The issue of a second edition has permitted a careful revision of the translation and the correction of several verbal errors. In subsequent editions, no effort will be spared by the translator and his publishers to make this volume worthy of the favor with which it has been received by the educational public.
W. H. P.
Aug. 1, 1886.
INTRODUCTION.
What a Complete History of Education would be.—In writing an elementary history of pedagogy, I do not pretend to write a history of education. Pedagogy and education, like logic and science, or like rhetoric and eloquence, are different though analogous things.
What would a complete history of education not include? It would embrace, in its vast developments, the entire record of the intellectual and moral culture of mankind at all periods and in all countries. It would be a résumé of the life of humanity in its diverse manifestations, literary and scientific, religious and political. It would determine the causes, so numerous and so diverse, which act upon the characters of men, and which, modifying a common endowment, produce beings as different as are a contemporary of Pericles and a modern European, a Frenchman of the middle ages and a Frenchman subsequent to the Revolution.