January, 1899, Vol. XVII, pp. 1-15.

13.——How the School Strengthens the Individuality of the Pupil. Educational Review, October, 1902, Vol. XXIV, pp. 228-237.

14.Prof. John Dewey’s Doctrine as Related to Will. Educational Review, May, 1896, Vol. XI, pp. 486-493.

REFERENCES

1.Hall, Granville Stanley. Adolescence; its Psychology and its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion. Appleton, New York, 1905. 2 vols.

2.——Youth; its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene. Appleton, New York, 1906. 369 pages.

3.——and Some of his Pupils. Aspects of Child Life and Education. Ginn & Co., Boston, 1907. 326 pages.

4.——What is Pedagogy? Pedagogical Seminary, December, 1905. Vol. XII, pp. 375-383.

5.——Confessions of a Psychologist. Pedagogical Seminary, March, 1901. Vol. VIII, pp. 92-143.

6.——Moral and Religious Training of Children and Adolescents. Pedagogical Seminary, June, 1891, pp. 196-210.

7.——Moral Education and Will Training. Pedagogical Seminary, June, 1892, pp. 72-98.

8.——The Ideal School, as Based on Child Study. Proceedings of National Education Association, 1901, pp. 475-488. (Also in Forum, September, 1901, Vol. XXXII, pp. 24-39.)

9.——The High School or the People’s College versus the Fitting School. Proceedings of National Education Association, 1902. (Also in Pedagogical Seminary, March, 1902, Vol. IX, pp. 63-73.)

10.——What is Research in a University Sense and How May it Best be Promoted? Pedagogical Seminary, March, 1902, Vol. IX, pp. 74-80.

11.——Pedagogy of History. Pedagogical Seminary, September, 1905, Vol. XII, pp. 339-349.

12.——How to Teach Reading and What to Read in School. Heath & Co., Boston, 1890. 40 pages.

13.——Coeducation in the High School. Proceedings of National Education Association, 1903, pp. 446-460.

14.——The Question of Coeducation. Munsey, February, 1906. Vol. XXXIV, pp. 588-592. (Also in Bulletin of American Academy of Medicine, October, 1906, Vol. VII, pp. 653-656.)

15.Russel, Elias Harlow. Biographical Sketch of President Hall. (In American Journal of Insanity, October, 1896, Vol. LIII, pp. 317-322.)

INDEX

————●————

Adolescence, 28, 82-89, 109-110, 262-264, 280-282, 284, 286-290.

Alsted, 19.

Andreä, 19.

Arithmetic, 135, 178.

Association, 52, 206.

Athenian education, 2-3.

Attention, 50-51, 129, 208-209, 233, 255.

Bacon, 12-15.
mentioned, 18, 30, 38, 39, 52, 54, 223, 225, 226, 289.
on higher education, 15.
on knowledge, 12-14.

Barnard, quoted, 146.

Basedow, 93-98.
fundamental principles of didactics, 96-97.
ideal education, 95.
influence of, 94, 97-98.
language instruction, 95-96.
mentioned, 103, 105, 113, 139.
“Philalethie,” 94.
physical culture, 95-96.

Bible, 8, 27.

Boardman, quoted, 189-190.

Bodily faculty, A. B. C. of, 151.

Boyhood, 28, 77-82, 179-186, 253-261, 270-274, 280, 283-286.

Browning, on Locke, 38.
on Rousseau, 61.

Campanella, 19.

Carlyle, on Rousseau, 59, 60.

Character. See Moral Training.

Child-study movement, 277-278.

Childhood, 28, 71-77, 133-137, 174-179, 252-253, 270, 280, 282-283, 285.
early, 28, 69-71, 173-174, 252.

Chinese, compared with Greeks, 1.

Christianity, influence of, on education, 3-12.

Church, education by, 4-5.
service of Catholic, 7.

Cicero, quoted, 3.

Circle of thought, 206.

Civilization and education, 268-269.

Classics, 5, 10, 14, 26, 39, 48-49, 94, 162, 225, 228, 257.

Coeducation, 157, 293.

Comenius, 18-31.
compared with Locke. See Locke.
early education advocated, 22-24.
existing schools criticised, 24-26.
“Great Didactic,” 20, 29, 35.
ideal of education, 20-21, 29, 35.
mentioned, 68, 89, 94, 96, 119-120, 138, 139, 194, 276-277.
on discipline, 25-26.
on function of school, 24.
on method, 26-28.
on necessity of education, 21-22.
on necessity of school, 23-24.
on school system, 28.
on subject-matter, 26.
“Orbis Pictus,” 96.

Compayré, on Froebel, 192-193.
on Greek influence on education, 1.
on Luther, 7.

Comte, 230.

Concentration-center, 213-214.

Coöperation, 155-156, 162-163, 216.

Corporal punishment, 43-44, 283.

Cosmopolitanism, 110.

Culture stages, 213-214.

Curiosity, 50, 253.

Dancing, 48.

Davidson, on Rousseau, 61.

Developmental stages, 68-69, 124, 169, 173-173, 213, 251-252.

Discipline, 10, 25-26, 42-46, 102-103, 152, 214-215, 234-236, 250-251, 259-260, 270-272, 282-283.
See also Moral Training.

Domestic work, 12, 129-130, 136-137, 178-179, 183-184.

Drawing, 177-178.

Education, academic, 15, 159-164, 239-240.
Athenian, 2-3.
by nature, 64-66.
early, 22-23, 69-77, 101-103, 133-137, 173-179, 252-253, 270, 280, 282-283, 285.
economic, 155-157.
efferent, 181-184.
elementary, 133-137, 272-274.
in middle ages, 4-5.
industrial, 137-139, 281-282.
intellectual, 10, 15, 25-28, 48-54, 66-68, 72-74, 76-77, 79-82, 87, 88, 95-96, 104-106, 133-136, 148-151, 159-164, 174, 178, 179, 180-181, 184, 185, 206-214, 225-233, 239-240, 254-259, 268, 272-275, 284-290.
liberal, 288.
man-making, 282.
moral, 10, 25, 42-46, 83-89, 106-110, 112-113, 132, 136-137, 152-155, 181-182, 205-207, 214-215, 236-238, 250-251, 259-261, 270-272, 279, 282-284.
national, 144.
of adolescents, 28, 82-89, 109-110, 262-264, 280-282, 284, 286-290.
of boys, 28, 77-82, 179-186, 253-261, 270-274, 280, 283-286.
physical, 1, 10, 40-41, 54, 65, 69, 71-75, 101, 103-104, 151, 173-174, 182-183, 236-238, 280-281.
private, 55-56, 217.
See also Home Training.
“psychologizing,” 124.
public, 2-3, 55-56, 101, 144, 216-217, 238-243, 268.
religious, 83, 110-113, 158-159, 260-261.
Roman, 3.
Spartan, 2-3.
uniform, opposed, 3, 240-243.
universal, advocated by Comenius, 22.
university, 15, 161-164, 289-290.

Educational ideals, 1-3, 4, 5, 6-7, 11-12, 15, 21, 24, 40, 63, 95, 99-100, 122, 146-147, 169, 203, 227, 250-251, 268, 278.

Emotion, 63, 84-85, 87, 128-129, 133, 153-154, 182, 204, 239, 261, 278.

Emulation, 23, 55, 109.

Evolutionary ideas, 169-170, 213, 230-232, 248-249, 278-279, 290.

Examination, 163, 288.

Fairy tales, 184-185, 213.

Family. See Home Training.

Fichte, 143-164.
“Addresses to the German Nation,” 145.
“Aphorisms on Education,” 147.
“Characteristics of the Present Age,” 152.
first essentials of new education, 152.
mentioned, 113, 195, 245, 246, 248, 259, 263, 289.
on moral training, 152-155.
on academic education, 159-164.
on coeducation, 157.
on home, 154-155.
on manual work, 156.
on Pestalozzi, 140.
on religious education, 158-159.
on university education, 161-164.
plan of an educational community, 154-157.

Formal steps of instruction, 209.

Formative instinct, 183-184.

Froebel, 166-196.
“Education of Man,” 168, 193.
evolutionary idea of education, 169-170.
mentioned, 199, 200, 250, 258.
on arithmetic, 178.
on education of boys, 179-186.
on domestic work, 178-179, 182, 183-184.
on drawing, 177-178.
on early education, 173-179.
on efferent education, 181-184.
on harmonious development, 173.
on ideal of education, 169.
on kindergarten, 180-181, 186-192.
on mathematics, 178.
on play, 174-175, 182-183.
on rhythm, 176.
on school, 181.
on songs, 185-186.
on speech, 174, 175-176, 179-180.
on stories, 184-185.
pedagogy of, characterized, 166-168, 192-196.
“Prospectus of an institution for the Training of Nurses and Educators of Children,” 190.

Grammar, 54, 228, 257, 273.

Genetic psychology, 278.

Greek, language and culture, 14, 39, 162, 257.

Greek ideals of education, 1-3.

Gymnastics, 151, 237, 281.

Habit, 41, 49, 95, 101, 102-103, 105, 153-154, 157, 178, 270-271, 279.

Hall, G. Stanley, 276-290.
on adolescence, 282, 283, 286, 288.
on college education, 288-289.
on discipline, 282-283.
on education of boys, 282-283, 285-286.
on Froebel, 193.
on industrial education, 281-282.
on intellectual education, 284-290.
on kindergarten, 285.
on moral training, 279, 282-284.
on motor training, 279-282.
on play, 281.
on teachers, 286, 287-289.
on university education, 289-290.
on harmonious development, 287.
pedagogy of, characterized, 278-279, 290.
psychology of, 278-279.

Harmonious development, 1, 12, 21, 24, 40, 71, 94-95, 105, 121-123, 130-131, 136-137, 157, 170-172, 206-208, 227, 280, 287-288.

Harnisch, on Pestalozzi, 139.

Harris, William T., 267-276.
on elementary education, 273-274.
on higher education, 274.
on intellectual education, 268, 269, 272-275.
on manual training, 273.
on moral training, 270-272.
on school, 268, 271.
pedagogy of, characterized, 267-268, 276.
school and home compared, 271-272.
subject-matter, 272-273.

Hegel, 245-266.
“Ages of Man,” 251.
education defined by, 248-251.
mentioned, 267-268.
on adolescence, 262-264.
on classics, 257.
on early education, 252-253.
on education of boys, 253-261.
on grammar, 257.
on intellectual education, 254-259.
on logic, 257.
on manhood, 264.
on mathematics, 257, 259.
on memory, 256.
on moral training, 250-251, 259-261.
on old age, 265.
on school, 258-259.
on subject-matter, 257-258.
pedagogy of, characterized, 245-248, 265-266.

Heinemann, quoted, 189.

Herbart, 199-219.
end of education, 203.
mentioned, 119, 248, 265.
on attention, 208-209.
on discipline, 214-215.
on home training, 216-217.
on instruction, 206-214.
on interest, 206-209.
on moral training, 205-207, 214-215.
on state education, 216-217.
pedagogy of, characterized, 199-203, 215-216.
psychology of, 203-205, 218-219.

Heredity, 170-173, 278-279, 281, 282, 285, 286-287.

Herr von Arnswald, quoted, 188.

High school, 288.

Higher education, 15, 28, 161-164, 274, 288-290.

Home training, 3, 8, 12, 23, 55-56, 70, 100-101, 124-137, 155, 178-179, 182, 183, 184, 187-188, 216-217, 241, 261, 268, 271.

Honor, 45.

Hotho, quoted, 246.

Humanism, 5-6.

Infant schools, 188.

Institutions, private, 217.

Instruction. See Learning, Intellectual Education, and Subject-Matter.
analytic, 210-211.
presentative, 210.
synthetic, 211-212.

Interest, 27, 50, 51, 77-81, 104-105, 127, 147, 206-209, 233, 253-254, 255, 268-269, 289.
See also Natural Development, Spontaneous Activity.

Jahn, 96, 151.

Kant, 98-114.
compared with Locke, 102-103.
compared with Rousseau, 98-99.
mentioned, 41, 143-144, 153-154, 169, 200-203, 257.
on adolescence, 109.
on discipline, 102-103.
on emulation, 109-110.
on home training, 100-101.
on ideal of education, 99-100.
on manners, 106.
on mental culture, 104-106.
on moral education, 106-110, 112-113.
on physical culture, 103-104.
on play, 104-105.
on religious education, 110-113.
on sex pedagogy, 109-110.
on state education, 110.
on sympathy, 108-109.
pedagogy of, characterized, 98-99.

Kindergarten, 28, 180, 186-192, 258, 285.

Krüsi, on Pestalozzi, 116.

La Chalotais, 93.

Language, Bible as text-book of, 8.
instruction in, 10, 28, 54, 73, 95, 96, 151, 162, 176, 212, 228, 257, 272-273.
See also Speech and Vernacular.

Laurie, on Comenius, 19.
on Locke, 37.

Learning, discussed by Bacon, 12-15.
Comenius, 25-28.
Fichte, 147-151, 162-164.
Froebel, 174, 181.
Hall, 284-290.
Harris, 268-270, 272-275.
Hegel, 253-258.
Herbart, 206-212.
Kant, 104-106.
Locke, 48-55.
Pestalozzi, 131-137.
Rousseau, 65-68, 71-82, 87, 88.
Spencer, 225-228, 230-233.

Leibnitz, on Locke, 37.

Locke, 35-56.
compared with Comenius, 35-38, 54-56.
compared with Kant, 102-103.
influence on English education, 38.
mentioned, 59, 89, 94, 96, 99, 113, 139, 203, 224, 237.
on attention and association, 50-52.

on dancing, 48.
on discipline, 42-45.
on example and company, 45-46.
on Greek, 39.
on honor, 44-45.
on learning, 48-55.
on logic, 52.
on manners, 47-48.
on mathematics, 52.
on memory, 52-53.
on play instinct, 42-43.
on principles of hygiene, 40-41.
on punishment, 43-44.
on subject-matter, 54.
psychology of, 41-42, 52-53.

Logic, 52, 135, 257.

Luther, 7-12.
mentioned, 19, 145, 146.
on discipline, 9-10.
on home training, 8, 10, 12.
on relation of religion and
education, 8-9.
on school, 9-10, 12.
on subject-matter, 10, 12.
on teachers, 9-11.

Madame de Staël, on Rousseau, 59-60.

Mager, on Pestalozzi, 120.

Manhood, 264.

Manners, 47-48, 106, 270-271.

Manual training, 12, 54, 88, 94-95, 136-139, 155-157, 162, 168, 183-184, 273, 281.

Marenholz-Bülow, on Froebel, 187.

Mathematics, 52, 178, 257.

Memory, 52-53, 256.

Method, 26-28, 42, 242, 275.

Military drill, 258.

Montaigne, 39, 40.

Mother, 125-129, 134, 187-188, 190, 261, 270.
See also Parents.

Morley, on Rousseau, 62.

Motor training, 71-72, 74-75, 95-96, 103-104, 129, 136-139, 151, 155-157, 162, 168, 173-179, 181-184, 188, 237-238, 258, 279-282.

Munroe, on Froebel, 166, 192.

Muscles. See Motor Training.

Music. See Songs.

Natural development, 122-124, 229-231.
See also Spontaneous Activity.

Nature, 13, 27, 62-64.

Niemeyer, on “Émile,” 61.

Parents, 10, 23, 43, 46, 69-70, 100-101, 107, 129, 133, 173, 172, 179, 189, 216-217, 228, 234, 235, 242-243, 250, 261.
See also Home Training and Mother.

Perception of A. B. C. of, 150-151, 200.

Pestalozzi, 116-140.
“Christopher and Alice,” 125.
compared with Rousseau, 124-125.

elementary method of education, 133-137.
function of education, 123.
“How Gertrude Taught  Children,” 131.
“Leonard and Gertrude,” 131.
mentioned, 149-151, 159, 169, 190, 194-196, 199-201, 218, 223, 229, 234, 257, 259, 273.
“New Year’s Address,” 121-122.
on harmonious education, 121, 123, 136.
on home, 126-132.
on ideal of education, 121.
on industrial education, 137-139.
on moral training, 128-129, 132, 133.
on motor training, 136-137, 138-139.
on nature’s method, 132-133.
pedagogy of, characterized, 117-120.
“Swan Song,” 132, 133.

Philanthropium, 94, 96, 98.

Play, 42-43, 103-105, 174-175, 182-183, 238, 281.

Prescription, 254, 269, 270-271, 287.

Protestantism, 6-7.

Psychology, genetic, 278.
national, 274-275.
of Hall, 278-279.
of Herbart, 203-205.
of Locke, 41-42, 52-53.

Puberty, 82-87, 109-110, 280-281, 286-287.

Public school versus private education, 55-56, 125-128, 216-217, 271-272.

Punishment, 43-44, 214, 235, 287.

Pythagoras, 255.

Quick, on Froebel, 193.

Rabelais, 19, 39.

Ratke, 19.

Recitation, 275, 288.

Reformation, 5-7, 11-12, 31.

Rein, 214.
on Herbart, 202.

Religion and education, relation of, 8-9, 19.

Renaissance, 5-6, 11-12.

Rhythm, 176.

Roman education, 3.

Rousseau, 59-90.
“Émile,” 61.
mentioned, 41, 93-94, 96, 97, 98-99, 103, 113, 119, 124, 159, 169, 173, 172, 186-187, 194, 201, 223, 229, 235, 250, 261, 267.
on adolescent education, 87-89.
on book study, 63-68, 72-73.
on duty of parents, 69-70.
on early education, 64-67, 70-71.
on education by activity, 64, 67-68, 71-72, 74-75.
on education by inaction, 65-66.

on education by nature, 63-65, 89.
on ideal boyhood, 81-82.
on ideal childhood, 76-77.
on the origin of intellectual interest, 78-79.
on preadolescent education, 77-82.
on puberty, 82-87.
on science instruction, 66-68, 79-81.
on work interest, 81.
pedagogy of, characterized, 59-62, 89-90.
sex pedagogy, 83-88.
social-settlement anticipated, 88-89.
stages of natural development, 68-69.

Rosenkranz, 245.

Scholars, vocation of, discussed by Fichte, 160-161, 163-164.

School, 9-10, 12, 24-26, 55-56, 181, 258, 268, 271, 272, 284-285.
See also teachers.

Schneider, on Pestalozzi, 139.

Science, instruction in, 66-68, 79-81, 282.
value of, 227-228.

Self-activity, 147-149, 155, 160-163, 173, 208, 254, 256, 269, 273-275.
See also Spontaneous Activity.

Self-expression, 174-175, 177.

Self-instruction, 232-235.

Sensation, A. B. C. of, 150-151.

Sex pedagogy, 83-88, 109-110.

Silence, 255, 272.

Social nursery, 188.

Solger, quoted, 247.

Songs, 10, 185-186.

Spartan education, 2-3.

Speech, 70, 133-135, 151, 174-176, 179, 180, 252-253.
See also Language.

Spencer, 223-243.
“Education, intellectual,
moral, physical,” 243.
mentioned, 267.
on aim of education, 226-227.
on classics, 225, 228.
on intellectual education, 225-233.
on method, 242.
on moral training, 233, 236.
on physical education, 236-238.
on state education, 238-243.
on value of science, 227-228.
pedagogy of, characterized, 223-224.

Spielmann, on Comenius, 30.
on Herbart, 217-218.

Spontaneous activity, 170-173, 180, 188, 192, 280.
See also Natural Development, Self-activity and Self-instruction.

State education, 2-3, 101, 144, 216-217, 238-243, 268.

Stoicism, 3.

Stories, 184-185.

Subject-matter, 10, 12, 26, 53-54, 208, 227-228, 257-258, 272-273.

Teachers, 9-11, 127-128, 203, 216, 250, 271.

Temming, on Kant, 113.

Text-books, 275.

Vernacular, 19, 26.

Vives, 19.

Work interest, 51, 81, 105, 253-254.

Youth. See Adolescence.

Ziegler, on Kant, 113.

Ziller, 213-214.

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“The President of Western Reserve University, a graduate of Harvard thirty years ago, has rendered a good service to the students of education, in this country and abroad, by the preparation of an historical volume which is full and comprehensive.... The supporters of superior education are certainly grateful to the author for bringing together such a mass of details on this important subject.”—New York Evening Post.

“The book has a very distinct character of its own: first, it does not contain an uninteresting page; the reader who takes it up is likely to read from page to page and from chapter to chapter until he reaches the end.... The book is conceived and executed in a large and generous spirit, combines accuracy and interest in an unusual degree, and is a notable addition to the literature of our educational history.”—The Dial.

“This is the first adequate modern book on higher education in America that has appeared, and it is also President Thwing’s best work. It is good history, good literature, and good professional reading.”—Boston Journal of Education.

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Table of Contents

- MODERN EDUCATORS AND THEIR IDEALS

- PREFACE

- CONTENTS

- MODERN EDUCATORS AND THEIR IDEALS

- CHAPTER I.

- CHAPTER II.

- CHAPTER III.

- CHAPTER IV.

- CHAPTER V.

- CHAPTER VI.

- CHAPTER VII.

- CHAPTER VIII.

- CHAPTER IX.

- CHAPTER X.

- CHAPTER XI.

- CHAPTER XII.

- INDEX

- INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION SERIES.

- AN IMPORTANT EDUCATIONAL HISTORY.

- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE