[147. Analytical Summary.—1. Decisive changes in human opinion, political, religious, or scientific, involve corresponding changes in the purposes and methods of education.
2. The Reformation was a breaking with authority in matters of religion, as the Baconian philosophy was a breaking with authority in matters of science; and their joint effect on education was to subject matters of opinion, belief, and knowledge to the individual reason, experience, and observation.
3. In holding each human being responsible for his own salvation, the Reformation made it necessary for every one to read, and the logical consequence of this was to make instruction universal; and as schools were multiplied, the number of teachers must be increased, and their grade of competence raised.
4. The conception that ignorance is an evil, and a constant menace to spiritual and temporal safety, led to the idea of compulsory school-attendance.
5. In the recoil from the intuitions of the intellect sanctioned by Socrates, to the intuitions of the senses sanctioned by Bacon, education passed from an extreme dependence on reflection and reason, to an extreme dependence on sense and observation; so that inference has been thrown into discredit, and the verdict of the senses has been made the test of knowledge.
6. In adapting the conception of universal education to the social conditions of his time, Comenius was led to a gradation of schools that underlies all modern systems of public instruction.]
FOOTNOTES:
[95] Dittes, op. cit. p. 127.
[96] Luther’s argument for compulsion should not be omitted: “It is my opinion that the authorities are bound to force their subjects to send their children to school.... If they can oblige their able-bodied subjects to carry the lance and the arquebuse, to mount the ramparts, and to do complete military service, for a much better reason may they, and ought they, to force their subjects to send their children to school, for here it is the question of a much more terrible war with the devil.” (P.)
[97] Names for treatises on grammar and philosophy respectively. Donatus was a celebrated grammarian and rhetorician who taught at Rome in the middle of the fourth century A.D.; and Alexander, a celebrated Greek commentator on the writings of Aristotle, who taught the Peripatetic philosophy at Athens in the end of the second and the beginning of the third centuries A.D. (P.)