The History Of Education by Ellwood P. Cubberley (epub e reader .txt) 📖

[1] See footnote 1, p. 272, on the origin of the term. Six years before the publication of the Tractate, Milton had visited Italy, and had been much entertained in Florence by members of the Academy and University there. In the Tractate he outlined a plan for a series of classical Academies for England, many of which were established. From England the term was carried to America, and became the name for a great development of semi-private secondary schools which flourished during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

[2] Unlike England and France, the German lands long remained feudal and not united. As late as the beginning of the nineteenth century Germany was made up of more than three hundred little principalities, of which sixty were free cities. Each little principality was self-governing and maintained its little court.

[3] Richard Mulcaster (1531-1611), for forty-eight years a famous London Latin grammar-school master, often classed as a precursor of the sense realists, in two books, published in 1581 and 1582, had urged the great importance of a study of the English tongue, and of using it as a medium for instruction. In his Elementarie (1582) he had said: “Our own language bears the joyful title of our liberty and freedom, the Latin remembers us of our thralldom and bondage. I love Rome, but London better; I favor Italy, but England more. I honor the Latin, but I worship the English.” (R. 226.)

[4] The school was opened with 433 boys and girls enrolled. It was divided into six classes. In the first three German only was used. In the first two classes the children were taught to read and write German, Genesis being the reading book of the second class. In the third class German grammar was studied. Music, religion, and the elements of arithmetic were also taught in these classes. In the fourth class Latin was begun, studying Terence, and Latin grammar was worked out from the constructions.

In the sixth and highest class Greek was taught. A good education was to be given in six years, through the saving of time.

[5] This was written out in his native Czech tongue, but was not published at the time. A quarter of a century later it appeared in Latin, with his collected works, as published by his patron at Amsterdam (1657). It was then forgotten for two centuries. In 1841 the manuscript was found at Lissa, and published in the original at Prague, in 1848. The first English edition appeared in 1896.

[6] See the English edition edited by M. W. Keatinge, A. and C. Black, London, 1896.

[7] The following is illustrative: “Sec. 518 (Geometria). Ex concursu linearum fit angulus qui est vel rectus, quern linea incidens perpendicularis efficit, ut est (in subjecto schemate) angulus A C B; vel acutus, minor recto, A ut B C D; vel obtusus, major recto, ut A C D.”

[Illustration:

B D

| /

|/ A––––-

C ]

[8] A very good reprint of the 1727 English edition, with pictures from the first edition of 1658, was brought out by C. W. Bardeen, of Syracuse, New York, in 1887. This ought to be in all libraries where the history of education is taught.

[9] Basedow’s Elementarwerk mit Kupfern (Elementary Reading Book, with copperplate pictures), published in 1773 (see p. 535), was the first attempt, and not a particularly successful one either, to improve on the Orbis Pictus.

[10] This term was at first applied in derision, just as Methodism was applied to the English religious reformers in the eighteenth century, but the term was soon made reputable by the earnestness and ability of those who accepted it.

[11] Francke’s father had been counselor to Duke Ernest of Gotha, who had created for his little duchy the most modern-type school system of the seventeenth century. How much Francke’s progressive ideas in educational matters go back to the work of Duke Ernest forms an interesting speculation.

[12] “Francke had the rare ability to see clearly what needed doing, and then to do it regardless of obstacles or consequences. The magnitude of his work in Halle is simply marvelous, and yet what he actually accomplished is insignificant in comparison with what he inspired others to do. He showed how practical Christianity could be incorporated in the work of the common schools; his plan was immediately adopted by Frederick William I and made well-nigh universal in Prussia. He showed how the Realien could be profitably employed in a Latin school, and even made a constituent part of a university preparatory course; as a result of his methods, and especially of his suggestion that schools should be founded for the exclusive purpose of fitting the youth of the citizen class for practical life, there has since grown up in Germany a class of Real-schools.” (Russell, J. E., German Higher Schools, p. 64.) [13] Paulsen, Fr., The German Universities, p. 36.

[14] As late as 1805, according to Paulsen, of the whole number of students in the universities of Prussia, there were but 144 in the combined medical faculties, as against 555 in theology, and 1036 in law.

[15] Francke relates that, as a student at Erfurt (c. 1675), he was able to study physics and botany, along with his theological studies. Oxford records show the publication of a list of plants in the “Physick Garden”

there as early as 1648. The garden was endowed about that time by the Earl of Danby, and in 1764 lectures on botany were begun there. Lord Bacon, in his Advancement of Learning (1605), had written: “We see likewise that some places instituted for physic (medicinae) have annexed the commodity of gardens for simples of all sorts, and do likewise command the use of dead bodies for anatomies.”

[16] Thomasius was made professor of theology, and Francke professor of Greek and Oriental languages. Both had been expelled from the University of Leipzig. Christian Wolff, who had been banished by Frederick William I, was recalled and made professor of philosophy. It was he who “made philosophy talk German.”