Such commendable frankness is not always found in the reformers that follow Comenius; but in their writings it is not difficult to discern community of ideas first definitely formulated by Comenius. This holds true in a degree of all reformers since Comenius’ day, but in a measure sufficiently large to require passing note in Francke, Rousseau, Basedow Pestalozzi, Fröbel, and Herbart.
Francke[39]
Of a profoundly religious nature like Comenius, Francke applied himself to the study of theology at the Universities of Kiel and Leipzig, after having studied at Erfurt. The listless and heartless character of the teaching and study at these institutions impressed him profoundly, and directed his attention to the need of educational reform. Four years after taking his degree at Leipzig (1688), he established an infant school at Hamburg, which, though brief, was, as he tells us, the richest and happiest experience of his long and varied career. It taught him the lesson which he thought was needed alike by himself and his contemporaries— that teachers of little children entered upon their work with altogether too little preparation. He says, “Upon the establishment of this school, I learned how destructive is the usual school management, and how exceedingly difficult is the discipline of children; and this reflection made me desire that God would make me worthy to do something for the improvement of schools and instruction.”
He received an ecclesiastical call to Erfurt, which he accepted, but his orthodoxy was questioned and he was not permitted to fill the office to which he had been appointed. The foundation of the University of Halle, in 1691, made an opening for him in the chair of Greek and Oriental languages. While serving in this capacity, he organized the philanthropic institution which has made Halle famous. It began as a charity work among the poor, and grew to such proportions that at his death, in 1727,—thirty-three years after its inception,—it included (1) the pædagogium with eighty-two students and seventy teachers and pupil-teachers; (2) the Latin school of the orphanage with three inspectors, thirty-two teachers, four hundred pupils, and ten servants; (3) elementary schools in Halle for the children of citizens, employing four inspectors, ninety-eight male and eight female teachers, and having an enrollment of one thousand and twenty-five children; (4) apothecary shops and bookstores. As a charity school, Francke’s institution became the model of hundreds organized in Europe during the next century.
The pædagogium, which was a part of the great philanthropic institution, was opened in 1696, as a select school for the sons of noblemen. It was one of the earliest training schools for teachers, and the forerunner of university pedagogical seminaries, which, in Germany at least, serve as training schools for teachers in secondary schools. Francke aimed to fit young men, and particularly university students, in the faculties of philosophy and theology, for greater usefulness as teachers. Indeed, much of the teaching in the pædagogium was done by the university students who contemplated teaching careers. Besides the practice work, instruction was given in the history and theory of education, methods of teaching, and school organization and government. Francke’s pædagogium was a worthy progenitor of the long line of renowned university seminaries which are now integral factors of the German universities, such, for example, as the deservedly noted pedagogical seminary at Jena under the direction of Professor Wilhelm Rein, and the not less noted pedagogical seminaries at Leipzig under Professors Volkelt, Schiller, and Richter.
Like Comenius, Francke valued less the classical culture, but more the modern learning which fitted for the duties of life. “It is a common evil,” he says, “that we do not teach what we use in our occupations every day.” This led him to give large consideration to the study of the mother-tongue. “I find few university students,” he says, “who can write a German letter correctly spelled. They violate orthography in almost every line. I know of many examples where, after they have entered upon the ministry and have had occasion to have something printed, it has been necessary to have their manuscripts first corrected in almost every line. The reason for this defect is usually in the schools, where only the Latin translation of their exercises is corrected, but not the German.” In many ways he labored to actualize the larger idea of education which Comenius had outlined in the Great didactic.
Rousseau
While he does not mention Comenius by name, even a cursory reading of the Émile[40] furnishes abundant evidence of Rousseau’s familiarity with the writings of the Moravian reformer, if not at first hand, then through the writings of others. At any rate, some striking parallels are suggested in a comparative study of the writings of the two reformers. As summarized by Mr. Davidson,[41] Rousseau’s educational demands are threefold: (1) the demand that children should, from the moment of their birth, be allowed complete freedom of movement; (2) that they should be educated through direct experience, and not through mere information derived from books; (3) that they should be taught to use their hands in the production of useful articles. These demands, it will be recalled, were also made by Comenius in one form or another.
Comenius and Rousseau both emphasized the fact that school systems must be made for children, and not children for school systems. Neither reformer shared the schoolmaster’s customary contempt for childhood, but both urged that childhood must be studied and loved to be understood and trained, and both, if they had lived in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, would have been enthusiastic advocates of child study. Says Rousseau: “We do not understand childhood, and pursuing false ideas of it, our every step takes us farther astray. The wisest among us fix upon what it concerns men to know, without ever considering what children are capable of learning. They always expect to find the man in the child, without thinking of what the child is before it is a man.... We never know how to put ourselves in the place of children; we do not enter into their ideas; we attribute to them our own; and following always our own train of thought, even with syllogisms, we manage to fill their heads with nothing but extravagance and error.... I wish some discreet person would give us a treatise on the art of observing children—an art which would be of immense value to us, but of which parents and teachers have not as yet learnt the very rudiments.”
Sense training was fundamental in Comenius’ scheme of primary education. Nature studies—plants, animals, and minerals—were introduced from the first, that the child might early cultivate his powers of observation, and form the habit of acquiring knowledge at first hand. Rousseau likewise lays great stress on sense training. “The faculties which become strong in us,” he says, “are our senses. These, then, are the first that should be cultivated; they are, in fact, the only faculties we forget, or at least those which we neglect most completely. The child wants to touch and handle everything. By no means check this restlessness; it points to a very necessary apprenticeship. Thus it is that the child gets to be conscious of the hotness or coldness, the hardness or softness, the heaviness or lightness of bodies, to judge of their size and shape and all their sensible properties by looking, feeling, listening, especially by comparing sight and touch, and combining the sensations of the eye with those of the fingers.”