International Education Series

EDITED BY
WILLIAM T. HARRIS, A. M., LL. D.

Volume XVII.

THE
INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION SERIES.

12mo, cloth, uniform binding.

The International Education Series was projected for the purpose of bringing together in orderly arrangement the best writings, new and old, upon educational subjects, and presenting a complete course of reading and training for teachers generally. It is edited by W. T. Harris, LL. D., United States Commissioner of Education, who has contributed for the different volumes in the way of introductions, analysis, and commentary. The volumes are tastefully and substantially bound in uniform style.

VOLUMES NOW READY.

Vol. I.—THE PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION. By Johann K. F. Rosenkranz, Doctor of Theology and Professor of Philosophy, University of Königsberg. Translated by Anna C. Brackett. Second edition, revised, with Commentary and complete Analysis. $1.50.

Vol. II.—A HISTORY OF EDUCATION. By F. V. N. Painter, A. M., Professor of Modern Languages and Literature, Roanoke College, Va. $1.50.

Vol. III.—THE RISE AND EARLY CONSTITUTION OF UNIVERSITIES. With a Survey of Mediæval Education. By S. S. Laurie, LL. D., Professor of the Institutes and History of Education, University of Edinburgh. $1.50.

Vol. IV.—THE VENTILATION AND WARMING OF SCHOOL BUILDINGS. By Gilbert B. Morrison, Teacher of Physics and Chemistry, Kansas City High School. $1.00.

Vol. V.—THE EDUCATION OF MAN. By Friedrich Froebel. Translated and annotated by W. N. Hailmann, A. M., Superintendent of Public Schools, La Porte, Ind. $1.50.

Vol. VI.—ELEMENTARY PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION. By Joseph Baldwin, A.M., LL. D., author of “The Art of School Management.” $1.50.

Vol. VII.—THE SENSES AND THE WILL. (Part I of “The Mind of the Child.”) By W. Preyer, Professor of Physiology in Jena. Translated by H. W. Brown, Teacher in the State Normal School at Worcester, Mass. $1.50.

Vol. VIII.—MEMORY: What it is and how to Improve it. By David Kay, F. R. G. S., author of “Education and Educators,” etc. $1.50.

Vol. IX.—THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE INTELLECT. (Part II of “The Mind of the Child.”) By W. Preyer, Professor of Physiology in Jena. Translated by H. W. Brown. $1.50.

Vol. X.—HOW TO STUDY GEOGRAPHY. A Practical Exposition of Methods and Devices in Teaching Geography which apply the Principles and Plans of Ritter and Guyot. By Francis W. Parker, Principal of the Cook County (Illinois) Normal School. $1.50.

Vol. XI.—EDUCATION IN THE UNITED STATES: Its History from the Earliest Settlements. By Richard G. Boone, A. M., Professor of Pedagogy, Indiana University. $1.50.

Vol. XII.—EUROPEAN SCHOOLS: or, What I Saw in the Schools of Germany, France, Austria, and Switzerland. By L. R. Klemm, Ph. D., Principal of the Cincinnati Technical School. Fully illustrated. $2.00.

Vol. XIII.—PRACTICAL HINTS FOR THE TEACHERS OF PUBLIC SCHOOLS. By George Howland, Superintendent of the Chicago Public Schools. $1.00.

Vol. XIV.—PESTALOZZI: His Life and Work. By Roger de Guimps. Authorized Translation from the second French edition, by J. Russell, B. A. With an Introduction by Rev. R. H. Quick, M. A. $1.50.

Vol. XV.—SCHOOL SUPERVISION. By J. L. Pickard, LL. D. $1.00.

Vol. XVI.—HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN IN EUROPE. By Helene Lange, Berlin. Translated and accompanied by comparative statistics by L. R. Klemm. $1.00.

Vol. XVII.—ESSAYS ON EDUCATIONAL REFORMERS. By Robert Herbert Quick, M. A., Trinity College, Cambridge. Only authorized edition of the work as rewritten in 1890. $1.50.

Vol. XVIII.—A TEXT-BOOK IN PSYCHOLOGY. By Johann Friedrich Herbart. Translated by Margaret K. Smith. $1.00.

Vol. XIX.—PSYCHOLOGY APPLIED TO THE ART OF TEACHING. By Joseph Baldwin, A. M., LL. D. $1.50.

Vol. XX.—ROUSSEAU’S ÉMILE: or, Treatise on Education. Translated and annotated by W. H. Payne, Ph. D., LL. D., Chancellor of the University of Nashville. $1.50.

Vol. XXI.—THE MORAL INSTRUCTION OF CHILDREN. By Felix Adler. $1.50.

Vol. XXII.—ENGLISH EDUCATION IN THE ELEMENTARY AND SECONDARY SCHOOLS. By Isaac Sharpless, LL. D., President of Haverford College. $1.00.

Vol. XXIII.—EDUCATION FROM A NATIONAL STANDPOINT. By Alfred Fouillée. $1.50.

Vol. XXIV.—MENTAL DEVELOPMENT IN THE CHILD. By W. Preyer, Professor of Physiology in Jena. Translated by H. W. Brown. $1.00.

Vol. XXV.—HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. By B. A. Hinsdale, Ph. D., LL. D., University of Michigan. $1.50.

Vol. XXVI.—SYMBOLIC EDUCATION: A Commentary on Froebel’s “Mother Play.” By Susan E. Blow. $1.50.

Vol. XXVII.—SYSTEMATIC SCIENCE TEACHING. By Edward Gardnier Howe. $1.50.

Vol. XXVIII.—THE EDUCATION OF THE GREEK PEOPLE. By Thomas Davidson. $1.50.

Vol. XXIX.—THE EVOLUTION OF THE MASSACHUSETTS PUBLIC-SCHOOL SYSTEM. By G. H. Martin, A.M. $1.50.

Vol. XXX.—PEDAGOGICS OF THE KINDERGARTEN. By Friedrich Froebel. 12mo. $1.50.

Vol. XXXI.—THE MOTTOES AND COMMENTARIES OF FRIEDRICH FROEBEL’S MOTHER PLAY. By Susan E. Blow and Henrietta R. Eliot. $1.50.

Vol. XXXII.—THE SONGS AND MUSIC OF FROEBEL’S MOTHER PLAY. By Susan E. Blow. $1.50.

Vol. XXXIII.—THE PSYCHOLOGY OF NUMBER, and its Applications to Methods of Teaching Arithmetic. By James A. McLellan, A. M., and John Dewey, Ph. D. $1.50.

Vol. XXXIV.—TEACHING THE LANGUAGE-ARTS. Speech, Reading, Composition. By B. A. Hinsdale, Ph. D., LL. D., Professor of Science and the Art of Teaching in the University of Michigan. $1.00.

Vol. XXXV.—THE INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE CHILD. Part I. Containing Chapters on Perception, Emotion, Memory, Imagination, and Consciousness. By Gabriel Compayré. Translated from the French by Mary E. Wilson, B. L. Smith College, Member of the Graduate Seminary in Child Study, University of California. $1.50.

Vol. XXXVI.—HERBART’S A B C OF SENSE-PERCEPTION, AND INTRODUCTORY WORKS. By William J. Eckoff, Ph. D., Pd. D., Professor of Pedagogy in the University of Illinois; Author of “Kant’s Inaugural Dissertation.” $1.50.

Vol. XXXVII.—PSYCHOLOGIC FOUNDATIONS OF EDUCATION. By William T. Harris, A. M., LL. D.

Vol. XXXVIII.—THE SCHOOL SYSTEM OF ONTARIO. By the Hon. George W. Ross, LL. D., Minister of Education for the Province of Ontario. $1.00

Vol. XXXIX.—PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICE OF TEACHING. By James Johonnot. $1.50.

Vol. XL.—SCHOOL MANAGEMENT AND SCHOOL METHODS. By Joseph Baldwin.

OTHERS IN PREPARATION.

New York: D. APPLETON & CO., Publishers, 72 Fifth Avenue.

INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION SERIES

ESSAYS ON
EDUCATIONAL REFORMERS

BY
ROBERT HEBERT QUICK
M. A. TRIN. COLL., CAMBRIDGE
FORMERLY ASSISTANT MASTER AT HARROW, AND LECTURER ON
THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION AT CAMBRIDGE
LATE VICAR OF SEDBERGH

ONLY AUTHORIZED EDITION OF THE WORK
AS REWRITTEN IN 1890

NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1896

Copyright, 1890,
By D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.

To
DR. HENRY BARNARD,
The first United States Commissioner of Education,
WHO IN A LONG LIFE OF
SELF-SACRIFICING LABOUR HAS GIVEN TO THE ENGLISH
LANGUAGE AN EDUCATIONAL LITERATURE,
THIS VOLUME IS DEDICATED,
WITH THE ESTEEM AND ADMIRATION OF
THE AUTHOR.

Οὺ γὰρ ἔστι περὶ ὅτου θειοτέρου ἄνθρωπος ἄν βουλεύσαιτο, ὴ περὶ παιδείας καὶ τῶν αὑτοῦ και τῶν οἰκείων. Plato in initio Theagis (p. 122 B).

Socrates saith plainlie, that “no man goeth about a more godlie purpose, than he that is mindfull of the good bringing up both of hys owne and other men’s children.”—Ascham’s Scholemaster. Preface.

Fundamentum totius reipublicæ est recta juventutis educatio.

The very foundation of the whole commonwealth is the proper bringing up of the young.—Cic.

EDITOR’S PREFACE.

Many years ago I proposed to my friend Mr. Quick to rewrite his Educational Reformers, making some additions (Sturm and Froebel, for example), and allow me to place it in this series of educational works. I had read his essays when they first appeared, and noted their great value as a contribution to the right kind of educational literature. They showed admirable tact in the selection of the materials; the “epoch-making” writers were chosen and the things that had been said and done of permanent value were brought forward. Better than all was the running commentary on these materials by Mr. Quick himself. His style was popular, taking the reader, as it were, into confidential relations with him from the start, and offering now and then a word of criticism in the most judicial spirit, leaning neither to the extreme of destructive radicalism, which seeks revolution rather than reform, nor, on the other hand, to the extreme of blind conservatism, which wishes to preserve the vesture of the past rather than its wisdom.

I have called this book of Mr. Quick the most valuable history of education in our mother-tongue, fit only to be compared with Karl von Raumer’s Geschichte der Pädagogik for its presentation of essentials and for the sanity of its verdicts.

I made my proposal that he “rewrite” his book because I knew that he considered his first edition hastily written and, in many respects, not adequate to the ideal he had conceived of the book. I knew, moreover, that years of continued thinking on a theme necessarily modifies one’s views. He would wish to make some changes in matter presented, some in judgments rendered, and many more in style of presentation.

Hence it has come about that after this lapse of time Mr. Quick has produced a substantially new book, which, retaining all or nearly all of the admirable features of the first edition, has brought up to their standard of excellence many others.

The history of education is a vast field, and we are accustomed to demand bulky treatises as the only adequate ones. But the obvious disadvantage of such works has led to the clearly defined ideal of a book like Mr. Quick’s, which separates the gold from the dross, and offers it small in bulk but precious in value.

The educational reformers are the men above all others who stimulate us to think about education. Every one of these was an extremist, and erred in his judgment as to the value of the methods which prevailed in his time, and also overestimated the effects of the new education that he proposed in the place of the old. But thought begins with negations, and originality shows itself first not in creating something new, but in removing the fettering limitations of its existing environment. The old is attacked—its good and its bad are condemned alike. It has been imposed on us by authority, and we have not been allowed to summon it before the bar of our reason and ask of it its credentials. It informs us that it presented these credentials ages ago to our ancestors—men older and wiser than we are. Such imposition of authority leaves us no choice but to revolt. We, too, have a right to think as well as our ancestors; we, too, must clear up the ground of our belief and substitute insight for blind faith in tradition.

These educational reformers are prophets of the clearing-up period (Aufklärung) of revolution against mere authority.

While we are inspired to think for ourselves, however, we must not neglect that more important matter of thinking the truth. Free-thinking, if it does not reach the truth, is not of great value. It sets itself as puny individual against the might of the race, which preserves its experience in the forms of institutions—the family, the social organism, the state, the Church.

Hence our wiser and more scientific method studies everything that is, or exists, in its history, and endeavors to discover how it came to be what it is. It inquires into its evolution. The essential truth is not the present fact, but the entire process by which the present fact grew to be what it is. For the living force that made the present fact made also the past facts antecedent to the present, and it will go on making subsequent facts. The revelation of the living forces which make the facts of existence is the object of science. It takes all these facts to reveal the living force that is acting and producing them.

Hence the scientific attitude is superior to the attitude of these educational reformers, and we shall in our own minds weigh these men in our scales, asking first of all: What is their view of the world? How much do they value human institutions? How much do they know of the substantial good that is wrought by those institutions? If they know nothing of these things, if they see only incumbrance in these institutions, if to them the individual is the measure of all things, we can not do reverence to their proposed remedies, but must account their value to us chiefly this, that they have stimulated us to thinking, and helped us to discover what they have not discovered—namely, the positive value of institutions.

All education deals with the boundary between ignorance and knowledge and between bad habits and good ones. The pupil as pupil brings with him the ignorance and the bad habits, and is engaged in acquiring good habits and correct knowledge.

This situation gives us a general recipe for a frequently recurring type of educational reformer. Any would-be reformer may take his stand on the boundary mentioned, and, casting an angry look at the realm of ignorance and bad habit not yet conquered, condemn in wholesale terms the system of education that has not been efficient in removing this mental and moral darkness.

Such a reformer selects an examination paper written by a pupil whose ignorance is not yet vanquished, and parades the same as a product of the work of the school, taking great pains to avoid an accurate and just admeasurement of the actual work done by the school. The reformer critic assumes that there is one factor here, whereas there are three factors—namely, (a) the pupil’s native and acquired powers of learning, (b) his actual knowledge acquired, and (c) the instruction given by the school. The school is not responsible for the first and second of these factors, but it is responsible only for what increment has grown under its tutelage. How much and what has the pupil increased his knowledge, and how much his power of acquiring knowledge and of doing?

The educational reformer is always telling us to leave words and take up things. He dissuades from the study of language, and also undervalues the knowledge of manners and customs and laws and usages. He dislikes the study of institutions even. He “loves Nature,” as he informs us. Herbert Spencer wants us to study the body, and to be more interested in biology than in formal logic; more interested in natural history than in literature. But I think he would be indignant if one were to ask him whether he thought the study of the habits and social instincts of bees and ants is less important than the study of insect anatomy and physiology. Anatomy and physiology are, of course, important, but the social organism is more important than the physiological organism, even in bees and ants.

So in man the social organism is transcendent as compared with human physiology, and social hygiene compared with physiological hygiene is supreme.

To suppose that the habits of plants and insects are facts, and that the structure of human languages, the logical structure of the mind itself as revealed in the figures and modes of the syllogism and the manners and customs of social life, the deep ethical principles which govern peoples as revealed in works of literature—to suppose that these and the like of these are not real facts and worthy of study is one of the strangest delusions that has ever prevailed.

But it is a worse delusion to suppose that the study of Nature is more practical than the study of man, though this is often enough claimed by the educational reformers.

The knowledge of most worth is first and foremost the knowledge of how to behave—a knowledge of social customs and usages. Any person totally ignorant in this regard would not escape imprisonment—perhaps I should say decapitation—for one day in any city of the world—say in London, in Pekin, in Timbuctoo, or in a pueblo of Arizona. A knowledge of human customs and usages, next a knowledge of human views of Nature and man—these are of primordial necessity to an individual, and are means of direct self-preservation.

The old trivium or threefold course of study at the university taught grammar, logic, and rhetoric—namely, (1) the structure of language, (2) the structure of mind and the art of reasoning, (3) the principles and art of persuasion. These may be seen at once to be lofty subjects and worthy objects of science. They will always remain such, but they are not easy for the child. In the course of mastering them he must learn to master himself and gain great intellectual stature. Pedagogy has wisely graded the road to these heights, and placed much easier studies at the beginning and also made the studies more various. Improvements in methods and in grading—devices for interesting the pupil—so essential to his self-activity, for these we have to thank the Educational Reformers.

W. T. Harris.

Washington, D. C., 1890.

PREFACE TO EDITION OF 1868.

“It is clear that in whatever it is our duty to act, those matters also it is our duty to study.” These words of Dr. Arnold’s seem to me incontrovertible. So a sense of duty, as well as fondness for the subject, has led me to devote a period of leisure to the study of Education, in the practice of which I have been for some years engaged.

There are countries where it would be considered a truism that a teacher in order to exercise his profession intelligently should know something about the chief authorities in it. Here, however, I suppose such an assertion will seem paradoxical; but there is a good deal to be said in defence of it. De Quincey has pointed out that a man who takes up any pursuit without knowing what advances others have made in it works at a great disadvantage. He does not apply his strength in the right direction, he troubles himself about small matters and neglects great, he falls into errors that have long since been exploded. An educator is, I think, liable to these dangers if he brings to his task no knowledge but that which he learnt for the tripos, and no skill but that which he acquired in the cricket ground or on the river. If his pupils are placed entirely in his hands, his work is one of great difficulty, with heavy penalties attached to all blundering in it; though here, as in the case of the ignorant doctor and the careless architect, the penalties, unfortunately, are paid by his victims. If (as more commonly happens) he has simply to give a class prescribed instruction, his smaller scope of action limits proportionally the mischief that may ensue; but even then it is obviously desirable that his teaching should be as good as possible, and he is not likely to employ the best methods if he invents as he goes along, or simply falls back on his remembrance of how he was taught himself, perhaps in very different circumstances. I venture to think, therefore, that practical men in education, as in most other things, may derive benefit from the knowledge of what has already been said and done by the leading men engaged in it, both past and present.

All study of this kind, however, is very much impeded by want of books. “Good books are in German,” says Professor Seeley. I have found that on the history of Education, not only good books but all books are in German or some other foreign language.[1] I have, therefore, thought it worth while to publish a few such imperfect sketches as these, with which the reader can hardly be less satisfied than the author. They may, however, prove useful till they give place to a better book.

Several of the following essays are nothing more than compilations. Indeed, a hostile critic might assert that I had used the scissors with the energy of Mr. Timbs and without his discretion. The reader, however, will probably agree with me that I have done wisely in putting before him the opinions of great writers in their own language. Where I am simply acting as reporter, the author’s own way of expressing himself is obviously the best; and if, following the example of the gipsies and Sir Fretful Plagiary, I had disfigured other people’s offspring to make them pass for my own, success would have been fatal to the purpose I have steadily kept in view. The sources of original ideas in any subject, as the student is well aware, are few, but for irrigation we require troughs as well as water-springs, and these essays are intended to serve in the humbler capacity.

A word about the incomplete handling of my subjects. I have not attempted to treat any subject completely, or even with anything like completeness. In giving a sketch of the opinions of an author one of two methods must be adopted; we may give an epitome of all that he has said, or by confining ourselves to his more valuable and characteristic opinions, may gain space to give these fully. As I detest epitomes, I have adopted the latter method exclusively, but I may sometimes have failed in selecting an author’s most characteristic principles; and probably no two readers of a book would entirely agree as to what was most valuable in it: so my account must remain, after all, but a poor substitute for the author himself.

For the part of a critic I have at least one qualification—practical acquaintance with the subject. As boy or master, I have been connected with no less than eleven schools, and my perception of the blunders of other teachers is derived mainly from the remembrance of my own. Some of my mistakes have been brought home to me by reading works on education, even those with which I do not in the main agree. Perhaps there are teachers who on looking through the following pages may meet with a similar experience.

Had the essays been written in the order in which they stand, a good deal of repetition might have been avoided, but this repetition has at least the advantage of bringing out points which seem to me important; and as no one will read the book as carefully as I have done, I hope no one will be so much alive to this and other blemishes in it.

I much regret that in a work which is nothing if it is not practically useful, I have so often neglected to mark the exact place from which quotations are taken. I have myself paid the penalty of this carelessness in the trouble it has cost me to verify passages which seemed inaccurate.

The authority I have had recourse to most frequently is Raumer (Geschichte der Pädagogik). In his first two volumes he gives an account of the chief men connected with education, from Dante to Pestalozzi. The third volume contains essays on various parts of education, and the fourth is devoted to German Universities. There is an English translation, published in America, of the fourth volume only. I confess to a great partiality for Raumer—a partiality which is not shared by a Saturday Reviewer and by other competent authorities in this country. But surely a German author who is not profound, and is almost perspicuous, has some claim on the gratitude of English readers, if he gives information which we cannot get in our own language. To Raumer I am indebted for all that I have written about Ratke, and almost all about Basedow. Elsewhere his history has been used, though not to the same extent.

C. A. Schmid’s Encyclopädie des Erziehungs-und-Unterrichtswesens is a vast mine of information on everything connected with education. The work is still in progress. The part containing Rousseau has only just reached me. I should have been glad of it when I was giving an account of the Emile, as Raumer was of little use to me.

Those for whom Schmid is too diffuse and expensive will find Carl Gottlob Hergang’s Pädagogische Realencyclopädie useful. This is in two thick volumes, and costs, to the best of my memory, about eighteen shillings. It was finished in 1847.

The best sketch I have met with of the general history of education is in the article on Pädagogik in Meyers Conversations-Lexicon.[2] I wish someone would translate this article; and I should be glad to draw the attention of the editor of an educational periodical, say the Museum or the Quarterly Journal of Education, to it.

I have come upon references to many other works on the history of Education, but of these the only ones I have seen are Theodore Fritz’s Esquisse d’un Système complet d’instruction et d’éducation et de leur histoire (3 vols., Strasburg, 1843), and Carl Schmidt’s Geschichte der Pädagogik (4 vols.). The first of these gives only the outline of the subject. The second is, I believe, considered a standard work. It does not seem to me so readable as Raumer’s history, but it is much more complete, and comes down to quite recent times.

For my account of the Jesuit schools and of Pestalozzi, the authorities will be found elsewhere (pp. 34 and 383). In writing about Comenius I have had much assistance from a life of him prefixed to an English translation of his School of Infancy, by Daniel Benham (London, 1858). For almost all the information given about Jacotot, I am indebted to Mr. Payne’s papers, which I should not have ventured to extract from so freely if they had been before the public in a more permanent form.

I am sorry I cannot refer to any English works on the history of Education, except the essays of Mr. Parker and Mr. Furnivall, and Christian Schools and Scholars, which are mentioned above, but we have a very good treatise on the principles of education in Marcel’s Language as a Means of Mental Culture (2 vols., London, 1853). Edgeworth’s Practical Education seems falling into undeserved neglect, and Mr. Spencer’s recent work is not universally known even by schoolmasters.

If the following pages attract but few readers, it will be some consolation, though rather a melancholy one, that I share the fate of my betters.

R. H. Q.

Ingatestone, Essex, May, 1868.

PREFACE TO EDITION OF 1890.

When I was a young man (i.e., nearly forty years ago), I once did what those who know the ground would declare a very risky, indeed, a fool-hardy thing. I was at the highest point of the Gemmi Pass in Switzerland, above the Rhone Valley; and being in a hurry to get down and overtake my party I ran from the top to the bottom. The path in those days was not so good as it is now, and it is so near the precipice that a few years afterwards a lady in descending lost her head and fell over. No doubt I was in great danger of a drop of a thousand feet or so. But of this I was totally unconscious. I was in a thick mist, and saw the path for a few yards in front of me and nothing more. When I think of the way in which this book was written three and twenty years ago I can compare it to nothing but my first descent of the Gemmi. I did a very risky thing without knowing it. My path came into view little by little as I went on. All else was hid from me by a thick mist of ignorance. When I began the book I knew next to nothing of the Reformers, but I studied hard and wrote hard, and I turned out the essays within the year. This feat I now regard with amazement, almost with horror. Since that time I have given more years of work to the subject than I had then given months, and the consequence is I find I can write fast no longer. The mist has in a measure cleared off, and I cannot jog along in comfort as I did when I saw less. At the same time I have no reason to repent of the adventure. Being fortunate in my plan and thoroughly interested by my subject, I succeeded beyond my wildest expectations in getting others to take an interest in it also. The small English edition of 500 copies was, as soon as I reduced the price, sold off immediately, and the book has been, in England, for twenty years “out of print.” But no less than three publishing firms in the United States have reprinted it (one quite recently) without my consent, and, except in the edition of Messrs. R. Clarke & Co., Cincinnati, with omissions and additions made without my knowledge. It seems then that the book will live for some years yet, whether I like it or not; and while it lives I wish it to be in a form somewhat less defective than at its first appearance. I have therefore in a great measure re-written it, beside filling in a gap here and there with an additional essay. Perhaps some critics will call it a new book with an old title. If they do, they will I trust allow that the new book has at least two merits which went far to secure the success of the old, 1st, a good title, and 2nd, a good plan. My plan in both editions has been to select a few people who seemed specially worth knowing about, and to tell concerning them in some detail just that which seemed to me specially worth knowing. So I have given what I thought very valuable or very interesting, and everything I thought not particularly valuable or interesting I have ruthlessly omitted. I have not attempted a complete account of anybody or anything; and as for what the examiner may “set,” I have not once given his questions a thought.

As the book is likely to have more readers in the country of its adoption than in the country of its birth, I have persuaded my friend Dr. William T. Harris, the United States Commissioner of Education, to put it into “The International Education Series” which he edits. So the only authorized editions of the book are the English edition, and the American edition published by Messrs. D. Appleton & Co.

R. H. Q.

Earlswood Cottage, Redhill, Surrey, England, 28th July, 1890.

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

I
EFFECTS OF THE RENASCENCE.

§ 1. The history of education, much as it has been hitherto neglected, especially in England, must have a great future before it. If we ignore the Past we cannot understand the Present, or forecast the Future. In this book I am going to speak of Reformers or Innovators who aimed at changing what was handed down to them; but the Radical can no more escape from the Past, than the Conservative can stereotype it. It acts not by attraction only, but no less by repulsion. There have been thinkers in latter times who have announced themselves as the executioners of the Past and laboured to destroy all it has bequeathed to us. They have raised the ferocious cry, “Vive la destruction! Vive la mort! Place à l’avenir! Hurrah for destruction! Hurrah for death! Make room for the world that is to be!” But their very hatred of the Past has brought them under the influence of it. “Do just the opposite of what has been done and you will do right,” said Rousseau; and this rule of negation would make the Past regulate the Present and the Future no less than its opposite, “Do always what is usual.”

If we cannot get free from the Past in the domain of thought, still less can we in action. Custom is to all our activities what the mainspring is to the watch. We may bring forces into play to make the watch go faster or slower, but if we took out the mainspring it would not go at all. For our mainspring we are indebted to the Past.

§ 2. In studying the Past we must give our special attention to those periods in which the course of ideas takes, as the French say, a new bend.[3] Such a period was the Renascence. Then it was that the latest bend was given to the educational ideal of the civilized world; and though we seem now again to have arrived at a period of change, we are still, perhaps far more than we are aware, affected by the ideas of the great scholars who guided the intellect of Europe in the Revival of Learning.

§ 3. From the beginning to the end of the fifteenth century the balance was trembling between two kinds of culture, and the fate of the schoolboy depended on the result. In this century men first got a correct conception of the globe they were inhabiting. Hitherto they had not even professed to have any knowledge of geography; there is no mention of it in the Trivium and Quadrivium which were then supposed to form the cycle of things known, if not of things knowable. But Columbus and Vasco da Gama were grand teachers of geography, and their lessons were learnt as far as civilization extended.

The impetus thus given to the study of the earth might, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, have engrossed the mind of Europe with the material world, had not the leaning to physical science been encountered and overcome by an impulse derived from another discovery. About the time of the discovery of America there also came to light the literatures of Greece and Rome.

§ 4. When I speak of the discovery of the ancient literatures as rivalling that of America, this use of the word “discovery” may be disputed. It may be urged that though the Greek language and literature were unknown in the West of Europe till they were brought there by the fugitives after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, yet the works of the great Latin writers had always been known in Italy, and Dante declares himself the disciple of Virgil. And yet I cannot give up the word “discovery.” In the life of an individual it sometimes happens that he suddenly acquires as it were a new sense. The world around him remains the same as before, but it is not the same to him. A film passes from his eyes, and what has been ordinary and unmeaning suddenly becomes a source of wonder and delight to him. Something similar happens at times in the history of the general mind; indeed our own century has seen a remarkable instance of it. In reading the thoughts of great writers of earlier times, we cannot but be struck, not only with their ignorance of the material world, but also with their ignorance of their ignorance. Little as they know, they often speak as if they knew everything. Newton could see that he was like a child discovering a few shells while the unexplored ocean lay before him; but in those days it required the intellect of a Newton to understand this. To the other children the ocean seemed to conceal nothing, and they innocently thought that all the shells, or nearly all, had been picked up. It was reserved for the people of our own century to become aware of the marvels which lie around us in the material world, and to be fascinated by the discovery. If the human race could live through several civilizations without opening its eyes to the wonders of the earth it inhabits, and then could suddenly become aware of them, we may well understand its retaining unheeded the literatures of Greece and Rome for centuries, and at length as it were discovering them, and turning to them with unbounded enthusiasm and delight.

As students of education we can hardly attach too much importance to this great revolution. For nearly three centuries the curriculum in the public schools of Europe remained what the Renascence had made it. We have again entered on an age of change, but we are still much influenced by the ideas of the Renascence, and the best way to understand the forces now at work is to trace them where possible to their origin. Let us then consider what the Renascence was, and how it affected the educational system.

§ 5. In endeavouring to understand the Renascence, we cannot do better than listen to what Mark Pattison says of it in his “Life of Casaubon”:—“In the fifteenth century was revealed to a world which had hitherto been trained to logical analysis, the beauty of literary form. The conception of style or finished expression had died out with the pagan schools of rhetoric. It was not the despotic act of Justinian in closing the schools of Athens which had suppressed it. The sense of art in language decayed from the same general causes which had been fatal to all artistic perception. Banished from the Roman Empire in the sixth century or earlier, the classical conception of beauty of form re-entered the circle of ideas after near a thousand years of oblivion and abeyance. Cicero and Virgil, Livius and Ovid, had been there all along, but the idea of composite harmony on which their works were constructed was wanting. The restored conception, as if to recoup itself for its long suppression, took entire possession of the mind of Europe. The first period of the Renascence passed in adoration of the awakened beauty, and in efforts to copy and multiply it.”

§ 6. Here Mark Pattison speaks as if the conception of beauty of form belonged exclusively to the ancients and those who learnt of them. This seems to require some abatement. There are points in which mediæval art far excelled the art of the Renascence. The thirteenth century, as Archbishop Trench has said, was “rich in glorious creations of almost every kind;” and in that century our great English architect, Street, found the root of all that is best in modern art. (See “Dublin Afternoon Lectures,” 1868.)

But there are expressions of beauty to which the Greeks, and those who caught their spirit, were keenly alive, and to which the people of the Middle Age seem to have been blind. The first is beauty in the human form; the second is beauty in literature.

The old delight in beauty in the human form has never come back to us. Mr. Ruskin tells us we are an ugly race, with ill-shapen limbs, and well pleased with our ugliness and deformity, and in reply we only mutter something about the necessity of clothing both for warmth and decency. But as to the other expression of beauty, beauty in literature, the mind of Europe again became conscious of it in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The re-awakening of this sense of beauty we call the Renascence.

§ 7. Before we consider the effect of this intellectual revolution on education, let us be sure that we are not “paying ourselves with words,” and that we know exactly what we mean by “literature.”

When the conceptions of an individual mind are expressed in a permanent form of words, we get literature. The sum total of all the permanent forms of expression in one language make up the literature of that language; and if no one has given his conceptions a form which has been preserved, the language is without a literature. There are then two things essential to a literary work: first, the conceptions of an individual mind; second, a permanent form of expression. Hence it follows that the domain of literature is distinct from the domain of natural or mathematical science. Science does not give us the conceptions of an individual mind, but it tells us what every rational person who studies the subject must think. And science is entirely independent of any form of words: a proposition of Euclid is science; a sonnet of Wordsworth’s is literature. We learn from Euclid certain truths which we should have learnt from some one else if Euclid had never existed, and the propositions may be conveyed equally well in different forms of words and in any language. But a sonnet of Wordsworth’s conveys thought and feeling peculiar to the poet; and even if the same thought and feeling were conveyed to us in other words, we should lose at least half of what he has given us. Poetry is indeed only one kind of literature, but it is the highest kind; and what is true of literary works in verse, is true also in a measure of literary works in prose. So great is the difference between science and literature, that in literature, as the first Lord Lytton said, the best books are generally the oldest; in science they are the newest.

§ 8. At present we are concerned with literature only. There are two ways in which a work of literature may excite our admiration and affect our minds. These are, first, by the beauty of the conceptions it conveys to us; and second, by the beauty of the language in which it conveys them. In the greatest works the two excellences will be combined.[4]

Now the literary taste proper fastens especially on the second of the two, i.e., on beauty of expression; and the Renascence was the revival of literary taste. “It was,” as Mark Pattison says, “the conception of style or finished expression which had died out with the pagan schools of rhetoric, and which re-entered the circle of ideas after a thousand years of oblivion and abeyance.” If we lose sight of this, we shall be perplexed by the unbounded enthusiasm which we find in the sixteenth century for the old classics. What great evangel, we may ask, had Cicero and Virgil and Ovid, or even Plato and the Greek dramatists, for men who lived when Europe had experienced a thousand years of Christianity? The answer is simple. They had none whatever. Their thoughts and conceptions were not adapted to the wants of the new world. The civilization of the Christian nations of the sixteenth century was a very different thing from the civilization of Greece and Rome. It had its own thoughts, its own problems, its own wants. The old-world thoughts could not be thought over again by it. This indeed was felt though not admitted by the Renascence scholars themselves. Had it been the thoughts of the ancients which seemed to them so valuable they would have made some effort to diffuse those thoughts in the languages of the modern world. Much as a great literary work loses by translation, there may still be enough left of it to be a source of instruction and delight. The thoughts of Aristotle, conveyed in a Latin translation of an Arabic translation, profoundly affected the mind of Europe in the Middle Ages. The Bible, or Book par excellence, is known to few indeed in its original form. Some great writers—Cervantes, and Shakespeare, and the author of the “Arabian Nights”—please and instruct nations who know not the sound of the languages wherein their works are composed. If then the great writers of Greece and Rome had been valued for their matter, their works would have been translated by the Renascence scholars as the Bible was translated by the Reformers, and the history of modern education would have taken a very different turn from that which awaited it. But it was not so. The Renascence scholars did all they could to discourage translations. For the grand discovery which we call the Revival of Learning was, not that the ancients had something to say, but that whatever they had to say they knew how to say it.

§ 9. And thus it happens that in the period of change, when Europe was re-arranging its institutions, developing new ideas and settling into new grooves of habit, we find the men most influential in education entirely fascinated by beauty of expression, and this in two ancient languages, so that the one thing needful for the young seemed to them an introduction to the study of ancient writings. The inevitable consequence was this: education became a mere synonym for instruction in Latin and Greek. The only ideal set up for the “educated” was the classical scholar.

§ 10. Perhaps the absurdity of taking this ideal, an ideal which is obviously fitted for a small class of men only, and proposing it for general adoption, was partly concealed from the Renascence scholars by the peculiar circumstances of their age. No doubt they thought literature would in the future be a force capable of much wider application than it had ever been before. True, literature had till then affected a small class only. Literature meant books, books meant MSS., and MSS. were rare and costly. Literature, the embodiment of grand thoughts in grand words, had existed before letters, or at least without letters. The Homeric poems, for example, had been known to thousands who could not read or write. But beauty of expression naturally got associated and indeed confounded with the art by which it was preserved; so the creations of the mind, when embodied in particular combinations of words, acquired the name of literature or letters, and became almost exclusively the affair of those who had opportunities of study, opportunities afforded only to the few. During the Middle Ages every one who could read was allowed his “privilege of clergy;” that is, he was assumed to be a clergyman. Literature then was not thought of as a means of instruction. But at the very time that the beauty of the ancient writings dawned on the mind of Europe, a mechanical invention seemed to remove all hindrances to the spread of literature. The scholars seized on the printing press and thought by means of it to give all “the educated” a knowledge of classics.

§ 11. We cannot help speculating what would have been the effect of the discovery of printing if it had been made at another time. As there may be literature without books, so there may be books without literature. If at the time of the invention of printing there had been no literature, no creations of individual minds embodied in permanent forms of speech, books might have been used as apparatus in a mental gymnasium, or they might have been made the means of conveying information. But just then the intellect of Europe was tired of mental gymnastics. It had taken exercise in the Trivium like a squirrel in its revolving cage, and was vexed to find it made no progress.[5] As for information there was little to be had. The age of observation and of physical science was not yet. So the printing press was entirely at the service of the new passion for literature and the scholars dreamed of the general diffusion of literary culture by means of printed books.

§ 12. For some two centuries the literary spirit had supreme control over the intellect of Europe, and the literary spirit could then find satisfaction nowhere but in the study of the ancient classics. The natural consequence was that throughout this period the “educated man” was supposed to be identified with the classical scholar. The great rival of the literary spirit, the scientific spirit which cares for nothing but sequences independent of the human mind, began to show itself early in the seventeenth century: its first great champion was Francis Bacon. But by this time the school course of study had been settled, and two centuries had to elapse before the scientific spirit could unsettle it again. Even now when we speak of a man as “well-educated” we are commonly understood to mean that in his youth he was taught the two classical languages.

§ 13. The taking of the classical scholar as the only ideal of the educated man has been a fruitful source of evil in the history of education.

I. This ideal exalted the learner above the doer. As far back as Xenophon, we find a contest between the passive ideal and the active, between the excellence which depends on a knowledge of what others have thought and done and the excellence which comes of thinking and doing. But the excellence derived from learning had never been highly esteemed. To be able to repeat Homer’s poetry was regarded in Greece as we now regard a pleasing accomplishment; but the dignity of the learned man as such was not within the range of Greek ideas. Many of the Romans after they began to study Greek literature certainly piqued themselves on being good Greek scholars, and Cicero occasionally quotes with all the airs of a pedant; but so thoroughly was the contrary ideal, the ideal of the doer, established at Rome, that nobody ever dreamt of placing its rival above it. In the decline of the Empire, especially at Alexandria, we find for the first time honours paid to the learned man; but he was soon lost sight of again. At the Renascence he burst into sudden blaze, and it was then discovered that he was what every man would wish to be. Thus the Renascence scholars, notwithstanding their admiration of the great nations of antiquity, set up an ideal which those nations would heartily have despised. The schoolmaster very readily adopted this ideal; and schools have been places of learning, not training, ever since.

§ 14. II. The next defect I observe in the Renascence ideal is this: it attributes to literature more direct power over common life than literature has ever had, or is ever likely to have.

I say direct power, for indirectly literature is one of the grand forces which act on all of us; but it acts on us through others, its most important function being to affect great intellects, the minds of those who think out and act out important changes. Its direct action on the mass of mankind is after all but insignificant. We have seen that literature consists in permanent forms of words, expressing the conceptions of individual minds; and these forms will be studied only by those who are interested in the conceptions or find pleasure in the mode in which they are expressed. Now the vast majority of ordinary people are without these inducements to literary study. They take a keen interest in everything connected with their relations and intimate friends, and a weaker interest in the thinkings and sayings and doings of every one else who is personally known to them; but as to the mental conceptions of those who lived in other times, or if now alive are not known even by sight, the ordinary person is profoundly indifferent to them; and of course delight in expression, as such, is out of the question. The natural consequence is that the habit of reading books is by no means common. Mark Pattison observes that there are few books to be found in most English middle-class homes, and he says: “The dearth of books is only the outward and visible sign of the mental torpor which reigns in those destitute regions” (see “Fortnightly Review,” November, 1877). I much doubt if he would have found more books in the middle-class homes of the Continent. There is only one kind of reading that is nearly universal—the reading of newspapers; and the newspaper lacks the element of permanence, and belongs to the domain of talk rather than of literature.

Even when we get among the so-called “educated,” we find that those who care for literature form a very small minority. The rest have of course read Shakespeare and Milton and Walter Scott and Tennyson, but they do not read them. The lion’s share of our time and thoughts and interests must be given to our business or profession, whatever that may be; and in few instances is this connected with literature. For the rest, whatever time or thought a man can spare from his calling is mostly given to his family, or to society, or to some hobby which is not literature.

And love of literature is not shown in such reading as is common. The literary spirit shows itself, as I said, in appreciating beauty of expression, and how far beauty of expression is cared for we may estimate from the fact that few people think of reading anything a second time. The ordinary reader is profoundly indifferent about style, and will not take the trouble to understand ideas. He keeps to periodicals or light fiction, which enables the mind to loll in its easy chair (so to speak) and see pass before it a series of pleasing images. An idea, as Mark Pattison says, “is an excitant, comes from mind and calls forth mind; an image is a sedative;” and most people when they take up a book are seeking a sedative.

So literature is after all a very small force in the lives of most men, and perhaps even less in the lives of most women. Why then are the employments of the school-room arranged on the supposition that it is the grand force of all? The reason is, that we have inherited from the Renascence a false notion of the function of literature.

§ 15. III. I must now point out a fault in the Renascence ideal which is perhaps the most remarkable of all. Those by whom this ideal was set up were entirely possessed by an enthusiasm for literature, and they made the mistake of attributing to literature a share in general culture which literature seems incapable of taking. After this we could little have expected that the new ideal would exclude literature from the schoolroom, and yet so it has actually turned out.

As a literary creation contains the conceptions of an individual mind expressed in a permanent form of words, it exists only for those who can understand the words or at least the conceptions.

From this it follows that literature for the young must have its expression in the vernacular. The instances are rare indeed in which any one below the age of fifteen or sixteen (perhaps I might put the limit a year or two higher) understands any but the mother tongue. In the mother tongue indeed some forms of literature exercise a great influence over young minds. Ballad literature seems especially to belong to youth, the youth of nations and of individuals. Aristotle educated Alexander with Homer; and we can easily imagine the effect which the Iliad must have had on the young Greeks. Although in the days of Plato instruction was not confined to literature, he gives this account of part of the training in the Athenian schools: “Placing the pupils on benches, the instructors make them read and learn by heart the poems of good poets in which are many moral lessons, many tales and eulogies and lays of the brave men of old; that the boys may imitate them with emulation and strive to become such themselves.” Here we see a very important function attributed to literature in the bringing up of the young; but the literature so used must obviously be in the language of the learners.

The influence of a literary work may, however, extend itself far beyond the limits of its own language. When our minds can receive and take pleasure in the conceptions of a great writer, he may speak to us by an interpreter. At the Renascence there were books in the world which might have affected the minds of the young—Plutarch, Herodotus, and above all Homer. But, as I have already said, it was not the conceptions, but the literary form of the ancients, which seemed to the Renascence scholars of such inestimable value, so they refused to give the conceptions in any but the original words. “Studying the ancients in translations,” says Melancthon, “is merely looking at the shadow.” He could not have made a greater mistake. As far as the young are concerned the truth is exactly the reverse. The translation would give the substance: the original can give nothing but the shadow. Let us take the experience of Mr. Kinglake, the author of “Eothen.” This distinguished Eton man, fired by his remembrances of Homer, visited the Troad. He had, as he tells us, “clasped the Iliad line by line to his brain with reverence as well as love.” Well done, Eton! we are tempted to exclaim when we read this passage: here at least is proof that some literature was taught in those days of the dominion of the classics. But stop! It seems that this clasping did not take place at Eton, but in happy days before Eton, when Kinglake knew no Greek and read translations. “Heroic days are these,” he writes, “but the Dark Ages of schoolboy life come closing over them. I suppose it’s all right in the end: yet, by Jove! at first sight it does seem a sad intellectual fall.... The dismal change is ordained and thin meagre Latin (the same for everybody) with small shreds and patches of Greek, is thrown like a pauper’s pall over all your early lore; instead of sweet knowledge, vile monkish doggrel, grammars and graduses, dictionaries and lexicons, horrible odds and ends of dead languages are given you for your portion, and down you fall from Roman story to a three-inch scrap of ‘Scriptores Romani’—from Greek poetry down, down, to the cold rations of ‘Poetæ Græci,’ cut up by commentators and served out by schoolmasters!” (“Eothen,” the Troad.)

We see from this how the Renascence ideal had the extraordinary effect of banishing literature from the school-room. Literature has indeed not ceased to influence the young; it still counts for much more in their lives than in the lives of their seniors; but we all know who are the writers who affected our own minds in childhood and youth, and who affect the minds of our pupils now—not Eutropius or Xenophon, or Cæsar or Cicero, but Defoe and Swift and Marryatt and Walter Scott. The ancient writings which were literature to Melancthon and Erasmus, as they are still to many in our universities and elsewhere, can never be literature to the young. Most of the classical authors read in the schoolroom could not be made literature to young people even by means of translations, for they were men who wrote for men and women only. We see that it would be absurd to make an ordinary boy of twelve or fourteen study Burke or Pope. And if we do not make him read Burke, whose language he understands, why do we make him read Cicero whose language he does not understand? If he cannot appreciate Pope, why do we teach him Horace? The Renascence gives us the explanation of this singular anomaly. The scholars of that age were so delighted with the “composite harmony” of the ancient classics that the study of these classics seemed to them the one thing worth living for. The main, if not the only object they kept in view in bringing up the young was to gain for them admission to the treasure house; and though young people could not understand the ancient writings as literature, they might at least study them as language and thus be ready to enjoy them as literature in after-life. Thus the subject of instruction in the schoolroom came to be, not the classics but, the classical languages. The classics were used as school books, but the only meaning thought of was the meaning of the detached word or at best of the detached sentence. You ask a child learning to read if he understands what he is reading about, and he says, “I can’t think of the meaning because I am thinking of the words.” The same thing happened in the schoolboy’s study of the classics, and so it has come to pass that to this day the great writers of antiquity discharge a humble function which they certainly never contemplated.

“Great Cæsar’s body dead and turned to clay

May stop a hole to keep the wind away.”

And great Cæsar’s mind has been turned to uses almost as paltry. He has in fact written for the schoolroom not a commentary on the Wars of Gaul—nothing of the kind—but simply a book of exercises in Latin construing; and an excellent book it would be if he had only graduated the difficulties better.

§ 16. IV. There is yet another weakness about the Renascence ideal—a weakness from which most ideals are free.

Most ideals have this merit at least, that he who makes even a feeble and abortive attempt to reach them is benefited in proportion to his advance, however small that advance may be. If he fails to seize the coat of gold, he carries away, as the proverb tells us, at least one of the sleeves; or, to use George Herbert’s metaphor—

“ ... Who aimeth at the sky,

Shoots higher far than he who means a tree.”

But the learned ideal has not even this advantage. The first stage, the study of the ancient languages, is so totally different from the study of the ancient literatures to which it is the preliminary, that the student who never goes beyond this first stage either gets no benefit at all, or a benefit which is not of the kind intended. Suppose I am within a walk, though a long one, of the British Museum, and hearing of some valuable books in the library, which I can see nowhere else, I set off to consult them. In this case it makes no difference to me how valuable the books are if I do not get as far as the Museum.[6] My friends may comfort me with the assurance that the walk must have done me good. Perhaps so; but I left home to get a knowledge of certain books, not to exercise my legs. Had exercise been my object I should probably have chosen another direction.

Now schoolmasters, since the Renascence, have been in the habit of leading all their pupils through the back slums of the Seven Dials and Soho in the direction of the British Museum, with the avowed purpose of taking them to the library, although they knew full well that not one pupil in ten, not one in fifty, would ever reach the door. To produce a few scholars able to appreciate the classics of Greece and Rome they have sacrificed everybody else; and according to their own showing they have condemned a large portion of the upper classes, nearly all the middle classes, and quite all the poorer classes to remain “uneducated.” And, according to the theory of the schoolroom, one-half of the human race—the women—have not been supposed to need education. For them “accomplishments” have been held sufficient.

§ 17. V. In conclusion I must point out one effect of the Renascence ideal which seems to me no less mischievous than those I have already mentioned. This ideal led the schoolmasters to attach little importance to the education of children. Directly their pupils were old enough for Latin Grammar the schoolmasters were quite at home; but till then the children’s time seemed to them of small value, and they neither knew nor cared to know how to employ it. If the little ones could learn by heart forms of words which would afterwards “come in useful,” the schoolmasters were ready to assist such learning by unsparing application of the rod, but no other learning seemed worthy even of a caning. Absorbed in the world of books they overlooked the world of nature. Galileo complains that he could not induce them to look through his telescope, for they held that truth could be arrived at only by comparison of MSS. No wonder then that they had so little sympathy with children, and did not know how to teach them. It is by slow degrees that we are breaking away from the bad tradition then established, are getting to understand children, and with such leaders as Rousseau, Pestalozzi, and Froebel, are investigating the best education for them. We no longer think of them as immature men and women, but see that each stage has its own completeness, and that there is a perfection in childhood which must precede the perfection of manhood just as truly as the flower goes before the fruit. “Childhood,” says Rousseau, “has its own ways of seeing, feeling, thinking;” and it is by studying these that we find out how children should be educated. Our connexion with the world of nature seems much closer in our early years than ever afterwards. The child’s mind seems drawn out to its surroundings. He is intensely interested in the new world in which he finds himself, and whilst so many of us grown people need a flapper, like the sages of Laputa, to call our attention from our own thoughts to anything that meets the eye or ear, the child sees and hears everything, and everything seen or heard becomes associated in his mind not so much with thought as with feeling. Hence it is that we most of us look back wistfully to our early days, and confess sorrowfully that though years may have brought “the philosophic mind,”

“ ... Nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower.”

The material world then seems to supply just those objects, whether birds, beasts, or flowers, by which the child is attracted, and on which his faculties will therefore be most naturally and healthily employed. But the Renascence schoolmasters had little notion of this. If you think that the greatest scholar is the greatest man, you will, as a matter of course, place at the other end of the scale those who are not scholars at all. An English inspector, who seems to have thought children had been created with due regard to the Revised Code of the Privy Council, spoke of the infants who could not be classed by their performances in “the three R’s” as “the fag end of the school;” and no doubt the Renascence schoolmasters considered the children the fag end of humanity. The great scholars were indeed far above the race of pedants; but the schoolmasters who adopted their ideal were not. And what is a pedant? “A man who has got rid of his brains to make room for his learning.”[7] The pedantic schoolmasters of the Renascence wished the mind of the pupil to be cleared of everything else, that it might have room for the languages of Greece and Rome. But what if the mind failed to take in its destined freight? In that case the schoolmasters had nothing else for it, and were content that it should go empty.

II.
RENASCENCE TENDENCIES.

§ 1. In considering and comparing the two great epochs of intellectual activity and change in modern times, viz., the sixteenth century and the nineteenth, we cannot but be struck with one fundamental difference between them.

§ 2. It will affect all our thoughts, as Sir Henry Maine has said, whether we place the Golden Age in the Past or in the Future. In the nineteenth century the “good time” is supposed to be “coming,” but in the sixteenth century all thinkers looked backwards. The great Italian scholars gazed with admiration and envy on the works of ancient Greece and Rome, and longed to restore the old languages, and as much as possible the old world, so that such works might be produced again. Many were suspected, not altogether perhaps without reason, of wishing to uproot Christianity itself,[8] that they might bring back the Golden Age of Pericles.

§ 3. At the same time another movement was going on, principally in Germany. Here too, men were endeavouring to throw off the immediate past in order to revive the remote past. The religious reformers, like the scholars, wished to restore a golden age, only a different age, not the age of the Antigone, but the age of the Apostles’ Creed. Thus it happened that the scholars and the reformers joined in attaching the very highest importance to the ancient languages. Through these languages, and, as they thought, through them alone, was it possible to get a glimpse into the bygone world in which their soul delighted.

§ 4. But though all joined in extolling the ancient writings, we find at the Renascence great differences in the way of regarding these writings and in the objects for which they were employed. A consideration of these differences will help us to understand the course of education when the Renascence was a force no longer.

§ 5. Very powerful in education were the great scholars, of whom Erasmus was perhaps the greatest, certainly the most celebrated. In devoting their lives to the study of the ancients their object was not merely to appreciate literary style, though this was a source of boundless delight to them, but also to understand the classical writings and the ancient world through them. These men, whom we may call par excellence the Scholars, cared indeed before all things for literature; but with all their delight in the form they never lost sight of the substance. They knew the truth that Milton afterwards expressed in these memorable words: “Though a linguist should pride himself to have all the tongues that Babel cleft the world into, yet if he have not studied the solid things in them as well as the words and lexicons, he were nothing so much to be esteemed a learned man as any yeoman or tradesman competently wise in his mother dialect only.” (Tractate to Hartlib, § 4).

So Erasmus and the scholars would have all the educated understand the classical authors. But to understand words you must know the things to which the words refer. Thus the Scholars were led to advocate a partial study of things a kind of realism. But we must carefully observe a peculiarity of this scholastic realism which distinguished it from the realism of a later date—the realism of Bacon. The study of things was undertaken not for its own sake, but simply in order to understand books. Perhaps some of us are conscious that this kind of literary realism has not wholly passed away. We may have observed wild flowers, or the changes in tree or cloud, because we find that the best way to understand some favourite author, as Wordsworth or Tennyson. This will help us to understand the realism of the sixteenth century. The writings of great authors have been compared to the plaster globes (“celestial globes” as we call them), which assist us in understanding the configuration of the stars (Guesses at Truth, j. 47). Adopting this simile we may say that the Scholars loved to study the globe for its own sake, and when they looked at stars they did so with the object of understanding the globe. Thus we read of doctors who recommended their pupils to look at actual cases of disease as the best commentary on the works of Hippocrates and Galen. This kind of realism was good as far as it went, but it did not go far. Of course the end in view limited the study, and the Scholars took no interest in things except those which were mentioned in the classics. They had no desire to investigate the material universe and make discoveries for themselves. This is why Galileo could not induce them to look through his telescope; for the ancients had no telescopes, and the Scholars wished to see nothing that had not been seen by their favourite authors. First then we have the Scholars, headed by Erasmus.

§ 6. Next we find a party less numerous and for a time less influential, who did care about things for the sake of the things themselves; but carried away by the literary current of their age, they sought to learn about them not directly, but only by reading. Here again we have a kind of realism which is not yet extinct. Some years ago I was assured by a Graduate of the University of London who had passed in chemistry, that, as far as he knew, he had never seen a chemical in his life: he had got all his knowledge from books. While such a thing is possible among us, we need not wonder if those who in the sixteenth century prized the knowledge of things, allowed books to come between the learner and the object of his study, if they regarded Nature as a far-off country of which we could know nothing but what great authors reported to us.

As this party, unlike the Scholars, did not delight in literature as such, but simply as a means of acquiring knowledge, literary form was not valued by them, and they preferred Euclid to Sophocles, Columella to Virgil. Seeking to learn about things, not immediately, but through words, they have received from Raumer a name they are likely to keep—Verbal Realists. In the sixteenth century the greatest of the Verbal Realists also gave a hint of Realism proper; for he was no less a man than Rabelais.

§ 7. Lastly we come to those who, as it turned out, were to have more influence in the schoolroom than the Scholars and the Verbal Realists combined. I do not know that these have had any name given them, but for distinction sake we may call them Stylists. In studying literature the Scholars cared both for form and substance, the Verbal Realists for substance only, and the Stylists for form only. The Stylists gave up their lives, not, like the scholars, to gain a thorough understanding of the ancient writings and of the old world, but to an attempted reproduction of the ancient languages and of the classical literary form.

§ 8. In marking these tendencies at the Renascence, we must remember that though distinguished by their tendencies, these Scholars, Verbal Realists, and Stylists, were not divided into clearly defined parties. Categories like these no doubt assist us in gaining precision of thought, but we must not gain precision at the expense of accuracy. The tendencies we have been considering did not act in precisely opposite directions, and all were to some extent affected by them. But one tendency was predominant in one man and another in another; and this justifies us in calling Sturm a Stylist, Erasmus a Scholar, and Rabelais a Verbal Realist.

§ 9. In one respect they were all agreed. The world was to be regenerated by means of books. Nothing pleased them more than to think of their age as the Revival of Learning.

III.
STURMIUS.
1507-1589.

§ 1. The curriculum bequeathed by the Renascence and stereotyped in the School Codes of Germany, in the Ratio of the Jesuits, and in the English public school system, was greatly influenced by the most famous schoolmaster of the fifteen hundreds, John Sturm, who was for over forty years Rector of the Strassburg Gymnasium.

§ 2. Sturm was a fine specimen of the successful man: he knew what his contemporaries wanted, and that was just what he wanted. “He was a blessed fellow,” as Prince Hal says of Poins, “to think as every man thought,” and he not only “kept the roadway” himself, but he also “personally conducted” great bands of pupils over it, at one time “200 noblemen, 24 counts and barons, and 3 princes.” What could schoolmaster desire more?

§ 3. But I frankly own that Sturm is no favourite of mine, and that I think that he did much harm to education. However, his influence in the schoolroom was so great that I must not leave him unnoticed; and I give some information, taken mainly from Raumer’s account of him, which is translated in Henry Barnard’s “German Teachers and Educators.” I have also looked at the exhaustive article by Dr. Bossier in K. A. Schmid’s Encyklopädie (sub v.)

§ 4. John Sturm, born at Schleiden in the Eifel, not far from Cologne, in 1507, was one of 15 children, and would not have had much teaching had not his father been steward to a nobleman, with whose sons he was brought up. He always spoke with reverence and affection of his early teachers, and from them no doubt he acquired his thirst for learning. With the nobleman’s sons and under the guidance of a tutor he was sent to Liège, and there he attended a school of the “Brethren of the Life in Common,” alias Hieronymites. Many of the arrangements of this school he afterwards reproduced in the Strassburg Gymnasium, and in this way the good Brethren gained an influence over classical education throughout the world.

§ 5. Between the age of 15 and 20 Sturm was at Lyons, and before the end of this period he was forced into teaching for a maintenance. He then, like many other learned men of the time, turned printer. We next find him at the University of Paris, where he thought of becoming a doctor of medicine, but was finally carried away from natural science by the Renascence devotion to literature, and he became a popular lecturer on the classics. From Paris he was called to Strassburg (then, as now, in Germany) in 1537. In 1538 he published his plan of a Gymnasium or Grammar School, with the title, “The right way of opening schools of literature (De Literarum Ludis recte aperiendis),” and some years afterwards (1565) he published his Letters (Classicæ Epistolæ) to the different form-masters in his school.

§ 6. The object of teaching is three-fold, says Sturm, “piety, knowledge, and the art of expression.” The student should be distinguished by reasonable and neat speech (ratione et oratione). To attain this the boys in his school had to give seven years to the acquirement of a pure Latin style; then two years more were devoted to elegance; then five years of collegiate life were to be given to the art of Latin speech. This course is for ten years carefully mapped out by Sturm in his Letters to the masters. The foundation is to be laid in the tenth class, which the child enters at seven years old, and in which he learns to read, and is turned on to the declensions and conjugations. We have for all classes the exact “pensum,” and also specimens of the questions put in examination by the top boy of the next class above, a hint which was not thrown away upon the Jesuits.

§ 7. Sturm cries over the superior advantages of the Roman children. “Cicero was but twenty when he delivered his speeches in behalf of Quintius and Roscius; but in these days where is there the man even of eighty, who could make such speeches? Yet there are books enough and intellect enough. What need we further? We need the Latin language and a correct method of teaching. Both these we must have before we can arrive at the summit of eloquence.”

§ 8. Sturm did not, like Rabelais, put Greek on a level with Latin or above it. The reading of Greek words is begun in the sixth class. Hebrew, Sturm did not himself learn till he was nearly sixty.

§ 9. With a thousand boys in his school, and carrying on correspondence with the leading sovereigns of his age, Sturm was a model of the successful man. But in the end “the religious difficulty” was too much even for him, and he was dismissed from his post by his opponents “for old age and other causes.” Surely the “other causes” need not have been mentioned. Sturm was then eighty years old.

§ 10. The successful man in every age is the man who chooses a popular and attainable object, and shows tremendous energy in pursuit of it. Most people don’t know precisely what they want; and among the few who do, nine-tenths or more fail through lack of energy. But Sturm was quite clear in his aim, and having settled the means, he showed immense energy and strength of will in going through with them. He wanted to restore the language of Cicero and Ovid and to give his pupils great power of elegant expression in that language. Like all schoolmasters he professed that piety and knowledge (which in more modern phrase would be wisdom and knowledge) should come first, but like most schoolmasters he troubled himself mainly, if not exclusively, about the art of expression. As an abstract proposition the schoolmaster admits that to have in your head something worth saying is more important than to have the power of expression ready in case anything worth saying should “come along.” But the schoolmaster’s art always has taken, and I suppose, in the main, always will take for its material the means of expression; and by preference it chooses a tongue not vulgar or “understanded of the people.” Thus the schoolmasters with Sturm at their head set themselves to teach words—foreign words, and allowed their pupils to study nothing else, not even the mother tongue. The satirist who wrote Hudibras has stated for us the result—

“No sooner are the organs of the brain

Quick to receive and stedfast to retain

Best knowledges, but all’s laid out upon

Retrieving of the curse of Babylon.

...

And he that is but able to express

No sense in several languages

Will pass for learneder than he that’s known

To speak the strongest reason in his own.”[9]

§ 11. One of the scholars of the Renascence, Hieronymus Wolf, was wise enough to see that there might be no small merit in a boy’s silence: “Nec minima pueri virtus est tacere cum recte loqui nesciat” (Quoted by Parker). But this virtue of silence was not encouraged by Sturm, and he determined that by the age of sixteen his pupils should have a fair command of expression in Latin and some knowledge of Greek.[10] Latin indeed was to supplant the mother tongue, and boys were to be severely punished for using their own language. By this we may judge of the pernicious effects of following Sturm. And it is a mistake to suppose that the unwisdom of tilting at the vernacular was not so much Sturm’s, as of the age in which he lived. The typical English schoolmaster of the century, Mulcaster, was in this and many other ways greatly in advance of Sturm. To him it was plain that we should “care for that most which we ever use most, because we need it most.”[11] The only need recognized by Sturm was need of the classical languages. Thus he and his admirers led the unlucky schoolboy straight into that “slough of Despond”—verbalism, in which he has struggled ever since;

“Plunged for some sense, but found no bottom there,

So learned and floundered on in mere despair.”[12]

IV.
SCHOOLS OF THE JESUITS.

§ 1. Since the Revival of Learning, no body of men has played so prominent a part in education as the Jesuits. With characteristic sagacity and energy they soon seized on education as a stepping-stone to power and influence; and with their talent for organization, they framed a system of schools which drove all important competitors from the field, and made Jesuits the instructors of Catholic, and even, to some extent, of Protestant Europe. Their skill in this capacity is attested by the highest authorities, by Bacon[13] and by Descartes, the latter of whom had himself been their pupil; and it naturally met with its reward: for more than one hundred years nearly all the foremost men throughout Christendom, both among the clergy and laity, had received the Jesuit training, and in most cases retained for life an attachment to their old masters.

§ 2. About these Jesuit schools—once so celebrated and so powerful, and still existing in great numbers, though little remains of their original importance—there does not seem to be much information accessible to the English reader. I have, therefore, collected the following particulars about them; and refer any one who is dissatisfied with so meagre an account, to the works which I have consulted.[14] The Jesuit schools, as I said, still exist, but they did their great work in other centuries; and I therefore prefer to speak of them as things of the past.[15]

§ 3. When the Jesuits were first formally recognized by a Bull of Paul III in 1540, the Bull stated that the Order was formed, among other things, “especially for the purpose of instructing boys and ignorant persons in the Christian religion.” But the Society well understood that secular was more in demand than religious learning; and they offered the more valued instruction, that they might have the opportunity of inculcating lessons which, to the Society at least, were the more valuable. From various Popes they obtained powers for founding schools and colleges, for giving degrees, and for lecturing publicly at universities. Their foundations rapidly extended in the Romance countries, except in France, where they were long in overcoming the opposition of the Regular clergy and of the University of Paris. Over the Teutonic and Slavonic countries they spread their influence first by means of national colleges at Rome, where boys of the different nations were trained as missionaries. But, in time, the Jesuits pushed their camps forward, even into the heart of the enemy’s country.

§ 4. The system of education to be adopted in all the Jesuit institutions was settled during the Generalship of Aquaviva. In 1584 that General appointed a School Commission, consisting of six distinguished Jesuits from the various countries of Europe. These spent nearly a year in Rome, in study and consultation; and the fruit of their labours was the ground-work of the Ratio atque Institutio Studiorum Societatis Jesu. This, however, did not take its final form till twelve other commissioners had been at work upon it. It was then (1599) revised and approved by Aquaviva and the Fifth and Sixth General Assemblies. By this code the Jesuit schools were governed till 1832, when the curriculum was enlarged so as to include physical science and modern languages.

§ 5. The Jesuits who formed the Societas Professa, i.e., those who had taken all the vows, had spent from fifteen to eighteen years in preparation, viz., two years as novices and one as approved scholars, during which they were engaged chiefly in religious exercises, three years in the study of philosophy and mathematics, four years of theology, and, in the case of the more distinguished students, two years more in repetition and private theological study. At some point in this course, mostly after the philosophy, the students were sent, for a while, to teach the “lower studies” to boys.[16] The method of teaching was to be learnt in the training schools, called Juvenats,[17] one of which was founded in each province.

Few, even of the most distinguished students, received dispensation from giving elementary instruction. Salmeron and Bobadilla performed this duty in Naples, Lainez in Florence, Borgia (who had been Viceroy of Catalonia) in Cordova, Canisius in Cologne.

§ 6. During the time the Jesuit held his post as teacher he was to give himself up entirely to the work. His private studies were abandoned; his religious exercises shortened. He began generally with the boys in the lowest form, and that he might be able to study the character of his pupils he went up the school with them, advancing a step every year, as in the system now common in Scotland. But some forms were always taught, as the highest is in Scotland, by the same master, who remained a teacher for life.

§ 7. Great care was to be taken that the frequent changes in the staff of masters did not lead to alteration in the conduct of the school. Each teacher was bound to carry on the established instruction by the established methods. All his personal peculiarities and opinions were to be as much as possible suppressed. To secure this a rigid system of supervision was adopted, and reports were furnished by each officer to his immediate superior. Over all stood the General of the Order. Next came the Provincial, appointed by the General. Over each college was the Rector, who was appointed (for three years) by the General, though he was responsible to the Provincial, and made his reports to him. Next came the Prefect of Studies, appointed, not by the Rector, but by the Provincial. The teachers were carefully watched both by the Rector and the Prefect of Studies, and it was the duty of the latter to visit each teacher in his class at least once a fortnight, to hear him teach. The other authorities, besides the masters of classes, were usually a House Prefect, and Monitors selected from the boys, one in each form.

§ 8. The school or college was to be built and maintained by gifts and bequests which the Society might receive for this purpose only. Their instruction was always given gratuitously. When sufficient funds were raised to support the officers, teachers, and at least twelve scholars, no effort was to be made to increase them; but if they fell short of this, donations were to be sought by begging from house to house. Want of money, however, was not a difficulty which the Jesuits often experienced.

§ 9. The Jesuit education included two courses of study, studia superiora et inferiora. In the smaller colleges only the studia inferiora were carried on; and it is to these lower schools that the following account mainly refers. The boys usually began this course at ten years old and ended it at sixteen.[18]

§ 10. The pupils in the Jesuit colleges were of two kinds: 1st, those who were training for the Order, and had passed the Novitiate; 2nd, the externs, who were pupils merely. When the building was not filled by the first of these (the Scholastici, or Nostri, as they are called in the Jesuit writings), other pupils were taken in to board, who had to pay simply the cost of their living, and not even this unless they could well afford it. Instruction, as I said, was gratuitous to all. “Gratis receive, gratis give,” was the Society’s rule; so they would neither make any charge for instruction, nor accept any gift that was burdened with conditions.

§ 11. Faithful to the tradition of the Catholic Church, the Society did not estimate a man’s worth simply according to his birth and outward circumstances. The Constitutions expressly laid down that poverty and mean extraction were never to be any hindrance to a pupil’s admission; and Sacchini says: “Do not let any favouring of the higher classes interfere with the care of meaner pupils, since the birth of all is equal in Adam, and the inheritance in Christ.”[19]

§ 12. The externs who could not be received into the building were boarded in licensed houses, which were always liable to an unexpected visit from the Prefect of Studies.

§ 13. The “lower school” was arranged in five classes (since increased to eight), of which the lowest usually had two divisions. Parallel classes were formed wherever the number of pupils was too great for five masters. The names given to the several divisions were as follows:

Each was “absolved” in a year, except Rhetorica, which required two years (Stöckl, p. 237).

Jesuits and Protestants alike in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries thought of little but literary instruction, and that too connected only with Latin and Greek. The subject-matter of the teaching in the Jesuit schools was to be “præter Grammaticam, quod ad Rhetoricam, Poësim et Historiam pertinet,” in addition to Grammar, whatever related to Rhetoric, Poetry, and History. Reading and writing the mother-tongue might not be taught without special leave from the Provincial. Latin was as much as possible to supersede all other languages, even in speaking; and nothing else might be used by the pupils in the higher forms on any day but a holiday.[20] To gain a supply of Latin words for ordinary use, the pupils committed to memory Latin conversations on general topics, such as Francis Pomey’s “Indiculus Universalis” and “Colloquia Scholastica.”

§ 14. Although many good school-books were written by the Jesuits, a great part of their teaching was given orally. The master was, in fact, a lecturer, who expounded sometimes a piece of a Latin or Greek author, sometimes the rules of grammar. The pupils were required to get up the substance of these lectures, and to learn the grammar-rules and parts of the classical authors by heart. The master for his part had to bestow great pains on the preparation of his lectures.[21]

§ 15. Written exercises, translations, &c., were given in on every day, except Saturday; and the master had, if possible, to go over each one with its writer and his appointed rival or æmulus.

§ 16. The method of hearing the rules, &c., committed to memory was this:—Certain boys in each class, who were called Decurions, repeated their tasks to the master, and then in his presence heard the other boys repeat theirs. The master meanwhile corrected the written exercises.[22]

§ 17. One of the leading peculiarities in the Jesuits’ system was the pains they took to foster emulation—“cotem ingenii puerilis, calcar industriæ—the whetstone of talent, the spur of industry.” For this purpose all the boys in the lower part of the school were arranged in pairs, each pair being rivals (æmuli) to one another. Every boy was to be constantly on the watch to catch his rival tripping, and was immediately to correct him. Besides this individual rivalry, every class was divided into two hostile camps, called Rome and Carthage, which had frequent pitched battles of questions on set subjects. These were the “Concertations,” in which the boys sometimes had to put questions to the opposite camp, sometimes to expose erroneous answers when the questions were asked by the master[23] (see Appendix: Class Matches, p. 529). Emulation, indeed, was encouraged to a point where, as it seems to me, it must have endangered the good feeling of the boys among themselves. Jouvency mentions a practice of appointing mock defenders of any particularly bad exercise, who should make the author of it ridiculous by their excuses; and any boy whose work was very discreditable, was placed on a form by himself, with a daily punishment, until he could show that some one deserved to change places with him.

§ 18. In the higher classes a better kind of rivalry was cultivated by means of “Academies,” i.e., voluntary associations for study, which met together, under the superintendence of a master, to read themes, translations, &c., and to discuss passages from the classics. The new members were elected by the old, and to be thus elected was a much-coveted distinction. In these Academies the cleverer students got practice for the disputations, which formed an important part of the school work of the higher classes.

§ 19. There was a vast number of other expedients by which the Jesuits sought to work on their pupils’ amour propre, such as, on the one hand, the weekly publication of offences per præconem, and, on the other, besides prizes (which could be won only by the externs), titles and badges of honour, and the like. “There are,” says Jouvency, “hundreds of expedients of this sort, all tending to sharpen the boys’ wits, to lighten the labour of the master, and to free him from the invidious and troublesome necessity of punishing.”

§ 20. The school-hours were remarkably short: two hours and a half in the morning, and the same in the afternoon; with a whole holiday a week in summer, and a half holiday in winter. The time was spent in the first form after the following manner:—During the first half-hour the master corrected the exercises of the previous day, while the Decurions heard the lesson which had been learnt by heart. Then the master heard the piece of Latin which he had explained on the previous day. With this construing, was connected a great deal of parsing, conjugating, declining, &c. The teacher then explained the piece for the following day, which, in this form, was never to exceed four lines. The last half-hour of the morning was spent in explaining grammar. This was done very slowly and carefully: in the words of the Ratio Studd.: “Pluribus diebus fere singula præcepta inculcanda sunt”—“Generally take a single rule and drive it in, several days.” For the first hour of the afternoon the master corrected exercises, and the boys learnt grammar. If there was time, the master put questions about the grammar he had explained in the morning. The second hour was taken up with more explanations of grammar, and the school closed with half an hour’s concertation, or the master corrected the notes which the pupils had taken during the day. In the other forms, the work was very similar to this, except that Greek was added, and also in the higher classes a little mathematics.

§ 21. It will be observed from the above account, that almost all the strength of the Jesuit teaching was thrown into the study of the Latin language, which was to be used, not only for reading, but also in writing and speaking. But under the name of “erudition” some amount of instruction in other subjects, especially in history and geography, was given in explaining, or rather lecturing on, the classical authors. Jouvency says that this lecture must consist of the following parts:—1st, the general meaning of the whole passage; 2nd, the explanation of each clause, both as to the meaning and construction; 3rd, any information, such as accounts of historical events, or of ancient manners and customs, which could be connected with the text; 4th, in the higher forms, applications of the rules of rhetoric and poetry; 5th, an examination of the Latinity; 6th, the inculcation of some moral lesson. This treatment of a subject he illustrates by examples. Among these is an account of a lesson for the first (i.e., lowest) class in the Fable of the Fox and the Mask:—1st, comes the argument and the explanation of words; 2nd, the grammar and parsing, as vulpes, a substantive of the third declension, &c., like proles, clades, &c. (here the master is always to give among his examples some which the boys already know); 3rd, comes the eruditio—something about foxes, about tragedy, about the brain, and hence about other parts of the head; 4th, Latinity, the order of the words, choice of the words, synonyms, &c. Then the sentences may be parodied; other suitable substantives may be found for the adjectives and vice versâ; and every method is to be adopted of showing the boys how to use the words they have learnt. Lastly, comes the moral.

§ 22. The practical teacher will be tempted to ask, How is the attention of the class to be kept up whilst all this information is given? This the Jesuits did partly by punishing the inattentive. Every boy was subsequently required to reproduce what the teacher had said, and to show his written notes of it. But no doubt this matter of attention was found a difficulty. Jouvency tells the teachers to break off from time to time in their lectures, and to ask questions; and he adds: “Variæ sunt artes excitandæ attentionis quas docebit usus et sua cuique industria suggeret.—Very various are the devices for arousing attention. These will occur with practice and pains.”

For private study, besides written exercises and learning by heart, the pupils were recommended subjects to get up in their own time; and in this, and also as to the length of some of the regular lessons, they were permitted to decide for themselves. Here, as everywhere, the Jesuits trusted to the sense of honour and emulation—those who did extra work were praised and rewarded.

§ 23. One of the maxims of this system was: “Repetitio mater studiorum.” Every lesson was connected with two repetitions—one before it began, of preceding work, and the other at the close, of the work just done. Besides this, one day a week was devoted entirely to repetition. In the three lowest classes the desire of laying a solid foundation even led to the second six months in the year being given to again going over the work of the first six months.[24] By this means boys of extraordinary ability could pass through these forms in eighteen months, instead of three years.

§ 23. Thoroughness in work was the one thing insisted on. Sacchini says that much time should be spent in going over the more important things, which are “veluti multorum fontes et capita (as it were the sources and starting points of many others)”; and that the master should prefer to teach a few things perfectly, to giving indistinct impressions of many things.[25] We should remember, however, that the pupils of the Jesuits were not children. Subjects such as grammar cannot, by any expenditure of time and trouble, be perfectly taught to children, because children cannot perfectly understand them; so that the Jesuit thoroughness is not always attainable.

§ 24. The usual duration of the course in the lower schools was six years—i.e., one year in each of the four lower classes, and two years in the highest class. Every year closed with a very formal examination. Before this examination took place, the pupils had lessons in the manner of it, so that they might come prepared, not only with a knowledge of the subjects, but also of the laws of writing for examination (“scribendi ad examen leges”). The examination was conducted by a commission appointed for the purpose, of which commission the Prefect of Studies was an ex officio member. The masters of the classes, though they were present, and could make remarks, were not of the examining body. For the vivâ voce the boys were ushered in, three at a time, before the solemn conclave. The results of the examination, both written and verbal, were joined with the records of the work done in the past year; and the names of those pupils who had distinguished themselves were then published in order of merit, but the poll was arranged alphabetically, or according to birthplace.

§ 25. As might be expected, the Jesuits were to be very careful of the moral and religious training of their pupils. “Quam maxime in vitæ probitate ac bonis artibus doctrinaque proficiant ad Dei gloriam.” (Ratio Studd., quoted by Schmid.) And Sacchini tells the master to remember how honourable his office is; as it has to do, not with grammar only, but also with the science and practice of a Christian and religious life: “atque eo quidem ordine ut ipsa ingenii eruditio sit expolitio morum, et humana literatura divinæ ancilletur sapientiæ.”[26]

Each lesson was to begin with prayer or the sign of the Cross. The pupils were to hear Mass every morning, and were to be urged to frequent confession and receiving of the Holy Communion. The Father Confessor was always a Jesuit, but he was not a master in the school.

§ 26. The bodily health also was to be carefully attended to. The pupils were not to study too much or too long at a time. Nothing was to be done for a space of from one or two hours after dinner. On holidays excursions were made to farms in the country.[27]

§ 27. Punishments were to be as light as possible, and the master was to shut his eyes to offences whenever he thought he might do so with safety. Grave offences were to be visited with corporal punishment, performed by a “corrector,” who was not a member of the Order. Where this chastisement did not have a good effect, the pupil was to be expelled.[28]

§ 28. The dry details into which I have been drawn by faithfully copying the manner of the Ratio Studiorum may seem to the reader to afford no answer to the question which naturally suggests itself—To what did the school-system of the Jesuits owe its enormous popularity? But in part, at least, these details do afford an answer. They show us that the Jesuits were intensely practical. The Ratio Studiorum hardly contains a single principle; but what it does is this—it points out a perfectly attainable goal, and carefully defines the road by which that goal is to be approached. For each class was prescribed not only the work to be done, but also the end to be kept in view. Thus method reigned throughout—perhaps not the best method, as the object to be attained was assuredly not the highest object—but the method, such as it was, was applied with undeviating exactness. In this particular the Jesuit schools contrasted strongly with their rivals of old, as indeed with the ordinary school of the present day. The Head Master, who is to the modern English school what the General, Provincial, Rector, Prefect of Studies, and Ratio Studiorum combined were to a school of the Jesuits, has perhaps no standard in view up to which the boy should have been brought when his school course is completed.[29] The masters of forms teach just those portion of their subject in which they themselves are interested, in any way that occurs to them, with by no means uniform success; so that when two forms are examined with the same examination paper, it is no very uncommon occurrence for the lower to be found superior to the higher. It is, perhaps, to be expected that a course in which uniform method tends to a definite goal would on the whole be more successful than one in which a boy has to accustom himself by turns to half-a-dozen different methods, invented at haphazard by individual masters with different aims in view, if indeed they have any aim at all.

§ 29. I have said that the object which the Jesuits proposed in their teaching was not the highest object. They did not aim at developing all the faculties of their pupils, but mainly the receptive and reproductive faculties. When the young man had acquired a thorough mastery of the Latin language for all purposes, when he was well versed in the theological and philosophical opinions of his preceptors, when he was skilful in dispute, and could make a brilliant display from the resources of a well-stored memory, he had reached the highest point to which the Jesuits sought to lead him.[30] Originality and independence of mind, love of truth for its own sake, the power of reflecting, and of forming correct judgments were not merely neglected—they were suppressed in the Jesuits’ system. But in what they attempted they were eminently successful, and their success went a long way towards securing their popularity.[31]

§ 30. Their popularity was due, moreover, to the means employed, as well as to the result attained. The Jesuit teachers were to lead, not drive their pupils, to make their learning, not merely endurable, but even acceptable, “disciplinam non modo tolerabilem, sed etiam amabilem.” Sacchini expresses himself very forcibly on this subject. “It is,” says he, “the unvarying decision of wise men, whether in ancient or modern times, that the instruction of youth will be always best when it is pleasantest: whence this application of the word ludus. The tenderness of youth requires of us that we should not overstrain it, its innocence that we should abstain from harshness.... That which enters into willing ears the mind as it were runs to welcome, seizes with avidity, carefully stows away, and faithfully preserves.”[32] The pupils were therefore to be encouraged in every way to take kindly to their learning. With this end in view (and no doubt other objects also), the masters were carefully to seek the boys’ affections. “When pupils love the master,” says Sacchini, “they will soon love his teaching. Let him, therefore, show an interest in everything that concerns them and not merely in their studies. Let him rejoice with those that rejoice, and not disdain to weep with those that weep. After the example of the Apostle let him become a little one amongst little ones, that he may make them adult in Christ, and Christ adult in them ... Let him unite the grave kindness and authority of a father with a mother’s tenderness.”[33]

§ 31. In order that learning might be pleasant to the pupils, it was necessary that they should not be overtasked. To avoid this, the master had to study the character and capacity of each boy in his class, and to keep a book with all particulars about him, and marks from one to six indicating proficiency. Thus the master formed an estimate of what should be required, and the amount varied considerably with the pupil, though the quality of the work was always to be good.

§ 32. Not only was the work not to be excessive, it was never to be of great difficulty. Even the grammar was to be made as easy and attractive as possible. “I think it a mistake” says Sacchini, “to introduce at an early stage the more thorny difficulties of grammar: ... for when the pupils have become familiar with the earlier parts, use will, by degrees, make the more difficult clear to them. His mind expanding and his judgment ripening as he grows older the pupil will often see for himself that which he could hardly be made to see by others. Moreover, in reading an author, examples of grammatical difficulties will be more easily observed in connection with the context, and will make more impression on the mind, than if they are taught in an abstract form by themselves. Let them then, be carefully explained whenever they occur.”[34]

§ 33. Perhaps no body of men in Europe (the Thugs may, in this respect, rival them in Asia) have been so hated as the Jesuits. I once heard Frederick Denison Maurice say he thought Kingsley could find good in every one except the Jesuits, and, he added, he thought he could find good even in them. But why should a devoted Christian find a difficulty in seeing good in the Jesuits, a body of men whose devotion to their idea of Christian duty has never been surpassed?[35] The difficulty arose from differences in ideal. Both held that the ideal Christian would do everything “to the greater glory of God,” or as the Jesuits put it in their business-like fashion, “A.M.D.G.,” (i.e., ad majorem Dei gloriam). But Maurice and Kingsley thought of a divine idea for every man. The Jesuits’ idea lost sight of the individual. Like their enemy, Carlyle, the Jesuits in effect worshipped strength, but Carlyle thought of the strength of the individual, the Jesuits of the strength of “the Catholic Church.” “The Catholic Church” was to them the manifested kingdom of God. Everything therefore that gave power to the Church tended “A.M.D.G.” The Company of Jesus was the regular army of the Church, so, arguing logically from their premises, they made the glory of God and the success of the Society convertible terms.

§ 34. Thus their conception was a purely military conception. A commander-in-chief, if he were an ardent patriot and a great general, would do all he could to make the army powerful. He would care much for the health, morals, and training of the soldiers, but always with direct reference to the army. He would attend to everything that made a man a better soldier; beyond this he would not concern himself. In his eyes the army would be everything, and a soldier nothing but a part of it, just as a link is only a part of a chain. Paulsen, speaking of the Jesuits, says truly that no great organization can exist without a root idea. The root idea of the army is the sacrifice and annihilation of the individual, that the body may be fused together and so gain a strength greater than that of any number of individuals. Formed on this idea the army acts all together and in obedience to a single will, and no mob can stand its charge. Ignatius Loyola and succeeding Generals took up this idea and formed an army for the Church, an army that became the wonder and the terror of all men. Never, as Compayré says, had a body been so sagaciously organized, or had wielded so great resources for good and for evil.[36] (See Buisson, ij, 1419.)

§ 35. To the English schoolmaster the Jesuits must always be interesting, if for no other reason at least for this—that they were so intensely practical. “Les Jésuites ne sont pas des pédagogues assez desintéressés pour nous plaire.—The Jesuits as schoolmasters,” says M. Compayré, “are not disinterested enough for us.” (Buisson, sub v. Jésuites, ad f.). But disinterested pedagogy is not much to the mind of the Englishman. It does not seem to know quite what it would be after, and deals in generalities, such as “Education is not a means but an end;” and the end being somewhat indefinite, the means are still more wanting in precision. This vagueness is what the English master hates. He prefers not to trouble himself about the end. The wisdom of his ancestors has settled that, and he can direct his attention to what really interests him—the practical details. In this he resembles the Jesuits. The end has been settled for them by their founder. They revel in practical details, in which they are truly great, and here we may learn much from them. “Ratio applied to studies” says Father Eyre,[37] “more naturally means Method than Principle; and our Ratio Studiorum is essentially a Method or System of teaching and learning.” Here is a method that has been worked uniformly and with singular success for three centuries, and can still give a good account of its old rivals. But will it hold its own against the late Reformers? As regards intellectual training the new school seeks to draw out the faculties of the young mind by employing them on subjects in which it is interested. The Jesuits fixed a course of study which, as they frankly recognized, could not be made interesting. So they endeavoured to secure accuracy by constant repetition, and relied for industry on two motive powers: 1st, the personal influence of the master; and, 2nd, “the spur of industry”—emulation.

§ 36. To acquire “influence” has ever been the main object of the Society, and his devotion to this object makes a great distinction between the Jesuit and most other instructors. His notion of the task was thus expressed by Father Gerard, S. J., at the Educational Conference of 1884: “Teaching is an art amongst arts. To be worthy of the name it must be the work of an individual upon individuals. The true teacher must understand, appreciate, and sympathize with those who are committed to him. He must be daily discovering what there is (and undoubtedly there is something in each of them) capable of fruitful development, and contriving how better to get at them and to evoke whatever possibilities there are in them for good.” The Jesuit master, then, tried to gain influence over the boys and to use that influence for many purposes; to make them work well being one of these, but not perhaps the most important.

§ 37. As for emulation, no instructors have used it so elaborately as the Jesuits. In most English schools the prizes have no effect whatever except on the first three or four boys, and the marking is so arranged that those who take the lead in the first few lessons can keep their position without much effort. This clumsy system would not suit the Jesuits. They often for prize-giving divide a class into a number of small groups, the boys in each group being approximately equal, and a prize is offered for each group. The class matches, too, stimulate the weaker pupils even more than the strong.

§ 38. In conclusion, I will give the chief points of the system in the words of one of its advocates and admirers, who was himself educated at Stonyhurst:

“Let us now try to put together the various pieces of this school machinery and study the effect. We have seen that the boys have masters entirely at their disposition, not only at class time, but at recreation time after supper in the night Reading Rooms. Each day they record victory or defeat in the recurring exercises or themes upon various matters. By the quarterly papers or examinations in composition, for which nine hours are assigned, the order of merit is fixed, and this order entails many little privileges and precedencies, in chapel, refectory, class room, and elsewhere. Each master, if he prove a success and his health permit, continues to be the instructor of the boys in his class during the space of six years. ‘It is obvious’ says Sheil, in his account of Stonyhurst, ‘that much of a boy’s acquirements, and a good deal of the character of his taste, must have depended upon the individual to whose instructions he was thus almost exclusively confined.’ And in many cases the effects must be a greater interest felt in the students by their teachers, a mutual attachment founded on long acquaintance, and a more thorough knowledge, on the part of the master, of the weak and strong points of his pupils. Add to the above, the ‘rival’ and ‘side’ system, the effect of challenges and class combats; of the wearing of decorations and medals by the Imperators on Sundays, Festival Days, Concertation Days, and Examination Days; of the extraordinary work—done much more as private than as class work—helping to give individuality to the boy’s exertions, which might otherwise be merged in the routine work of the class; and the ‘free time’ given for improvement on wet evenings and after night prayers; add the Honours Matter; the Reports read before the Rector and all subordinate Superiors, the Professors, and whole body of Students; add the competition in each class and between the various classes, and even between the various colleges in England of the Society; and only one conclusion can be arrived at. It is a system which everyone is free to admire or think inferior to some other preferred by him; but it is a system.” (Stonyhurst College, Present and Past, by A. Hewitson, 2nd edition, 1878, pp. 214, ff.)

§ 39. Yes, it is a system, a system built up by the united efforts of many astute intellects and showing marvellous skill in selecting means to attain a clearly conceived end. There is then in the history of education little that should be more interesting or might be more instructive to the master of an English public school than the chapter about the Jesuits.[38]

V.
RABELAIS.
(1483-1553.)

§ 1. To great geniuses it is given to think themselves in a measure free from the ordinary notions of their time and often to anticipate the discoveries of a future age. In all literature there is perhaps hardly a more striking instance of this “detached” thinking than we find in Rabelais’ account of the education of Gargantua.

§ 2. We see in Rabelais an enthusiasm for learning and a tendency to verbal realism; that is, he turned to the old writers for instruction about things. So far he was a child of the Renascence. But in other respects he advanced far beyond it.

§ 3. After a scornful account of the ordinary school books and methods by which Gargantua “though he studied hard, did nevertheless profit nothing, but only grew thereby foolish, simple, dolted, and blockish,” Rabelais decides that “it were better for him to learn nothing at all than to be taught suchlike books under suchlike schoolmasters.” All this old lumber must be swept away, and in two years a youth may acquire a better judgment, a better manner, and more command of language than could ever have been obtained by the old method.

We are then introduced to the model pupil. The end of education has been declared to be sapiens et eloquens pietas; and we find that though Rabelais might have substituted knowledge for piety, he did care for piety, and valued very highly both wisdom and eloquence. The eloquent Roman was the ideal of the Renascence, and Rabelais’ model pupil expresses himself “with gestures so proper, pronunciation so distinct, a voice so eloquent, language so well turned and in such good Latin that he seemed rather a Gracchus, a Cicero, an Æmilius of the time past than a youth of the present age.”

§ 4. So a Renascence tutor is appointed for Gargantua and administers to him a potion that makes him forget all he has ever learned. He then puts him through a very different course. Like all wise instructors he first endeavours to secure the will of the pupil. He allows Gargantua to go the accustomed road till he can convince him it is the wrong one. This seems to me a remarkable proof of wisdom. How often does the “new master” break abruptly with the past, and raise the opposition of the pupil by dispraise of all he has already done! By degrees Ponocrates, the model tutor, inspired in his pupil a great desire for improvement. This he did by bringing him into the society of learned men, who filled him with ambition to be like them. Thereupon Gargantua “put himself into such a train of study that he lost not any hour in the day, but employed all his time in learning and honest knowledge.” The day was to begin at 4 a.m., with reading of “some chapter of the Holy Scripture, and oftentimes he gave himself to revere, adore, pray, and send up his supplications to that good God, whose word did show His majesty and marvellous judgments.” This is the only hint we get in this part of the book on the subject of religious or moral education: the training is directed to the intellect and the body.

§ 5. The remarkable feature in Rabelais’ curriculum is this, that it is concerned mainly with things. Of the Seven Liberal Arts of the Middle Ages, the first three were purely formal: grammar, logic, rhetoric; while the following course: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music, were not. The effect of the Renascence was to cause increasing neglect of the Quadrivium, but Rabelais cares for the Quadrivium only; Gargantua studies arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music, and the Trivium is not mentioned. Great use is made of books and Gargantua learned them by heart; but all that he learned he at once “applied to practical cases concerning the estate of man.” It was the substance of the reading, not the form, that was thought of. At dinner “if they thought good they continued reading or began to discourse merrily together; speaking first of the virtue, propriety, efficacy, and nature of all that was served in at that table; of bread, of wine, of water, of salt, of flesh, fish, fruits, herbs, roots, and of their dressing. By means whereof he learned in a little time all the passages that on these subjects are to be found in Pliny, Athenæus, &c. Whilst they talked of these things, many times to be more certain they caused the very books to be brought to the table; and so well and perfectly did he in his memory retain the things above said, that in that time there was not a physician that knew half so much as he did.” Again, out of doors he was to observe trees and plants, and “compare them with what is written of them in the books of the ancients, such as Theophrastus, Dioscorides, &c.” Here again, actual realism was to be joined with verbal realism, for Gargantua was to carry home with him great handfuls for herborising. Rabelais even recommends studying the face of the heavens at night, and then observing the change that has taken place at 4 in the morning. So he seems to have been the first writer on education (and the first by a long interval), who would teach about things by observing the things themselves. It was this Anschauungs-prinzip—use of sense-impressions—that Pestalozzi extended and claimed as his invention two centuries and a half later. Rabelais also gives a hint of the use of hand-work as well as head-work. Gargantua and his fellows “did recreate themselves in bottling hay, in cleaving and sawing wood, and in threshing sheaves of corn in the barn. They also studied the art of painting or carving.” The course was further connected with life by visits to the various handicraftsmen, in whose workshops “they did learn and consider the industry and invention of the trader.”

Thus, even in the time of the Renascence, Rabelais saw that the life of the intellect might be nourished by many things besides books. But books were still kept in the highest place. Even on a holiday, which occurred on some fine and clear day once a month, “though spent without books or lecture, yet was the day not without profit; for in the meadows they repeated certain pleasant verses of Virgil’s Agriculture, of Hesiod, of Politian’s Husbandry.” They also turned Latin epigrams into French rondeaux.

This course of study, “although at first it seemed difficult, yet soon became so sweet, so easy, and so delightful, that it seemed rather the recreation of a king than the study of a scholar.”

In preferring the Quadrivial studies to the Trivial, and still more in his use of actual things, Rabelais separates himself from all the teachers of his time.

§ 6. Very remarkable too is the attention he pays to physical education. A day does not pass on which Gargantua does not gallantly exercise his body as he has already exercised his mind. The exercises prescribed are very various, and include running, jumping, swimming, with practice on the horizontal bar and with dumb-bells, &c. But in one respect Rabelais seems behind our own writer, Richard Mulcaster. Mulcaster trained the body simply with a view to health. Rabelais is thinking of the gentleman, and all his physical exercises are to prepare him for the gentleman’s occupation, war. The constant preparation for war had a strong and in some respects a very beneficial influence on the education of gentlemen in the fifteen and sixteen hundreds, as it has had on that of the Germans in the eighteen hundreds. But to be ready to slaughter one’s fellow creatures is not an ideal aim in education; and besides this, one half of the human race can never (as far as we can judge at present) be affected by it. We therefore prefer the physical training recommended by the Englishman.

Mr. Walter Besant by his Readings in Rabelais (Blackwood, 1883), has put Rabelais’ wit and wisdom where we can get at most of it without searching in the dung-hill. But he has unfortunately omitted Gargantua’s letter to Pantagruel at Paris (book ij, chap. 8), where we get the curriculum as proposed by Rabelais, a chapter in which no scavenger is needed.

I will give some extracts from it:—

“Although my deceased father of happy memory, Grangousier, had bent his best endeavours to make me profit in all perfection and political knowledge, and that my labour and study was fully correspondent to, yea, went beyond his desire; nevertheless, the time then was not so proper and fit for learning as it is at present, neither had I plenty of such good masters as thou hast had; for that time was darksome, obscured with clouds of ignorance and savouring a little of the infelicity and calamity of the Goths, who had, wherever they set footing, destroyed all good literature, which in my age hath by the Divine Goodness been restored unto its former light and dignity, and that with such amendment and increase of knowledge that now hardly should I be admitted unto the first form of the little grammar school boys (des petits grimaulx): I say, I, who in my youthful days was (and that justly) reputed the most learned of that age. Now it is that the old knowledges (disciplines) are restored, the languages revived. Greek (without which it is a shame for any one to call himself learned), Hebrew, Chaldee, Latin. Printing (Des impressions) too, so elegant and exact, is in use, which in my day was invented by divine inspiration, as cannon were by suggestion of the devil. All the world is full of men of knowledge, of very learned teachers, of large libraries; so that it seems to me that neither in the age of Plato, nor of Cicero, nor of Papinian was there such convenience for studying as there is now. I see the robbers, hangmen, adventurers, ostlers of to-day more learned then the doctors and the preachers of my youth. Why, women and girls have aspired to the heavenly manna of good learning ... I mean you to learn the languages perfectly first of all, the Greek as Quintilian wishes, then the Latin, then Hebrew for the Scriptures, and Chaldee and Arabic at the same time; and that thou form thy style in Greek on Plato, in Latin on Cicero. Let there be no history which thou hast not ready in thy memory, in which cosmography will aid thee. Of the Liberal Arts, geometry, arithmetic, music, I have given thee a taste when thou wast still a child, at the age of five or six [Pantagruel was a giant, we must remember]; carry them on; and know’st thou all the rules of astronomy? Don’t touch astrology for divination and the art of Lullius, which are mere vanity. In the civil law thou must know the five texts by heart.

“ ... As for knowledge of the works of Nature, I would have thee devote thyself to them so that there may be no sea, river, or spring of which thou knowest not the fishes; all the birds of the air, all the trees, forest or orchard, all the herbs of the field, all the metals hid in the bowels of the earth, all the precious stones of the East and the South, let nothing be unknown to thee.

“Then turn again with diligence to the books of the Greek physicians, and the Arabs, and the Latin, without despising the Talmudists and the Cabalists; and by frequent dissections acquire a perfect knowledge of the other world, which is Man. And some hours a-day begin to read the Sacred Writings, first in Greek the New Testament and Epistles of the Apostles; then in Hebrew the Old Testament. In brief, let me see thee an abyss and bottomless pit of knowledge, for from henceforth as thou growest great and becomest a man thou must part from this tranquillity and rest of study ... And because, as Solomon saith, wisdom entereth not into a malicious mind, and science without conscience is but the ruin of the soul, thou shouldst serve, love, and fear God, and in Him centre all thy thoughts, all thy hope; and by faith rooted in charity be joined to Him, so as never to be separated from Him by sin.”

The influence of Rabelais on Montaigne, Locke, and Rousseau has been well traced by Dr. F. A. Arnstädt. (François Rabelais, Leipzig, Barth, 1872.)

VI.
MONTAIGNE.
(1533-1592.)

§ 1. The learned ideal established by the Renascence was accepted by Rabelais, though he made some suggestions about Realien[39] that seem to us much in advance of it. When he quotes the saying “Magis magnos clericos non sunt magis magnos sapientes” (“the greatest clerks are not the greatest sages”), this singular piece of Latinity is appropriately put into the mouth of a monk, who represents everything the Renascence scholars despised. In Montaigne we strike into a new vein of thought, and we find that what the monk alleges in defence of his ignorance the cultured gentleman adopts as the expression of an important truth.

§ 2. We ordinary people see truths indeed, but we see them indistinctly, and are not completely guided by them. It is reserved for men of genius to see truths, some truths that is, often a very few, with intense clearness. Some of these men have no great talent for speech or writing, and they try to express the truths they see, not so much by books as by action. Such men in education were Comenius, Pestalozzi, and Froebel. But sometimes the man of genius has a great power over language, and then he finds for the truths he has seen, fitting expression, which becomes almost as lasting as the truths themselves. Such men were Montaigne and Rousseau. If the historian of education is asked “What did Montaigne do?” he will answer “Nothing.” “What did Froebel say?” “He said a great deal, but very few people can read him and still fewer understand him.” Both, however, are and must remain forces in education. Montaigne has given to some truths imperishable form in his Essays, and Froebel’s ideas come home to all the world in the Kindergarten.

§ 3. The ideal set up by the Renascence attached the highest importance to learning. Montaigne maintained that the resulting training even at its best was not suited to a gentleman or man of action. Virtue, wisdom, and intellectual activity should be thought of before learning. Education should be first and foremost the development and exercise of faculties. And even if the acquirement of knowledge is thought of, Montaigne maintains that the pedants do not understand the first conditions of knowledge and give a semblance not the true thing.—“Il ne faut pas attacher le savoir à l’âme, il faut l’incorporer.—Knowledge cannot be fastened on to the mind; it must become part and parcel of the mind itself.”[40]