Vives, a contemporary of Erasmus (1492-1540), a Spanish teacher, expressed analogous ideas in his books on the education of women, in which he recommends young women to read Plato and Seneca.
To sum up, the pedagogy of Erasmus is not without value; but with him, education ran the risk of remaining exclusively Greek and Latin. A humanist above everything else, he granted but very small place to the sciences, and to history, which it sufficed to skim over, as he said; and, what reveals his inmost nature, he recommended the study of the physical sciences for this reason in particular, that the writer will find in the knowledge of nature an abundant source of metaphors, images, and comparisons.
101. Rabelais (1483-1553).—Wholly different is the spirit of Rabelais, who, under a fanciful and original form, has sketched a complete system of education. Some pages of marked gravity in the midst of the epic vagabondage of his burlesque work, give him the right to appear in the first rank among those who have reformed the art of training and developing the human soul.[71]
The pedagogy of Rabelais is the first appearance of what may be called realism in instruction, in distinction from the scholastic formalism. The author of Gargantua turns the mind of the young man towards objects truly worthy of occupying his attention. He catches a glimpse of the future reserved to scientific education, and to the study of nature. He invites the mind, not to the labored subtilties and complicated tricks which scholasticism had brought into fashion, but to manly efforts, and to a wide unfolding of human nature.
102. Criticism of the Old Education: Gargantua and Eudemon.—In the manners of the sixteenth century, the keen satire of Rabelais found many opportunities for disporting itself; and his book may be regarded as a collection of pamphlets. But there is nothing that he has pursued with more sarcasms than the education of his day.
At the outset, Gargantua is educated according to the scholastic methods. He works for twenty years with all his might, and learns so perfectly the books that he studies that he can recite them by heart, backwards and forwards, “and yet his father discovered that all this profited him nothing; and what is worse, that it made him a madcap, a ninny, dreamy, and infatuated.”
To that unintelligent and artificial training which surcharges the memory, which holds the pupil for long years over insipid books, which robs the mind of all independent activity, which dulls rather than sharpens the intelligence,—to all this Rabelais opposes a natural education, which appeals to experience and to facts, which trains the young man, not only for the discussions of the schools, but for real life, and for intercourse with the world, and which, finally, enriches the intelligence and adorns the memory without stifling the native graces and the free activities of the spirit.
Eudemon, who, in Rabelais’ romance, represents the pupil trained by the new methods, knows how to think with accuracy and speak with facility; his bearing is without boldness, but with confidence. When introduced to Gargantua, he turns towards him, “cap in hand, with open countenance, ruddy lips, steady eyes, and with modesty becoming a youth”; he salutes him elegantly and graciously. To all the pleasant things which Eudemon says to him, Gargantua finds nothing to say in reply: “His countenance appeared as though he had taken to crying immoderately; he hid his face in his cap, and not a single word could be drawn from him.”