In 1793 the Philanthropinum at Dessau was closed permanently. Its teachers were scattered through Europe, and gave a great impulse to the new education. Becomes a fad, but accomplished some good. An unfortunate result of this popularity was that the Philanthropinum became a fad, and schools with this name were opened everywhere in Germany by educational mountebanks. These teachers prostituted the system to their own ends, degraded the profession into a mere trade, and became the subject of much satire and ridicule. Nevertheless, the philanthropinic movement seems not to have been without good results, especially when we consider the educational conditions and the pedagogy of the times. It introduced many new ideas concerning methods and industrial training into all parts of France and Switzerland, as well as Germany, and these were carefully worked out by such reformers as Pestalozzi, Froebel, and Herbart. In this way there were embodied in education the first positive results of Rousseau’s ‘naturalism.’
Fig. 25.—The child as a miniature adult.
(Reproduced from a French fashion plate of the eighteenth century.)
Fig. 26.—A naturalistic school.
(Reproduced from the Elementarwerk of Basedow.)
SUPPLEMENTARY READING
Graves, In Modern Times (Macmillan, 1913), chap. II; and Great Educators (Macmillan, 1912), chaps. VII and VIII; Monroe, Text-book (Macmillan, 1905), chap. X; Parker, S. C., History of Modern Elementary Education (Ginn, 1912), chaps. VIII-X. The Emile (Translated by Payne; Appleton, 1895) should be read, and the Elementarwerk (Wiegandt, Leipzig, 1909) should be examined. A judicial description of the life and work of Rousseau is that by Morley, J. (Macmillan), while Davidson, T., furnishes an interesting interpretation of Rousseau and Education from Nature (Scribner, 1902), but the standard treatise on The Educational Theory of Rousseau (Longmans, Green, 1911) at present has been written by Boyd, W. A good brief account of Basedow: His Educational Work and Principles (Kellogg, New York, 1891) is afforded by Lang, O. H. See also Barnard, H., American Journal of Education, vol. V, pp. 487-520.