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1507-1589.

of school books and his practical labours in education, earned the title of Præceptor Germaniæ. Aristotle had been dethroned from his pre-eminence in the schools, and Melanchthon attempted to supply his place. He appreciated the importance of Greek, the terror of the obscurantists, and is the author of a Greek grammar. He wrote elementary books on each department of the trivium-grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric. He made some way with the studies of the quadrivium, and wrote Initia doctrine Physicæ, a primer of physical science. He lectured at the university of Wittenberg, and for ten years, from 1519 to 1529, kept & schola privata in his own house. Horace was his favourite classic. His pupils were taught to learn the whole of it by heart, ten lines at a time. The tender refined lines of his well-known portraits show clearly the character of the painful, accurate scholar, and contrast with the burly powerful form of the genial Luther. He died in 1560, racked with anxiety for the church which he had helped to found. If he did not carry Protestantism into the heart of the peasant, he at least made it acceptable to the intellect of the man of letters.

We now come to the names of three theoretical and practical teachers who have exercised and are still exercising a profound effect over education. The so-called Latin school, the parent of the gymnasium and the lycée, had spread all over Europe, and was especially flourishing in Germany. The programmes and time tables in use in these establishments have come down to us, and we possess notices of the lives and labours of many of the earliest teachers. It is not difficult to trace a picture of the education which the Reformation offered to the middle classes of Europe. Ampie materials exist in German histories of education. We must confine ourselves to those moments which were of vital influence in the development of the science. One school stands pre-eminently before the rest, situated in that border city on the debatable land between France and Germany, which has known how to combine and reconcile the peculiarities of French and German culture. Strasburg, besides a school of theology which unites the depth of Germany to the clearness and vivacity of France, educated the gilded youth of the 16th century under Sturm, as it trained the statesmen and diplomatists of the 18th under Koch. John Sturm of Strasburg was the friend of Ascham, the author of the Scholemaster, and the tutor of Queen Elizabeth. It was Ascham who found Lady Jane Grey alone in her room at Bradgate bending her neck over the page of Plato when all the rest of her family were following the chose. Sturm was the first great head master, the progenitor of Busbys if not of Arnolds. He lived and worked till the age of eighty-two. He was a friend of all the most distinguished men of his age, the chosen representative of the Protestant cause in Europe, the ambassador to foreign powers. He was believed to be better informed than any man of his time of the complications of foreign politics. Rarely did an envoy pass from France to Germany without turning aside to profit by his experience. But the chief energies of his life were devoted to teaching. He drew his scholars from the whole of Europe; Portugal, Poland, England sent their contingent to his halls. In 1578 his school numbered several thousand students; he supplied at once the place of the cloister and the castle. What he most insisted upon was the teaching of Latin, not the conversational lingua franca of Erasmus, but pure, elegant Ciceronian Latinity. He may be called the introducer of scholarship into the schools, a scholarship which as yet took little account of Greek. His pupils would write elegant letters, deliver elegant Latin speeches, be familiar, if not with the thoughts, at least with the language of the ancients, would be scholars in order that they might be gentlemen. Our space will not permit us to

trace the whole course of his influence, but he is in all probability as much answerable as any one for the euphuistic refinement which overspread Europe in the 16th century, and which went far to ruin and corrupt its literatures. Nowhere perhaps had he more effect than in England. Our older public schools, on breaking with the ancient faith, looked to Sturm as their model of Protestant education. His name and example became familiar to us by the exertions of his friend Ascham. Westminster, under the long reign of Busby, received a form which was generally accepted as the type of a gentleman's education. The Public School Commission of 1862 found that the lines laid down by the great citizen of Strasburg, and copied by his. admirers, had remained unchanged until within the memory of the present generation. Wolfgang Ratke or Ratichius was born in Holstein in 1571. He anticipated some of the best improvements in the method of teaching which have been made in modern times. He was like many of those who have tried to improve existing methods in advance of his age, and he was rewarded for his labours at Augsburg, Weimar, and Köthen by persecution and imprisonment. Can we wonder that education has improved so slowly when so much pains has been taken to silence and extinguish those who have devoted themselves to its improvement? His chief rules were as follows. 1. Begin everything with prayer. 2. Do everything in order, following the course of nature. 3. One thing at a time. 4. Often repeat the same thing. 5. Teach everything first in the mother tongue. 6. Proceed from the mother tongue to other languages. 7. Teach without compulsion. Do not beat children to make them learn. Pupils must love their masters, not hate them. Nothing should be learnt by heart. Sufficient time should be given to play and recreation. Learn one thing before going on to another. Do not teach for two hours consecutively. 8. Uniformity in teaching, also in school books, especially grammars, which may with advantage be made comparative. 9. Teach a thing first, and then the reason of it. Give no rules before you have given the examples. Teach no language out of the grammar, but out of authors. 10. Let everything be taught by induction and experiment. Most of these precepts are accepted by all good teachers in the present day; all of them are full of wisdom. Unfortunately their author saw the faults of the teaching of his time more clearly than the means to remove them, and he was more successful in forming precepts than in carrying them out. Notwithstanding these drawbacks, he deserves an honourable place among the forerunners of a rational education.

John Amos Comenius was the antithesis to Sturm, and a greater man than Ratke. Born a Moravian, he passed a wandering life, among the troubles of the Thirty Years' War,, in poverty and obscurity. But his ideas we accepted by the most advanced thinkers of the age, notably in many respects by our own Milton, and by Oxenstiern the chancellor of Sweden. His school books were spread throughout Europe. The Janua Linguarum Reserata was translated into twelve European and several Asiatic languages. His works, especially the Didascalia magna, an encyclopædia of the science of education, are constantly reprinted at the present day; and the system which he sketched will be found to foreshadow the education of the future. He was repelled and disgusted by the long delays and pedantries of the schools. His ardent mind conceived that if teachers would but follow nature instead of forcing it against its bent, take full advantage of the ianate desire for activity and growth, all men might be able to learn all things. Languages should be taught as the mother tongue is taught, by conversations on ordinary topics; pictures, object lessons, should be freely used; teaching should go hand in hand with a cheerful, Comenius included in his course elegant, and happy life.

1592-1671.

the teaching of the mother tongue, singing, economy, and politics, the history of the world, physical geography, and a knowledge of arts and handicrafts. But the principle on which he most insisted, which forms the special point of his teaching, and in which he is followed by Milton, is that the teaching of words and things must go together hand in hand. When we consider how much time is spent over new languages, what waste of energy is lavished on mere preparation, how it takes so long to lay a foundation that there is no time to rear a building upon it, we must conclude that it is in the acceptance and development of this principle that the improvement of education will in the future consist. Any one who attempts to inculcate this great reform will find that its first principles are contained in the writings of Comenius. But this is not the whole of his claim upon our gratitude. He was one of the first advocates of the teaching of science in schools. His kindness, gentleness, and sympathy make him the forerunner of Pestalozzi. His general principles of education would not sound strange in the treatise of Herbert Spencer.

The Protestant schools were now the best in Europe, and the monkish institutions were left to decay. Catholics would have remained behind in the race if it had not been for the Jesuits. Ignatius Loyola gave this direction to the order which he founded, and the programme of studies, which dates from the end of the 16th century, is in use, with certain modifications, in English Jesuit schools at the present day. In 1550 the first Jesuit school was opened in Germany; in 1700 the order possessed 612 colleges, 157 normal schools, 59 noviciates, 340 residences, 200 missions, 29 professed homes, and 24 universities. The college of Clermont had 3000 students in 1695. Every Jesuit college was divided into two parts, the one for higher the other for lower education, the studia superiora, and the studia inferiora. The studia inferiora, answering to the modern gymnasium, was divided into five classes. The first three were classes of grammar (rudiments), grammar (accidence), and syntax, the last two humanity and rhetoric. The motto of the schools was lege, scribe, loquere,--you must learn not only to read and write a dead language, but to talk. Purism was even more exaggerated than by Sturm. No word might be used which did not rest upon a special authority. The composition of Latin verses was strongly encouraged, and the performance of Latin plays. Greek was studied to some extent; mathematics, geography, music, and the mother tongues were neglected. The studia superiora began with a philosophical course of two or three years. In the first year logic was taught, in the second the books of Aristotle de cœlo, the first book de generatione, and the Meteorologica. In the third year the second book de generatione, the books de anima, and the Metaphysics. After the completion of the philosophical course the pupil studied theology for four years. The Jesuits used to the full the great engine of emulation. Their classes were divided into two parts, Romans and Carthaginians; swords, shields, and lances hung on the walls, and were carried off in triumph as either party claimed the victory by a fortunate answer. It would be unfair to deny the merits of the education of the Jesuits. Bacon speaks of them in more than one passage as the revivers of this most important art. Quum talis sis utinam noster esses. Descartes approved of their system; Chateaubriand regarded their suppression as a calamity to civilization and enlightenment. They were probably the first to bring the teacher into close connection with the taught. According to their ideal the teacher was neither inclosed in a cloister, secluded from his pupils, nor did he keep order by stamping, raving, and flogging. He was encouraged to apply his mind and soul to the mind and soul of his pupil; to study the nature, the disposition,

the parents of his scholars; to follow nature as far as pos sible, or rather to lie in wait for it and discover its weak points, and where it could be most easily attacked. Doubtless the Jesuits have shown a love, devotion, and selfsacrifice in education, which is worthy of the highest praise; no teacher who would compete with them can dare do less. On the other hand, they are open to grave accusation. Their watchful care degenerated into surveillance, which lay-schools have borrowed from them; their study of nature has led them to confession and direction. They have tracked out the soul to its recesses, that they might slay it there, and generate another in its place; they educated each mind according to its powers, that it might be a more subservient tool to their own purposes. They taught the accomplishments which the world loves, but their chief object was to amuse the mind and stifle inquiry; they encouraged Latin verses, because they were a convenient plaything on which powers might be exercised which could have been better employed in understanding and discussing higher subjects; they were the patrons of school plays, of public prizes, declamations, examinations, and other exhibitions, in which the parents were more considered than the boys; they regarded the claims of education, not as a desire to be encouraged, but as a demand to be played with and propitiated; they gave the best education of their time in order to acquire confidence, but they became the chief obstacle to the improvement of education; they did not care for enlightenment, but only for the influence which they could derive from a supposed regard for enlightenment. Whatever may have been the service of Jesuits in past times, we have little to hope for them in the improvement of education at present. Governments have, on the whole, acted wisely by checking and suppressing their colleges. The ratio studiorum is antiquated and difficult to reform. In 1831 it was brought more into accordance with modern ideas by Roothaan, the general of the order. Beckx his successor has, if anything, pursued a policy of retrogression. The Italian Government, in taking possession of Rome, found that the pupils of the Collegio Romano were far below the level of modern requirements.

It may be imagined that, by this organization both Catholics and Protestants were apt to degenerate into pedantry, both in name and purpose. The schoolmaster had a great deal too much the best of it. The Latin school was tabulated and organized until every half hour of a boy's time was occupied ; the Jesuit school took possession of the pupil body and soul. It was, therefore, to be expected that a stand should be made for common sense in the direction of practice rather than theory, of wisdom instead of learning. Montaigne has left us the most delightful utterances about education. He says that the faults of the education of his day consist in over-estimating the intellect and rejecting morality, in exaggerating memory and depreciating useful knowledge. He recommends a tutor who should draw out the pupil's own power. and originality, to teach how to live well and to die well, to enforce a lesson by practice, to put the mother tongue before foreign tongues, to teach all manly exercises, to educate the nerfect man. Away with force and compulsion, with severity and the rod. John Locke, more than a hundred years afterwards, made a more powerful and systematic attack upon useless knowledge. His theory of the origin of ideas led him to assign great importance to education, while his knowledge of the operations of the human mind lends a special value to his advice. His treatise has received in England more attention than it deserves, partly because we have so few books written upon the subject on which he treats. Part of his advice is useless at the present day; part it would be well to follow, or at any rate to consider seriously, especially his condemna

1533-1592.

1608-1674.

tion of repetition by heart as a means of strengthening the memory, and of Latin verses and themes. He sets before himself the production of the man, a sound mind in a sound body. His knowledge of medicine gives great value to his advice on the earliest education, although he probably exaggerates the benefits of enforced hardships. He recommends home education without harshness or severity of discipline. Emulation is to be the chief spring of action; knowledge is far less valuable than a well-trained mind. He prizes that knowledge most which fits a man for the duties of the world, speaking languages, accounts, history, law, logic, rhetoric, natural philosophy. He inculcates the importance of drawing, dancing, riding, fencing, and trades. The part of his advice which made most impression upon his contemporaries was the teaching of reading and arithmetic by well-considered games, the discouragement of an undue compulsion and punishment, and the teaching of language without the drudgery of grammar. In these respects he has undoubtedly anticipated modern disco-eries. He is a strong advocate for home education under a private tutor, and his bitterness against public schools is as vehement as that of Cowper.

The

Far more important in the literature of this subject than the treatise of Locke is the Tractate of Education by Milton, "the few observations," as he tells us, "which flowered off, and are, as it were, the burnishings of many studious and contemplative years spent in the search for civil and religious knowledge." This essay is addressed to Samuel Hartlib, a great friend of Comenius, and probably refers to a project of establishing a university in London. "I will point you out," Milton says, "the right path of a virtuous and noble education,-laborious, indeed, at first ascent, but else so smooth and green and full of goodly prospects and melodious sounds on every side, that the harp of Orpheus is not more charming. This is to be done between twelve and one-and-twenty, in an academy containing about a hundred and thirty scholars, which shall be at once school and university,-not needing a remove to any other house of scholarship except it be some peculiar college of law and physics, where they mean to be practitioners." important truth enunciated is quite in the spirit of Comenius that the learning of things and words is to go hand in hand. The curriculum is very large. Latin, Greek, arithmetic, geometry,, agriculture, geography, physiology, physics, trigonometry, fortification, architecture, engineering, navigation, anatomy, medicine, poetry, Italian, law both Roman and English, Hebrew with Chaldee and Syriac, history, oratory, poetics. But the scholars are not to be book-worms. They are to be trained for war, both on foot and on horseback, to be practised "in all the locks and gripes of wrestling," they are to "recreate and compose their travailed spirits with the divine harmonies of music heard or learnt." "In those vernal seasons of the year when the air is calm and pleasant, it were an injury and a sullenness against nature not to go out and see her riches, and partake in her rejoicing with heaven and earth. I should not then be a persuader to them of studying much then, after two or three years that they have well laid their grounds, but to ride out in companies with prudent and staid guides to all the quarters of the land." The whole treatise is full of wisdom, and deserves to be studied again and again. Visionary as it may appear to some at first sight, if translated into the language of our own day, it will be found to abound with sound practical advice. Only," Milton says in conclusion, "I believe that this is not a bow for every man to shoot who counts himself a teacher, but will require sinews almost equal to those which Homer gavo Ulysses; yet I am persuaded that it may prove much more easy in the essay than it now seems at a distance, and much more illustrious if God have so decided and this

66

age have spirit and capacity enough to apprehend." Almost while Milton was writing this treatise, he might have seen an attempt to realize something of his ideal in Port Royal. What a charm does this name awaken! Yet how few of us have made a pilgrimage to that secluded valley! Here we find, for the first time in the modern world, the highest gifts of the greatest men of a country applied to the business of education. Arnauld, Lancelot, Nicole did not commence by being educational philosophers. They began with a small school, and developed their method as they proceeded. Their success has seldom been surpassed. But a more lasting memorial than their pupils are the books which they sent out, which bear the name of their cloister. The Port Royal Logic, General Grammar, Greek, Latin, Italian, and Spanish Grammars, the Garden of Greek Roots which taught Greek to Gibbon, the Port Royal Geometry, and their translations of the classics held the first place among school books for more than a century. The success of the Jansenists was too much for the jealousy of the Jesuits. Neither piety, nor wit, nor virtue could save them. A light was quenched which would have given an entirely different direction to the education of France and of Europe. No one can visit without emotion that retired nook which lies hidden among the forests of Versailles, where the old brick dove-cot, the pillars of the church, the trees of the desert alune remain to speak to us of Pascal, Racine, and the Mère Angélique. The principles of Port Royal found some supporters in a later time, in the better days of French education before monarchism and militarism had crushed the life out of the nation. Rollin is never mentioned without the epithet bon, a testimony to his wisdom, virtue, and simplicity. Fénelon may be reckoned as belonging to the same school, but he was more fitted to mix and grapple with mankind.

No history of education would be complete without the name of August Hermann Francke, the founder of the school of Pietists, and of a number of institutions which now form almost a suburb in the town of Halle to which his labours were devoted. The first scenes of his activity were Leipzig and Dresden; but in 1692, at the age of 29, he was made pastor of Glaucha near Halle, and professor in the newly established university. Three years later he commenced his poor school with a capital of seven guelders which he found in the poor box of his house. At his death in 1727 he left behind him the following institutions :-& pædagogium, or training college, with 82 scholars and 70 teachers receiving education, and attendants; the Latin school of the orphan asylum, with 3 inspectors, 32 teachers, 400 scholars, and 10 servants; the German town schools, with 4 inspectors, 98 teachers, 8 female teachers, and 1725 boys and girls. The establishment for orphan children contained 100 boys, 34 girls, and 10 attendants. A cheap public dining table was attended by 255 students and 360 poor scholars, and besides this there was an apothecary's and a bookseller's shop. Francke's principles of education were strictly religious. Hebrew was included in his curriculum, but the heathen classics were treated with slight respect. The Homilies of Macarius were read in the place of Thucydides. As might be expected, the rules laid down for discipline and moral training breathed a spirit of deep affection and sympathy. Francke's great merit, however, is to have left us a model of institutions by which children of all ranks may receive an education to fit them for any position in life. The Franckesche Stiftungen are still, next to the university, the centre of the intellectual life of Halle, and the different schools which they contain give instruction to 3500 children.

We now come to the book which has had more influence than any other on the education of later times. The Emile of Rousseau was published in 1762. It produced ar

astounding effect throughout Europe. Those were days when the whole cultivated world vibrated to any touch of new philosophy. French had superseded Latin as the general medium of thought: French learning stood in the same relation to the rest of Europe as German learning does now; and any discovery of D'Alembert, Rousseau, or Maupertuis travelled with inconceivable. speed from Versailles to Schönbrunn, from the Spree to the Neva. Kant in his distant home of Königsberg broke for one day through his habits, more regular than the town clock, and stayed at home to study the new revelation. The burthen of Rousseau's message was nature, such a nature as never did and never will exist, but still a name for an ideal worthy of our struggles. He revolted against the false civilization which he saw around him; he was penetrated with sorrow at the shams of government and society, at the misery of the poor existing side by side with the heartlessness of the rich. The child should be the pupil of nature. He lays great stress on the earliest education. The first year of life is in every respect the most important. Naturo must be closely followed. The child's tears are petitions which should be granted. The naughtiness of children comes from weakness; make the child strong and he will be good. Children's destructiveness is a form of activity. Do not be too anxious to make children talk; be satisfied with a small vocabulary. Lay aside all padded caps and baby jumpers. Let children learn to walk by learving that it hurts them to fall. Do not insist too much on the duty of obedience as on the necessity of submission to natural laws. Do not argue too much with children; educate the heart to wish for right actions; before all things study nature. The chief moral principle is do no one harm. Emile is to be taught by the real things of life, by observation and experience. At twelve years old he is scarcely to know what a book is; to be able to read and write at fifteen is quite enough. We must first make him a man, and that chiefly by athletic exercises. Educate his sight to measure, count, and weigh accurately; teach him to draw; tune his ear to time and harmony; give him simple food, but let him eat as much as he likes. Thus at twelve years old Émile is a real child of nature. His carriage and bearing are fair and confident, his nature open and candid, his speech simple and to the point; his ideas are few but clear; he knows nothing by learning, much by experience. He has read deeply in the book of nature. His mind is not on his tongue but in his head. He speaks only one language, but knows what he is saying, and can do what he cannot describe. Routine and custom are unknown to him; authority and example affect him not; he does what he thinks right. He understands nothing of duty and obedience, but he will do what you ask him, and will expect a similar service of you in return. His strength and body are fully developed; he is first-rate at running, jumping, and judging distances. Should he die at this age he will so far have lived his life. From twelve to fifteen Émile's practical education is to continue. He is still to avoid books which teach not learning itself but to appear learned. He is to be taught and to practice some handicraft. Half the value of education is to waste time wisely, to tide over dangerous years with safety, until the character is better able to stand temptation. At fifteen a new epoch commences. The passions are awakened; the care of the teacher should now redouble; he should never leave the helm. Émile having gradually acquired the love of himself and of those immediately about him, will begin to love his kind. Now is the time to teach him history, and the machinery of society, the world as it is and as it might be. Still an encumbrance of useless and burdensome knowledge is to be avoided. Between this age and manhood Émile learns all that it is necessary for him to know. It is, per

But

haps, strange that a book in many respects so wild ant fantastic should have produced so great a practical effect. In pursuance of its precepts, children went about naked, were not allowed to read, and when they grew up wore the simplest clothes, and cared for little learning except the study of nature and Plutarch. The catastrophe of the French Revolution has made the importance of Emile less apparent to us. Much of the heroism of that time is doubtless due to the exaltation produced by the sweeping away of abuses, and the approach of a brighter age. we must not forget that the first generation of Émile was just thirty years old in 1792; that many of the Girondins, the Marseillais, the soldiers and generals of Carnot and Napoleon had been bred in that hardy school. There is no more interesting chapter in the history of education than the tracing back of epochs of special activity to the obscure source from which they arose. Thus the Whigs of the Reform Bill sprang from the wits of Edinburgh, the heroes of the Rebellion from the divines who translated the Bible, the martyrs of the Revolution from the philosophers of the Encyclopædia.

The teaching of Rousseau found its practical expression in the philanthropin of Dessau, a school founded by Basedow, the friend of Goethe and Lavater, one of the two prophets between whom the world-child sat bodkin in that memorable post-chaise journey of which Goethe has left us an account. The principles of the teaching given in this establishment were very much those of Comenius, the combination of words and things. An amusing account of the instruction given in this school, which at this time consisted of only thirteen pupils, has come down to us, a translation of which is given in the excellent work of Mr Quick on educational reformers. The little ones have gone through the oddest performances. They play at "word of command." Eight or ten stand in a line like soldiers, and Herr Wolke is officer. He gives the word in Latin, and they must do whatever he says. For instance when he says "claudius oculos," they all shut their eyes; when he says "circumspicite," they look about them; "imitamini sutorem," they draw the waxed thread like cobblers. Herr Wolke gives a thousand different commands in the drollest fashion. Another game, "the hiding game," may also be described. Some one writes a name and hides it from the children, the name of some part of the body, or of a plant or animal, or metal, and the children guess what it is. Whoever guesses right gets an apple or a piece of cake; one of the visitors wrote "intestina," and told the children it was part of the body. Then the guessing began, one guessed caput, another nasus, another os, another manus, pes, digiti, pectus, and so forth for a long time, but one of them hits it at last. Next Herr Wolke wrote the name of a beast or quadruped, then came the guesses, leo, ursus, camelus, elephas, and so on, till one guessed right it was mus. Then a town was written, and they guessed Lisbon, Madrid, Paris, London, till a child won with St Petersburg. They had another game which was this. Herr Wolke gave the command in Latin, and they imitated the noises of different animals, and made the visitors laugh till they were tired. They roared like lions, crowed like cocks, mewed like cats, just as they were bid. Yet Kant found a great deal to praise in this school, and spoke of its influence as one of the best hopes of the future, and as "the only school where the teachers had liberty to act according to their own methods and schemes, and where they were in free communication both among themselves and with all learned men throughout Germany."

A more successful labourer in the same school was Salzmann, who bought the property of Schnepfenthal near Gotha in 1784, and established a school there, which still exists as a flourishing institution. He gave full scope to

1746-1827.

the doctrines of the philanthropists; the limits of learning | were enlarged; study became a pleasure instead of a pain; scope was given for healthy exercise; the school became light, airy, and cheerful. A charge of superficiality and weakness was brought against this method of instruction; but the gratitude which our generation of teachers owes to the unbounded love and faith of these devoted men cannot be denied or refused. The end of the 18th century saw a great development given to classical studies. The names of Cellarius, Gesner, Ernesti, and Heyne are perhaps more calebrated as scholars than as schoolmasters. To them we owe the great importance attached to the study of the classics, both on the Continent and in England. They brought into the schools the philology which F. A. Wolf had organized for the universities. Pestalozzi, on the other hand, was completely and entirely devoted to education. His greatest merit is that he set an example of absolute selfabnegation, that he lived with his pupils, played, starved, and suffered with them, and clung to their minds and hearts with an affectionate sympathy which revealed to him every minute difference of character and disposition. Pestalozzi was born at Zurich in 1746. His father died when he was young, and he was brought up by his mother. His earliest years were spent in schemes for improving the condition of the people. The death of his friend Bluntschli turned him from political schemes, and induced him to devote himself to education. He married at 23, and bought a piece of waste land in Aargau, where he attempted the cultivation of madder. Pestalozzi knew nothing of business, and the plan failed. Before this he had opened his farm-house as a school; but in 1780 he had to give this up also. His first book published at this time was The Evening Hours of a Hermit, a series of aphorisms and reflections. This was followed by his masterpiece, Leonard and Gertrude, an account of the gradual reformation, first of a household, and then of a whole village, by the efforts of a good and devoted woman. It was read with avidity in Germany, and the name of Pestalozzi was rescued from obscurity. His attempts to follow up this first literary success were failures. The French invasion of Switzerland in 1798 brought into relief his truly heroic character. A number of children were left in Canton Unterwalden on the shores of the Lake of Lucerne, without parents, home, food, or shelter. Pestalozzi collected a number of them into a deserted convent, and spent his energies in reclaiming them.

he

I was,"

says, "from morning till evening, almost alone in their midst. Everything which was done for their body or soul proceeded from my hand. Every assistance, every help in time of need, every teaching which they received came immediately from me. My and lay in their hand, my eye rested on their eye, my tears flowed with theirs, and my laughter accompanied theirs. They were out of the world, they were out of Stanz; they were with me, and I was with them. Their soup was mine, their drink was mine. I had nothing, I had no housekeeping, no friend, no servants around me; I had them alone. Were they well I stood in their midst; were they ill, I was at their side. I slept in the middle of them. I was the last who went to bed at night, the first who rose in the morning. Even in bed I prayed and taught with them until they were asleep,-they wished it to be so." Thus he passed the winter, but in June 1799 the building was required by the French for a hospital, and the children were dispersed. We have dwelt especially on this episode of Pestalozzi's life, because in this devotion lay his strength. In 1801 he gave an exposition of his ideas on education in the book How Gertrude teaches her Children. His method is to proceed from the easier to the more difficult. To begin with observation, to pass from observation to consciousness, from consciousness to speech. Then come measuring, drawing, writing, numbers, and so❘

In

reckoning. In 1799 he had been enabled to establish a school at Burgdorf, where he remained till 18. 4. In 1802, he went as deputy to Paris, and did his best to interest Napoleon in a scheme of national education; but the great conqueror said that he could not trouble himself about the alphabet. In 1805 he removed to Yverdun on the Lake of Neufchatel, and for twenty years worked st. adily at his task. He was visited by all who took interest in educaticn,-Talleyrand, Capo d'Istria, and Madame de Stael. He was praised by Wilhelm von Humboldt and by Fichte. His pupils included Ramsauer, Delbrück, Blochmann, Carl Ritter, Fröbel, and Zeller. About 1815 dissensions broke out among the teachers of the school, and Pestalozzi'a last ten years were chequered by weariness and sorrow. 1825 he retired to Neuhof, the home of his youth; and after writing the adventures of his life, and his last work, the Swan's Song, he died in 1827. As he said himself, the real work of his life did not lie in Burgdorf or in Yverdun, the products rather of his weakness than of his strength. It lay in the principles of education which he practised, the development of his observation, the training of the whole man, the sympathetic application of the teacher to the taught, of which he left an example in his six months' labours at Stanz. He shewed what truth there was in the principles of Comenius and Rousseau, in the union of training with information, and the submissive following of nature; he has had the deepest effect on all branches of education since his time, and his influence is far from being exhausted.

The Emile of Rousseau was the point of departure for an awakened interest in educational theories which has continued unto the present day. Few thinkers of eminence during the last hundred years have failed to offer their contributions more or less directly on this subject. Poets like Richter, Herder, and Goethe, philosophers such as Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Schleiermacher, and Schopenhauer, psychologists such as Herbart and Beneke, have left directions for our guidance. Indeed, during this time the science of education or pædagogics, as the Germans call it, may have been said to have come into existence. It has attracted but little attention in England; but it is an important subject of study at all German universities, and we may hope that the example given by the establishment of chairs of education in the Scotch universities may soon be followed by the other great centres of instruction in Great Britain. Jean Paul called his book Levana, after the Roman goddess to whom the father dedicated his new-born child, in token that he intended to rear it to manhood. He lays great stress on the preservation of individuality of character, a merit which he possessed himself in so high a degree. The second part of Wilhelm Meister is in the main a treatise upon education. The essays of Carlyle have made us familiar with the mysteries of the pædagogic province, the solemn gestures of the three reverences, the long cloisters which contain the history of God's dealings with the human race. The most characteristic passage is that which describes the father's return to the country of education after a year's absence. As he is riding alone, wondering in what guise he will meet his son, a multitude of horses rush by at full gallop. "The monstrous hurly-burly whirls past the wanderer; a fair boy among the keepers looks at him with surprise, pulls in, leaps down, and embraces his father." He then learns that an agricultural life had not suited his son, that the superiors had discovered that he was fond of animals, and had set him to that occupation for which nature had destined him.

The system of Jacotot has aroused great interest in this country. Its author was born at Dijon in 1770. In 1815 he retired to Louvain and became professor there, and director of the Belgian military school. He died in 1840. His method of teaching is based on three principles :

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