The History of Pedagogy

by Gabriel Compayré

In fact, there is not only an education, properly so called, that which is given in schools and which proceeds from the direct action of teachers, but there is a natural education, which we receive without our knowledge or will, through the influence of the social environment in which we live. There are what a philosopher of the day has ingeniously called the occult coadjutors of education,—climate, race, manners, social condition, political institutions, religious beliefs. If a man of the nineteenth century is very unlike a man of the seventeenth century, it is not merely because the first was educated in a Lycée of the University and the other in a college of the Jesuits; it is also because in the atmosphere in which they have been enveloped they have contracted different habits of mind and heart; it is because they have grown up under different laws, under a different social and political régime; because they have been nurtured by a different philosophy and a different religion. Upon that delicate and variable composition known as the human soul, how many forces which we do not suspect have left their imprint! How many unobserved and latent causes are involved in our virtues and in our faults! The conscious and determined influence of the teacher is not, perhaps, the most potent. In conjunction with him are at work, obscurely but effectively, innumerable agents, besides personal effort and what is produced by the original energy of the individual.

We see what a history of education would be: a sort of philosophy of history, to which nothing would be foreign, and which would scrutinize in its most varied and most trifling causes, as well as in its most profound sources, the moral life of humanity.

What an Elementary History of Pedagogy should be.—Wholly different is the limited and modest purpose of a history of pedagogy, which proposes merely to set forth the doctrines and the methods of educators properly so called. In this more limited sense, education is reduced to the premeditated action which the will of one man exercises over other men in order to instruct them and train them. It is the reflective auxiliary of the natural development of the human soul. To what can be done by nature and by the blind and fatal influences which sport with human destiny, education adds the concurrence of art, that is, of the reason, attentive and self-possessed, which voluntarily and consciously applies to the training of the soul principles whose truth has been recognized, and methods whose efficiency has been tested by experience.

Even thus limited, the history of pedagogy still presents to our inquiry a vast field to be explored. There is scarcely a subject that has provoked to the same degree as education the best efforts of human thinking. Note the catalogue of educational works published in French, which Buisson has recently prepared.[1] Though incomplete, this list contains not less than two thousand titles; and probably educational activity has been more fruitful, and has been given a still greater extension in Germany than in France. This activity is due to the fact, first of all, that educational questions, brought into fresh notice with each generation, exercise over the minds of men an irresistible and perennial attraction; and also to the fact that parenthood inspires a taste for such inquiries, and, a thing that is not always fortunate, leads to the assumption of some competence in such matters; and finally to the very nature of educational problems, which are not to be solved by abstract and independent reasoning, after the fashion of mathematical problems, but which, vitally related to the nature and the destiny of man, change and vary with the fluctuations of the psychological and the moral doctrines of which they are but the consequences. To different systems of psychology correspond different systems of education. An idealist, like Malebranche, will not reason upon education after the manner of a sensationalist like Locke. In the same way there is in every system of morals the germ of a characteristic and original system of education. A mystic, like Gerson, will not assign to education the same end as a practical and positive writer like Herbert Spencer. Hence a very great diversity in systems, or at least an infinite variety in the shades of educational opinion.

Still farther, educational activity may manifest itself in different ways, either in doctrines and theories or in methods and practical applications. The historian of pedagogy has not merely to make known the general conceptions which the philosophers of education have in turn submitted to the approbation of men. If he wishes to make his work complete, he must give a detailed account of what has been accomplished, and make an actual study of the educational establishments which have been founded at different periods by those who have organized instruction.

Pedagogy is a complex affair, and there are many ways of writing its history. One of these which has been too little considered, and which would surely be neither the least interesting nor the least fruitful, would consist in studying, not the great writers on education and their doctrines, not the great teachers and their methods, but pupils themselves. If it were possible to relate in minute detail, supposing that history would furnish us the necessary information on this point, the manner in which a great or a good man has been educated; if an analysis could be made of the different influences which have been involved in the formation of talent or in the development of virtue in the case of remarkable individuals; if it were possible, in a word, to reproduce through exact and personal biographies the toil, the slow elaboration whence have issued at different periods solidity of character, rectitude of purpose, and minds endowed with judicial fairness; the result would be a useful and eminently practical work, something analogous to what a history of logic would be, in which there should be set forth not the abstract rules and the formal laws for the search after truth, but the successful experiments and the brilliant discoveries which have little by little constituted the patrimony of science. This perhaps would be the best of logics because it is real and in action; and also the best of treatises on pedagogy, since there might be learned from it, not general truths, which are often of difficult application and of uncertain utility, but practical means and living methods whose happy and efficient applications would be seen in actual use.

We have just traced the imaginary plan of a history of pedagogy rather than the exact outline of the series of lessons which this book contains. However, we have approached this ideal as nearly as we have been able, by attempting to group about the principal philosophical and moral ideas the systems of education which they have inspired; by endeavoring to retain whatever is essential; by adding to the first rapid sketches studied and elaborate portraits; by ever mingling with the expositions of doctrines and the analysis of important works the study of practical methods and the examination of actual institutions; and, finally, by penetrating the thought of the great educators, to learn from them how they became such, and by following them, as they have united practice with theory, in the particular systems of education which they have directed with success.[2]

Division of the History of Pedagogy.—The abundance and the variety of pedagogical questions, the great number of thinkers who have written upon education, in a word, the complexity of the subject, might inspire the historian of pedagogy with the idea of dividing his work, and of distributing his studies into several series. For example, it would be possible to write the history of education in general by itself, and then the history of instruction, which is but an element of education. As education itself comprises three parts, physical education, intellectual education, and moral education, there would be an opportunity for three series of distinct studies on these different subjects. But these divisions would present grave inconveniences. In general, the opinions of an educator are not susceptible of division; there is a connection between his manner of regarding the matter of instruction and the solution he gives to educational questions proper. One mode of thinking pervades his theories or his practice in the matter of moral discipline, and his ideas on intellectual education. It is, then, necessary to consider each of the different systems of education as a whole.

Perhaps a better order of division would be that which, without regard to chronological order, should distinguish all pedagogical doctrines and applications into a certain number of schools, and connect all educators with certain general tendencies: as the ascetic tendency, that of the fathers of the church, for example, and of the middle ages; the utilitarian tendency of Locke, and of a great number of moderns; the pessimism of Port Royal, the optimism of Fénelon; the literary school of the humanists of the Renaissance, and the scientific school of Diderot and of Condorcet. Such a mode of procedure would have its interest, because in the manifestations of educational thought so apparently different it would sharply distinguish certain uniform principles which reappear at all periods of history; but this would be rather a philosophy of the history of education than a simple history of pedagogy.