Vives’ Last Dialogue: The Precepts of Education
Vives lays down twenty-four Precepts of Education. Some critics have thought such precepts out of place in a book written for boys. But Vives has done all he could to interest boys on their own level. He has always retained the boy in himself, and has spoken from the fulness of his heart, as a boy, in the dialogues. And as he parts company with boys in these dialogues, he wishes, as all true, older human beings must wish, for once at least to give of his best to the young. He will give back to the boys who have followed him through the Dialogues (as a teacher who is a “good sort”) a full reward for their trouble. He will pay them the compliment of treating them seriously.
This seems a right instinct. It is not priggish (as some seem to think) to give of a man’s best to a boy or to boys at[li] the right moment. When once a boy is sure there is “the boy” in any man he knows, there is no camaraderie he delights in such as that which allows him to see a little of the man,—to jump, so to say, on the man’s mental shoulders to catch a better glimpse of the far distance.
When John Thomas Freigius—grown up into the classical scholar—looks back, in his Preface to his edition of Vives’ School Dialogues, he says: “As a boy, I so loved Luis Vives that not even now do I feel my old love for him has faded away from my mind.” Perhaps the last dialogue, with its twenty-four precepts, did not cause the love of Freigius for Vives, but the love being there, it continued in spite of having to read the precepts. Anyway, Vives, who had turned aside from the weighty problems of learning and literature, where he belonged to the great triumvirate of writers of his day—enthroned by contemporary judges by the side of the great Erasmus and the great Budaeus—stated the precepts which, in his view, should guide, not only his book of dialogues and the schools, but all stages of culture. Boys brought up on these precepts, and retaining them as principles of education in their later life, might perhaps have cheered the heart of Vives by showing that he had abstained from his higher studies to some purpose when he wrote his School Dialogues.
At any rate, for the modern reader, there is the satisfaction of knowing, when he reads the School Dialogues of Vives, that he is reading a work which won the approval of children. With all our modern advance, of which of the writers of our text-books to-day would present-day children say as much as was said of this sixteenth-century scholar, who merely wrote a text-book to help boys of the Tudor Age to speak Latin!—“As a boy I so loved Luis Vives that not even now do I feel my old love for him has faded away from my mind.”