The History of Pedagogy

by Gabriel Compayré

Moreover, it can be given with reference to everything. Madame Pape-Carpentier admits what she calls “occasional lessons”; but she also thinks that object-lessons can be given according to a plan, a fixed programme.

Madame Pape-Carpentier deserves, then, to be heard as an experienced adviser in whatever relates to elementary instruction; but that which we must admire in her still more than her professional skill and her pedagogical knowledge, is an elevated conception of the teacher’s work, and a lofty inspiration coming from her devotion to children and her love for them.

“To educate children properly,” she said, “ought to be for the teacher only the second part of his undertaking; the first, and the most difficult, is to perfect himself.”

“What we are able to do for children is measured by the love we bear them.”

594. Other Women who were Educators.—If the education of women has received an important development in our day, it is due, then, in great part to the women who have shown what they were worth and what they could do, either as teachers or as educators. And yet the history whose principal features we have just traced remains very incomplete. By the side of the celebrated women whose works we have studied, we should mention Mademoiselle Sauvan, who, in 1811, founded at Chaillot an educational establishment which she did not leave till about 1830, to take the intellectual and moral direction of the girls’ schools of Paris;[252] Madame de Maisonneuve, author of an Essay on the Instruction of Women,[253] in which she sums up the results of a long experience acquired in the management of a private boarding-school.

But men have also contributed by their theoretical objections, or by their practical efforts, to the progress of the education of women. It would be of interest, for example, to study the courses in secondary instruction of Lourmand (1834), and the Courses in Maternal Education, of Lévi Alvarès (1820). “Monsieur Lévi,” says Gréard, “makes the mother tongue and history the basis of instruction. He himself sums up his methods in this formula of progressive education: Facts, comparison of facts, moral or philosophical consequence of facts; that is, seeing, comparing, judging. This is the very order of nature.” Let us mention also the work of Aimé Martin, The Education of Mothers,[254] which for several years enjoyed an extraordinary reputation that it would be rather difficult to justify.

595. Dupanloup and the Education of Women.—A bishop of the nineteenth century, Dupanloup, has assumed to rival Fénelon in the delicate question of the education of women. Different works, and in particular the one which he esteemed most, his Letters on the Education of Girls, published after his death in 1879, give proof of the interest which he took in these questions. These letters are for the most part real letters which were addressed to women of the time. Notwithstanding the variety and the freedom of the epistolary form, the work may be divided into three parts: 1. the principles of education; 2. the education of young women; 3. free and personal study in the world. Dupanloup should be thanked for having summoned woman to a true intellectual culture, and for not consenting to have her faculties remain “smothered and useless.” Through the revelations of the confessional and the spiritual direction of a great number of women, Dupanloup knew exactly what a void an incomplete education of the mind and heart leaves in the soul. He is indeed willing to acknowledge that piety is not enough, and with a certain breadth of spirit which drew upon him the censure of the ultramontane press, he recommends the serious studies to women. His counsels, however, are addressed only to women of the middle classes, to those who, he says, “occupy the third story of houses in Paris.” His book is rather a reminiscence of the seventeenth century, of its manners and its habits of thinking, than a living work of to-day, adapted to the needs of modern society.

[596. Analytical Summary.—1. The formal discussion of woman’s education by women marks an important epoch in the history of education. Had the education of men been wholly, or even chiefly, discussed by women, it cannot be doubted that it would have been more or less partial and imperfect.

2. The formal discussion of infant education by women is scarcely less important; for nothing less than maternal instinct and affection can divine the nature and the needs of the child.