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

with a wide variety of exercises. In the education given in the grammar schools of his time he found much that seemed to him wasteful of time and thoroughly bad in principle, and he used much space to point out defects and describe better methods of teaching and management, giving in some detail reasons therefor. His ideas as to needed reforms in the teaching of Latin (R. 227) are illustrative.

 

LOCKE ON ELEMENTARY EDUCATION. For the beginnings of education, and for elementary education in general, Locke sticks close to the prevailing religious conception of his time. As for the education of the common people, he writes:

 

The knowledge of the Bible and the business of his own calling is enough for the ordinary man; a Gentleman ought to go further.

 

Continuing regarding the beginnings of education and the studies and textbooks of his day, he says:

 

The Lord’s Prayer, the Creeds, and the Ten Commandments, ‘t is necessary he should learn perfectly by heart…. What other Books there are in English of the Kind of those above-mentioned (besides the Primer) fit to engage the Liking of Children, and tempt them to read, I do not know;… and nothing that I know has been considered of this Kind out of the ordinary Road of the Horn Book, Primer, Psalter, Testament, and Bible (� 157).

 

Locke does, however, give some very sensible suggestions as to the reading of the Bible (R. 228), the imparting of religious ideas to children, and the desirability of transforming instruction so as to make it pleasant and agreeable, with plenty of natural playful activity. [3] On this point he writes:

 

He that has found a Way how to keep up a Child’s Spirit easy, active, and free, and yet at the same time to restrain him from many Things he has a Mind to, and to draw him to Things that are uneasy to him; he, I say, that knows how to reconcile these seeming Contradictions, has, in my Opinion, got the true Secret of Education (� 46).

 

INFLUENCE OF LOCKE’S THOUGHTS. The volume by Locke contains much that is sensible in the matter of educating a boy. The emphasis on habit formation, reasoning, physical activities and play, the individuality of children, and a reformed method in teaching are its strong points. The thoroughly modern character of the book, in most respects, is one of its marked characteristics. The volume seems to have been much read by middle and upper-class Englishmen, and copies of it have been found in so many old colonial collections that it was probably well known among early eighteenth-century American colonists. That the book had an important influence on the attitude of the higher social classes of England toward the education of their sons and, consciously or unconsciously, in time helped to redirect the teaching in that most characteristic of English educational institutions, the English Public (Latin Grammar) School, seems to be fairly clear. On elementary religious and charity-school education it had practically no influence.

 

Locke’s great influence on educational thought did not come, though, for nearly three quarters of a century afterward, and it came then through the popularization of his best ideas by Rousseau. Karl Schmidt [4] well says of his work:

 

Locke is a thorough Englishman, and the principle underlying his education is the principle according to which the English people have developed.

Hence his theory of education has in the history of pedagogy the same value that the English nation has in the history of the world. He stood in strong opposition to the scholastic and formalized education current in his time, a living protest against the prevailing pedantry; in the universal development of pedagogy he gives impulse to the movement which grounds education upon sound psychological principles, and lays stress upon breeding and the formation of character.

 

Restating and expanding the leading ideas of Locke in his Emile (chapter XXI), and putting them into far more attractive literary form, Rousseau scattered Locke’s ideas as to educational reform over Europe. In particular Rousseau popularized Locke’s ideas as to the replacement of authority by reason and investigation, his emphasis on physical activity and health, his contention that the education of children should be along lines that were natural and normal for children, and above all Locke’s plea for education through the senses rather than the memory. In so popularizing Locke’s ideas, and at a time when all the political tendencies of the period were in the direction of the rejection of authority and the emphasis of the individual, those educational reformers who were inspired by the writings of Rousseau created and applied, largely on the foundations laid down by John Locke, a new theory as to educational aims and procedure which dominated all early nineteenth-century instruction. This we shall trace further in a subsequent chapter (chapter XXI).

 

It was at this point that the educational problem stood, in so far as a theory as to educational aims and the educational process was concerned, when Rousseau took it up (1762). Before passing to a consideration of his work, though, and the work of those inspired by him and by the French revolutionary writers and statesmen, let us close this third part of our history by a brief survey of the development so far attained, the purpose, character, aims, and nature of instruction in the schools, and their means of support and control at about the middle of the century in which Rousseau wrote, and before the philosophical and political revolutions of the latter half of the eighteenth century had begun to influence educational aims and procedure and control.

 

II. MID-EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY EDUCATIONAL CONDITIONS

 

THE PURPOSE. The purpose of maintaining the elementary vernacular school, in all European lands, remained at the middle of the eighteenth century much as it was a century before, though in the German States and in the American Colonies there was a noticeable shifting of emphasis from the older exclusively religious purpose toward a newer conception of education as preparation for life in the world here. Still, one learned to read chiefly “to learn some orthodox Catechism,” “to read fluently in the New Testament,” and to know the will of God, or, as stated in the law of the Connecticut Colony (R. 193), “in some competent measure to understand the main grounds and principles of Christian religion necessary to salvation.”

The teacher was still carefully looked after as to his “soundness in the faith” (R. 238 a); he was required “to catechise his scholars in the principles of the Christian religion,” and “to commend his labors amongst them unto God by prayer morning and evening, [5] taking care that his scholars do reverently attend during the same.” The minister in practically all lands examined the children as to their knowledge of the Catechism and the Bible, and on his visits quizzed them as to the Sunday sermon. In Boston (1710) the ministers were required, on their school visits, to pray with the pupils, and “to entertain them with some instructions of piety adapted to their age.” In Church-of-England schools “the End and Chief Design” of the schools established continued to be instruction in “the Knowledge and Practice of the Christian Religion as Professed and Taught in the Church of England” (R. 238 b). In German lands the elementary vernacular school was still regarded as “the portico of the Temple,” “Christianity its principal work,” and not as “mere establishments preparatory to public life, but be pervaded by the religious spirit.” [6] The uniform system of public schools ordered established for Prussia by Frederick the Great, in 1763, were after all little more than religious schools (R. 274), conducted for purposes of both Church and State. As Frederick expressed it, “we find it necessary and wholesome to have a good foundation laid in the schools by a rational and a Christian education of the young for the fear of God, and other useful ends.” In the schools of La Salle’s organization, which was most prominent in elementary vernacular education in Catholic France, the aim continued to be (R. 182) “to teach them to live honestly and uprightly, by instructing them in the principles of our holy religion and by teaching them Christian precepts.”

 

WEAKENING OF THE OLD RELIGIOUS THEORY. By the middle of the eighteenth century, however, there is a noticeable weakening of the hold of the old religious theory on the schools in most Protestant lands. In England there was a marked relaxation of the old religious intolerance in educational matters as the century proceeded, and new textbooks, embodying but little of the old gloomy religious material, appeared and began to be used. By a series of decisions, between 1670 and 1701 (chapter XXIV), the English courts broke the hold of the bishops in the matter of the licensing of elementary schoolmasters, and by the Acts of 1713 and 1714 the Dissenters were once more allowed to conduct schools of their own. Coincident with this growth of religious tolerance among the English we find the Church of England redoubling its efforts to hold the children of its adherents, by the organization of parish schools and the creation of a vast system of charitable religious schools. In German lands, too, a marked shifting of emphasis away from solely religious ends and toward the needs of the government began, toward the end of the eighteenth century, to be evident.

In W�rtemberg, which was somewhat typical of late eighteenth-century action by other German States, a Circular of the General Synod, of November 1787, declares the German schools to be “those nurseries in which should be taught the true and genuine idea of the duties of men—created with a reasoning soul toward God, government, their fellowmen, and themselves, and also at least the first rudiments of useful and indispensable knowledge.”

 

It was in the American Colonies, though, that the waning of the old religious interest was most notable. Due to rude frontier conditions, the decline in force of the old religious-town governments, the diversity of sects, the rise of new trade and civil interests, and the breakdown of old-home connections, the hold on the people of the old religious doctrines was weakened there earlier than in the old world. By 1750 the change in religious thinking in America had become quite marked. As a consequence many of the earlier parochial schools had died out, while in the New England Colonies the colonial governments had been forced to exercise an increasing state oversight of the elementary school to keep it from dying out there as well.

 

STUDIES AND TEXTBOOKS. The studies of the elementary vernacular school remained, throughout the whole of the eighteenth century, much as before, namely, reading, a little writing and ciphering, some spelling, religion, and in Teutonic countries a little music. La Salle (R. 182) had prescribed, for the Catholic vernacular schools of France, instruction in French, some. Latin, “orthography, arithmetic, the matins and vespers, le Pater, l’Ave Maria, le Credo et le Confiteor, the Commandments, responses, Catechism, duties of a Christian, and maxims and precepts drawn from the Testament.” The Catechism was to be taught one half-hour daily. The schoolbooks in England in Locke’s day, as he tells us (p. 435), were “the Horn Book, Primer, Psalter, Testament, and Bible.” These indicate merely a religious vernacular school. The purpose stated for the English Church charity-schools (R. 238 b), schools that attained to large importance in England and the American Colonies during the eighteenth century, shows them to have been, similarly, religious vernacular schools. The School Regulations which Frederick the Great promulgated for Prussia (1763), fixed the textbooks to be used (R. 274, � 20), and indicate that the instruction in Prussia was still restricted to reading, writing, religion, singing, and a little arithmetic. In colonial America, Noah Webster’s description (R. 230) of the schools he attended in Connecticut, about 1764-70,