The History of Pedagogy

by Gabriel Compayré

Is not this the same as declaring that knowledge is not intended for women, and that it is repugnant to their delicate nature?

When Fénelon tells us that a young girl ought to learn to read and write correctly (and observe that account is taken only of the daughters of the nobility and of the wealthy middle classes); when he adds, let her also learn grammar, we can infer from these puerile prescriptions, that Fénelon does not exact any great things from women in the way of knowledge. And yet, such as it is, this programme surpassed, in the time of Fénelon, the received custom, and constituted a substantial progress. It was to state an excellent principle, whose consequences should have been more fully analyzed, to demand that women should learn all that is necessary for them to know, in order to bring up their children. Fénelon should also be commended for having recommended to young women the reading of profane authors. He who had been nourished on such literature, who was, so to speak, but a Greek turned Christian, who knew Homer so perfectly as to write the Telemachus, could not, without belying himself, advise against the studies from which he had derived so much pleasure and profit. He also recognized the utility of history, ancient and modern. He grants a place to poetry and eloquence, provided an elimination be made of whatever would be dangerous to purity of morals. What we comprehend less easily is that he condemns, as severely as he does, music, which, he says, “furnishes diversions that are poisonous.”

But these faults, this mistrust of too high an intellectual culture, ought not to prevent us from admiring the Education of Girls. Let us be grateful to Fénelon for having resisted, in part, the prejudices of a period when young women were condemned by their sex to an almost absolute ignorance; for having declared that he would follow a course contrary “to that of alarm and of a superficial culture of the intelligence”; and finally, for having written a book, all the generous inspirations of which Madame de Maintenon herself has not caught; and of which we may say, finally, that almost everything that it contains is excellent, and that it is defective only in what it does not contain.

187. Madame de Lambert (1647-1733).—Fénelon, as an educator of women, was the founder of a school. From Rollin to Madame de Genlis, how many teachers have been inspired by him! But in the front rank of his pupils we must place Madame de Lambert. In her Counsels to her Son (1701), and especially in her Counsels to her Daughter (1728), she has taken up the tradition of Fénelon with greater breadth and freedom of spirit. “As discreet as he with respect to works of the imagination, of which she fears that the reading may inflame the mind;” more severe, even, than he towards Racine, whose name she seems to hesitate to pronounce; disposed to exclude her daughter from “plays, representations that move the passions, music, poetry,—all belonging to the retinue of pleasure,—in other respects, Madame de Lambert takes precedence and surpasses her master” (Gréard). She reproaches Molière for having abandoned women to idleness, pastime, and pleasure. She loves history, especially the history of France, “which no one is permitted not to know.” Finally, without entering into the details of her protests, she makes a powerful plea for the cause of woman’s education; she already belongs to the eighteenth century.

188. Education of the Duke of Bourgogne.—Singularly enough, Fénelon did not make an application of his ideas on education till after he had set them forth in a theoretical treatise. The education of the Duke of Bourgogne permitted him to make a practical test of the rules established in the Education of Girls. Nothing is of more interest to the historian of pedagogy than the study of that princely education into which Fénelon put all his mind and heart, and which, by its results, at once brilliant and insufficient, exhibits the merits and the faults of his plan of education.

189. Happy Results.—The Duke of Bourgogne with his active intelligence, and also with his impetuous, indocile character, and his fits of passion, was just the pupil for the teacher who relied on indirect instruction. It would have been unwise to indoctrinate with heavy didactic lessons a spirit so impetuous. Through tact and industry, Fénelon succeeded in captivating the attention of the prince, and in skillfully insinuating into his mind knowledges that he would probably have rejected, had they been presented to it in a scientific and pedantic form. “I have never seen a child,” says Fénelon, “who so readily understood the finest things of poetry and eloquence.” Doubtless the happy nature of the prince contributed a large part towards these results; but the art of Fénelon had also its share in the final account.

190. Moral Lessons; The Fables.—How shall morals be taught to a violent and passionate child? Fénelon did not think of preaching fine sermons to him; but presented to him, under the form of Fables, the moral precepts that he wished to inculcate. The Fables of Fénelon certainly have not, as a whole, a large literary value; but, to form a just appreciation of them, we must recollect that their merit is especially to be seen in the circumstances attending their composition. Composed from day to day, they were adapted to the circumstances of the life of the young prince; they were filled with allusions to his faults and his virtues, and they conveyed to him, at the favorable moment, under the veil of a pleasing fiction, the commendation or the censure that he deserved. “One might,” says the Cardinal de Bausset, “follow the chronological order in which these pieces were composed, by comparing them with the progress which age and instruction must have made in the education of the prince.” The apologues, even with their very general morals, will always have their value and place in the education of children. What shall be said of the fables in which the moral, wholly individual, was addressed exclusively to the pupil for whom they were written, either on account of some perversity that he let come to the surface, or of a rising virtue that had been manifested in his conduct? It is thus that the fable called The Capricious presented to the young duke the picture of his fits of passion, and taught him to correct himself; that of the Bee and the Fly reminded him that the most brilliant qualities serve no good purpose without moderation. One day, in a fit of anger, the prince so far forgot himself as to say to Fénelon, who was reproving him: “No, no, Sir! I know who I am, and who you are!” The next day, doubtless in response to this explosion of princely self-conceit, Fénelon had him read the fable entitled Bacchus and the Faun: “As Bacchus could not abide a malicious jeerer always ready to make sport of his expressions that were not correct and elegant, he said to him in a fiery and important tone: ‘How dare you jeer the son of Jupiter?’ The Faun replied without emotion: ‘Alas! how does the son of Jupiter dare to commit any fault?’”

Certain fables, of a more elevated tone than the others, are not designed simply to correct the faults of children; they prepare the prince for the exercise of government. Thus, the fable of the Bees disclosed to him the beauties of an industrious State, and one where order reigns; the Nile and the Ganges taught him love for the people, “compassion for humanity, harassed and suffering.” Finally, from each of these fables there issued a serious lesson under the pleasing exterior of a witticism; and more than once, in reading them, the prince doubtless felt an emotion of pleasure or of shame, as he recognized himself in a commendation or in a reproof addressed to the imaginary personages of the Fables.

191. Historical Lessons; The Dialogues of the Dead.—It is not alone in moral education, but in intellectual education as well, that Fénelon resorts to artifice. The ingenious preceptor has employed fiction in all its forms the better to compass and dominate the spirit of his pupil. There are the fables for moral instruction, the dialogues for the study of history, and finally, the epopée in the Telemachus, for the political education of the heir to the throne of France.