Frank Pierrepont Graves

“ Everywhere in Germany the greatest enthusiasm prevailed among teachers, state officials, and princes. Thus in place of the reading, singing, and memorizing of texts, songs, and catechism, under the direction of incompetent choristers and sextons, with unsanitary buildings and brutal punishment, all Germany has come to have in each village an institution for training real men and women. Each school is under the guidance of a devoted, humane, and trained teacher, and the methods in religion, reading, arithmetic, history, geography, and elementary science are vitalized and interesting. ”

“ Hence Spencer advocates a complete change from the type of training that had dominated education since the Renaissance and calls for a release from the traditional bondage to the classics. Instead of Greek and Latin for ‘culture’ and ‘discipline,’ and an order of society where the few are educated for a life of elegant leisure, he recommends the sciences and a new scheme of life where every one shall enjoy all advantages in the order of their relative value. ”

“ Since all things live and have their being in and through God and the divine principle in each is the essence of its life, everything is liable to be considered by Froebel as symbolic in its very nature, and he often resorts to fantastic and strained interpretations. Thus with Froebel the cube becomes the symbol of diversity in unity, the faces and edges of crystals all have mystic meanings, and the numbers three and five reveal Fantastic and vague doctrines. ”

“ The systematic philosophers,—Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, tried to mediate the outworn institutional education and the extreme individualism. Socrates held that the sophistic ‘knowledge’ was only ‘opinion,’ and that the more universal knowledge could be reached in every person by stripping off his individualistic opinion. ”

“ Since virtue is of two kinds, moral or practical, and intellectual or speculative, and the former is merely the stepping-stone to the latter, the education needed for the virtue of the state must not, like that of Sparta, be purely a training for war and practical affairs. ”

“ For childhood, or from six to twelve, was to be organized the ‘vernacular school,’ which should appear in every hamlet and village. From that time up to eighteen comes the ‘Latin school,’ to be maintained in every city; and, finally, for youth from eighteen to twenty-four, there should be a university in every kingdom or province. Such an organization would have made education universal, and would tend to bring about the custom of education according to ability, rather than social status, which was a suggestion some three centuries in advance of the times. ”

“ The greatest services that the History of Education can perform for the teacher are to impel him to analyze his problems more completely and to throw light upon the school practices with which he is himself concerned. ”

“ As Voltaire, Rousseau, and others had held that the panacea for the corrupt times was rationalism, atheism, 288 deism, socialism, anarchy, or individualism, Pestalozzi found his remedy in education. Like Rousseau, he keenly felt the injustice, unnaturalness, and degradation of the existing society, but he was not content to stop with mere destruction and negations. He saw what education might do to purify social conditions and to elevate the people by intellectual, moral, and industrial training, and he longed to apply it universally and to develop methods in keeping with nature. ”

“ They never possessed either lofty ideals or enthusiasm. Their training was best adapted to a small state, and became unsatisfactory when they had spread over the entire Italian peninsula. The golden age of valor and stern virtue had then largely departed, and they began unconsciously to seek a more universal culture. While such a people regarded the Greeks as visionary, just as the Greeks looked upon them as barbarians, they felt instinctively that only by absorption of the Hellenic ideals could their cosmopolitan ambitions be carried out. ”

“ The Sociological Movements in Modern Education.—The most marked feature of the Rousselian education and the one most subject to criticism has been its extreme Revolt from social control, revolt against civilization and all social control. A state of nature is held to be the ideal condition, and all social relations are regarded as degenerate. The child is to be brought up in isolation by the laws of brute necessity and to have no social education until he is fifteen, when an impossible set of expedients for bringing him into touch with his fellows is devised. ”

“ It is evident, however, that Montessori lays too much stress upon the acquisition of the formal studies and starts them at too early an age. In this she fails to appreciate Froebel’s great contribution of a school without books, and certainly does not realize, with Dewey, that the main purpose of education is to give a child some control of his social environment and that for this there are activities of more importance to child life than the school arts. Within a few years it will probably be difficult to understand the furore that has been created by the Montessori methods. ”

“ But the human spirit could not be forever held in bondage, and, after almost a millennium of repression and uniformity, various factors that had accumulated within the Middle Ages produced an intellectual awakening the Renaissance, that we know as the ‘Renaissance.’ Its vitality lasted during the fifteenth century in Italy and to the close of the sixteenth in the Northern countries, but by the dawn of the seventeenth century it had everywhere degenerated into a dry and mechanical study of the classics. ”

“ Thus education in early Rome was practical, and, to some extent, occupational. It was intended to produce efficiency as fathers, citizens, and soldiers. It consisted in training the youths to be healthy and strong in mind and body, and sedate and simple in their habits; to reverence the gods, their parents, the laws, and institutions; and to be courageous in war, and familiar with the traditional agriculture, or the conduct of some business. It did produce a nation of warriors and loyal 35 citizens, but it inevitably tended to make them calculating, selfish, overbearing, cruel, and rapacious. ”

“ While, after the death of Fellenberg in 1844, the schools at Hofwyl gradually declined, various types of industrial education everywhere came to supplement academic courses, and extend the work of the school to a larger number of pupils. Thus the tendency of modern civilization to care for the education of the poor, the defective, and the delinquent through industrial training has sprung from the philanthropic spirit of Pestalozzi and his practical collaborator, Fellenberg, and has become apparent in all advanced countries. ”

“ Thus the year 1827 “marks the culmination of a process which had been going on for more than a century,—the high-water mark of modern democracy, and the low-water mark of the Massachusetts school system.” The district system did in its earlier stages bind the families of a neighborhood into a corporation whose intent was the most vital of human needs,—education, and the people came to feel the necessity of supporting Degeneracy of the district system. ”

“ Often the upper classes held that the masses should be kept in their place, and feared that any education at all would make them discontented and cause an uprising. The poor themselves, in turn, were often suspicious of any schooling that tended to elevate them, and were unwilling to stamp themselves as paupers. Moreover, the sectarian color that sometimes appeared in the religious training not infrequently repelled people of other creeds or kept the schools from receiving their children. ”

“ The Value of the History of Education.—The History of Education from the earliest times should contribute largely to one’s breadth of view and prove a study of the greatest liberal culture. A record of typical instances of the moral, æsthetic, and intellectual development of man in all lands and at all periods should certainly enlarge one’s vision and enable him to appreciate more fully the part that education has played in the 4 progress of civilization. Such cultural values may be found even in a limited survey of the world’s educational development. ”

“ The type of education differs greatly according to the institution, ranging from almost purely manual training to a large proportion of the intellectual rudiments, but in all the work is adapted to the various grades in such a way as to raise them a little in the scale of efficiency and to keep them as far as possible from being a burden to themselves and to society. ”

“ Progressive Nature of Greek Education.—Real educational progress began with the Greeks. In their training gradually appeared considerable regard for individuality. They were the first people whose outlook seems to have been toward the future rather than the past, and they first made a serious attempt to promote human development in accordance with a remote ideal progressively revealed. As a result, they not only gave a wonderful impetus to educational practice in their own time, but ever since then the world has had constant recourse to them for inspiration and counsel. ”

“ The seventeenth century was, therefore, for American education distinctly a period of ‘transplantation of schools,’ with little or no conscious change; and it is only toward the middle of the next century, as new social and political conditions were evolving and the days of the Revolution were approaching, that there are evident the gradual modification of European ideals and the differentiation of American schools toward an ideal of their own. ”

“ The Relation of the Reformation to the Renaissance.—The series of revolts from the Catholic Church, generally known collectively as the ‘Reformation,’ may be regarded as closely connected with the Renaissance. As shown in the last chapter, humanism in the North led to a renewed study of the Scriptures and a reform of ecclesiastical doctrines and abuses, and took on a moral and religious color. Reformers arose, like Wimpfeling and Erasmus, who, while remaining within the Church, sought to purify it of corruption and obscurantism. ”

“ Dewey declares: “The industrial history of man is not a materialistic or merely utilitarian affair. It is a matter of intelligence. Its record is the record of how man learned to think, to think to some effect, to transform the conditions of life so that life itself became a different thing. ”

“ The Growth of Industrial Training.—The movement that is perhaps most widely discussed to-day is the introduction of vocational training into the systems of education. Social reasons for industrial education. There is now an especial need for this type of training. Since the industrial revolution and the development of the factory system, the master no longer works by the side of his apprentice and instructs him, and the ambition of the youth can no longer be spurred by the hope that he may himself some day become a master. ”

“ The training in debate was furnished by means of formal disputations, in which one student, or group of students, was pitted against another (Fig. 11) . In these contests, which also were conducted in Latin, not only were authorities cited, but the debaters might add arguments of their own. Thus, compared with the memorizing of lectures, debating afforded some acuteness and vigor of intellect, but by the close of the fifteenth century it had become no longer reputable. The aim came to be to win and to secure applause without regard to truth or consistency. ”

“ Incidentally, however, in order to make Emile tolerable in society, for he cannot entirely escape it, he must though moral training through ‘natural consequences.’ be given the idea of property and some ideas about conduct. But this is simply because of practical necessity, and no moral education is to be given as such, for, “until he reaches the age of reason, he can form no idea of moral beings or social relations.” He is to learn through ‘natural consequences’ until he arrives at the age for understanding moral precepts. ”

“ And before the middle of the eighteenth century the total number of these charity schools in England and Wales reached nearly two thousand, with about fifty thousand boys and girls in attendance. This increase in facilities for the education of the poor was not kindly received by many in the upper classes, who often felt that “there is no need for any learning at all for the meanest ranks of mankind: their business is to opposition and advocacy, labour, not to think.” ”

“ Their systems of education prepare mostly for vocations, and are not sufficiently advanced to undertake a training for manhood or citizenship. But since a division of labor has now been evolved, the training has become more clearly differentiated and fits for specific occupations. In this way, class divisions, or even castes, have generally arisen in society, and the 6 young people are educated according to the position in life they desire, or are required to fill. As an illustration of this stage of development, we may consider somewhat in detail the social environment and education of India. ”

“ Effect of the Hindu Education.—Hence, among the Hindus education is forbidden to ninety-five per cent of the population, and, as far as it does exist, it is a mere stuffing of the memory. It concerns itself but little with 8 mental culture or with preparation for real living. The brahmins have handed down considerable traditional learning, grammar, phonetics, rhetoric, logic, ‘Arabic’ notation, algebra, astronomy, and medicine, but new knowledge of any sort is barred. The Hindus still plow with sticks of wood, and their crops are harvested and threshed by devices equally primitive. ”

“ Educational Development in France.—The development of a centralized system of education in France began almost a century later than in Germany. During the eighteenth and the early nineteenth century the different monarchic powers were not at all favorable to training the masses, and popular education was badly neglected. It required several revolutions in government and the establishment of a permanent republic, to break the old traditions completely, and to make it evident that universal suffrage should be accompanied by universal education. ”

“ An acquaintance with physiology is necessary to the maintenance of health, and so for self-preservation. Any form of industry or other means of indirect self-preservation will require some understanding of mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, and sociology. To care for the physical, intellectual, and moral training of their children, parents should know the general principles of physiology, psychology, and ethics. A man is best fitted for citizenship through a knowledge of the science of history in its political, economic, and social aspects. ”

“ A student might, for the sake of a degree, go from a court school to a university, but, as a rule, if what he wished were a general course, he would be satisfied with the greater prestige that came from being a pupil of one of the distinguished humanists that the court schools were generally able to retain at their head. ”