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

before, and in addition were to be given a knowledge of morals, commerce, scientific subjects, and social usages by “an incomparable method,” founded on experience in teaching children. The book enjoyed a wide circulation among the middle and upper classes in German lands.

 

BASEDOW’S PHILANTHROPINUM. In 1774 Prince Leopold, of Dessau, a town in the duchy of Anhalt, in northern Germany, gave Basedow the use of two buildings and a garden, and twelve thousand thalers in money, with which to establish his long-heralded Philanthropinum, which was to be an educational institution of a new type. Great expectations were aroused, and a widespread interest in the new school awakened. Education according to nature, with a reformed, time-saving, natural method for the teaching of languages, were to be its central ideas. Children were to be treated as children, and not as adults. Powdered hair, gilded coats, swords, rouge, and hoops were to be discarded for short hair, clean faces, sailor jackets, and caps, while the natural plays of children and directed physical training were to be made a feature of the instruction. The languages were to be taught by conversational methods. Each child was to be taught a handicraft—turning, planing, and carpentering were provided—

for both social and educational reasons. Instruction in real things—

science, nature—was to take the place of instruction in words, and the vernacular was to be the language of instruction. The institution was to have the atmosphere of religion, but was not to be Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed, or Jewish, and was to be free from “theologizing distinctions.”

Latin, German, French, mathematics, a knowledge of nature (geography, physics, natural history), music, dancing, drawing, and physical training were the principal subjects of instruction. The children were divided into four classes, and the instruction for each, with the textbooks to be used, was outlined (R. 265).

 

The school opened with Basedow and three assistants as teachers, and two of Basedow’s children and twelve others as pupils. Later the school came to have many boarding pupils, drawn from as far-distant points as Riga and Spain. In 1776 a public examination was held, to which many distinguished men were invited, and the work which Basedow’s methods could produce was exhibited. These methods seem to have been successful, judging from the rather full accounts which have been left us. [4] The school represented a new type of educational effort, and was frankly experimental in purpose.

It was an attempt to apply, in practice, the main ideas of Rousseau’s �mile. Basedow tried the plan of education outlined by Rousseau with his own daughter, whom he named �milie.

 

[ILLUSTRATION: FIG. 165 IMMANUEL KANT (1724-1804)]

 

As a promising experiment the school awakened widespread interest, and Basedow was supported by such thinkers of the time as Goethe and Kant. The year following the “Examination” Kant, then professor of philosophy at the University of K�nigsberg, contributed an article to the K�nigsberg Gazette explaining the importance of the experiment Basedow was making.

Still later, in his university lectures On Pedagogy, he further stated the importance of such a new experiment, in the following words: It was imagined that experiments in education were not necessary; and that, whether any thing in it was good or bad, could be judged of by the reason. But this was a great mistake; experience shows very often that results are produced precisely the opposite to those which had been expected. We also see from experiment that one generation cannot work out a complete plan of education. The only experimental school which has made a beginning toward breaking the path was the Dessau institution. This praise must be given to it, in spite of the many faults which may be charged against it; faults which belong to all conclusions based upon such undertakings; and which make new experiments always necessary. It was the only school in which the teachers had the liberty to work after their own methods and plans, and where they stood in connection, not only with each other, but with men of learning throughout all Germany.

 

BASEDOW’S INFLUENCE, AND FOLLOWERS. Basedow, though, was an impractical theorist, boastful and quarrelsome, vulgar and coarse, given to drunkenness and intemperate speech, and fond of making claims for his work which the results did not justify. In a few years he had been displaced as director, and in 1793 the Philanthropinum closed its doors. The school, nevertheless, was a very important educational experiment, and Basedow’s work for a time exerted a profound influence on German pedagogical thought. He may be said to have raised instruction in the Realien in German lands to a place of distinct importance, and to have given a turn to such instruction which it has ever since retained. [5] The methods of instruction, too, worked out in arithmetic, geography, geometry, natural history, physics, and history were in many ways as revolutionary as those evolved by Pestalozzi later on in Switzerland. In his emphasis on scientific subject-matter Basedow surpassed Pestalozzi, but Pestalozzi possessed a clearer, intuitive insight into the nature and purpose of the educational process. The work of the two men furnishes an interesting basis for comparison (R. 271), and the work of each gave added importance to that of the other.

 

From Dessau an interest in pedagogical ideas and experiments spread over Europe, and particularly over German lands. Other institutions, modeled after the Philanthropinum, were founded in many places, and some of Basedow’s followers [6] did as important work along certain lines as did Basedow himself. His followers were numerous, and of all degrees of worth.

They urged acceptance of the new ideas of Rousseau as worked out and promulgated by Basedow; vigorously attacked the old schools, making converts here and there; and in a way helped to prepare northern German lands for the incoming, later, of the better-organized ideas of the German-Swiss reformer Pestalozzi, to whose work we next turn.

 

III. THE WORK AND INFLUENCE OF PESTALOZZI THE INSPIRATION OF PESTALOZZI. Among those most deeply influenced by Rousseau’s �mile was a young German-Swiss by the name of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, who was born (1746) and brought up in the ancient city of Zurich. Inspired by Rousseau’s writings he spent the early part of his life in trying to render service to the poor, and the latter part in working out for himself a theory and a method of instruction based on the natural development of the child. To Pestalozzi, more than to any one else, we owe the foundations of the modern secular vernacular elementary school, and in consequence his work is of commanding importance in the history of the development of educational practice.

 

Trying to educate his own child according to Rousseau’s plan, he not only discovered its impracticability but also that the only way to improve on it was to study the children themselves. Accordingly he opened a school and home on his farm at Neuhof, in 1774. Here he took in fifty abandoned children, to whom he taught reading, writing, and arithmetic, gave them moral discourses, and trained them in gardening, farming, and cheese-making. It was an attempt to regenerate beggars by means of education, which Pestalozzi firmly believed could be done. At the end of two years he had spent all the money he and his wife possessed, and the school closed in failure—a blessing in disguise—though with Pestalozzi’s faith in the power of education unshaken. Of this experiment he wrote: “For years I have lived in the midst of fifty little beggars, sharing in my poverty my bread with them, living like a beggar myself in order to teach beggars to live like men.”

 

Turning next to writing, while continuing to farm, Pestalozzi now tried to express his faith in education in printed form. His Leonard and Gertrude

(1781) was a wonderfully beautiful story of Swiss peasant life, and of the genius and sympathy and love of a woman amid degrading surroundings. From a wretched place the village of Bonnal, under Pestalozzi’s pen, was transformed by the power of education. [7] The book was a great success from the first, and for it Pestalozzi was made a “citizen” of the French Republic, along with Washington, Madison, Kosciusko, Wilberforce, and Tom Paine. He continued to farm and to think, though nearly starving, until 1798, when the opportunity for which he was really fitted came.

 

PESTALOZZI’S EDUCATIONAL EXPERIMENTS. In 1798 “The Helvetic Republic” was proclaimed, an event which divided Pestalozzi’s life into two parts. Up to this time he had been interested wholly in the philanthropic aspect of education, believing that the poor could be regenerated through education and labor. From this time on he interested himself in the teaching aspect of the problem, in the working-out and formulation of a teaching method based on the natural development of the child, and in training others to teach. Much to the disgust of the authorities of the new Swiss Government, citizen Pestalozzi applied for service as a schoolteacher. The opportunity to render such service soon came.

 

That autumn the French troops invaded Switzerland, and, in putting down the stubborn resistance of the three German cantons, shot down a large number of the people. Orphans to the number of 169 were left in the little town of Stanz, and citizen Pestalozzi was given charge of them. For six months he was father, mother, teacher, and nurse. Then, worn out himself, the orphanage was changed into a hospital. A little later he became a schoolmaster in Burgdorf; was dismissed; became a teacher in another school; and finally, in 1800, opened a school himself in an old castle there. He now drew about him other teachers interested in improving instruction, and in consequence could specialize the work. He provided separate teachers for drawing and singing, geography and history, language and arithmetic, and gymnastics. The year following the school was enlarged into a teachers’ training-school, the government extending him aid in return for giving Swiss teachers one month of training as teachers in his school. Here he wrote and published How Gertrude teaches her Children, which explained his methods and forms his most important pedagogical work (R. 267); a Guide for teaching Spelling and Reading; and a Book for Mothers, devoted to a description of “object teaching.” In 1803, the castle being needed by the government, Pestalozzi moved first to Munchenbuchsee, near Hofwyl, opening his Institute temporarily in an old convent there. For a few months, in 1804, he was associated with Emanuel von Fellenberg, at Hofwyl (p. 546), but in October, 1804, he moved to Yverdon, where he re�stablished the Institute, and where the next twenty years of his life were spent and his greatest success achieved.

 

[Illustration: FIG. 166. THE SCENE OF PESTALOZZI’S LABORS]

 

THE CONTRIBUTION OF PESTALOZZI. The great contribution of Pestalozzi lay in that, following the lead of Rousseau, he rejected the religious aim and the teaching of mere words and facts, which had characterized all elementary education up to near the close of the eighteenth century, and tried instead to reduce the educational process to a well-organized routine, based on the natural and orderly development of the instincts, capacities, and powers of the growing child. Taking Rousseau’s idea of a return to nature, he tried to apply it to the education of children. This led to his rejection of what he called the “empty chattering of mere words” and “outward show” in the instruction in reading and the catechism, and the introduction in their place of real studies, based on observation, experimentation, and reasoning. “Sense impression” became his watchword.

[8] As he expressed it, he “tried to organize and psychologize the educational process” by harmonizing it with the natural development of the child (R. 267). To this end he carefully studied children, and developed his methods experimentally as a result of his observation. To this end, both at Burgdorf and Yverdon, all