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A .TEXT-:-BOOK
IN THE

BY

PAUL MONROE, PH.D.
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PROFESSOR IN THF. HISTORY OF RDUCATJON, TEACHERS COLLEGE

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• COLUMBIA UN IVERSITY .. -. ;

'-j:A.U'l'llOF--OY-~SOURCE BOOK IN THE HISTORY OF -EDUCATION FOR THE

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GREEK AND ROMAN PERIOD," O.F "THOMAS PLATIER AND
THE EDUCATIONAL RENAISSANCE OF THE ~

SIXTEENTH .cENTURY," .. ETc,'

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CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE OF . EDUCATIONAL DEVELOPMENT
SEVENTEENTH ~ND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES

LITERARY
POLITIC AL

MEN,

EVENTS AND

RKLIGJO US
LEAD ERS,
E TC.

PERSONAGES

SC IENTISTS,
PHI LOSO~
PHERS 1
ETC.

EDUCATIONAL
'VRITINGS AND
EDUCATORS

Buny•n
Galileo
Ratich . i571- 1635 1619. First N atural Scien~
1628 -1688
1564-1642 Comcnius
sociati?n (·Restock). · ll,
Thirty Years' George Fox Hugo
. ;s92 1671 x619. F!rstcomp. ed. ,CW
War.
x624-16g1 Grotius
Comenrns s
x633 . First el. school m
.
1620. Plymouth Spener
1583-1645 Gr_eat .
{N. Y.).
.
"
settled.
(Pietist)
Bacon ...-0
Didf!ct~c . 1.6.30 1635 . Boston Latm. Gra
1637 -.1702
1561-1626 Com~mus s Orbu
School.
.. .·: ~
1 6 48. · Peace of
W ei;t halia.
1673 . 1 eu Horv ey
P1'1ttR • • •6~7 16361 Horvnrd founded.
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Act, E ng.
1578 1657 Milton's
1642 . School refor'!!s C?fGoth&:
1649 . Charles I
beheaded.
i68s. Edict Hobbes
Tractale . 1644 x6n. Por,\ Royal Lillie
of Nantes . 1588-r679 Fenelon'• Ed. of
Schools.
.
. M
166o. Restoration .
revoked. Bes Cartes
Girls . . 1687 1647. Com.p. School law in
Louis XIV
i596-1650 Lasalle_'s
1693. William and Mary fou
169.5·
Ioleration Boyle
/nst1tutes, 1684 1694 First modern univcl'._lilJ;
16 4 3 -1715
167_9. H abeas
Act, Eng.
1627-1691 L ocke's
tHalle founde?.) .
" "
Corp us Act.
Corneille
Tltougltts . x&J3
Teachers semmaryat
1688 En~lish
t6o6-1684
alle.
'";
Revolution.
La Fontaine
16Qg. Soc. for Prom. of Ch111.
Know!. founded.
1 621 - 1685
Racine
1639-1699

i6oo.

1 618 - 1 6 48.

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I6f.r·

1700

Fenelon

1p51 _1715
Montesquie11
Queen Anne
x68g - IJ SS
1 0 2 - 1 714 Voltaire
Frederick
x6g4- 1778
\Villiam of
Pope
Prussia
1688- 1744
171 3- 1740 Richardson
Frederick th e
1689-1761
·

p

t7lf~rech~~cc o

f

Great

1740-1 86

7
17 6- 17 63 .
$even Years'
~ \Var.

De Foe

1661-1731

Newton
Francke, i663-1727 r700.
1642 - 1727 Rollin . 1661-1741 1704
Le1bmtz
Julius Hecker
1709

Y ale Colle~e foundedJ
F!rst A~encan ncwa
Ftrst d~uly newspaptr.

1646 x716
1707- 1)68 11724 C o mp1;1lsory education
H :illey
Rousseau
both se~es m Saxony. '1(
t656-1742
1712-1778 1746. P:rnceton founded._
Buffon
Ro\)ss~a u's
174r . Fust real schu/, (111.
1707- 1788 Emzle . . 1762 Berlm~.
:
Linn<!!US
Johann Basedow
1748. First Lehrerum111•r 1
1707 1778
1723- 1790 founded.
.

Frnnklin

Salzmann

x706-17go

1744- 1811

1751. Academy o( Ph1ladel
founde~. ,
~.

Addison
Hume
Campe . _1746 -1818 1754. Kmgs (now Columbia)
17:r:r-1776 Pestalozz1
College foun_ded.
,t
1 6 7 2.. . : :r719
Fielding
\Vatt
.~746- i: 827 1764. Exp ulsion of Jesu1~
1757 . Briti sh
1707-1757
1736-1819 Pestalozzt s
France. .
. .
,
East I nt.lia
Gray
Lavosier
Leonard and
t763 . SJ?ec1al tr:umng rcq
Empire
x716 1771
1743 -1794 Gertrude. 1781 of all Gcrm::in tc~chcrs .
founded .
Jon athan
Priest ley
Knox, L~'b~ral
1763. Foundmg ~f present 1
1733 · 18o4
Educaltott :r781 sys te m of Pru~s tan,schoo~
1772 P<trtitioh Edwards
of Poland.
1703- 1758 Adam
Edgeworth,
1774-1_793 . Bas~dow s
,
J ohn
Sm ith
Practic~l
Plulan l ltro/nnum.
1759- 1 773 to
\ Vesley
:r7 23-1790 Ed11ca.t101~ t 798 1783. Su~day-.sc hoo l s foun
18 14 . J esui t
Orde r
J ea n Paul Richter 1784 U111versny of State of
170 3-1791 Lam:uck
suppressed.
Dide rot
t744 --1829
. 1763-1825 New York.
_
8
'Verne
r
Frede rick
1785. _Land end<;>wme~ts for
-1784
.
1713
1775 17 3
Ame 1 ican
Helvetius
1750-1817 Augus tus \Volf
public~chool~ 111 UnitedS
Revolution.
171 5 -1771 Kant
1759-:"1824 1785 . " ebster s. Speller.
Condillac
1724-1804 Bell's E~perz 1794. All Prussian t~achcr1
17 s9 . First
Presiden t
m o tt w.
declared State offic ial~.
17 15-178o H erschel
inaugurated . Burns
1738-1832 Education, 1798 1793· D ecr~e of Rev. Cony
1 8 .
S
tates
17591796
Sc
h
\e
ie
rLan
cas
~er'~
on educa~ 1 on.
7 9
Genera l.
Schiller
macher
111omtorza l
1794. Nauonal Normal Sch
Louis XVI
1759 - 1805
1768 -1834
System
. 1798 m Fran~e.
.
Fic hte
Andrew Be ll
1795. Pnmary educatton '~
17 74- 1792
1

. B o naparte
799
overthrows

Directory.
18oo.

1162 -1814
1753-1832 es tabli shed in France.
"":
Laplace
J ose ph Lancastt!r 1795. Lindley Murray's En
174 9-1827
1778-1838 grammar..
.
_...\
Hum bo ldt !N oa h 'Vcbstcr
1798 . Momtonal System ·
1767-1835
1758 18.n es tabli shed.

532

CHAPTER X
NATURALISTIC TENDENCY IN EDUCATION
ROUSSEAU
RELATION TO PREVIOUS MOVEMENTS AND TO THE

IMES. - In order to understand the origin of the naturalis·
' ' movement in educational thought and practice, one must
turn to the various phases of the realistic movement in the
enteenth and early eighteenth centuries; for out of these
ew" two movements which explain the formalism of the
ghteenth century against which naturalism arose as a prot. The first of these was the orthodox religious formalism;
e.second was the rationalistic formalism of The Enlz'ghtennt.
On the one hand is found the formalism in religious
ought and life growing out of pietism i~ Germany, Jannism in France, and Puritanism in England. Originating
protests against earlier religious formalism, each of these
'gious movements degenerated during the early eighteenth
_ntury into another type of religious formalism.
That
ainst which they rebelled had been a formalism of observPuritanism and pietism were returns to the early
e,formation emphasis on faith, to the simplicity of a nonwalistic worship, and the earnestness of an intensely devoilOnal life, which found expression in the conduct of everyday
Jansenism was an emphasis on faith and an opposition
• the ceremonial expression of religious f~eling that was
.strong contrast to the characteristic beliefs and practices
f the Roman Catholic Church in general. These reform
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tendencies had degenerated into a type of life that posit
ideals impossible of actual realization by the masses of tli
people or even by the majority of their devotees; ideals whic
made the simplest amusements and pleasures heinous sips
and which, consequently, perpetuated, even if they did . no
develop, a piety that on the part of many became affectatip
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and hypocrisy, and on the part of others became fanat1c1s
and a menace. The heinousness of bell ringing and ball p}a~
ing to John Bunyan furnishes an exam pie of this extre.m~
pietism; but the reaction as seen in the depth and sincerity o
Bunyan's religious experience was radically different from -tll
prevailing spirit of a generation or so later. A tone of can
was introduced into literature and social intercourse, ·~~Cl
underneath this a frivolity and licentiousness was introduc
into the life of the times. There occurred a notable hiat
between profession and action, between faith formally-aJ
cepted and life actually lived. The resulting hypocrisy
despised by· those who, either through weakness of chai:~.
or through social situation, were compelled to conform, '§!
by those who honestly believed in the impotency of :SU,.
rigid ideals of conduct and who had greater faith in the gc
uineness of human nature and the permissibility of the re ·
tion and pleasures which it craved.
The dominant formalism in France was of a somew
different type. Here the Church retained all its for
power, and exerted a most oppressive influence over thou
and action. The reigning monarchs made amends for · fli
licentiousness by persecution and inquisitorial torturi
those who dared question the authority of the Churcn1
purchased a similar indulgence for their aristocracy. Q
most intense loyalty to formal orthodoxy. "Ceremonial
play and outward magnificence merely veiled moral mean~.
and inward depravity; punctilious attention to the rites1of"
Church, and a blind or feigned orthodoxy, only favor~d
spread of hypocrisy and of a secret and cynical skepticla
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535

France had been dur-

~'. the seventeenth century the first nation of the world, and

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urmg the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries had
assed through a period comparable to the Periclean or
ugustan ages of ancient civilizations. Victorious in war
ranee had spread abroad her power into other continent~
. _d possessed a court more brilliant than any in modern
mes. The French state WM the model of absolutism·
.rench aristocracy had become possessed of all power and
ealth. The French language was the language of the
~urts of Europe and of international communication; French
iterature had reached a beauty of form not then attained by
Y other modern language; French manners had attained
~efinement and French society a perfection in form and in
ttractiveness tl~at caused them to be imitated throughout
.~rope as the highest product of civilization. B_ut the bril,,n c! of Paris had been purchased at the expense of the
ovmces; the power of the king had been bought with the
very of his people; his success in war with the impover_li~ent ~f the country; the extravagance of arisfocratic
1ety with the sordid lives of the common people. · The
_premacy of the orthodox Church had been brought about
the suppression .~f all right of individual judgment; the
p_port of the nobility for the Church and State had been
~red by unj.ust p~ivileges and corrupt lives. In England
milar preten~10us piety and orthodoxy coul,d exist aIOngside
l~ws that enumerated one hundred and sixty-four offenses
ntshable by death. Nor were these mere statutory forms
tthere. were many ext;;utions for most trivial offenses'.
pon t~e ~ontinent the Inquisition was even yet in operation.
Spam, m 1723, the daughter of the regent of France was
.t~d, to the public spectacle of the burning alive of nine
etlcs as a ~art of her marriage festivities. France yet for~. the bunal of the bodies of heretics in any cemetery;
. , m the centers more remote from the "enlightenment"

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of the capital, scoffing heretics yet had their tongues ;~Qm
out. It is true that it was only the books of Rousseau ;that
were burned by public hangmen, but two generations earli
it would have been the author instead of his writings.
;·
The picture has been painted many times, but it tak~s.
large canvas for the details. Sufficient to say, that ther.
prevailed an absol~tism in politics, in religion, in thoug~ .
and in action that could continue only so long as great a~1l
ity was found in the rulers and so long as no one ·arose '.t o ·
lead the masses in revolt. The first revolt was that of ·_the ,
intellect against repression ; the second was that of. .tlie ·
masses for the rights of the common man. On the tho~ght
side these two movements had much in common and '. ~rc;
ofte~ included together. Yet, in certain fm1damental things, like !formalism and aristocracy, there was a radical diver:
gence between them. This divergence. gave t~ the natura!·
istic movement its chief features, and differentiates the fat
half of the eighteenth century from the first half.
However, it must be noted, that the two movements c_a_n?O
be sharply differentiated, and that they are often inclu~Cd
together under the term here restricted in i~s applica~~on
to the first period alone. Such a use necessitates an ·.~~
grouping of men. The quiet, timid, even pious L~~~~
who may be said to have begun the movement, the , sat1~1
Voltaire and Swift, the formalistic Pope and Chesterfiel~,
the emotionalistic Rousseau and Wordsworth, the anarchisti_9.
Danton and Robespierre - all participated. Thus in some
respects the greatest diversity of ideas as "".ell as of meth
are represented. The latter part of the eighteenth. cel)t
marks the complete bre'ak from the old system of thou~-­
and of social order, and the origin of the new system.a,
thought and of instruction which we call modern. ".:au ·
was the entire thought-movement of the century wh1cl!·
duced this. Therefore it is necessary to note the chara
istics of both phases in order to understand the social

537

tellectual development of ' the century; but it is the latter
hase, the naturalistic tendency, which is of peculiar interest
of its influence in the shaping of educa-

...

: " THE ILLUMINATION, OR THE ENLIGHTENMENT, is the
.term given to this movement of the early eighteenth century,
·thoug h frequently it is used to include the latter part of the
century as well. The lattyr movement- the naturalistic
.d~e - was made possible by the earlier one, - the EnlightenJl1ent, - and includes some features common to it. The term
illuminati possesses greater definiteness and is applied to the
ii
'roup of philosophers, theologiCal writers and "freethinkers"
and literary writers of Germany and France in the early part
of the century.
' ; Thi$ new movement, though it was a most notable step in
e· development of human freedom, was in its outcome but
~ ~ew type of formalism, - the second spoken of as resulting
om reaction to the earlier realistic movement. This eightenth-century formalism was materialistic as the former had
een pietistic ; skeptical and rationalistic as the former had
...eeri religious and devotional - or at least ceremonial ;
istocratic as that had been democratic.
Holding that
orality consisted in the observance of form and the presera'.tion of proper outward appearance, it permitted the gross~t immorality, as is evidenced by the literature of the times.
, ejecting the practices of Puritanism and pietism as hypoc. Yand revealed religion as superstition, it became openly
theistic or skeptical, and as with Hume · and Gibbon in
~
·. gland and Voltaire and the encyclopedists in France,
. terpreted life from that position. In its origin it was a
ction against the existing formalism in thought and in
lief, and against the absolutism of the Church.
'At bottom a protest against antiquated and arbitrary sysms .of thought and of society, the Enlightenment rebelled

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against hierarchy and despotism in Church," State; and society.
against superstition and ignorance in thought; agains.t :,by
pocrisy in morals ; - though often, as the price of freedom,
with the resultant extreme of anarchism in social order athe.
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ism and 's kepticism in thought, and license in morals. Esta
lishing as its fundamental prin~iple a complete reliance upon
human understanding and reason, it opposed all ancient
abuses and along with these all forms of tyranny, whether
in thought, in government, or in morals. Finally, it attacked
the very foundations of all t.h e institutions through\ which
such authority was exercised, thus destroying or eliminating
for the time being much that was wo:ven into the very textur~
of a stable society and is ever essential to it. Through human
reason alone was any true estimate of life now to be formu:
lated and human happiness attained.
~
The aim of the Enlightenment was to liberate the · mind
from the dominance of . supernatural terrorism; to establis~
the moral personality of the individual independent of ecdesi•
astical and social forms ; to demonstrate_ the intellectu
freedom and sufficiency o~ to destroy t~(!'- terrorism
over the feelings, the absolutism over thought;~the tyrann1
over action, exercised especially by the Church, and, as· ·su
plementing the Church, the monarchy. The Enlightenment
posited a supreme faith in the reason of the individual; in
justice in the state, in toleration in religious beliefs, in libeftY
in political action, and in the rights ?f man. The entire perii>d
was controlled by a profound belief in the prerogative of tit'
individual, his right to individual judgment, and to ; ti{
determination of' every question uninfluenced by the belief
and superstitions of the Church and the traditions of socie ~
Freedom of thought, liberty of conscience, sufficiency of re~OD·
for the conduct of life, were thus the watchwords and.
keys of interpretation of this eighteenth-century movem'eri
There were various phases to this new movement rioW, ,to
be briefly stated. Most fundamental among these w~~ ··tho

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philosophical phase. In this respect the movement began i;
.England with Locke, who stated the questions to be solved
!!_nd indicated the source of the answers.
R ejecting the
·older speculative philosophies, he sought the actual source of
knowledge, the degree of its validity, and the extent to which
_uman insight reached. All these questions were to be settled by investigation. The philosopher's rule was later formu-.
~ted into the poet's dictum, "The proper study. of mankind
js man." They held that all ideas arise from experience; that
t~ere are none innate.
Sensation to them was the primary
source of .all know ledge ; though reflection was a secondary
s,ource.
Philosophy delineated the secular view of life,
individualism was emphasized, the reason exalted. Sole reliance was to be placed in the human understanding.
,. If philosophy furnished the fundamental element in the
, nlightenment, the religious phase was certainly the ~ost
prominent. While Locke wrote in defense of religion, this
.aid not prevent his philosophy from becoming the basis of
attacks upon it. The emphasis ori reason was so promi\!Dt that the term "rationalism," in its narrower technical
~eaning, yet indicates that particular movement which
·Opposed both the belief in the supernatural religion of the
-~hur.ch and in the naturalistic religion of the succeeding '
period. To the rationalists the human understanding was
Jhe final test of religious truth. Rationalism rejected revelation either as false or, since merely confirmatory in its main
~...oints to the teachings already given by reason, as . unnecess~ry .
The orthodoxy of the times, previously mentioned as ,
_t9ductive of the pietistic movement and as responsible for ·
he formalism in education, prepared the way for rationalism
tl!rough its own emphasis upon the importance of logical.
..tatement and through its neglect of the spirit of religion.
·1·· But to the French philosophers and writers this religious
phase of the movement took upon itself · a more practical
character. There it was not only the formalism of belief, but

an

540

1Vaturalisti"c Tendency in .1:.,aucat£on

H£story o/ Educat£on

541

'" ·belief in a natural religion, Voltaire came in the later part of
the formalism of life a:nd of ceremonial that was objected to;
his life.
·
not only the superstition in thou g ht, but the immorality and _
heartlessness in action that was striven against; not only.
That phase of the movement which was directed to the
the harshness of orthodoxy, but th e violence and the tyranny,
orga~izati on and life uf society was characterized by the
the persecution and the te rrorism produced in suppressing·
donun a nce of the same unbounded faith in reason. Consequently the ~11onastic custom, the celibate life of the clergy,
all diffe.rence in opinion, th at called forth the opposition o(
these nien to the one great force, that, as they believed,_. '."
the ceremomals, and the repressive tyranny of the Church
opposed the exercise of individu a l judgment, th e use of rea- ·
.called forth the bitterest attacks because of their "unreasonson, the development of intelligence, and the progress of
.ableness," rather than because of their hollowness and the
society. Against the Church, then, they concentrated all
lack of conformity of ideal with practice. Thu.s th e same
their efforts. Voltaire (1694-1788) devoted his long life,
~tandard controlled in regard to social and especially political
productive of literary works numbering among the hundreds, ~
organization as did in the attitude toward. religion. Even in
to the overthrow of "The In fa mous," as th e Church was
France, the idea of natural rights, of equality before the
termed. As Louis XIV remarked, "I am th e state," VolJ
law, of individual choice as the source of sovereignty, and
taire, it !is said, might well repeat, "I am th e century." · ·
man~ of those ide as th,tt became of such trcmenclous practiVoltaire and his co-workers identified the obscurantist ecclesical Importance in the latter part of the century had been
asticism ' of the times with Chri stian ity, Ch ri stianity with ~
otten sug~ este <l and elab orated. Now commended by rea~on,
religion, and boldly argued that all religion was an evil, an ;,!_
they acquired a new vitality, a new meanini;,·
impediment to progress, a tyran t over reason, and that the - .
Another effect of thi s exaltation of reason deserves notice.
Church was the great curse of tlYe times, - was ," The
~ Voltaire and his _co -workers of the early ha lf of the century
Infamy." Jud ged from th e point of view of those attacked,
-were nu less anstocrats th a n those aristocrats of privilege
it has usually seemed th at the aim of Voltaire and his fol- ..;;..
· '.vbom they oppose d . 'vVhether th ey expressed it in so many
lowers was merely negative and destructive. Y et he chiefly
- words or not, they held that the lower classes were not amen.
attacked narrow dogmatism, persecution, inhum a nity , special •
able tu reason, that they were inca!Jable uf being educated,
privileges, which were in those times all summed up in the
"· tpat they were b~t. little above the savages, and consequently
Church, and aimed to make them hated by all. His posithat for them rel1g10n bad a legitim ate function.
tive aim was to free human thought from the superstition and - · <
The . thougl~t-movemcut. uf the ea rly pa rt of the century
bondage of tradition, to establish the right of individual
;.~ was aristocratic, beca11se it was rationalistic.
It ai med to
judg ment, to furth er the enlightenment of the people and the - .·. ~ --.. s.ecur~ the culture of the few, the overthrow of narrow tracliexaltation of reason. If reason is to be the g uid e to life and ~·- -r.o twnali s m anJ dogrnatism in the lives of t hose who controlle<l
the test of all custom and institutional life, it is necessary to ":-_ . ~ society an<l the control of reason among t he educated class. It
free it from prejudice and superstition. Since, :is the i!l11111i- - ·:"'.:'~- would substitute a new a ri stocracy of intelligence and wealth
nati held, th ese are rooted in religion, fostered and preserved ~ · ~;· for the old aristoc racy of family, of position; of the Ch urch.
by the Church, it is necessary to overthrow the Church and to
,,. - It_possessc<l a cleverness, a wit, a brilliancy that contrasted
substitute a religion of reason or of nature. To this modified
with the narrowne ss an<l clu!L1css of ,the old; but it was for

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543

· hilosuphy and reason concentrated most of their attac ks
the chosen few and had no regard for the masses sun
upon th e Church; after the middle of th e century, criticism
degradation a~d overwhelmed hy wrongs and ty~a?11
as directed toward the evils of the social and political orga niWhile the illuminati opposed tyranny and oppressJOn'!!'. f
ation of life. The earlier aim was tu de stroy th e existing
human thought, they but aspired tu profit by participation _buses; the latter rath er toward building up an ideal soc iety.
the social and political privileges ?f the few. There was "
But th ere were other mo re fundamental distinctions between
selfishness and inconsistency about it all that but made m_or__
t~e two movements. The rule of reason had come to be for
glaring the injustice to the many who must support the pri_
any no less a tyranny th an the rule of a uthority. As opposed
leges of the few.
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to· the earlier belief, th e view was now urged that the senses
The intellectualism, the aristocratic tendency of the earlier
movement, h ad developed into a formalism - a formalism-o - .." · were not always tci be dep ended upon and that reason was not
"- lways in fallible. On the other hand, the emotions or the inner
skepticism, of selfish indifference, of polished social inte _
.
entim ents, as true expressions of our nature ::tncl as opposed
course, of stilted forms of an artificial society - that Wc.
-tothe cold, scltish calculations of reasun, were rather to be folrational enough to be sure, but that, through its artificialit]
wed as the g uide to ri gh t cond uct. The movement of the
had lost all approach to a natural mode of livin g , and throu
tter half uf the century looked toward the improvement of
its cosmopolitanism all national and local feeling. · -T
tli ~ masses of the people, as the former had resulted in the
propaganda of the Enlightenment h ad been. confined_·to'i111
ormation of a n intellectual aristocracy.
one country; literature in the vernacular first came ~o ~.
Rousseau was the leader of the on e as Voltaire was the
cosmopolitan throu g h Locke, Pope, and the novelists of· ~~
land, through Voltaire and the encyclopedists of Fran
ader of the other : Voltaire a leader in the first because of
and the philosophers of Germany. This stilted wisdom a
is brillian t intellectual power and his far-reaching rationalm; Rou sseau a leader in the second because of• his deep
affected superiority of the lea rned class, now shunning 'sl
plicity as a mark of vulgarity and naturaln ess as a marlC't
motionalism a nd his profound sympathy for the people.
· If it is an explanation of the popularity of Voltaire that he.
irrationality, developed into a formalism that was no 1
'd what most were thinking, then we may say that Rousseau
repressive to the masses and no less distasteful to many. , .!,
formalism of morality into which the pietistic and Puritan
a.s popular because he gave the most perfect expression to
morality degen erated is well illu st rated in th e English nov~
hat others were fee lin g." 1 The early move ment had led to
eedom of the intellect, but yet had tolerated, or preserved
of the eighteenth century, especially those of Richardso
The formalism of th e Enlightenment is equally well illust_ra.
r selfish reasons, the formalism of social institutions. Since
in the conception of morality, of politeness, an d of symp_a
~ had n either the ability nor the training to move with ease
revealed in L ord Chesterfield's Letters. The later eighteel)
'_this form al life of society when the opportunity was given
century, wea ry of th e formalism of both, b eca me, under
1{11,. Rousseau, led partly by personal feeling and partly by
leadership of Rousseau, directed to a new purpose.
mpathy for the common lot made miserable by-this indifrence of the upper class, revolted most violently and proTHE NATURALISTIC PHASE OF THE EIGHTEE
unded in place of the old law of reason the new gospel of
CENTURY MOVEMENT. - Until the middle of the 1 ce_n~
1
Willert in A cton's Cambridge History, Vol. Vlll, p. 28.
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faith in nature, in the common man, and in man's ability:t.
work out his own good in life. Contrasting with the majes~
of the monarchy, the gayety and luxuriousness of the lives ?f
the nobility, the bri!lian::y of society, La Bruyere drew a pt~
ture of "cenain wiid animals, male and female, scattered o_ver
the fields, black, livid, all burnt by the sun, bound to the
earth that they dig and work with unconquerable pertinaci~)'.:-;
they have a sort of articulate voice, and when they _. rise
on their feet, they show a human face, and, in fact,; are
men." Quoting this, Morley adds: "There is no reason to
think that Voltaire ever saw this gaunt and tremendous sp ·
tacle. Rousseau was its first voice. Since him the reorgafil.
zation of the relations of men has never faded from the s!ght
either of statesmen or philosophers with visions keen en.ougli
to admit to their eyes even what they dreaded and execrated
in their hearts. Voltaire's task was different and preparatory.
It was to make popular the genius and authority of reason.' J
But the task of the second half-century, under the leadership
of Rousseau, was to develop a new faith in man, to work OU
a new ideal in life, to infuse a new spirit into society, and
reestablish a basis for religion in man's nature. When we
take the old period and the new, each at .its best, we ~n'
a profou~d difference between them. The same histori~
sums up the difference between the attitude of the natu
istic period and that of the period preceding the Enlig~1t
ment as follows: " Faith in a divine power, devout obedience
to its supposed will, hope of ecstatic, unspeakable rew~
these were the ·springs of the old movement. Undivi
love of our fellows, steadfast faith in human nature, st~adf
search after justice, firm aspiration toward improvement; ID
generous contentment in the hope that others may reap w
1
.
ever reward may be, these are t h e spnngs
o f th e new."' •
One other aspect of this difference between t~e ratio~a
and the naturalistic movements, between Volt¥fe and~•R
1

Voltaire, pp. 27-28.

2

Morley, Rousseat1, Vol. I, lntrod.

seau, was their attitude toward religion. Voltaire held that al\
, eligion was an illusion to the believer and a deception by the
. priesthood. The nattlralists, while they rejected both the skep. ticism of the illumi1lati and the old ecclesiasticism which they
c'onsidered to· be the superstition of orthodoxy, held and popularized a "natura_!_J:eligjon," which included the moraJity of
Christianityoutexclucled more or less completely the superatural element. The criticism of this natural religion does
'ot concern us here any more than does a criticism of the
osition of the skeptics; but it is important to note that the
aturalists believed in religion as an essential part of human
1~ety__ ~e~a\js_e it was an-essenti~i-part ~( h~~~an experi~
The attitude of the Revolutionary Convention is a
ju~t com.mentary on the difference between the two moveII!~nts in this respect: they affirmed the belief of the French
·ation in a Supreme Being and in the immortality of the soul,
d accepted the confession of the Savoyard Vicar (from the
mile, Bk. IV) as the established faith.
Skepticism and
theism were pronounced to be aristocratic and not to be
ndured.
:The general conception of civilization held by Voltaire and
is. associates eliminated religion; permitted the populace no
ghts; had no sympathy with the masses; erected a polished,
.• tellectual society, preserving its identity by a cold formalism
nd its morality by a punctilious observance of stiff rules;
cepted reason as a guide in thought, materialism as a standd in morality; and self-interest or rather selfishness as the
!inciple of action. In this con~eption of society is to be
und the animus of Rousseau's contention that civilization is
Of this contrast Flint states: "Voltaire's appreciation of civilization was likewise at once
He
ad a genuine enthusiasm for culture of a kind; a keen sense
f the worth of science, art, literature, and social refinement.
µt his idea of civilization was most defective. It excluded

ry sincere so far as it went, and yet very defective.

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f . ·I and included nothing higli
all earnest religions of a1t \ral respectability, and polishea
than intellectual cleverness!d~1a ~f a civilization appropriatiye
manners: It was not the I I
.
of all that educates· m~n. h
com pre 1ens1ve
d ·d·
of all that is um::i-n,
l . I
hile it should r efine an 18"
ta! and spiritual hfe, an_d w 1_1~1, :~eserve its sirn plicity, res~ect
cipline nature, should hk~wd1~ 'dp al and national original!ty} .
. f
d m and favor m 1v1 u
'fi . 1 type
its ' ree o '
ivilization of a special and art1 c1a
.·' ·
but rather that of a c local and temporary, and as ~as t9 ~
such ::is cai: onlly. b~ the fashionable salons and ph!los~ph1~,.
seen mall its g 01y m
.· .
.· cl" i
. 1es of Paris in the Voltaman pe110 .
, ~; · ·
circ
cl
f
in the schools the rationalistic mov
.
In regard to e uca wn_
h it controllecj. .$hO
t had little direct mfluence, thoug
.
f thll
m:n
cation of the
class. The character _o '
pnv<;tJ.~. edu______ h - 'cl 1 f life and conduct elaborated~
can be judged from t e I e~ so
An education of world!
by Lord Chesterfield for his son.
.
1 k of . all that
.
.
fection in forms of behav10r, a ac . . --=:.....;; • -·
~~om, a p.er . · .
·
hasis on the impg~e .o
is most senou_~ }~ __hfe, an e~p.
·-· nd cou
_. _.I'
!..,... --- duct a higher appreciation of manners a
po 1te ccm
,
.
n attention to outwaru
ness"than of virtue and ser.10us~~ss~eaality a smattering 10
form without regard to mwar
. , . . . cl ~ent ·
f 11 k' els a purely matenahst1c JU g
knowledge. o a
tm 'developed to decide all things,jn affairs of hfe, a na ure
f the bod with o
cold light of reason, full co;~::1~~1~stitute th/ideals ~f
ions never fully revealed,~
.
·
· cl It is but
.
f the rationalistic-anstocrat1c peno .
.
.
educat10n o
.
ial realism of Montaigne,
further formulat10n of the soc though in others an advan
t a degenerate one,
some respec s
· .
cl between Rou
.
The connect10n ·so often ma e
. .. ~
upon
it.
.
.
because
of
their
relationship
to
the
cl Montaigne is
't ·lD
rationalistic period; the one contributfedrn1toto1
. 1dgavea·new o
cl the other made concre t e a1
t
an
. . 1
Yet compared with that
•
abstrac~
pnl~ct1p
tehs~
education
of
th
e
naturalistic
pe
the rat10na is s,
·
cl
about as reac tl·o· nary as could be constructe .

upp_~~

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Hi'story of Education

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p'.

300.

547

is not in the details of the "education according to
ature" that we are here chiefly interested; nor in the fundamental distinctions it opposes to the education of the rationalistic period. The main point to notice is that just as the
, great doctrines of liberation of the common man find their
origin in the teachings of Rousseau, so also do the great
educational doctrines of the liberation of the child. As the
e~ntrat Social contains the germs of the Declaration of ~nde­
endence and of the Ametican Constitution, so the Emile
ontains the germinal ideas of the kindergarten, of modern
le.m entary school work, and of the entire modern. conception
£education.

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ifhe extravagant form in which the doctrines are stated,
- e wild emotional vagaries of the author, his offensive
nality, his inconsistent career, his evil influence, - political,
'terary, moral, - should not blind one to the fact that from
• 'm
< we obtain our idea that education starts from the child,
'at its process is determined by. the child nature, and that its .
' is summed up in the child's character and social relation;
. other words, our idea of all that has since been elaborated
the details of the doctrines and processes of modern

per~

JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU. - Essentially democratic, as
e·early phase of the Enlightenment had been essentially
' tocratic, forming at once the culmination of the Enlighten.ent and the basis of nineteenth-century thought and life,
.e.. natui:_alistic movement finds both its origin and its most
influential exponent in Jean Jacques Rousseau.
·.estimate aright the ideas and purposes of this man, to
aerstand the essential principles of the movement itself
(l:its relation to the manifold institutional changes soon to
; brought about, especially to gain any conception of its
ring on the development of educational thought, one must
prepared to lay aside all prejudices in the consideration of

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a character in whom, probably beyond all others, is : ~o ~
found the greatest mixture of strength and weakness,''of,
truth and falsity, of that which is attractive and that" which
is detestable. A man governed wholly by his emotions,
possessing the highest ideals with ~he g reatest power:.i ~f
ernl?odying them in words, but the slightest ability to re~liio
them in action, with clear insight, unbound ed sympathy, ~ttJe
accurate knowledge and less of disciplined power of mind,' h
gave an impetus to ideas held and expressed by ma~y: oth.e
that has made him one of the most powerful factors mall h,fl:
tory. Napoleon said that without him the French Rcvolutloll
would not have occurred; and, while it is impossible.t,o .say;
what would or would not have happened, he certainly caus
a more complete revolution in educational thought and ·-p
tice than any one man or group of men that we have to consider. He it was who first preached the political and so~
gospel of the common man and gave to him an educatio~
. a right by birth. To quote again from Morley: "It waa
Rousseau that polite Europe first ha rkene<l to strange vof
and faint reverberations from out of the vague and cavemo
shadow in which the common people move."
•
Rousseau was born (171 2) at Gen eva, - a city renown
for its great intellectual and moral vigor, and its influence
th ese respects on Europe exerted through the doml
Calvinism of the Protestant population of France, Engl
and Scotland. In Geneva prevailed an earnestness of m
life, purity of domestic relations, simplicity of social: or
freedom of government, that were in sh arp contrast _with·
luxury, th e wealth, the artificiality, the immorality, the
cism of Parisian life. It was the memory of thes~
associations, intensifi ed by the contrast with his later
sia n associations, that undoubtedly furnished the elem
of the ideal natural state pictured by R ousseau; for to
burgesses of his native city, who later reciprocated by '~
ing his books burned by p~blic hangmen, Rousseau ~ed,i

Naturalisti'c Tendency in Education

549

. . ~ork in which this ideal is most clearly set forth, his
'Orzgzn of Inequality among Men. · His training in earl
years was one of indulgence; and, whil e he was early taug;;
. ~~read, he devoted his early years to the unrestricted devourl~g of romar,~ - an experience which fi xe d in him a native
te11dency to sentimen tality; even to sensuality. A few years
.f more formal e.d ucation, very indifferen tly a ttend ed to, failed
o make any radical .change in his character thus ea rly formed.
.t twel~e we find him apprenticed to a trade, wh ere, accordg to his own account, he lea rn ed more of dece1't 'd i
d d· h
, 1 eness,
~ rs one.sty than l~e did of craftsmanship. Four years later
~till consultmg only his emo tions and the whims of sentiment'
e. became a common vagabond · But thr's Jr'fe, con t'mue d for'
veral years, had one merit, in that it strengthened both his
e for and knowledge of nature. Converted . one hun gry
a7 by a bottle of wine, a full meal, a nd the hospita lity of a
f!~St, whom he la ter makes famous as th e S avoya rd v·
e h
d I.
. .
rcar,
,c an!Se . us re!Jg10n and allowed this chance incident to
pe lus life f~r ~ear~. It is profitless from our point of
yr to fo llow his life rn detail; except th a t one may see in
e concrete R ousseau's ideal of education Of
t'
l
h th
c
•
an emo 10na
_.er .a n of a rational charac ter, exa ltin g natural instincts
~ desrres above reas~n, h olding that moral and relig ious
cas could n o~ develop 111 ear ly childhood, positing th at more
s to be
from association with nature tha n f.1om
. derived
.
mtmun1on with books or from the intelligence of oth ers
.t proper developrn!!nt._c~~~ from removing all restric~
ns. and ~llo~_0g natu ral tendencies to have full
th
· -·· r sway,
.Is conc~pt10n oc education was merely th e outgrowth
'his own lrfe. Th e on l
·
. .
.
'::"-------"-""·Y permanent and elevatm g l11terest
seem.e~ to. possess throug hout this period, as well as the
y .activity 111 which h e possessed any ability wa
..
f
,
s music.
;p.er ormer and as composer, if not as teacher, he possessed
. s1derable ~alent, and contributed upon his specialty many
the treatises for the encyclopedic publications of hi s

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' day. When abo ut forty, his aimless, meaningless existence
became possessed of a great idea - an idea which gave pomt
to his sentimental vaporings, to his emotional prejudices-·an
beliefs; an idea that through him was to revolutionize ' tll
social structure of his adopted country as we ll as to modif
profound ly that of many others; an idea which when appl.ie
to education was to create a new epoch therein as welJ. 'i'tt.ln
brief, the main idea was simple, and now commonpla
enough. Human happiness and human welfare are ".'t
natural rights of every individual, not the special poss~~
sion of a favored class; legitimate so~ial organization ··
education exist but to bring about the realization of ' ( ' desideratum. To this he add ed as a ma in argument, fuse which was to explode the bomb, - sci e nce, art, gov
mcnt as then constituted, prevented tliis realization "
hence ~ere objects for destruction.
DOCTRINE OF THE "NATURAL
coming by chance across the theme for a prize essa _
pounded by the Dijon .A cademy, - one of the institu
which during the cighlce11lh century did so much to '
France famous in literature, art, and science, - Rou~s
was seized with what he terms an inspiration. This
was one of th ose s pontancous convictions reached wit
any previous rational reflection, which were so influcntia
the life of this great exponent of the emoti ons and _w
were about as near an approach to definite rational pr()C
as he ever reached. The theme was formulated in the.::tion: "Has the restoration of the sciences contribu
purify or corru pt manners?;, His answer was the ne
one elaborated in the idea of the " natural state,"
much discussed during this period and by some even giv "
<
same form as that now propounded by Rousseau, But,JJothers, Rousseau furnished in defense of this thesis a
tional fervor and a literary style that carried convictio

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~ ' him belongs the honor of secur in it
.
~ousseau did but little more than id g 1· s p~pular acceptance.
the simple G _
·
_ ea tze his remembrance of
- - ._ep.c;:yan _l1fe and societ ;- ··c - ·--11- ---.- ·--own aimless, emotional J'f~
. A ) ' oget e_r w1tlitfiat of his
1 c.
s we rccocrn · tl
·
. "' izc 1e primitive
.111an · to-be;· so-certainly___ b h.
·b·
Y is own showincr
R
_

worst mo men ts "lyi 1 f . hi .
o was ousseau m
'
r g, a1t css, slanderous th . . l .
nt, cruel, coward ly selfi h ,,
. . . . , icv1s 1, mde13 ut this life had its positive
. e also; it was entire] is · Y spontaneous· it wa 1. 1
ntented, earnest honest
. tl
'
, s s mp c, happy,
'
- m 1esenscoft·
t J'f
.
~~ e find later one of its cl11. f -'
.
i ue o l e ; hcrem
.h
e euucat10nal bea -·
C
It the life which Rous
'
i rngs.
om pared
seau contrasted it wit!
ti
al
-- se, hypocritical supe fi" • l
.
1, 1e formal
l
.
'
'
r c1a , unfeeling h
~. d to him in h uma11 life f p . . ' ars _1, selfish, cruel,
0
·ccora·mg to nature Ind
ansian soc1ct y, - t h'1s life
, muc 11 to comm end .t l\I J
- _.. nattractivencss of ·t . f
i · 1 uc l of the
. . . .
.
Is orm was due t
l
_ ph1st1cat1011 so charactcrisf f l
o t le lack of that
. ic o t 1e so cnl lif f ti
.
: was more than counterbalanced
. ,
~. o
le tunes
. strength lay in its rec a 't •
by its genumeness; while
" .
oonI IOn of the worth 0 f th . d' .
· IS own merits in the b
d f
em 1v1clual
'
on o sympatl
l. l .
.
, 1y .w 11c 1 it recognized
e universal sol vent . 1.t
' Il1
s pass10n for f - cl
dence from the tr;irn ·l · f.
Iee om and for inde'
, mes o USJ.ue
lrad'f
i
1
0
ousseau had now . , . . .
10n anc tyra nny.
'
,.
spent Se\ era) ye ·irs i
m sympathy with ti . ,· .
'
n contact, thoug h
' ie society of culture
ll
'on the one ban l
l
'wea ti and posi•
< c anc, on the otl ,
·J
.
erfu! intellects cent . d
".; er, wit I that circle of
e re around :-rcilta·.
h' h
IlCWthoU<YJit and 1• fl
j
.
cll e W IC COntrolJcd
o
n uen cec most of ti1
r .
archies of Europe \V. h
.
. e po Jt1cal and social
,sympathy; for th~ one it _. n~1thcr
these societies had he
.throughout his life w ti)l!Illc1ple wh'.ch he honestly lived up
·
as 1 e c emocrat1c one
I· f .
common man his b 1· f .
, - 11s ee 1mg for
'
e ic ll1 the wort!1 0 f l ·
~.~as this hollow ai1d . .
t 1e mclividual.
<
msrncere th
l b - ·
lthy and "cultured"
.
'
oug 1 n 1liant, witty
society that was bef
h'
'
. uced his famous essays
d th
ore im when he
"
an
ose work f
1
. een years ending with the Em.i!e
. s or t 1e following
famous and to revolut · .
. ' which were to render
·· ·
10mze society.
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The argument, if argument it may be called, stripp~d.
all its rhetorical embellishment and wealth of illustra,P
conveys little of the forcefulness and none of the fervo
the original essay and the subsequent defenses of the ~hem
Herein we find the negation of the Renaissance in all ~~
phases, including the rationalistic literary enlightenment
reachinoits culmination.
This, for us, is the significance
>:>
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these ideas and of the following which they speedily obtain
The second discourse, On tlze Origin of Inequality of.
is devoted largely to an imaginary description of the stat
society among primitive men. Herc one finds only the. p
ical or intellectual inequality established .by nature, w
under the natural conditions of primitive life hardly rev,
itself and hence causes no diminution of the happiness, co
tentment, and welfare of man. Man is not then vicious"f he does not know what being good or .bad is. He hasM>.
primitive virtue, that of pity, which tak es the place of;;4.,~
manners and customs. It is reflection which isolates ma_o- •
is philosophy which leads one to say to a fellow-c.rea
"Perish if needs be i I am safe and sound." Throug~
ference in natural talent, in environment, but, more tha .
through the rise of private property, those social inequa
aro~e that have been magnified and perpetuated by pQli
society. Political power is developed and organized to '.p
tect accumulated · property .. Ineq uality, summed up in..
distinction between the rich and poor, becomes differentia
. into many forms. It is to perpetuate these ~.r1.e.qualities, ·
which modern society consists~thatall political power '.exis .
The idea of this discourse leads to that of Rousseau's ;
political treatise, the Social Co11tract, wherein the basal; d
trines of. the French Revolution as well as of our own Declar
tion of Independence are laid. Government is the res .
a "contract" among the people, by which some an~;1gi¥
.delegated power to rule, while the r emainder of the_:I>-=--e"!'!
give to the governing class some service in return for se~ .

Naturalistic Tendency in Education

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p~rformed. Government, thus formed by agreement, can be
,)ssolved when the parties no longer agree. It is to be noted
hat the conception of the " natural state" is modified in the
. ·_ ocial Contract; it is no longer the life of the savage· that is
ideal, but the life ·in society organized under the rul e of the
., p_eople. Such a society- where the simple tastes and wants
of the masses shall dominate and wh ere an aristocracy with
ts · ill-gained wealth, leisure time, and selfish incl ulgence is
Wanting- can devote itself to the development of an ideal
· fe, wherein the "natural man" is not hampered, fre• ·' -::not lost, and the arts and sciences of polite society are
pdevelopecl.
,,With the detailed argument of these Discourses, full of
tJor as they are, we are not here concerned, but · primarily
ith an exposition of their fundamental ideas and with their
uence 'on educational thought.
HE "EMILE" AND EDUCATION ACCORDING TO NAE. - In this long tale, part novel, part didactic exposi' Rousseau relates the proper education of the youth by
wing the training of the child taken from his parents and
schools, isolated from society, and put into the hands of
~ideal tutor, who brings him up in contact with nature's
.. c ~uti es a nd nat ure 's wonders.
· ·h reefold Meaning of Nature in the "Emile." -Thou gh
ucation according to nature" is given a wider meanin g ,
doctrine of the natural state, as previously defined, here
ives one of its fullest expositions and its most thoroug h
Jication. In the opening sentence of the work the funental principle is stated: "Everything is good as it comes
.rom the hand of the author of nature; but everything clegen'ates in the hands of man." We ~eceive our education from
t .ese sources; from nature, from m}h, from things. When the
ainin g received from these three teachers is not harmonized ,
e individual is badly educated. " He in whom they all

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History of Education

Naturalistic Tendency in Education

coincide and tend to the same end, he alone may be said ,tcs
move toward his destiny and to live consistently ; he alon ,
is well educated." Over two of these man has considerable
control · over the third, nature, - "the internal development
of our faculties," - he has none. Harmony in educati~n,'is
obtained by subordinating the education of man and of things
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to that of nature.
.
Nature is a habit, education is nothing but a habit. 'pBut
habiti;-~d in two senses. Primary dispositions, unalter.e'9
by enlightenment, by sophistication, or by suggestion fro
others constitute nature.
Habit in this sense is to ,,
followed; but habit in its mjual significance indicates !h~~
which is acquired by direct imitation of other human bein.lf~
by suggestiou, or by obedience·to command.
Concenv,x~g
this Rousseau later says: "The only habit which
. the child
.,
should be allowed to form is to contract no habit whatever. •
As a subordinate connotation tht'oughout the treatise, ed~u~
tion according to nature thus indicates that the instin~~v
primitive emotions, natural instin cts, "first impreJo
J"udrrments
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reflection,
the caution, t(le experience that comes from:~ ­
ciation with others. " Before this alteration (by habi .
thought arid judgment acquired from others) these
tions are what I call our nature."
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The fundamental meaning of "the natural state !J.ll
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Emile is its social one. This, however, is not, as conlf ,
in the Discourses, that the state of primitive man is sy~ . .•
to all higher forms of culture. But as in the Social C~nt.
he shows how a state of high culture can be based iiP.,
truer political principle and thus a nobler type ~f · so~,i;f:
than that of the eighteenth century evolved; so m the;;sj
he . propounds an education, based not on the forms of soete
t.he meaningless traditions of the school and a misconcepp
or entire ignorance of childhood, but on a knowledge :o~
.t rue nature of man. As in the Social Contract he taug~~:

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only rights of man, natural rights, were those fo1,md in the
fa.ws of his own nature, so, according to the Emile, education
is to be guided by these same laws. The "natural man" is
_pot the savage man, but man governed ~direct-~d by the
: l~ws of his own nature: 'sucfi -ra-;;,-·a:s-are-the-laws~·o( '~ny
·. other portion of nature, are discoverable through investigation.
M~st criticisms of Rousseau (and very many of these may be
, :vahd) are based upon the fact that Rousseau himself, like
most others, was ignorant of the real facts, certainly of the
~~aws, of human nature, and that, despite the lack of actual
~nowledge, he was given to dogmatizing.
} This being, according to Rousseau, the primary meaning
of; education according to nature, an opposition to ·society
't,ollows as a corollary. "vVe must choose between making
a· man and a citizen, for we cannot make both at once."
·But it must be understood that in a citizen and in society he
·Ji~d primarily in mind the civilization of the eighteenth cenµry. In the Social Contract he had shown how a high state
ofJ' culture, one infinitely preferable to the existing one, could
be developed on a different social principle, that of individual choice, instead of that of arbitrary authority. Yet much
ip. ·the situation is of general significance and is but a new
f?rm of the old problem of individual rights and social welfare. The same individualistic solution is given by Rousseau
s 1 vas given by the Sophists and by the early Renaissan ce
le.~J ers. While Rousseau often suggests a rather vague doc-~me of the _rrimacy of self-~ove and love of f!nr .•1ess among
~?man motives, no harmomzation of this c~ .diet is sought
·or found as it was by the Greek philosophers or the humanists
~!." the reform period. As with the rationalism of the early
eighteenth century, so with Rousseau, criticism is negative
and destructive, with little of the constructive element in it.
The positive interpretation i{t to be found in the following
~ ~riod: philosophically, with :ltant and Hegel; educationally,
.
.
W.1th Herbart and Froebe!.

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Hi'story of Educati'on

Naturali'sti'c Tendency -in Educati'on

"The J?atural man is complete in himself;
.
ical unit, the absolute man who is related only to himselC p
his fellow-man. Civilized man is but a fractional unit, whicli
is dependent on its denominator, and whose value consists iii,,.
its relation to the whole, which is the social organization.}
Thus does Rousseau hold exactly the reverse of the though
of the present, which conceives the natural man to be .t h
fraction, which finds completion as the social man as a •unj
in the greater unity of the whole. But this misanthrope, who
at the same time was one of the greatest . lovers of the co
mon man and who had profound confidence in human nature
held that ·~the breath of man is fatal to his fellows." . This ,
is one of the paradoxes no less striking in his life than in .hi
writings. . Education for social institutions, for custom, :2'
these :dominated in Rousseau's period of extreme artificialit
- he / held to .be mere slavery; by it the true nature of,t ;
child ; is neglected and true happiness overlooked. '' T.
whole sum of human wisdom," he says, "consiststin serv.il
prejudices; our customs aFe nothing more than· ~·ubjectio)l
worry, and restraint. Civilized man is . born, lives, and :dL
in a state of slavery; at his birth, he.is sewn up in swaddlin
clothes, at his death, he is nailed in a coffin; so .long as~.b'
preserves the human form he is fettered by different in~* •
tions."
·
Education, according to nature, had a third meaning in .~n
Emile. This results, when the author elevates his chief mea
contact .with the phenomena of nature, into an end· in its~!
.I'•
The mal-education which comes from ·man is to be coun~ .
acted by contact, fearless and intimate, with subhuman nat.
- with animals, with plants, with physic.al forces of all ki
Rousseau was a "lover of nature," and through his teachi~
began a movement of finer and fuller appreciation of natur
which found its expression in a wide school of literature bo
on the .Continent and in England. Rousseau's conceptio
however, based upon a wholly misanthropic view of theJ'

f man in society, was not quite so genial, since it led to complete isolation from society and to the preference for the life
o( the recluse. Both morally and physically he held that
.,,·"·cities are the graves of the human species."
When applied to education this threefold view concerning
~he "doctrine of the natural state" resulted in a number of
Corollaries which were revolutionary.
, ,:~, Negative Education. - The prevailing conception of human
ature and especially of child nature, reenforced by both
r. educ~tional and religious teachings, was diametrically opposed
that of Rousseau. Hum an nature was considered essentially bad; the purpose of religious training as well as of edu.cation in general was to eradicate the original nature and to
replace it - by one shaped under man's direction. Rousseau
opposed this idea with the following principle : " The first
education · then should be purely negative. It consists, not
. in teaching the principles of virtue or truth, but in guarding
the heart against vice and the mind against error."
'"' With him the entire education of the child was to come
"from the free development of his )Wn nature, his own
powers, his own natural inclinations. His will was not to be
·}hwarted.

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" Experience or want of power ought alone to supply the
place of law in regard to your pupil. Never let him have
~nything because he demands it, but because he needs it.
Let him not know what obedience is when he acts; nor what
'a.uthority is when others act for him. Let him be sensible of
·~is liberty, alik~ in his own action and in yours.
Is it not
· yery extraordinary that t)1e persons concerned in the education of children should never have devised any other instruiments for managing them but jealousy, envy, vanity,
greediness, and fear, passions all of a most dangerous tend
~ncy, the quickest to ferment and the most proper for
corrupting the soul, even before the body is formed? At
e_very crude lesson which yo lfiwant to drive into their heads,
·you plant a vice in the depthU• of th eir heart. Some foolish
teachers think it a great thing, that, to the end that they may
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Na~urali'stz'c

History of Education

learn the nature of virtue, they thus should become vicious·f
and then they tell us, with grave countenance, that his natu!~
is such. Yes, truly, as it was spoiled by you. All instruments ·
have been tried but one, the only one which can succeed,;-ir~
well-regulated liberty."
'
By this negative education, expounded in most startli
par'adoxes, Rousseau did not maintain that there should .be ,ilo.,
education at all; but that there should be one very differ/
ent £n kind from the accepted educational practices:,
In one of his letters in defense of the Emile against the mariy
attacks made upon it, the author wrote : "I call a ..p.o_sitive '
education one that tends to form the mind prematurely....gnd
to instruct the chili i~--th·~-- d~ties -that belong to a man ' '.; I
calt'·a negative education one that tends to perfect the organs·{
that;. arel:he instruments of knowledge before -_giving this;;]
knowledge directly; and that endeavors to prepare the way, '·
for reason by the proper exercise ~}he senses. A negatiV.
education does not mean a time of idleness; far from it. .-~-., l
does n.ot give virtue, it protects from vice; it does notr in··
culcate truth, it prot; .cts from error. It disposes the chi
to take the path that will lead him to truth, when he , has
reached the age to understand it; and to goodness, when . h i:_
has acquired the faculty of recognizing and loving it."
. ·•'.
Interpretation of Negative Education. - This doctrine ·-~
plied to physical education dem'anded the greatest freed?
for the child, commended the most simple diet and clothin ,
condemned all medic~l treatment, and insisted upon . a' life.. _>..,..i
the country and in the open air. When applied to the inte
lectual training of the child it tai1ght that little attentio.
should be gLven to the child's intellectual training until . a(t
the age of twelve. "Childhood is the sleep of reason.
Therefore the child should not be presumed to reason-eve
to read or work during this period. In its moral applic~ -.
this doctrine of negative education led to the formation _o
hypothesis that since has had much influence and some

Tendency £n Educat£on

fo.terpreters, notably Herbert Spencer. This is the doctrine
of~ moral training by natural consequences: allow the child
t~ suffer the natural results of his own acts without the inter. vention of human beings to protect or to punish.
As
ri nterpreted by Rousseau this meant, further, that the educator might correct the child so Jong as he could make it
ppear to the child that the punishment came through natural
onsequences and that human interference had nothing to do
with it. If the· child is slow in dressing for a walk, leave him
a~ home ; if he breaks a window, let him sit in the cold; if he
isobeys and gets wet, let him have a cold and be compelled
o:remain indoors; if he overeats, let him be sick; if he is
1pdolent and will not perform tasks assigned, let him go without food that would come as a result. In fact, let him suffer
ili'enatural results of the contravention of any laws of nature
~:of his own being; so far as concerns opposition from indivi~uals, he should be opposed by no will of man, by no human
authority.
, ·,W hile this doctrine has some obvious advantages and con~jns much truth, there are limitations upon· its applicability
ijiat render it entirely unsatisfactory as a -sole guide. While
ei:e is no room for discussion, a few of these may at least
'' qientioned. The value of such a principle depends altogether upon the pupil's connecting cause and effect; but
ousseau has already taught that, during the period wherein
is_doctrine is to be most thoroughly applied, the child does
9treason. Therefore he would be unable, at all, to receive
y moral instruction from such a pro-c edure.
Aside from this reaction upon one's self, it is a large
qµestion whether the effects upon one's own physical
lbeing or individual· welfare are the only ones to be considered. The results upon the feelings and the welfare of
thers are to be considered and cannot be left fer developent merely to natural love of goodness. Further, if all
uthority is to be thrown aside, is there no profit in the
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H£story of Education

Naturalz"stz'c Tendency £n Educatz'on

experience of others? . Rousseau thought; as that expert
was embodied in literature, history, customs, · institutfo
there was little. To those who deny all legitimacy to· autho;,
ity, there is no answer to be made, for the individualism o}
Rousseau is sufficient; but in this position Rousseau himself
was fali from consistent.
. Further, such a training would lead to the judgment
all acts from consequences rather than from motives, and=t
the development of prudence rather than of morality. ·Eve
granting that this were not true, it is diffi cu lt to see 'ho r
s uch an e ducation would ever develop positive moral chara
ter. Positive virtues could hardly be produced through: t
avoidance of non-pleasurable results to one's self : alorr
esp eciall y when the unreflective character of childhood ;:j
taken into consideration.
The practical objection that this methotr
training woul lead to irreparable injury before the child could be educate
. need not be considered.
While th ese gen eral principles of negative education uncle
lie all education, Rousseau held that each phase of educatio
physical, intellectual, and moral, had an appropriate stage; ·
The old attitude toward education - th at it was a procedur
uniform in character throu ghou t and that the child was to be
treated and the child mind to be trained just as the adul
would be - Rousseau rejected; but he went to the other
extreme and held that development of the child was through
sharply defined per iods which had little or n o con nection
with each other and that each of these periods possessed 'a
education of its own.
Education from One to Five. - Devoted largely
statement of gen~ral principles, previously summarized, thi
first book of the Emile, treating of the educa tion of the chit
from one to five, adds little of the concrete. The father is· the"'
natural teacher, as the mother is the natural nurse. By these
two is to be given the early training, for the most part ph
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~' 1 opposition to the customary restrictions of swaddling
· thes, of restraints on freedom, and of indoor life; oppo11tion to the thwarting of natural inclinations and desires,
· .~ of punishment for acts before the ch ild can have any
l!Ception of wrong or of why punishment is given. It
-eludes extravagant praise of life in the country, of freedom,
!: sports and games, an<l of exercise. "The weaker the
., -ody, the more it commands; the stronger it is, th e better it
'beys. All the sensual passions find lodgment in effeminate
·oodies." "All wickedness comes from weakness. A child
- -:_.bad only because he is weak; make him strong ancl he will
·-~.:.e · good. He who can do everything does nothin g bad."
,.: hese are th e pri ncipl es, however defectiv e, that und er lie all
"" is earlier training. Little attention is to be paid to his inJ ellectual a nd moral development. Effort slwuld be mack,
- ·ven, to restrict his vocabulary. "It is a great disadvantage
' ror · him to h ave more words than ideas, a nd to know how to
sa more things than he can think. "
<Education from~ive to Twelve. - This, "the most critical
period of human life," is to be controlled by the two priniples already elaborated, th at education should be negative
~ nd that moral trainin g shou ld be by natural consequ ences.
- tis in hi s description of the proper educatio n of the child
uring thi s period that Rou sseau manifests mo st clearly his
ostility to the type of ed ucatio n th e n pre\·alent. Instead of
ttemptin g , as is ordinaril y clone, to give the child a ll so rts
,,~f ideas, nothing at all s hould b e done toward molding or
·"forcing his mind. Child hood is for its own sake. "Nature
4
desires that children should be children before they are
fulen." The child need not be taught to read, though prob- biy he will pick this up on his own accord. He will hardly
- now what a book is. " Exe rcise the body, the organs, the
nses and powers, but keep the soul lying fallow as long as
his advice. While the child knows nothing of
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Hi'story o/ Education

Natu'ralz"stic Tendency in Education

books and of that. which passes for knowledge, "on th '
hand he judges, foresees, reasons on everything whic
directly related to him;" for this education is to be lar'
a training of the senses, such as can be gained by con'sfa
life with the forces and phenomena of nature. He measu~C~ ·
weighs, counts, compares, draws conclusions, tests infereric '
discovers principles.
" 'ft~[
Education from Twelve to Fifteen. - This is the one pe
in life in which the strength of the individual is greater ~!ha
his needs. As intellectual training bas for its general resµl
the multiplication of wants without any corresponding deve
opment of power adequate to meet those needs, this· is":
one period in life .in which greatest stress can b'e laid ·
the acquisition of knowledge. What will the child dothis surplus of power and energy ? .
-~

ent of a principle far more widely accepted in this day than
•his own. There is little of" book knowledge" even in this
period. Robi11son Cmsoc, a study of "life according to nature,"
.of.self-help, of the uselessness of most knowledge and of all so,cial forms, is the chief book recommended. Knowledge is· to
be clearly distinguished from truth and the useful from both.

563

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"He will endeavor to employ it in tasks which may i>to_,
him when the_.J?ccasion comes; he will project into the f~tll .
so to speak, Drat which is superfluous for the time being., :.;,.T~
robust child will make provisions for the feeble man; but h
will place these stores neither in coffers which can be .·stole
from him, nor in barns which are not his own. Irt order~tll
he may really appropriate his acquisitions to himself, it .l8 1·
his arms, in his head, and in himself, that he will lodge·tpe ~
This, then, is the period of labor, of instruction, and of s~ud .
and observe, it is not I who have arbitrarily made this choi
but it is nature herself who indicates it."
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But, after all, there are comparatively few things ·
known that are of value. Curiosity - that ardor for k.
edge which comes from natural desires, the innate desir
well being, not the ardor for knowledge that is founde
the desire to be considered wise- is the sole motive and
sole guide. The test of all is its practical use. "Let us. ,.
reject from our primary studies those branches of knowt~
for which man has not a natural taste, and let us limit~ o ·
selves to those which instinct leads us to pursue," is his ·&

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l i• Since all our errors come from our judgment, it is clear
hat if we never needed to judge we should have no need to
earn ; we should never be in a situation to deceive ourselves;
e should be happier in our ignorance than we could be with
Ol\r knowledge. Who denies that scholars know a thousand
true things which the ignorant will never know? Are scholars
earer the truth on this account? Quite the contrary: they
Hepart from truth as they advance; because the vanity of j uclg'1ng, ever making greater progress than knowledge , each truth
~hich they learn brings with it a hundred false judgments.
Hs absolutely certain that the ·learn ed societies of Europe
fu "but so ma~public schools of falsehood; and very surely
ere are more errors in the Academy of Sciences than in the
hole tribe of Hurons."
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if..mong other things, Emile bas learned a trade, "less for
~~sake of knowing the trade than for overcoming the preju· ~~s which , despise it." In bis long discussions of the im. ~rtance of the manual and industrial jCtivities in education,
o.usseau emphasizes many of the socfal advantages, without
_omprehending at all the psychological advantages that are so
mphasized at present. At the end of this period " Emile is
' dustrious, tempernte, patient, firm, and .full of courage . . . .
· ~!!" has little knowledge, but what he has is really his own;
'e knows nothing by halves . . . . Do you think that a child
,~o has thus reache.d his fifteenth year has lost the years
"'receding ? "
' Education from Fifteen to Twenty. - Hitherto Emile's body,
senses, and brain have been formed; it is now time that his
eart should be shaped. Hitherto the child has been educated
Jely for himself and by himself; self-love has been the con-

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History of Education

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trolling motive; self-perfection, self-development, the ultimate
end. Now the youth is to be educated for life with ' otnets'
and is to be educated in social relationships. Love for others·
becomes the controlling motive; emotional development, moril
perfection the goal.
· -.H :·
iRousseau first called attention to the transcendent importance of the period of adolescence in education. "At, thls.
stage the ordinary course of ~education ends; but st~i.~t}y,
speaking here one's should begin." Up to this time Eniile
has not been brought, save indirectly, into contact «'witli
others; he has not had to adapt himself to the co·nau '
and interests ·of others; he has known no motives -~S3tVC
those of self-interest and curiosity. He has prob~bly ~~ve~
even heard the name of God. Now his education is to 'Do
strictly moral and religious. Previous attachments for'.- ~er­
soi;is have been merely the result of habitual association;'
they are based on unity in sympathy and upon emotiqp~
experience. The whole character of his education changes;·
"The study proper for man is that of his relations. Wh ile
h~ know.s only his. physic~l ~xistence, he should solely ~tud1
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his relat10ns to thmgs; this is the employment of his child
hood. When he begins to feel his moral existence, he' o.ugb;
then to inquire after hi1 relations to mankind; for this· is ~fli·~~
proper occupation of his whole life, beginning from the perl~
which we have now reached."
· ·. -.~~ •
Self-love, in which are latent both good and evil, is. now
be turned irrevocably toward the good. The basis of 'alh t
is the emotional life. '.' From the first moveme.n ts o '
heart, arise the first utterances of the conscience; and: 1
the first feelings of love and hate, spring the first notioris
good and evil." As this training was to be secured "in-~tli
earlier period by the preservation of his native mcidJs .
through the negative t~aining, so now, not through ~_rec~e
but through contact with men, through the example ·
tutor, through the study of history, is this developmli\

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" I do no_t grow weary of repeating that all the
~~ssons of young men should be given in action rather than
' ·words. Let. them learn nothing in books that can be
t!lught them by experience." And yet Rousseau was far
Lr.om preaching the dangerous doctrine that one should learn
.to avoid evil through experience of its consequences. "There
is ,no ethical knowledge which cannot be acquired through
tfe experience of others or through one's own. In case the
·experience is dangerous, instead of making it ourselves, we
r.aw the lesson from history. When the trial is without con1
~quences, it is , well for the young ma_
n to remain exposed
0 it." Thus, Emile is taught not only to . shun evH, but to
,O good. Especially the poor and the oppressed call for his
:$,Xmpathy and his assistanc~ While he is fir~ ·in the asserli,on of his own rights, and i~quick to the defense and pro~ction of others, he is an exponent of the virtues of .peace.
.' The spirit of peace is the effect of his education."
'Jn a similar way he receives his religious education. "At
~P.e age of fifteen, he did not know that he had a soul, and
.e,rhaps at eighteen it is not yet time for him to be informed
it; ·for: if he learns it too soon, he runs the risk of never
owing -~~~hi~iastcl~~s~-~;n-t~in-;-the~n-derlying- prilleiple othis teaching concerning religious education. Other,)se, the religious ideas the child gets are mere forms, verbal
.JI1itations, worthless so far as real experience is ·concerned.
:ousseau's development of the idea of a natural religion · e'·confession of th_e Savoyard Vicar_:_ occupies a large por'on ' of his work. While this is the portion of the treatise
· ~t caused the book to be burned by public executioner and
h_e· author to be expelled from Paris, we can devote no atten«on to it here, since it is aside from our main interest.
'.tThe Education of Women is treated in the fifth and last
?ok. Though a prolonged treatise, it is of but little inter_,t:here, since it does not elucidate at all Rousseau's main
tinciple. In fact, since Sophia's entire education is to be

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Hz'story of Educatz'on

Natural£stzc Tendency z'n Educatz"on
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determined by her future career as the life companioDji ~
Emile Rousseau violates his fundamental idea, that·, ea
individual is to be educated for himself and gu~ded by ili4 •
needs and rights of . his own personality. The a111mus of ~be;
entire argument is clearly reveal ed in this one sentence O
condemnation of the prevailing literary education: "A woman.
of culture is the plague of her husband, her children, r ~er·
family, her servants, - everybody."

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SOME PERMANENT RESULTS OF ROUSSEAU'S ,.
FLUENCE. The Education of Natural Interests vs. the E.~u
tion of Artificial Effort. - That education is a natural, not ~an.
' \ '1'' artificial process; that it is a development from within, no~ an
. I l t'..: ,.· , accretion from without; that it comes through the workinp
t.. \ _.,} ·of natural instincts and interests and. not through resp~DSO:
( ,(l' - \ to external force; that it is an expans10~ ?f ~atu.ral p~WCl'll
.
\ not an acquisition of information ; that it is hfe itself, not &
preparation for a future state rem ote in intere_sts and
•·
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t
teristics from the life of childhood, - these ideas constltu
the fundam ental teaching of Rousseau. The great vane .
of forms which these ideas have been given during the · ,
tee nth ce ntury, even by many who repudiate the doctrint
(I
and influences of the "great leveler," are, after all, but . .
l: ?'
versions of the truth originally proclaimed in somewha~
'
gerated form by Rousseau.
.
.r.'
The old conception of educat10n aimed to
i,
nature of the child by forcing upon him the traditional
l'
customary way of thinking, of doing , and even of emotJo
reaction; to substitute for the in ~ tinctive or "natural!~ .' .
tion of the child those artificial reactions developed throu
many ge nerations of religious, intellectual, a nd social ,fo
I
ism
. Hum a n affections were evil, and hence the ~ea_rt_.
Ji
. 1 1,
to be separated from the objects of natural desire . . H .
senses were untrustworthy, and hence could not be
the basis of knowledge or of instruction. Human ini;:lini

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instincts, springing from a nature depraved in its essence, were toward the evil and were to be eradicated.
atural interests, as expressions of the nature which both
education and religion sought to repress and make over,
\Vere to be shunned in all educ.a tional processes. To the
extent that an activity or task was difficult to perform intellectually and was distasteful emotionally, to ·this extent it
possessed educational value. The first step in the moral
education was to "break the will of the child," which in its
_erverseness but represented the evil of human nature.
his was to be followed in his social and moral education
the consL nt effort to mold the child into the artificial
forms of conduct, wherein a· real and natural motive was hiden in formal behavior satisfactory to the judgment of th e
dult, even though .i t might conceal a motive contradictory
. the external expression.

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~eligious, philosophical, psychological, social, educational
Jiefs and practices, coincided in this attitude toward the

ild.

,Not 01~ly did the religious and philosophical view reject
educat1011 founded on the training of the senses, the use
f, the imagination and the guidance of natural interes ts and
,~ti~cts, but, as has been seen in the previous chapter, th e
~!11mant psychological views implied the same a ttitude.
he ~.ind as a bundle of faculties was to be developed by
erc1smg these various powers upon appropriate tasks
hos~ value consisted in the difficulties th ey offered. · Th ese
,ulties were considered to have no necessary connection
one a?other, hence· these disci pli11es were separate and
tmct thmgs; th ough some faculties were higher tha n
hers. The hig hest was the reasoning power to be devel,d by appropria te discipline in mathematics, logical dispu.~ns, and the languages; but the faculty upon which all
i•ot?ers depended, and upon the successful development
which depended the success of the education, .was the

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History of Education
memory. Discipline -of the memory then took precedeµ
above all other exercises. The best training for the mem
was afforded by the mastery of material which had i10in _
ent interest for the child.
The social ideals of the time favored this same view. T
child was considered but a miniature adult - of no val
and of no rights umtil he could mimic the way of the aJ.
In this most artificial of all ages, in dress, in manners,
deportment, in pleasures, the child was m.old~d on the P
tern of his senicl-s, with the results that cb1ld life was aim
eliminated from the upper classes. l'revious to the Rouss _
period, the child as he appeared in literature was merely t ,
adult viewed through the wrong end of the telescope. = _
spoke as an adult, thought as an adul~, acted as an adu
Educationally he studied the same subiects as the adult,
preeminently th e language:;; approachecl them from th
same logical point of view, through formal grammar; .m
tered them through sheer effort of . memory; made the same
formal use of them, in the same artificially organized life. -- .All the subsidiary precepts of Rousseau were but con~r
applications of his one general protest against this -eq__ · conception of education. "Take the rever~e of" the acc_~~t
practice, and you will almost always do nght, he adv1,
Hence he reiterated in a variety of forms the thought~,
"Whatever may happen, abandon everything rather~~~t~~
h
have his [the child's J tasks become irksome; for how_, m~
he learns is of no account, but only that he does nothi!J
against his will."
.
Thus in Rousseau is found the negat10n of the conC!!f!
of education of the Renaissance and of all of its s~bs~q~
development. All of these had considered education.}~
the making over of the child in the hand of man throu~li
use of literature, religion and similar mea ns, into a :"_
different from the natural being, into one possessing: k,
edge valued by his fellows, ways of acting approved tf1;

- ·...

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1Vaturallstlc Tendency

in

_h_'ducation

569

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institutions, ways of reacting emotionally approved by
t e current religion :ind morality. To such an artificial proHuct, Rousseau opposed the human being educated through
c ontact with nature, guided by his own natural interests and
etermined by his own inherent capacities and tendencies.
j u all th e preceding period the educated man was the learned
~ 1an, the man possessed of social culture; to Rousseau the
~~ducated man was the wcll-clcveloped man.
~·- The dominant vie\\'S co nsid ered the value of any p:-irticular
training to lie in the effort ncccss:-i ry to overcome diffi.cultics.
.·- ousscau crn1 cei n~d it lo be in the interest stimulated in the
-\i!cl. This conflict between the edu cation of effort ancl the
'~ducation of interest instituted by Rou ss eau continues until
-· e present Lime. The conflict between the elccti\T and the
-·prescribed course in college, between the disciplinary studies
nd the interest or content studies in the elementary grades,
re aspects of the same struggle.
The reconciliation in
beory ancl the embodiment in practice are the tasks of the
- resent.
The fundamental truth of the position that he emphasized,
d th at subsequent experience has striven to reali ze
practice, is th at all educative efforts must start from
-e- instin ctive tendencies. 'l'he effort to thwart them, to
-__ 1fle them, to eradicate them instead of to modify or reorgan, ~e them is the great error of educators. The reacti on of
e''chilcl against unnatural treatment often results in producg' a type of character and a disposition which is then often
o_nsidered inherently evil. "Their first language, you say,
- 'a tear. I can well be lieve it. From the moment of their
ilth, you cross 'their desires; the first gifts they receive from
ou' are ch a ins; the first attentions they experience are
_iinents."
?fhe Conception of Education as a Process - as the process
f Jiving - follows as a corollary from the preceding. Ueing
process it lasts throu gho ut life, or at leas t from birth to adult

570

History of Education

life, and finds its meaning for any particular
future state, but in the process itself: "What must we think," he asks, "of that barbarous cdu
tion which sacrifices the present to the uncertain fut .
whi~h loads a child with chains of every sort, and begins::.6
making him miserable in order to prepare for him , long~_
advance, some pretended happiness which it is proba~leJl_
will never enjoy? Were I even to assume th~t educat~o .
be reasonable in its object, bow could we witness, w1tho . · indirrnation, these poor unfortunates, subject, like galk
slav~s, to never-ending toil, without any assurance tha: su,~
sacrifice will ever be useful to them? The age of mirt
passed in . the midst of tears, chastisements, threats,-:::
slavery."
· ...
Education is no longer a procedure, - artificial,
unsympathetic, repressive of all· natura} inclinations, ~ - ,
which the child as a little man is made into a big man throug
the hands of the teacher. But, throygh allowing natural for,
to have their way, it is the proc_ess of__Qevelopm~~t intQ.•:a
enjoyable, rational, harmoniously_balanced, useful, and hc;D
natural-life~ -- The. e~1d i~ ;eached, not with adult life, but. -Ii.
each succeeding day whenever life has its natural ac~iv
its appropriate duties, and its corresponding satisfac
Later Rousseau says : " A child knows that he is to b~
a man and all the ideas which he can have of man's e
are oc~asions of instruction to him; but of the ideas o(
state which are not within his comprehension, he oug
remain in absolute ignorance. My whole book is but~
tinual proof of this principle of education.j
A Simplification of the Educational Process
education as an artificial procedure, as a ma-king over of
child at the hands of man on the model conventionalize
society, is done away with, the highly elaborated
methods of instruction have no further use.
" Let us transform our sensations into ideas, but le
. jump abruptly from sensible objects to intellectual ,o

1Vaturalz.stic Tendency z"n Educatwll

571

-~ or it is through the first that we are to reach the second. In
~ th~ first movement of the mind, let the senses always be th e
gmdes; let there be no books but the world and no other
struction than facts. The child who reads docs not think,
he merely reads; he is not receiving instruction but
rning words."

is

History of Education

Naturalistic T mdency i"n Education

and its means wholly within the child life and the chil
perience. An appropriate development of C:hildhood : is~,,,
purpose of each particular stage of educat10n; the c~ll
nature and the child's growth are to determine the pro _ .
the child's experience is to furnish the means. All of ' ~•
pregnant reforms of Pestalozzi, of Herbart, of_ Froebel, an~.
of the multitude of other reformers of lesser mfluencettbua
find their origin in the teachings of Rousseau.
In a similar way sympathy with ch~ldhood is emph~s·.
as the qualification for all educational work. "0 men,~,.,
humane; it is your foremost duty. . . . Love childhoc)d.·
encourage its sports, its pleasures, its amiable instincts,i~. .
claims the man who forgot much 'of his own precepts in . '.
own practice. Made theory by Rousseau, made practiceY.
Pestalozzi, sympathy with the child, intellectually, mor~ly, .
personally, has come to be recognized as an essential in t
educative process.
I
·rhe Foundation of the Nineteenth-Century
.
Development. - Finally, it is to be noted that in Rousseau'
teachings, notwithstanding their extravagance, is to be f~u .
the truth upon which all educational development of. ttti .
nineteenth century is based. Rousseau was the prophetJ ~
nouncing the evil of the old; foretelling, yet seeing vag~
and in distorted outline, the vision of the new. He becD#.1
the inspiration of those educational reformers who re~u _.
his vagaries to practicable p~cedure. He was the fo~er~~
of many who, all unconsci!>us of their indebtedness ;to tile
despised revolutionist, have followed in the trails he bl'.
through the forest, until now they have become the tbr _
highway of common travel. The three interpretations ~¥c]j
Rousseau gave to his doctrine of nature mark out the...
of educational deve lopment during the nineteenth eentu
As nature to Rousseau meant the native instinctS, ·
dencies, capacities of the human being as opposed ·t~
acquired through association with his fellows, he dem

n education which was the unhampered development of
ese native powers or capacities. Hence the conscious
process of instruction must be based upon a study of this
native equipme11t, these natural instincts and interests, and
the resulting activities. Th ere grew out from this, especially
. ,in connection with the work of Pestalozzi, Herbart, and
Froebe!, the most important and most fruitful development
~·.in the whole history of education. The fundam ental idea of
· t~is tendency in educational thou ght derived from Rousseau
:j~ that eel uca tion is a natural process, starting from natural
.rinstincts and tendenci es to action, g uid ed by principles derived from the study of the child m'ind in c'Ievelopment and
· the adult mind in its functionin gs. Thus from Rousseau
comes the psychologica l tendency in education.
1
» In a similar way Rousseau's teaching that the educational
piaterial should be the facts and · phenomena of nature, that
.it should consist chiefly in an inquiry into nature's laws, and
~hould be throu gh an intim ate, fearless and constant association with nature rather than man, is th'e basis for the scientific tendency in modern education. This is not to say that
~ousseau's personal or literary influence is responsible for
d~velopment of science and of scientific education during
the nmeteenth century, but th a t his teachings did lay an eclu.c~tional basis for this tendency and did exert a very material
. ilfluence in furthering it.
, ', Finally, in Rousseau's teaching that education should aim
~9.·develop the virtues of the primitive man, or at least what
he considered to be his virtues, that it should prepare the
~.dividual to live in a society wherein eac h should contribute
by his own labor to his own support, should be bound by
ympathy to all his fellow-men and by benevolence to all that
eeded his aid, he laid the foundation for, or at least inftue~ced the development of, the sociological tendency in educa~on. In bis individualism he clearly emphasized the idea of
~t
. I
-,, socia education of a new type. In his emphasis on the

57 2

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History o.f Education

Naturalz's tic T endency in Education

learning of a trade or occupation as a component part ofjed
cation, in his emphasis on certain fundamental social virtueii
in his rejection of the formal education of the times fosteredl
by and fostering in turn the dominant aristocratic classes of
his day, in his emphasis upon the emotional and moral a,s
opposed to the intellectual aspect of education, he introduced
some of the tendencies that have come to be incorporated1
with others already at work In his own times, lhto the socio~
logical conception of education .
This threefold influence of Rousseau on education and the
actual work of the school can be illustrated by the parallel
influence which' he exerted upon literature. This influence
upon literature was more immediate and direct, but not.
more real or profound than that on schools. From Rousseau
came the great movement in romanticism of the later eight•
eenth and early nineteenth century. The combination of
the heroic in action, the dominance of the' passions, the glorification of the sentimental, find here an exposition little l~~
extre me than the more brutal and more frank realism of tlie
earlier period. Attention is turned from personal adventu
and social intrigues to the analysis of passions and th
descriptions of inn~r conflicts. The romantic movement
literature is no less a development from Rousseau than th
psychological movement in education.
In a similar way Rousseau first made the element ·of
·natural environment a fundamental element in the story O
human emotions. With him began the tendency to ~cor.­
porate into the novel the detailed pictures of natural seen
that should form an appropriate setting for the drama: O
human life wrought out on the stage of the printed pa~
The feeling for the beautiful in nature found in him 01\C ·
its most brilliant and most devoted exponents. In literatu
he was the first to revel in the charm of the country
to seek to analyze the influence upon character, of nature,
the mountains, and of the lakes. Thus his influence in

ation toward the use of natural phenomena as the subject.
. atter and the close contact with nature rather than with
books as the method, finds a further parallel in his literary
influence.
.One further parallel presents itself. Though here Rousseau cannot be said to be an initiator, but rather an imitator
of tlj.e prevailing English school, he transferred the interest
In literature from the palace to the hovel, from the lord and
lady to the commonplace mortal.
Minute descriptions of
the life of the common people and of life in the country,
more typical of realism than of romanticism, crowd his one
great novel, - the Nou11e!le Hlloi·se, - as well as his Confessions. Bourgeois morality is exalted; commonplace people
occupy the stage hitherto reserved for the quality; th e social
roblems of the masses permit the occasion for the plot, for
description and for moralizing. What might be termed a
sociological tendency in literature, corresponding · to the one
ip.education and illustrative of one great aspect of Rousseau's
1
doctrine of the natural state," here receives a tremendou.s
unpetus.

574

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575

. EFFECT UPON SCHOOLS. - When inquiry is made for
he influence of the "naturalistic" tendency on schools, the
is not immediately forthcoming . · So profound a
ovement does not have its effect immediately. The answer to this inquiry is secured onl y when the results of
ese later tendencies, especially of the psycholog ical, are
discovered. Immediately the effects were slight; ultimately
'they were so general as to defy measurement.
In France, where the influence of Rousseau on thought and
~ntiment was most profound, the old regime was so thorQughly intrenched in the social organization that chan' ae
b
~Id come only as a result of a violent revolution. In adition
to this the teachings of the Emile were looked upon '
:,,.
,lindeecl, they were, as direct attacks upon the aristocracy

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History o.f Education

Naturali'stic Tenc(ency in Education

and upon the Church. · Hence the vested interests ~an
authority of both were invoked against , it.
Many of di
caltiers, 1 or books of wrongs and grievances of the earl~
Revolution, contain comp laints and recommendations conce~ "
ing schools. In general, a demand was _made for a nationil
plan for education. The work of th e Revolution was chieft
to lay th e basis for the institutiona l organization of educ
tion. Little was carried out, but much was projected. Only,
with certain phases, and those ·not th e most important, can
the influence of Rousseau be connected. Education was to.
, be unive rsal and to be free; but it was also to be large)
political and social. Even this work, the di scussion of w:hich
belongs more properly under the sociological tendency:
(p. 731), was largely checked by the Napol eonic reaction. .
In England, where Rousseau's literary influence was vert ..
g rea t and where his social ideas found many converts, his
educational id eas received little support. True, they called
forth considerable literature on the subject; but as England
Ja cked any sys tem of schools and as ed ucation, though con
trolled t:..o a g reat extent by custom, 'was left almost wholly f
the individua l, th ere was little resp~nse in practice. Th
more restri cted and more common-sense naturalism of Lock
combined as it was with the dominant disciplinary conceptio
recommended itself much more strongly to the matter-of.fa
Briton. The one of these treatises on education of greates
originality was vVilliam Godwin's Tiu Enquirer. There i
nothing pec uliarly origin al in this, - in fact, it does no
approa~h the bread th of interest or of insight of the Emi~
In simp le essay form many of these princip les of naturalisti
ed ucation :i.re set forth. The followin g parag raph gives,
nearly as a single state ment can, the underlying thought of
th ese som ewhat scattered essays.

1' "According to the received modes of education, the master
goes first; the pupil follows. Accqrding to the me thod recom.mended, it is probable that the pupil should go first and the
master follow. If I learn nothing but what I desire to learn,
what should hind er me from being my own preceptor ? The
first. object of a system of instru ction is to g ive th e pupil a
motive to learn . We have seen bow far the established syst~ms fa.il in ~his office. The second object is to smooth the
difficulties which present themselves in the acquisition of knowledge." T~e method appropria~e to this has thus previously
been descnbed: "The most desirable mode of education thereore, i1: all instan~es ~here it shall be found sufficiently 'practi. cable, is that wl11ch 1s careful th at all the acquisitions of the
pupil shall be preceded and accompanied by desire. The best
motive to learn is a perception of the value of the thing
!earned. Th ~ worst motive, without deciding whether or not
it be necessary to have recourse to it, may well be affirmed to
be constraint and fear."

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Each of the three estate s in ev e ry d istrict dr ew up a mhier; the

represent&~

tives of that estate from every dist rict in the provinc e compil ed from thescap

l

:: The Work of Basedow, Salzmann, and Campe in Germany
:was the immedia te outgrowth of Rousseau's influence, and
~~presents the firs~ positive formulation in practice of th ose
revolutionary ideas given only a negative form by Rousseau.
But with these, as later with Pestalozzi and others, much of
the positive formulation was subject to the same criticism
: hat held in the case of the origina l statement of Rousseau .
...,~·- Johann Bemard J]ascdozv ( 1723- 1790) g ave in his early
-career and in his irregular co urse as a stud ent eviden ce of his
"'erratic though talented nature ancl of his unstable c haracter.
Becoming profess or of µhil oso ph y in a Danish Academy (1753)
· he was later tran sfe r reel ( 1763), and, though yet salaried by th e
governm ent, w:i.s su on compcllecl to g ive up all teac hing on
,i,. account of his unorthodo x views.
From 1763 he de luged
. Germ any for many yea rs wi th a s uccession of publicatio ns, and
~ by his µersistency s ucceeck cl in making hi s in nuen ce felt in
+spite of violent opposition on the part of a ll the traditional
Orthod ox forces. For th e first few years he was chiefly inerested 111 reform in philosophica l and religious teaching;

vindal cahier; in th e States -general a ct1rn mittcc of eac h estate former! from th
a ge neral ca/tier for its own estate, anJ these \\·ere prcsen tcJ lu the kin~g~.~~~;Iii~

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Naturalisti'c T_endency in Education

History of Education
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most of his publications were of a religious character, propll"
gating Rousseau's i.dea of natural religion and morality: Tli~­
one of his books most violently resented was Methodical In).
struction, both in Natural and Bibhcal R eligion. Comjng
under the influence of the Emile, from 1767 he directed .hb
attention wholly to educational reform. In I 768 he · issue.
An Address to the Friends of Humanity and to Persons '"

A

•' N ,\TURALISTI C " SCHOOL ,

FRn~f

BAsF. uow's F/c 1111t11turw11rk.

Power, on Schools, on Education, and its Influ ence on Pu
Happiness, which contained a plan for a complete syst:,
reformed elementary education. Advertised through
preliminary publications, supported by subscriptions ·!~O
all parts of Europe from royalty and commonalty - a~l
this Elementarwerk finally appeared in 1774. At th~~ ~
time was published his Booli of lltfetlzodfor Fath ers and Motk
of Families and of Nations. This Elementary Work, for,

579

ren, which appeared in four volumes with one hundred p lates
of illustrations, was a combination of the ideas of Co1nenius,
.Bacon, and Rousseau. It was the first step since th e time of
·comenius to improve the character of the work of the school
through the preparation of appropriate tex t-books and the
. radical revision of th e subject-matter of school work. It
aimed first of all to g ive a knowled ge of th in gs and of words
uite similar to the e ncyclopedic plan of the sevcnteenthentury refo rm e r. This knowledge was primarily a knowledge of natural phenomena and forces; in the n ex t place, a
nowledge of morals and of mental phenomena· and lastly
of social duties, of commerce, of economic affait'.s . I~ thcs~
Rousseau ideas were approximated. The "natural
· methods " of Rousseau appeared as the second great feature
·of the book.
Thus throu g h the "method of experience"
to be taught to read, both the vernacular and
atin, without weariness and without loss of time ; and in a
, similar way the truths of religion and of morality \\'CIC to be
j mpartecl without the acco mpanyin g prejudices, narrowness,
= and formalism of existin g religious teaching.
'· If we are lo accept the esti mate of the historian of the
"_:_mes, these volumes were soon in almost every home of the
' iddle and upp er cbss in Germany, just as were the /·mile
~~ nd the New H/loi'se of Rousseau in the preceding decade. As
Basedow aim ed to reform private as well as public education,
. he effect of this propagand a was profound, eve n if th e char~cter of the education impa rted could not be so characterized.
- 1Basedow and his followers, among whom Salzmann and
- _ampe were the most important, soon produced a wholly new
literature for children. As for the first time there was an
d_ucation designed wholly for children, not controlled by the
eeds, character, and interests of adults, so also this was the
~~t - literature designed for children.
Concerning the work
1
£ these men Schlosser, 1 the great German historian of the
'ghteenth century, remarks: -

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"They and thejr successors and imitators soon d~l~ge
Germany with a silly literature for children, and sought ~to
bring up littl e children in such a way as to make grown'
people into children. Th ey were zealous opponents of both
J esuitical and pietistic education, because they, as well as the
Jesuits, understood how to obtain th e favor both of children
and parents. They put an end indeed to all pedantry, but
we must ascribe to th em and their plans the sauciness and
pertness of that all -knowin g and th erefore ignorant and presumptuous generation of youths, who have been superficialli
educated by them, and of whom we have so many examples.•

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It is not to be understood that Basedow's work
positive and constructive. The greater part of it, especiiill.Y,
his early work, was critical and destructive; and much tlia
aimed to be constructive was ill-founded, erratic, overpreten-'
tious, superficial, and hence ineffective. Basedow himsel
was even less fitted than Rousseau to be an educational re>
former. It is sufficient to say of him personally that he wai'
vulgar, immoral, intemperate, given to the vices of the peasantry from which he. sprang without possessing their funda,_
mental virtues; above all it cannot be doubted that he was
in some respects an impostor and a mountebank. On, .tHe
other hand he possessed an intellectual ability, a cleffni .
aim to reform the educational practices of his time, a t~naclty.
of purpose worthy of the cause in which he enrolled himself,
a rationalistic insight into affairs, and a power of arous!ffi, .
enthusiasm in others. Notwithstanding these defects and·Ui
fact that he was totally un able to carry out his own refo
plans beca use he was so unprac tical, Schlosser states ·
"he succeeded in effecting a complete change in the who
nature of education and instruction in Germany, which Ro
seau was able to accomplish n either in his n a tive country;:n
in France."
The P hz'lanthropz'mtnt.1 - In I 77 4 was
1 A concrete description of the work of the P hil anth ropinum, translate_
Von Raumer, is to be found in Barnard's German Teachers and Educators, p.

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5

31

heralded institu~ion, erected to illustrate the principles of
reformed education and termed the PhiJ tl . .
.
· t' ·
an 11opmum. This
ms itut10n at Dessau was the parent of many oth
I
h
r
ers, more or
ess s . ort ived, but existing long enough to exert a pro.found i~fluence ?n the education of children throu g hout the
· euto111c countries It ·
'd h
·
is sai t at educational institutions
sprang up everywhere like factories After th fi I
·
e na overthrow f ti
Ph -1
1e
l anthropinum, through defective ma
o
ent, "the teachers f
D
nagefn all
t
rom
essau were scattered about
, ~Jar s of Germany, an<l each applied 1J·1se I ' . I
accord111g to his ow
I
' cow s ic eas
d
n Pan, they erected institutions and
otnvedrt~' I what had been previously an honorable offic~ into
ra e.

';•1

a

The fundament al id ea of the ref
·

arm was "education

ac~ordmg to nature," which was interpreted to mea n th a t

~h1ldren

should be treated as children, not as ad ults. that
thngua~es should .be taught by conversational method~, not
roug grammatical studies. that phys1'cal
.
'
exercises and
g,am es s l10uld find a place in the child' d
t.
tr · ·
s e uca ion · that early
. ammg should be connected with "motion and n~ise" .
qildren naturally love these. that e h l 'Id h ' smce
1
·
.
'
ac c 11
s ould be
ug 1t a hanchcraft, for reasons partly ed
t'
1
. I. h
.
uca ioi;ia ' partly
. c1a ' t . at ~he vernacular rath er th a n the classical lana-ua es
hould constitute the chief subJ' ect-matt
f d
. 0 g
.
er o e ucat10n · that
__stru ct10n shou ld be connected with real'f
1 ies rat her ' than
ith words.
The objects of the institution were to educate th
. 1
d poor together t
.
e nc 1
-- f
.
' .a. g ive the former a prope r natural educ a.cm or social act1v1ty and lead ersh ip a nd t 0
prepare the
tter to tea h U 1 ,
~t·
d c "1
nc er more competent hands the in stitution
mue unti I 793 · meam h ·1
'
" l e, many simi lar institut ions
f h.
. ere uncIer way two or th
;_l
'
. ree o w ich were widely influen. " The strong emphasis upon th t 1.. .
acted favorabl
.
e am mg of teachers
y upon the entire German school system.
1

Schlosser, Vol. II, p.

20 ~.

. ;i
~

.~. ~." I

, ·

;i

H£story of Education

'j

j

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r.

I

Naturalz"st£c Tendency in Education

The introduction of " turning, planing, and carpentei:in
into the regular cou.-se of study of the PhiJanthropinum 'fo,
educationa l purposes is the earliest practical recognition Of
the purely educational value of positi~e charact~r to~ §e
found in manual work. School instruct10n from objects a
from pictures here first found an elaboration in a~tual sc~
work. The connection between the out-of-door life and _t
process of instruction was made more intimate. !he princip
that a ll instruction has a moral because a practical outco~.
and that formal moral instruction is of little value when .no_
thus connected, was embodied in their work.
·'
From the later pa ges of this book it will be recognize
that all of these ideas are worked out more e xplicitly b.>'. la
reformers, especia lly Herbart, Pestalozzi, and Froebe!. fl_~w
ever crudely they were realized in the work of Basedow,-;,
work was of sufficient merit to command the approv~t
Kant, while the genera l ideas and the man himself rece!.
the commendation of Goethe. Though Basedow was Jll
out question much of a charlatan in his educational wor
he was also a drunkard and a n impractical visionary, a
same time his work undoubtedly initiated the reform mov
ment in th e German sc hools. His methods of instructio ,,,
geog raphy, physics, nature study, history'. geometry, ,,~~
arithmetic were as revolutionary and as fnutful as those
Pe stalozzi, and his appli cation of them was quite as succ
fol. But since the later reformer came to a clearer""'"
sciousness of the principles underlying the new, and
~
the Rousseau influence the particular tend ency in regar
method along which it afterward developed, further con~i
tions of the mo ve ment must be give n in th at conncc
However it is well to remember that the common pr
attributin'g the reform in education throughout the-::r~u
countries to Pestalozzi is an erroneoi.ts one, and
earlier period Basedow had exerted as profound an i
toward practical reform as did Pestalozzi a generatio .

tn-

latter reformer but continued along slightly different
'. es the movement initiated by Basedow and popularized
'y his followers.
;. Joachim Heinrich Campe (1746-1818) was the leading
ollower of Basedow, his successor at Dessau, the founder
Pf a philanthropinum at Hamburg, and the author of a great
•c umber of works embodying the idea of th e new edu ca tiou.
is Robinson der Jii11gere (I 779) was the model for vVyss'
' wiss Fam ily Rubinson, familiar to childre n of every land .
.•_he didacti c character, the p e nchant for information, espc- ially for that of na tural ph eno me na, th e familiar rnora li zin "
'
""
. e reli g iou s col oring, one mig ht alm ost say th e cant, that
, rvad es thi s little volu111 e is charac teristic of the e ntire mo ve~ent. Among Campe 's works are ma ny for teachers. He
·· lso translated the works of Locke and Rousseau as a basis
;'(or the educa ti onal reform movem e nt.
··Christian GiJttltdf Sa!z111mm (1744- 181 r) was, next to
}sedow and Carnpe, the most prominent of these expon e nts
-(the new education and a most voluminous writer on cdu ca_'o!l. Most of these writings sought to combin e a strong rcli-.
·~us. and moralizing tenden cy with the naturali sti c tend enci es
- Rousseau . As wi th Carnpe, Salzmann , in hi s atte111 p t to
,. body these ideas in a ne w educ a tion a l material, p roduced
many popular \1·ork s for childr en.
·; These men were followed in t urn by a multitude of minor
educators, many of the111 prete nd ers, who soug ht to take
· · vantage of this serious reform move ment, mere] y fo r their
own advantage. As the philanthropinist movem ent was an
inently practical one, this was most easily accomplished .
REFERENCES
eke, Social Forces in German Lzlerat11re, Chs. VII-VIII.
- 1897.)

. ~el, Philosophy o.f l!ist01 y, S ec. III, Ch. II I.

(New York,

Naturalistic Tendency zn Education

History of Educatz'on
Schlosser, History of the Eigllieenth Century, 8 vols.
, " r,. '.
Texte, Rousseau and the Cosmopolitan fnjlt.:ence in Lt'terature, Bk•.I•:,
II-Ill. (London, 1899.)

Rousseau.
Davidson, R ousseau, Pt. II. (New York, 1898.)
Hudson Rousseau and Naturalism in Life and Thought,
'
.
York, 1902.)
Macdonald, Studies in tlze France of Voltaire
(London, 1895.)
Morley, Rousseau, z vols. (London, 1888.)

Doctrine of the Natural State.
Davidson, Rousseau, Pt. I.
Hudson, Ch. VI.
Macdonald, Ch. VII.
Morley, Rousseau, ~ol. I, Ch. V.
Payne, Rousseau's Emile, Introduction.
.
Rousseau, A Dissertation on tlte Origin and F01mdation of the bu
· of Mankind. (English translations in any edition of R~~~eall
miscellaneous works.)
•
Rousseau, A Dissertation on the Effects of Cultivating tlze Arts and ~~ii,

Tlze imlle and Rousseau's Educational ld_e~s.
Davidson, Rousseau, Pt. Ill.
Hudson, Ch. IX.
.
Morley, Rousseau, Vol. II, Ch. VII.
Munroe Tlze l!-liucalional ideal. (Boston, 1896.)
'
,
l'aync, Rousseau's l!,i11ilc.
Quick, Educational R eformers, Ch. XIV.

Th e Naturalistic Tendency in Germany.
Barnard, Ge1'man Teaclzers and Educators, PP· 457-491.
,i
Quick, Educational R eformers, Basedou1, Ch. XV.
~~!II
Schlosser, History of tlze Eiglzteenth Century, Vol. II, Ch. II. .,
TOPICS FOR FURTHER INVESTIGATION
1. What ideals of education can you
Letters to lzis Son.?
z. What agreement b th ere between the educational
Enlightenment" and those of Montaigne?

,\'

585

3· What parallels and what connections can be discovered during the
ghteenth century hetwee n the development of either philosophical, reli'ous, or political thought and educational thought?
4· In their educational bearings what similarity is there betwee n "the
nlightenment" and the fifteenth-century Renaissance?
5· What justification can you find in the Emile and in the other
'tings of Rousseau for this threefold interpretation of the naturalistic
ctrine?
6. What concrete evidences and results of each aspect of naturalistic
ucation are to be found in the Emile?
7. To what extent is Rousseau correct in his contention that educan should be negative?
., 8. \Vhat defects can you point out in Rousseau's ideas of moral
ucation?
9· What are the details of Rousseau's ideas of the educat ion of
~men, and wherein do th ey controvert his general educational principles?
10. To what extent did J efferson and the early American statesmen
e their ideas on education to Rousseau; or to what extent, at least, is
ere a similarity between them?
I I. What similarity and what differences of views between Rousseau
d Locke are to be found? Iletween Rousseau and Montaigne?
12. What basis does Rousseau offer for the doctrine of self-activity
phasized by Froebe!? For the doctrine of interest?
·
'13. To what extent are Rousseau's principles of education applicable
the present time?
·
14. Which of Rousseau's ideas concerning education would be rejected

?
Give a statement in positive form of th e ideas stated negatively by
usseau.

"•I

.

'•

"
~

. ·1
•f

.

'
1

..i'

'l

·~ 1
. ,j

'.!
I

--·--......--·
. CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE OF EDUCATIONAL
NINETEENTH CENTURY

LITERARY

S CIENTISTS

POLITICAL

MEN,

AND

EDUCATIONAL

EVENTS AND

RE LI GIOUS
LE ADERS,

PHJLOSOPHRRS

\ VRITINGS ANO

PERSO?'AGES

EDUCATORS

ETC.

~~:

Goethe
Hegel
1749 1832
1770-1831
\Vordswo rth Cuvier
18~~~pc(:J~~s
1770 •1a5o
17 6g-18 3 2
d istinctions
Byron
C omte
and serfdom
1798 ·1857
17 88- 1824
abolished in
Scott
Faraday
Germany.
177 1-1832
1791 -1867
1814. Bonaparte Colcndge
Hamilton
at Elba .
1772 -1834 . 1788-1856
19 1 • Congress Irving
L1elng
of Vienna.
1783-1859
1803-1873
Bonaparte

Frederick
Cooper
J. S. ~I ill
William
1789-1851
r8o6 - 1873
179 7 ·18.,0 Emerso n
Herbert
i8io - i8 3o . Free18o3 1882 S pencer
dam of South Thac keray
1820-1903
Americ an
18t1-1863 Buckle,
State~ .
Dickens
. HiStory
r8x 7. \llartburg
1812-1870 ofCivili·
demonstration
zatz(m
for freedom.
1857
18 o. Julv
Darwin,
kevoludon in
Origi1t o.f
France.
Species
1 g o.
Reform
. 1859
Gill in
Agassiz
England.
18.07-1873
18
Slavery
Darwin
~~olished in
18u-1882
British
Wallace
colonies.
1820
1 846
Corn
hl..:..,s repealed.
18 8
French
kevolution.
1851. New
French
Empire.
:18 .. 4 Crimean '

~V'ar.

18 o .
1

Franco-

~russian \Var.

8 x. German

t:mpire
founded.
187~ . The
Union of Italy.

Pestalozzi,
fl ow Gertrude
Teaches . i 801
Jacoiot i770- 1840
Herbart, 1776 -1841
Froebe! 1782 1852
Thomas Arn old
. . 1795 · 1842
Rosnum
, 17_97-1855
Herhart s G_e1urn/
Ptdagtlg'ICS, x8o6

Horace Mann
1796-1859
Rosenkranz
r805 - 1879
George Com be
1788-1858
Froebel,
Edu cation t?f
Ma1t. . . 1826
Spencer, Es.my'"'
Education, 1861
Alexander Bain
1818-1887
Henry Barnard
iSu-1900

1Bo3. Sund.ay-schoo l Un~oft
1805. Public School Soc:tet
New Yo;k. .
18o6. Umv~rstty of France •
18o6. Neef 1_ntrod~ccs
Pest;;.l..C?7.7.I m U !uted Stares . .
18o8 . . 1· 1rs t _trc;'ltl ~ e on educat _
pubhshe? m ~mted Sta;tca.
18o<). University of Bcrhn

founded.

1Bo8-~811.

Yon Humboldt :r
o f German
'
18o4-1844 . F ellenberg 1 ,,,"· at H ofwrl.
.
,, }
18u. N "!llonal Society for
Prom~~ton of Ed. of t~e Poot.
1813 . . 1' _irs t St_ate supcrmtcndVai&)
o l ed. 11~ ,United S~ate~ (N. •
1814 . Brmsh and 1'ore1gn
Socie ty .
U '"
1818. L~ncast~r co.mes ~o ·~
1821. F!rst leg1slahve atd fo
cducat!Oll of ~Otll;eU (N.Y.)_
1821. First High Schoql ,
(Bos to n).
• , "
1827 . All schools free In
/
Massac husetts .
• •

s5hool~.

s-•-'

Stoy : 1815-1885 18~ 5 . Cousi~'s R<jorl pu~I~
Otto Fnck
m United States.
~ r.
1832 -1892 1837. Mount H olyoke semtDUJ
Tuiskon Zeller
fo r wo men.
'
I ~
1817 -:1883 1837-1 8~9. Mann Secretary of .
R. H . Quic k
Mass .Bureau of Ed.
.
1831-189:1 1837. F~rst k_mdergar~en.
•
:1837 . First city supcnntendcal
of sch~ols.
~
18~8. Fmt S tate normal &ehOol ,
tn United States Ci'1•" ),
184~. School Board m
City.
• _
185_0_ Kindergartens forb1ddeiii
Gernrn.!1y. .
•~
186o. F~rst kin dergarten 1.a. U
1861. Fust.Ph .D. m U.S.
1862 .. Mort~ll land graryt for
agncu~tural and technical
education ..
18U~rv~!~tuvc system at

N•w.\'.:n

18

t7~m.!;1i~:\~~e~t~}E.Juc~tloil.

1867. All State school• free la
New York.
1869_ English Endowed
Act.
·
..
1870- Elem. Ed. Act in EnJ;.
1873 Kindergarten part of'f,

public school (St. Louis),
1890. Berlin School Conk
1896-1897. University of••
reorga nized.

CHAPTER XI
PSYCHOLOGICAL TENDENCY IN EDUCATION
THE GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS. - These three ten
dencies, th e psychologica l, sociological, and scientific, growing
out of the thought of the later eighteenth century, developed
together and are not always clearly distinguishable in time,
!n place, or in personnel. So far as its full effect on schools
was concerned, the psychological · tendency, re lating chicAy
to educational method, had some precedence in time over the
scientific tendency, relating chiefly to subject-matter, and
over the sociological, relating both to subject-matter and to
brganization. As the direct outgrowth of the naturalistic
tendency, the psychological tendency has the logical claim to
first consideration.
· In the summary of the general educational results of the
naturalistic movement, it will be recalled that all those inauences, save possibly one, related to the method of education as method grows out of the natui-e of the child. The
psychological tendency was simply the clarifying and deveJoping of th ese positions; for certainly the basal thought of the
-psychological tendency was that educa~i911 is _r_1_0J _an artificial
~ procedure, by which one comes into possession of a knowledge
of the -fo~m s of language and literature or of formal knowl_edge of any sort, but that it is a natural process of growth
from within, of an unfolding of cap3.c itiesTrnP1anrea- r1i- our--- --- In other words, education was considered as a devel,opment, or organic growth, which could be hindered or
helped by the methods in which the natural capacities or
activities were_ treated. The great difference between the

586

,.,. '

587
~
-~

,.I

--- ------..-//

l
I~

I

'i

•·:

j

1 .. 1

\

l

·j
', t.

·'
."•

'~

,l

--~

.,

----

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE OF EDUCATIONAL DEVELOPMENT DURING

NINETEENT

POLITICAL
EVENTS AND
PERSO!<AGES

LITERARY
ME N,
RELIGIOUS
LEADERS,
ETC.

Sc1ENTISTS
AND
PHILOSOPHERS

GBN'.l'.UR Y

Ci

EDUCATIONAL
WRITINGS AND
EDUCATORS

.,

TQ
. ·.

EDUCATIONAL

1800.
Goethe
Hegel ,, Pestalozzi,
1803. Sund.ay-school Union (
•
1749 1832
1770-1831 How Gertrude 1805. Pubhc School Society ol
1804. Bonaparte
emperor.

1807. Class
distinctions
and serfdom

Wordsworth Cuvier

Teaches .

1801

New York.

1770-1850 176'r-1832 facorot 1770- 1840 18o6. University of France (
Byron
Comte
Herbart, 1776-1841 1806. Neef m1roduccs
1788-.t824

1798 -1857 Froebe!

1782 1852

Pestalozz1 in United Stares.

abolished in
Scott
Faraday · Thomas Arnold
l8o8. First treatise on educ:uioa
Germany.
1771 -1832
1791-1867
. . 1795 -1842 published in United States.
Hamilton
Rosm1m
1&x}. Umvers1ty of Bertin '
.
1814. Bonaparte Colertdge
at Elba.
1772 -1834 1788-1856
1797-1855 founded.
., _;,.
1815. Cungress Irving
Liebig
Herhart's General 1808-18u. Von Humboldt head '"
of Vienna.
. 1783-1859
18o3-1873 Pedag-ovcs, 18o6 of German schools. ·
Frederick
Cooper
] . S . Mill
Horace Mann
18o4-18..\4. Fellenberg's Sc:boal '
William
1789-1851
18o6-1873
1796-1859 at Hofwyl.
-. ~Le·
1797 -18•0 Emerson
Herbert
Rosenkranz
181r. National Society for
"-:_['
1810 -1830. Free18o3 1882 Spencer
18o5- 1879 Promotion of Ed. of tbe Poor. ·
<lorn of South Thac keray
1820-1903 George Combe
1813. First State superintendent
American
18n-1863 Buckle,
1788-1858 of ed. in United States (N . Y.) .
States.
Dickens
. HistoYy Froebe!,
1814. British and Foreign Sch<d
1817. Wartburg
1812-1870 ef CiviliEducation ef
Society.
demonstration
zation
Man.
. 1826 181 8. Lancaster comes to U.S. ·'
for freedom .
1857 Spencer, Essay 011 182t. First legislative aid fo r
1830. July
D arwin,
Ed11catio11, 1861 education of women (:S.Y.).
Revoluuon in
o,.,"g-in ef Alexander Bain
1821 . First High School
France.
Sjucies
1818-1887 (Boston).
·
1830. Reform
1859 Henry Barnard
1827. All schools free in
bill in
Ag'5siz
18u-1900 Massachusetts .
.
England.
18_07-1873 Stoy • 1815-1885 18~5 . Cousin's Rejorl pub!
1833 Slavery
Darwm
Otto Frick
m United States.
1811-1882
1832-1892 1837. Mount Holyoke scminalJ' '"'
abolished in
British
Wallace
Tuiskon Zeller
for women.
. i ' .
colonies.
1820
1817 ·1883 1837-1849. Mann Secretary of · •
1846. Corn
R . H. Quick
l\fass Bureau of Ed.
'f
laws repealed.
1831-1891 1837. First kindergartcn.
1848 French
1837. First city superintendent ,
of schools.
I '
Revolution.
1851. New
18~8 . First State normal school
French
m United States (Mass).
'Empire.
18.43. School Board in NewYork
18-4. Crimean •
City.
.
•·
War.
18S_o. Kindergartens forbidden •
1870. FrancoGermany.
•
'
Prussian War.
186o. First kinderi;arten m U.S.
18Z_1. German
186r. First Ph.D . m U.S.
'
· Empire
1862. Morrflll land gnnt foe
. founded.
'
agricultural and technical
18z1. The
education.
Union of Italy.
186z. Elective system at
Harvard.
,
180. United States
•
•

i

Commissioner of EducabOf!- ,,

186z. All State schools free m
New York.
-~ r _~.-1
1869. English Endow= ~
Act.
.
. ~
1870. Elem. Ed. Act m of
1873. Kindergarten Par:1 )
public school (St. Lows ·
1890. Berlin School.
t'
1896-1897. U nivers1ty al
reorganized.

586

.,

ion a:, ,:
sych0l n.
ping r
sych01u.

-

.--

·-- - -

...

- ·---------;
~--

~~r=;m::
=

H£story o/ Educatz'on

Psycholog-ical Tendency in Educatz'on

Rousseau ideas and the psychological principles was that the
former were mostly negative and destructive; while the
chological tendency was the effort to state these ideas iin ·
positive form and to give the influences a concrete for;u)a.
tion in actual school procedures. In one respect the centra
thought of the psychological tendency, as expressed by -its"
leading exponents, was a radical advance beyond tha~ .. o'f
Rousseau. The naturalistic tendency had opposed most
violently the dominant education of the school, whose . spiri
and purpose were represented in the disciplinary conception19£
education. The psythological tendency, on the other hand, ·
sought a reconciliation of the conflict between the old "edu"'
cation of effort" and the new "education of interest." But
s.i nce the old remained intrenched for many decades of th~
nineteenth century, and the work of the new was to destro~
it by conflict, it was this latter aspect of conflict rather tha'
that of reconciliation that was ever most prominent. . ::('ljt;
fact that the rank and file of the new educators - those that
followed the lead of the few great exponents without ha,ying
their grasp of the problem:___ emphasized almost exclusiye~
the importance of metlzod, and in this connection the inrnor~
tance of interest alSO;-ied to emphasis upon conflict rather \th~~
upon reconciliation. For while the philosophical . sfatctl)ent ·
of theory by the leading exponents of lhe new rccognizccl ,tb~f
importance of effort, it was in regard to details of methQ~ ,
that the conflict was most apparent and seemingly mo~~ fir ·
reconcilable. Having in mind, then, simply the histo~i~al
aspect, a11d that chiefly as it affected the schools previous t
the last twenty years, one may say that the psychologi . ·
movement, as here limited, continued the period of con~i
The attempt at reconciliation becomes prominent in the .f.o.in
temporary aspects of thought and practice, in which t1i .
psychological tendency becomes fused with other ninetee~th ·
century tendencies, and is to be considered m the concludin
,I ,
chapter.
·; I ,. ·

.'. '. ,However profound may have been the effort of Herbart
and Froebe! to effect this reconciliation, in the popular con~!!ption there was an irreconcilable opposition.
/\. brief
extract, contrasting the main ideas of these two views, taken
from a review of one of Pestalozzi's works by Caroline Frye
in her Assistant of .Education, 1 will serve as an illustration.

588

589

I

psyj

.·

.

."Of the second work, Pestalozzi's Letters on Early EducaliOn, we have little to say. A book written for the inhabitants
of Mars, if there are any, wouJd almost as much come under
our task of criticism. If there be a people between the Alps,
•in the bosom of whose offspring there is an innate principle
of faith and love, that needs only to be cultivated and cherished
by the sacred power of innocence, to produce pure morality
and exalted devotion, this book belongs to them. It need
not have been put into English, or any language into which
the word of God has been translated; for it belies it utterly.
We have no such children to educate, and therefore the book
ls useless to us. I could not help comparing the following
passage, one among many such, of Pestalozzi -- 'I would, in
the first place, direct your attention to the existence and the
early manifestation of a spiritual principle, even in an infant
inind. . I would put in the strongest light that there is in the
child ~n active power of faith and love; the two principles
oy ·which, uhder the divine guidance, our nature is made to
participate in the highest blessings that are in store for us.
Ancl this power is nut, as other faculties arc, in a dormant
~tate in the infant mind.
While all other faculties, whether
m~ntal or physical, present the image of utter helplessness,
of a weakriess which in its first attempts at exertion only
le!lds to pain and disappointment, that same power of faith
and love displays an energy, an intensity, which is never surpassed by its most successful efforts when in full growth ' w.e could not help comparing with curiosity this dream of
ocinianism, with some sentences from a Christian author 2
~~happened to take up on the same day:-' No sooner do
cnildren begin to act at all, but we discover how universally
sin has pervaded all the sources of intelligence. There is a
greater pleasure in reflecting on the images of crime than
1

Vol. IX, p. 363.

2

Newham, On the. Princitles of Education.

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History of l:.aucat£on

Psychologi'cal Tendency i'n Educati'on

on the character of piety ; the conscience is enfeebled :a
oppressed; its voice is stifled and its actions p~rv~rted; t~~
imagination delights to revel o~~r s~enes of m1quity, ~nd IS . .
difficultly carried forward to antlc1pat10ns of future happm~ss,
glory, and praise: the will is enslaved by selfishness; th,~ '
imitation of all that is wrong is most easy, - of all that !S ·
right is most onero:1s, - the j µdgment _is prol!-e to perpetual
error; the evil pass10ns grow and flo:m~h, while the ~ood are
educated with difficulty.' The Chnst1an m?ther will co!11··
pare these opposing principles wit~ the test1mon)'. of Scripture and of her own heart, and will have no difficulty ~n ·
deciding in which author to study the principles of education:'-: '
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The emphasis upon interest and the conception that edu~~~ ·
tion is but a development of germs, or powers, implanted·:µi
the child's nature, formed but part of a large thought w~k-~
constituted an essential of this tendency_. The idea t?a
education should be according to nature, which constitute
an aspect of the thought of the sense-realists as well as· t'-1
of Rousseau, now took more definite shape as a newe~ co
ception of human nature tends to take the place of ~he 'o]
one that had prevailed so long. This newer conception~ i
education was closely bound up with that which at the s~m
time was taking shape in philosophy and in science. Ed.ucationally "nature " now qi.me to indicate the nature, or mind,
of man; and the principles upon which education was tl) 'lici
based were now sought for in the principles of activity an~ of
development of the human mind. It is true, however~"· th ·
the scientific formulation of these principles of psychology;,based upon an accurate scientific knowledge derived .-b
observation and experimental method, was hardlYi »be .'
before the middle of the nineteenth century, and that
application of these to education is yet largely the wo,rlC: .o
the future; but the movement itself was begun in the ~J.
part of the century.
However much the Middle Ages had modified the p
chology of Aristotle, no advance.was made until the_o~~nin

591

modern philosophical and scientific movement, which
was the source of the educational movement described under
· the ten:-1 sense-realism. Descartes, and after him Hob bes
· .~nd Spmoza, had emphasized the relationship between phys.:_ical ~nd mental processes. While this was the key to the
,,:-s.olut10n of the psychological problems, \ ts general signifi~,,ca~ce :vas not grasped until later. Locke, who was not
pnm~nly a psychologist, attempted to show that all knowle.dge is d~e to the data given by sense-perception and reflection. This. again em phasizecl the dependence of the psychical
upon physical process:s and the importance of training of
the sense organs; but its chief immediate influence was that
-)Jpon the associative theory of knowledge, which practically
. cont~oll ecl throughout the eighteenth century. With the
, ?Pen!ng of t.he century there came a marked development of
the idea of psycho-physical parallelism, clue especially to
}:lerbart and · Hartley. Herbart investigated the origin and
d~~el.opme'.H. ~f space and time r elations - aspects of the
· tpmd s act1v1t1~s previously held innate_ as connected with
s:ense perceptions and physical processes. Herbart men~one.d expe~;i_mentation and experien!=e along with meta,_phl'.:'~~-s__and matQ~_matics as the three sources of kn~T
·edge of th
· d u
.
e mm · J. et, so far as his dominant attitude is
c9ncerned, he ~s _rct classed with the old -- psychologists,
who bas~d their rnterpretation of mental phenomena on
JR.,etaphys1cal grounds.
But in completely throwing over
l~h.e old psychology of the faculties, he is held to be the
ounder of the new. So in Herbart, who played
· _
ortant
·
h'
so Im \
a part I~ _t. Is educational development, psycho!- l
ogy . finds the d1v1dmg line between the old and ti )
new. Pestalozzi's gropings after these principles of educ:~ ,
on, fou~ded in a new and truer . conception of the
~uman mmd, were -purely empirical. Even the interpretati~ns reached by Herbart have had to be reformulated_
~~ny of them to be entirely rejected. . But the sig.nificant

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59 2

truth reached was the conviction that this more accu~itcp
interpretation of human_~a~~-t:_as~p.orL.a....cai:eiu sc1en•
tifi~uay ofthe mii1d, was ~~o~ P.O..~~~-~l_e, and t.hat an ado-_
quate conEei)tiOi-1.o C.educ.i tion and any formulation of ~ore
fruitful processes of ins1z:uction must be based upon. ~he
results of such studY·
this general tendency,. v~gu~
and indefinite as, it was in its application to education, we
have here given the term psychol9gical. The most that
can be essayed in this limited space is an account of wha:
those of the leading innovators in this line attemp~ed. , ~; ,
One further characteristic of this tendency which, as -~uat
seen, may not be quite adequately . characteriz~d by the ~enn
psychological, is that it aimed at improvement m the char~c~­
of educatio.n; whereas the complementary movement, w.~1~
in the same general way may be characterized. as sociolo.?1c~
aimed at the rriore general diffusion of educat10n. The 1,nte
est of the men included in this group, or_- mo~e ac.curat~
_the modifying influence of these t~ndencies mclu~Cd
under this term, was directed chiefly to the improvement· . ·
the method of instruction, in the spirit of the schoolroo~
in the character and training of the teacher, and in the pqp
larization of a broader and truer conception of the n~ture .,of

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education.
Thus there followed a sympathy for childhood, a kno'
e child of the child mind, of the child's inter
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and abilities, that were wholly unknown m previous ~e
and entirely absent from the schoolroom in all. previous , ag
While the actual knowledge of the child mind was ,at fi
slight and for a long time was gained by empirical: '_m_
alone, yet educational practice came to .be based ~po~ a stuC1
of childhood, and the theories concernmg educat10n came.
be formulated from data gathered during actual contact .
.

. the child.

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to an entirely different phase of the educational process • .

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Educat£on

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many centuries, it will be recalled, the interest in education
1'\.' as in the secondary and higher stages. All . the early re- ,
formers, the realists as well as the humanists, thought espe- ~ially of the acquisition of foreign . languages and literature
as the chief work of education. Little or no attention was
given to the elementary stage. Comenius, it is true, wrote
o( infant and vernacular schools, but he supervised and wrote
text-books for the Latin schools. The chief immediate inter- .
es~ of almost all those participating in this new tendency, not~ithstan~ing the. fact tha~ Hei:? art made use of the Gref:!k
a11d Latm for his educat10nal mstruments, was in the eleJ.Pentary stage. Pestalozzi's ideas and practices are limited
to work in reading in the vernacular, to writing, and to arithetic. While Froebel wrote concerning the philosophy of
~\lcation as a whole, his practical work and influence was
Qnfined to the earliest stages. From that time to this the
o,rmulation of educational theory and the improvement in
ducational practice has, with few exceptions, related prima'Jy to elementary education. . Since mo.s t educational prin'ples have been formulated with the problems of elementary
ducation only in mind, and since many such principles have
en projected, without sufficient adaptation, to apply to
i~her stages, when applicable in the given form only to
~ose conditions from which deduced, this condition has often
sulted in confusion.
A fundamental conception of the psychological tendency ~t education is the process of the development of the indi·~ual - accorded with the individualizing tendencies of the
~~r eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth .century, and
~th the ideas of social progress, of biological development,
.. ~ of evolution in all its scientific and philosophical implications, that during the same period were becoming clarified.
~ough stated in quite different terms now, the thought and
~n the form accepted for two or three generations was that
'v~n by Pestalozzi; namely, that education was "the har·
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Hz'story of Educatz'on

Psychologz'cal Tendency

monious development of all the powers of the
' The same general idea, in different terminology, due to more
accurate knowledge of psychology, is now expressed in teIJDI
of "organization of acquired habits of action or tendencies to
behavior." This conception of education in terms of
vidual development is an essen tial feature of the psychologic
conception of education, and is one great contribution 'o'f:th
late eighteenth a.n d the early nineteenth century to education
Nevertheless, this conception has its sociological significa~
and coincides with the tendency to universal education in ono
respect ; namely, if education is the process of developmen
of the individual, if it is at basis a natural rather than an · ~
ficial process, it is a process throu g h which all human b~in};s
go and a process from the regulation and direction of whic
. • •'!.<..
all can profit. Consequently there resl.1lts an emphasis upo
popular and universal education that was not possible so fon
as the chief interest was in higher education, and so long ·
education was the process of giving to the child. or forcip
on the child the ideas, emotional reactions, and activities ,(>f
adults.

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PHILOSOPHICAL ASPECT OF THE MOVEMENT.
Closely related to the psy~hological tendency w~s 1 ' t~
philosophical. So closely . related in fact that inste~~ ' O
two movements the psychological movement may be ,,,,,co.
sidered as possessing two aspects, one practical and concre
which through experimentation attempted to work out geri .
principles, the other metaphysical in its characteristics an
aiming at the formulation of the logic of education. · It is oDl
the former that can be considered here, since the men.'r ep '_
sen ting the practical movement -Pestalozzi, Herbart, Froe
- but expressed the dominant ideas gained from the thoifgb
movementtypified by Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Schleierma~het,
and Hegel. As occupants of chairs of philosophy,·t~li~
men found it part of their duty to lecture on education,·

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595

with most it was of subsidiary interest. The one man who
represented ~oth m?vements was Herbart. . There are many.
of less prommence m both groups, especially in more recent
:times, whose writings, though of value, and whose influence,
though of importance in their r.e spective countries, cannot be
qiscussed here.
.~·· The Philosopher Kant (1724-1804) had as a part of ·his
.schola~tic duties the delivering of a course of lectures upon
educat10n. The notes of these were published in 1803 under
the titk On Education ( Ueber Piidagogik). Much in these
·,was carried over from his philosophy and ethics; much was
common to the thought of the times. In fact, his work
reads like a combination of the familiar ideas of Locke and
~ss~~.ll· in .whichthe- e~t~e~~-~-attrraHslU-;;:;a -fre~dom of
,the French emotionalist is tempered with much of the discipline of the English rationalist. The groundwork of the
tr~atise is given in the first paragraph: "Man is the only
emg who needs education. For by education we must needs
u~d:rs.tand nurture. (the tending and feeding of the child),
d1sc1phne and teachmg, together with culture. According to
t!tis, :n~n is. ~n .su:cession infant (requiring nursing), child
(req_mrmg d1sc1plme ), and scholar (requiring teaching)."
While the gen~s of development are in nature, it is only
through educat10n that they are perfected. "There are
., any germs lying undeveloped in man. It is for us to make ·
~~ese germs grow, by developing his natural gifts in their
~ue proportion, and to see that he fulfills his destiny." Thus
is.suggested one of the earliest harmonizations of the educati~n of inte~est (nature) and the education of effort (disciplme).. While Ka~t ~ollows Rousseau in insisting on the
~ducat10n of the child for himself, yet he maintains that his
~~ucation must be "not for the present, but for ~ possibly
rpproved condition of man in the future." The treatment of
.~he subject divides into four topics; through education man
must be made subject to discipline, must be supplied with

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H£story of Educat£on

P sychologi"cal Tendency £n Educat£on

culture, endowed with discretion, and be made ' i morj,J:
Through discipline the unruliness of nature is subjected tO
reason. Through culture, consisting of information and in•
struction, ability is brought out which later may be applied to
various ends determined by moral and practical educatio'·.
Through discretion one is enabled to conduct himself i:witli;l
propriety and refinement in society. Through moral education one's disposition is so trained that he chooses only :good
aims in life. This latter, so neglected in education, ·is in
reality its highest end.
Johann Karl Friederick Rosenkranz ( 1805-18 79 ), th_e ~u~
cessor of Kant and Herbart in the philosophical chair::.
Konigsberg, published a Phz'losoplzy of Education in ~848,
which was largely an interpretation of the philosophy
Hegel in educational terms. M,an"s true nat~J:e is his ide
natm;·~, _
fou.n<! a_t__bj1:_th _<::>_~Jy_i11ge:i:111 .but developed __b_ ; o.
cess of education. This process consists in the putting ·awa
or suppression of his first or animal nature by a process·oi
"estrangement" and of gradual approximation to his id
nature by an assimilation of those things which belong .to
culture: Education is a process of "self-estrangement "1and
of "identification " with the self of that which was previo~slI
foreign and existed only in the ideal. Through the appll
tion of this principle to various phases, a philosophy oh~o
and religious as well as intellectual education, of discipli1;.1e, of
method, and of the history of education is worked out. . -~ '
The interest felt in the formulation of the problem~ g
education by this group of men is largely of a theoretic-ch
acter ; the practical bearing is given through those mention
in the other group.
"~· ~
The Phrenological Movement. - One other aspect of. psychological tendency, in its earlier form, needs to be p'i ·
tioned at least on account of its historical associa..tion; i ~
was the widely popular "science .of phre'n ology," ·now.
discredited that its advocacy is immediately condemn_ed

~,})arlatanism. In its earlier stages, however, this movement
~ad a far more_ respectable following and an educational

59/

i!]fluence of no mean character. The major premise of the
doctrine of the phrenologists is the belief that all nature is
governed by law and that there is a close relationshipbetwee;~~e -physic~J_~-if:~___ P.~Y.c~_ical; its min~r-·pre~is'e,'-that . many
mental fu.n ctions have localized brain centers. Both are
a.ccepted by present science. Modern investigators have, howe:er, rej.ected its conclusion that any mental trait is propor19nate m strength to the size of a given identified portion
of the brain organism and that this importance is indicated
,J. external conformations of the skull. That it was no charlatanism in its day is indicated by the men who were prominent
e~ders in the movement and by its educational influence.
_ ~vat.er and Spurzheim in Germany, George Combe in Engd, Horace Mann and Fowler in the United States were
it~j, chief exponents. In Germany the movement soo~ coaesced with the more scientific psychological movement; in
_pgland it realized itself in the demand for scientific education; while in the persons of Fellenberg, Com be and Mann in
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s the "science of mental faculties" it was an extremely
mpiric.al a'.1d pra:tic~l psychology that appealed to many
en_with little scientific training.
Character and Signi:fice o
is Work. - It must be understood at the outset
'.~t much more .is included under this subject than the per~
-Bal work and mfluence of Pestalozzi; for it is a very com.PU error to overestimate the importance of this one reformer
,.fithe history of education, and a gross exaggeration to
ibute to him the entire educational reform movement of
e early part of the nineteenth century. On the contrary,
estalozzi but made positive and concrete the negative and
.n.eral educational principles enunciated by Rousseau; and,

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Psychologz'cal Tendency in Educati"on

H£story of Educatz.'on
as we have seen, there were many others, notably Basedo~
and his group, who were successfully engaged in the same
work. Pesta~ozzi himself says of these: "Ignorant and 1 fo~t
practical as I was, but with my power of comprehension and
si!!.12!!_~,yi_~fu._I was at the san1e time the lowest hedge scho~J·. ·
ii1aster and also reformer of instruction - and this in an age
in which, since the epochs of Rousseau and Basedow, half
the world had been set in motion for this purpose." On the
other hand, the ideas and practices generally grouped · under
his name are largely due to the work of his assistants and ~of
the innumerable teachers of succeeding generations who have·'
labored along the lines first indicated by him. No one ~as
been more insistent than Pestalozzi that his ideas were ·no
realized by himself or by his assistants, and that it was 1fo ,1fi
the future to work them out in reality.

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gested by
conscious of its importance, and therein lies his greatness.
Around him centered the controversy concerning the new "'
point of view of method in education, and to him and his follow"
ers was due the initial propaganda. To his co-laborers shoul
be credited much of the concrete statement of the new .ideas; ·
to his successors, including the great number ' of unname'"d
but earnest and clear-sighted teachers everywhere, is due the
perfecting of them. Later educational theorists, especially
the two considered in this chapter, possessing all of the·pra~·
tical insight of Pestalozzi, with fuller philosophical penetration ~
than his, together with broader knowledge, have built upon ."
his work a more extensive and stable structure of educatfoniil ·
doctrine than could the Swiss reformer.
In his writings there are many blunders, - there muse 1>0
some for there are many contradictions; and the

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His practices were full of
a suf 1 1es, w o er
· could he have explained the
... .many failures in the application of ideas held to be the only
co.rre~t ones? The desire to be novel at every point in the
- re1ect10n of the old school routine led to many mistakes and
eccentricities. Von Raumer, the historian of education and a
: student in the Institute at Yverdun, remarks: "The source
of the internal contradiction which runs thro~gh the life of
Pestalozzi was, as we have seen from his own confessions, the
fact that in spite of his grand ideal which comprehended
· . the w?ole h~.1~an race, he did not possess the ability and
· the skill reqms1te for conducting the smallest village school."
·; But no one has been more just than Pestalozzi himself in
.' ~ecogniz~ng the limitations of his work, in realizing that
the particular form which he gave to his ideas was but ten. tafr:e, and · that these great ideas even were possessed in
. rudimentary form only. In the preface to his work on
~,m~t~od, written twenty years after the appearance of the first
,"ed1t10n, he says: "If these letters [How Gertmde Teaches J
· may be considered in some respects as already answered and
"partly refuted by this time, and th~1s appear to belong to the
past r~ther than to the present, yet if my idea of elementary
·education . has any value in itself and is fitted to survive
•in the futur~, the~ these letters, so far as they throw light
?n the way m which the germ of the idea was developed
: iin me, may have a living value for every man who considers
''.the psychological development of educational methods
"::.,worthy of his attention." .
. i;' The point made emphatic by the reformer is often over- 1 •
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' ·looked by his expositors .a nd dis~iples. The · significance of
.. ,our st~dy of Pestalozzi in connection with the general psy- /,//
. .'c~olog1cal tendency in education is not in the finality of his
~tv1ews, but in that which. he states, - that here we may see \( /.

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r the development of the germs of modern educational ide.as_: ·
Even in an examination of the practical work of PestalQZZl .
it is evident that the embodiment of his ideas was · v.ery
imperfect and his success in their formulation o~l~ par;.
tia1. Here again we may listen to his own apprec1at10n: oJ ·
his work and that of his co-laborers. Surveying his work from .·
near the close of his life, he remarks: "But the cry 'We c~
do it,' before we could; 'We are doing it,' before we did, was_
too loud, too distinct, too often repeated, partly by men wh.9s~
testimony had a real value in itself and deserved attention ..
But it had too much charm for us; we made more of it t~1an ·
it really said or meant." And in another place: "The h1g~ .
est attainment (in popular education) can only be reached .~~ ·
means of a finished art of teaching and a most perfect psy,•
chology; t~us securing the utmost perfection i~1 the m~cha.n• .
ism of the natural progression from confused impress10ns 0
intelligent ideas; this is in truth far beyon.d my p.owers.';' :~
In the face, then, of his lack of any ph1losoph1cal and :or·
ganizingability, his lack of accuracy, of consist~ncy, of persis
ency, and of practical succe~s, it beco.mes n~cessary to res~\O
the basis of his importance m educat10nal history. What ho
· do was to emphasize the new purpose in education, b1,tt

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vaguely perceived, where held at ~11, by .other.s; to make_cl
the new meaning of education w 111ch existed m rathc.r a .neb
}ous state in the public mind; to formulate an entirely :ne ,.
method 1 based on new principles, both of which were _to ·
c~ive a further development in subsequent times, and t~ ~ ,
under his name; and, finally, to give an entirely new sp1pt t!
the schoolroom.
' · •~ .
The significance of much of Pestalozzi's w.o:k was th~t
was experime!!ig.tion .no_w__su bstituted__fu.~~on as <I,(?~
for edu cation al work. He.nee its value hes, not many parf! .
lar form of experiment, but in the final results attained i ~r.
since we are even yet far from finality, in principle or practi
still to be attained. In much, then, Pestalozzi was a ~e

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Psychological T endency in Educat£on

601

than a teacher. "My views of the subject," said he,
"came out of a pe1~ sonal striving after methods, the execution
of which forced me actively and experimentally to seek, to
gain, and to work out what was not there, and what as yet I
r,eally knew not." Consequently, more than in the case of
any other man in the history of education, it is necessary to
-! I
study his life and experience·in order to understand his ideas,
) / l•
for these are not always the same, but develop. They are th e
) ) )
e experimental life which he led.
direct out rowt
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" .r...,
racfical success
n'· these mes he failed to obtain; but the failure gave him
ni opportunity for tryin g an experiment even nearer his
'"
·eart's
desire, the founding of a philanthropic institute for
liestitute children. Meanwhile he had been experimenting
in the attempt to bring up his one child according to the
~as of the Emile. Experience led him to see many. of the

602

P sycholog£cal Tendency in Educat£on

History of Education

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deficiencies as well as the excellencies of t~is negative trea?s~
and put him on the road toward his life's great task, in .th~
positive formulation of these ideas. His first cduc~tional :i
work, entitled A Journal of a 1'atlicr, - one of the earliest ej(.
amples of child study,-.was a further result of this experience..
The philanthropic venture mentioned above ':as .an educ~
tional experiment as well, for it was but an apphcat10n of }he
doctrine advocated by the naturalists, that ~he characte.r , o~
individuals is shaped by their environment. Reduce this to
as nearly natural conditions as possible, they held, and ch~~~
acter will be formed or developed. So N euhof becam~ . a
refuge for some score of beggar children, or children _of poo
parents who gave them no care. The development of · tlie
factory system of labor had already begun to accentuate the.
economic 'division of the people and to produce a poverJ:Y
stricken class, whose children were much 'more neglect~d
than tho~e of tlie peasantry and of whom no care was tak:en:
save· by th~ poorhouses or charitable in titutions that but in
creased the moral and industrial evils.

the revolutionary movement, devoted himself chiefly to literary
·work. For nearly two years he served as editor of the Swiss
Popular Gazette, published under the authority of the Directory
of the revolutionary government, and intended as a means of
i~tendin the educational
··
e revolution.

- not the current education, but a
ffiaCwould produce a moral and intellectual
people . . This, now, is a truth complementary to the pa~tial one
upon which he based his work at Neuhof. The earliest one of
these purely educational works was The Evening Hour of a
Hermit, published in I 780. This consisted of one hundred
and eighty propositions which contain the &erms of all his
later more concrete work combined with the . naturalistic
doctrines of Rousseau. Their character can be indicated by
a selected few .
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in spinning and weaving
.
and in other occupations. While so engaged they al!)o spe9t
some time in reading and committing passages to memory.
and especially in arithmetical exercises. The:e was no ~~al
connection between the occupations and the mtellectual _ac~
tivities, but Pestalozzi demonstrated at least that the tWo.
could go on together. The combined functions of manager,
farmer, manufacturer, merchant, schoolmaster, was beyond
the ability of the reformer. This, together with .the __fa<;~
that the children were practically the refuse of soc1ety, .apd1
that their parents and people in general were without an·
appreciation of his enterprise, but were rather hostile to
led to its abandonment.
During the next eighteen years Pestalozzi, as a partic~pa~~ i~

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I_.· " All the pure and beneficent powers of humanity are
neither the products of art nor the results of chance. They
'are really a natural possession of every man.
ment is a. universal human need." "
which develops the forces of humanity, mus
e easy
open to all ; education, which brings true wisdom and peace
.of mind, must be simple and within everybody's reach."
."Nature develops all the forces of humanity by exercising
them; they increase with use." "The ex~cise of Cl: man's
faculties and talents, to be profitable, must follow the course
laid down by nature for the education of humanity." "This
is why the man, who, in simplicity and innocence, exercises
his forces and faculties with order, calmness, and steady
application, is naturally led to true human wisdom; whereas,
he who subverts the order of nature, and thus breaks the
due connection between the different branches of his knowlbasis of knowledge,
!!dge, destroys in himself 1ivt only the true
,
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but the very need of such a basis, and becomes
appreciating the advantages of truth." "When . men •are
anxious to go too fast, and are not satisfied with nature'~
development, they imperil their inwar<l streugth, and destroy
the harmony an<l peace of their souls." "When men rush
into the labyrinth of words, formulas, and opinions, without
having gained a progressive knowledge of th e realities of life;
their minds must develop on this · one basis, and can have
no other source of strength."
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e,
·written as a nove,1;
in practical reform
a ge neration later. This new education was to consist in a ·
moral and intellectual development of the child and, in turn, ·
was to I produce a similar reform in society at large . . Jh~
purpose of the book was to depict the simple village life
of the people and the great changes caused therein by. ~he
insight and devotion of a single ignorant woman, Gertrud
By her industry and patience and. skill in educating, thejr.
children she saves her husband, Leonard, from idleness' a.~a
drink. Neighbors, children, and neig hboring families are
•
finally brought within the influence of the new ideas; an~l by.
the simple methods of this peasant woman this new purpqse
in education effects the reform of the entire village. ·Wha~·
was done in Banal, Pestalozzi held could be done in every ·
village. This was his mission ru: life: to work out in d~tan·
the .methods of this education that was to effect the regenera
ti_o n of society by securing for every child th at moral ianc\
intellectual development which was his natural right and inhe'r"
itance. Written as a "book for the people" it failed, 1 a's .~a
matter of course, in reachin g the ignorant masses; and the_·
three succeeding volumes, designed to give the reading public,
reached by the first, a more detailed knowledge of the . new
education, failed to interest it at all. In reading this .simp le

tale it is difficult for one now to understand its popularity and
influence. But coming in a period of romanticism, it appealed
to the popular fancy, and in a period of social agitation it
appealed to the enthusiasm and hopes of the thinking classes.
yYere it not for the ge rms of the great movement contained
therein, it would survive now only as a juvenile moral tale.
-..," While there were many other educational treatises produced by him during this period, but one can be noted here.
'That is his Resea1,c!tes into tlte Course of Nature £n tlte Devc/~pment oj tlte Human Race . . Into this brief treatise Pestalozzi
, put three years' labor in the endeavor to give a philosophical
formulation to his own ideas, which at that time were but a
restatement of Rousseau's theses. As he possessed neither
the philosophical insight to state the logic of his own ideas
or practices, nor the literary skill to improve upon Rousseau,
. he was in this unsuccessful.
• l l • l ?there occurred a complete change in Pestalozzi's
career. Hitherto he, like others, had been theorizing about
the new education, concerning which he knew little con" cretely, and criticising the old - the evils
which were
patent on ·every side.
he at length
the means to social reform
· was to demonstrate in a practical way its efficiency. No
· more remarkable testimony concerning the value and the
-validity of l1is fundamental educational ideas can be found
. than that this man who did not begin to teach until after
·' fifty years of age and who, from the practical point of view,
. failed in every enterprise he undertook in his long life,
should, after all, have had more influence than any other one
person in the educational improvement of the nineteenth century.' One chief reason for this was that his ideas were the
.. results of experimen~ation. Consequently the truths reached
were not completed and closed formulas, but rather suggestions for the guidance of the work of education, which, since

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the concrete personal elements to be dealt with are never
fully determinable in advance, must always partake some~hat .
of the nature of experimentation. Where, as it readily coul
the Pestalozzian influence realized itself in the imposition of
fixed formulas of procedure, there the least benefit resulted.
Where spirit and purpose prevailed, it became the gem~ . of ·
the broader educational thought and more intelligent practice.
of the latter part of the nineteenth century. But event i£
credit be given to Pestalozzi only for this more restrictd
influence, it is something to have established scientific experi~
mentation, rather than mere theorizing or mere empiricis
as the source of educational truths.
i '·
In the year mentioned, Pestalozzi's connection with the go¥
ernment publication having ceased, he accepted the charge io
those children in one of the districts of Switzerland mad
orphans through
eople by the Fre~'c
soldiery. ·
~··· es.
fl ere agam, as m.t
c e o 1s ear 1er expenence, 11s
damental purpose was·to
combine educational activities with handwork . ,But now. he
saw not only that the two could be carried on together, but that,
if an approach differing from that of the ordinary schoolr9om
was made, much of the experience that was most valuable for. ·
mental development came directly from those activities ini ·
which the children were immediately interested. Pestalozzi's ·
own statement of this work is full of the meaning of the n~'!'
truth. "Here is the principle upon which I acted: Seek
first to open the heart of the children, ~nd, by satisfying
their daily needs, mingle love and benevolence with all t~eit
impressions, experience, and activity, so as to develop theso
sentiments in · their hearts; then to accustom them to knowl·
edge in order that they may know how to employ ·.t heir•,
benevolence usefully and surely in the circle around them.'~
In this, as in all of Pestalozzi's later work, we find the key
his educational influence, - the essential to reform is a .-ne.
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and new spirit in all educational works. The for.
tunes of war terminated this experiment in less than a year.
Pestalozzi, now a drscreaited vision-

_omenius and earlier reformers,
Here Pestalozzi
'first announced his great aim, "I wish to psychologize eduThe recognition that the public failed to give was
furnished by some friends among the progressive officials of
revolutionary and hence philanthropic bent, and by some
schoolmasters, appreciative of the great significance of these
~ new ideas, who now attached themselves .as assistants.
To
·these Pestalozzi owed the avoidance of complete failure and
the educational world the carrying to a successful issue of
,,·this first stage · in modern educational reform. A private
·school, partially endowed by the government, was established, where for some four years experimentation, both with
the pupils and teachers along the line of the new thought,
'.continued.
. The great purpose now clearly held before him was to answer the fundamental educational question which was a chalJenge to the existing .education respecting its purpose and its
means. These inquiries were to determine what knowledge
·.and what practical abilities were necessary for the ' child, and
, how they could be furnished to the child or obtained by
.' him. This period produced Pestalozzi's most systematic work
: - How Gertrude Teach es her Children (1801)-which was
an attempt to answer the above questions. At least it is the

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most definite answer Pestalozzi himself gin:s to these tj~~
tions. But its value lies more in its suggestiveness an~'· in.
its indication of the fundamental problems with whi~h·i the :
author was' struggling than in the specific auswcrs it furnishes
to the questions raised. This work at Burgdorf, dire~t~~ ,
both toward the education of the children and the training
of teachers, was watched with great interest by publicists
philanthropists, was . assisted by the government, and · ~_?
widely discussed through pamphlet and magazine con_t~
versy. But again withdrawal of the meager though nee
sary support, on account of political changes, together wit
disagreement among the directors of the institute themselv
led to its abandonment, and
for his last a
longest experiment.
Among this Frencti-speaking people,
believed his reform would make
Pestalozzi labored

tion that we have found to be common to most educational··
reformers since the early Renaissance; namely, that education
is to become the chief means to social reform. This idea, however, possessed a peculiar significance during the latter half
qf the eighteenth century, since that was a period in which
the greatest variety of remedies for social evils were advoc~ted.
New religions, no religions; new governments, no
. govern men ts; new societies, no society - all were suggested.
~ocialism, an?-rchism,communism, pure individualism, atheism,
deism, naturalism - all found their advocates. Every form of
.Utopia found its devotee, while the practical means chosen
by all was revolution. Throughout all this period of turmoil,
e.specially during the period of his literary activity, the voice
bf Pestalozzi in suggesting education - a new education - as
the means for social regeneration became clearer and clearer.
. Few among those that in previous periods had held edu. cation to be the means for social regeneration had considered
that it was necessary for the masses.
Such as had, were
chiefly the Reformation leaders, who viewed the entire subject
·from the religious point of view. Even those, such as Comenius, who took a broader point of view and held that the
edi.ication of the masses in every phase of knowledge was
,desirable from reasons other than the purely religious, were
'far from the thought of Pestalozzi. The latter had in view
an entirely different conception of education - one that
had little or nothing to do with the comprehensive encyclo. 'pedism of Comenius, but that related solely to the develop.. p1ent of the child's nature, mental, moral, physical. In other
·.words, what Rousseau had demanded in a theoretic way,
'for one individual, Em£le, Pestalozzi demanded for every
' child, no matter how poor and humble his surroundings or
· how limited his capacities.

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Text- oo s were comp1 e , numerous
versial articles were published, students were trained for vari
ous European countries, and visitors were· welcomed frpm_
almost every civilized people. The obj ect of the work was '
a further definition of the problems raised at Burgdorf and ·
the propagation of· these school reforms. But the task~ ~f
managing the institute; not to mention th at of conducting, a,
world reform, was too great for the old enthusiast, who fwas
past sixty before the institute was found ed and who neyf r
possessed the ability for practical management. The imp_rac
ticability of the founder, together with the dissensio~s, bot~ .
private and public, of his assistants, did much to d1scr_ed1
his work of reform, and render it profitless to study,:?:
life further in detail.
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Throughout his long life Pestalozzi was moved by a co~v~eo
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Psychologz"cal Tendency in Education

tion and that which he held. The peculiar turn which Pesta-:
Iozzi gave to Rousseau's doctrine concerning. the detri~~~@J
influence of the arts and sciences was that through their iden•
tification with education, popular education comes to ht;
mere form without any resulting benefits for the mas~es,
while the learned classes grow into greater knowledge, po-.y_~. ,
and indifference to the needs of the masses. In his H~
Gertrude Teaches he says: -

stifling machines for destroying all the results of the
power and experience that nature herself brings to life in
them. You know it, my friend. But for a moment ~~icture
to yourself the horror of this murder. We leave children up
to their fifth year in the full enjoyment of nature; we. let every
impression of nature work upon them; they feel their power;
they already know full well the joy of unrest~airied liberty an
.- all its charms. The free natural bent which the sensuou
happy wild thing takes in his development has in them al
"ready taken its most decided direction. And after they hav
enjoyed this happiness of sensuous life for 'five whole years,
,we make all nature round them vanish before their eyes;
..tyrannically stop the delightful course of their unrestrained
freedom ; pen them up like sheep, whole flocks huddled to'·gether in stinking rooms; pitilessly chain . them for hours,
. days, weeks, months, years, to the contemplation of unnatural
' and unattractive letters, and, contrasted with their former con~
dition, to a maddening course of life."
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" Europe, with its system of popular teaching, ~as · ~~Ile ,
into error, or rather it has lost its way. On one side it has
risen to an immense height in the sciences and arts; on _tho ~
other it has lost the whole foundation of natural cult~re 'fof
the bulk of the people. No p;;i.rt of the wor_ld has i;1se1_1 ·~9i' .
high; no part has sunk so low.
Our cont~nent resem?les ,
the great image mentioned by the prophet; its golden he~Cl
touches the clouds, but popular instruction, which should be.a
this head is like the feet of clay. In Europe the culture~ of
the peopie has become vain babbling, as fatal t~ faith as;to
true knowledge; an instruction of mere w~rds which contain
a little dreaming and show which cannot give us the calm w.1s- .
dom of faith and love, but, on the contrary, lead t? :inb.ehefi
and superstition, to selfishness and hardnes~. It is md1sp_u
table that the mania for words and books, which has absorbe~
everything in our popular instruction, has been carried so ,f
that we cannot possibly remain long as we a~e. Everyth1~g
convinces me that the only means of prcscrvmg us fro~ r
maining at a civil, moral, and religious dea~ level i_s to aban•
don the superficiality, the pieceme~I, a~d 1~1~atuat10n of. o.fi~
popular instruction, and to recogmze mtmt1on as the t~ue
fountain of knowledge."

" Their power and their experience both are. great at th,i age ; but our unpsychological schools are essentially on~y

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"Whatever, therefore, man may attempt to do by his tuition,
he can do no more than assist in the effort which the child
· makes for his own development. To do this so that the impressions made upon him may always be commensurate to the
growth and character of the faculties already unfolded, and,
at the same time, in harmony with them, is the great secret
of education. The knowledge to which the child is to be led
' by instruction must, therefore, necessarily be subjected to a
certain order of succession, the beginning of which must be
'adapted to the first unfolding of his powers, and the progress
.kept exactly parallel to that of his development."

,.
con ams
,
,
or and its properties, is placed in
'the soil. The whole tree is an uninterrupted chain of organic
parts, the plan of which existed in its seed and root. Man is
similar to the tree. In the new-born _c hild are hidden those

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ac ica pow
o man mus be tnur; ·
tured within himself and not from artificial substitutes. Thus~
faith must be cultivated by our own act of believing, noti by
reasoning about faith; love, by our own act of loving, not'p
fine words about love; thought, by our own act of thinking,·
not by merely appropriating the thoughts of other men ;tand
knowledge, by our own investigation, not by endless talk aboµt
the results of art and science." •
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individual the germs of all the powers, sentiments, faculties.
. aptitudes that were needed for their successful, satisfactory,
and useful participation in their walks of life and in the satis.faction of the needs of society. Directed, as it was, toward
g~ving. the child possession of forms or of merely acquainting
,him with them, -forms of religious thought through the catechism, forms of thought through the mere ability to read words,
~orms of practical or scientific procedure through the mere
!llemoriter knowledge of mathematics, or the forms of culture
through the dead languages,-::- the existin education did not
accomplish this adjustment.
bf this, but something infinitely greater:
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These somewhat extended quotations give Pestalozzi's co
ception of education more clearly than would a similar ~~ou~
of exposition. Education is but the organic develop~ent oi
the individual, - mental, moral, physical. This development
comes in each of these phases by doing, through activitie~ initiated .by spontaneous desire for action, which leads to growth,
and along lines predetermined by the nature of the organism,...:.
the child. It does not come by forms of procedure established
by custom. To quote the definition in · its more traditional
form, education is the natural, progressive, harmonio~~~ d.e-.
velopment of all the powers and faculties of the human 'Qein
Starting from the new purpose that Pestalozzi gave t~ e
cation, the elevation of the common people from their 1ign
ranee, squalor, and misery, he was compelled to give tcd t ·
new meaning. His early experiences taught him that "i\l}e
material degradation could not be removed save by · th
removal of the intellectual and moral poverty and depravi
f
The removal of this, or rather the g rowth of the individ1f "
composing the submerged portion of humanity into the mo ...
and intellectual maturity for which they as well as the chos
few were destined, constituted education. He found in 'eicli

e nove y o a t is was not in the
pew
of the nature and powers of man, their
oevelopment and manner of action, but in the application of
this to education, - or more distinctively, - to the schoolr_oom. The school-teacher has to deal with these powers of
~~tion directly and his function is to furnish appropriate
1eans and material for activity. Pestalozzi's insistence that
Jhere was a natural order in the development of the child's
mind _and that all educational activity should be based upon
o.r gmded by the knowledge of that growth, is not a preten1011 to the accurate knowledge of those laws of the mind's
.a.ct!vity and development. That degree of finality was only
c~ai?1ed for him by his disciples of a later generation. But.
h1~ is the honor of having first insisted upon the necessity of
~his kn~wledge as a basis for instruction, a view which later
generat10ns have accepted in their continued endeavor to
J.nc:ease this ~nowledge which the great refo~mer sought.
This general idea of growth and of organic development
through activity had been formulated by Lamarck into a
'general philosophy or scientific hypothesis, and had received

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many special applications.· It wa~ Pestalozzi's work to ~pply
it to the schoolroom, and to attempt to organize activ.ities
appropriate both to intellectual and ·to moral development..
It is in this work, then, a work specifically related to metho~, ·
. that Pestalozzi exerted his greatest influence, and it is in 'tliis
connection that he merits the greatest praise.
.

was bette~ adapted for a school than that of my competitor, they
h~d appomted me ~c?oolmaster.
No doubt I felt happy at
this· unexpected decis10n, though I had no reason to be very
proud of my salary, which was only one dollar per week,
w~ile my vanquished opponent was appointed policeman,
with one and a half dollars per week."

si
cance o t e es ta ozz1an reform in method can e ·a
predated only when the character of the contemporary school
room is kept in mind. In the village school in Burgdorf;
where Pestalozzi was barely tolerated, even for a few montns;
. '
as assistant, the master was the ignorant village shoemakel\
,;.
who "kept" school in his shop and cobbled meanwhile•.
Kruesi, Pestalozzi's ablest assistant, gives· this account of' liJlr
first appointment as teacher, an office for which he haci;:'no
preparation, though, as later experience showed, one / for
which he possessed great natural aptitude: "The day of examination arrived. One candidate, · old~r
than myself, exhibited his learning-. He was ordered to read
the first chapter of the New Testament and write some lines,
- a task which took him half an hour to perform. I ·w~
called in. The examiner placed before me a genealogical
table from Adam to Abraham, as a reading exercise . .· He
· then handed me an unmen<led quill pen, desiring me to 'writ
something. 'But what shall I write? ' said I. 'Write tlie
Lord's Prayer, or whatever you like,' was the reply. As .I
had no knowledge, either of parts of speech or orthography,
or of punctuation [he explained elsewhere that he scatter$d
. capital letters at equal distances thinking they were for orn.~
ment ], the result of my scribbling may be imagined. rThis
was all the examination, and after it we retired. When <we
were recalled, the chairman informed us that neither 1 had
been found overburdened with learning; that one of us was
b.etter in reading, the other in writi.ng; but, that since,. 9::1.·
nval was already forty years old, while I was only eighteen,
they thought I would sooner acquire the necessary knowledge.
Moreover; since my dwelling [the town nad no schoo!housel
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·: So, we find the village watchman, · the bricklayer, the rope
·· maker, the crippled soldier, the widow, or any one whose
' occupation did not consume an his time or furnish him with
More fre·complete living, was chosen as schoolmaste~.
'1quently ~he convenient house which they o~cupied was of
· greater importance than their qualification as teachers .
• .When one turns to the character of the work of the school,
. the reasons for this can be readily understood. The work of
.. ,t he two schools mentioned above, and, with possible slight
alterations, that of all the regions around, consisted of a
primer (spelling and name book), a reader (the beginnings
.of Christian doctrine), the Heidelberg catechism and the
Psalter. Besides learning to read, that is, the mere ability to
. recognize forms of words, the work of the school was pure
. memorizing of theological or religious texts. This constituted
· both moral and religious education. The method in which
· 'this work was done is thus described by Diesterweg: ·. "Each child read by himself; the simultaneous method
was not known. One after another stepped up to the table
"Where the master sat. He pointed out one letter at a time,
and named it ; the child named it after him ; he drilled him
in recognizing and remembering each. They then took letter
'by 'letter of the words, ·and by getting acquainted with them
, in this way, the child gradually learned to read. This was a
;.difficult method for h~n!, a very difficult one .. Years usually
passe~ before any facility. had been acquired; many did not
) earn m four Y.ears. It- was imitative and purely mechanical
)abor on both sides. To understand what was read was seldom
. thought of. The syllables were pronounced with equal force,
~nd the rea.din g was without grace or expression.
Where
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Hi'story of Education

by heart was practiced. The children drawled. out t~xts of
Scripture, Psalms, and the con~ents of the catechism fr?m _
the
beginning to end; short quest10ns and lon g answ7rs ahk~, all
in the same monotonous manner. Anybody with. dehca_~_
ears who heaud the sound once would r emember it all H.11
Jife long. There are people yet living, who were taught ·in
that unintelligent way, who can corroborate these statements.
Of the actual contents of the words whose .sounds they had
thus barely committed to memory little by little, the ch1l~ren
knew absolutely almost nothing. They learned sui:erfic1ally
and understood superficially. Nothing really passed mt? th~ll'
minds; at least nothing <luring their school years. 1 h~ ln•
struction in singing was no better. The master sang to th~m
the psalm tunes over and over, until they could sing t~~m,,~~!' .
rather screech them, after him. Such was the cond1t10Ii ol
instruction in our schools during the sixteenth, seventeenth
and two thirds of the eighteenth centuries ; c~nfined to.one
or two studies and those taught in the most imperfect -~d
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This, in Pestalozzi's
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Psychological Tendency in Educati'on

61 7

1llverage elementary school in England much later is well

~nown.

·The character of the school which Pestalozzi would substiThe school was to be a
transformed home, approximating the same relationships,
4uplicating the same spirit, seeking the same ends; that is,
the moral and intellectual development and the material
~etterment of the child. It is the peculiar excellence of
l>estalozzi that he was the first to make great progress in
indicating the practical wa in which these new educational
ideas could be realized.

ts ase on e un amen a concep 10n
of what education is; namely, the continuous development of
t~e mind through appropriate exercise so selected that there
:Will result a harmoni ous a nd progressive functioning of th e
ind in all its capacities of action or expression. Th e
es ult at any stage should be a symmetrical and corn plcte oranic life. The fundamental endeavor was to analyze knowldge in any particular liu e into its simplest elements, as th ese
resent themselves naturally to the attention of the child.
hese were to be acquired not simply in their form, but in their
ea! inner meaning by the process of observation, or sense
mpression (intuition, it was often called), and developed by a
tible
progressive series of exercises graded b _almo~t im
4~.!:_ees into a continuous chain.

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History of Education

even of developing powers of observation.

"Meanwhile," he says, "the consciousness began dail~ to
develop in me that it tnust be absolutely impossible to rerl1~d~
school evils as a whole if one cannot succeed in reducin'g
the mechanical formulas of instruction to those eternal lawl!/
according to which the human mind rises from mere sense
impressions to clear ideas. The child learns- that isj. deo
velops mentally- through his own activities, and " only
through impressions, experiences, not through words; though,
to be sure, these experiences must be clearly expressed in
words, or otherwise there arises th e same dan ger that ''char·
acterizes the dominant word teaching, - th at of attributil!g·
entirely erroneous ideas to words."
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In their purpose and spirit at least, these are the essent1
that have entered into all subsequent educational reform . . Tli
particular form is incidental and has been vastly improved sinco
these earlier efforts: .
It is impossible in a brief space to indicate the details fp
special methods ; the great~r portion of Pestalozzian lite ·
ture is given up to this. A few indications of immediate
general changes must suffice for fuller presentation. ·The
great emphasis upon arithmetic in elementary education ;is
partly due to his insistence upon· the importance of nun{~ -~
Especially " mental " arithmetic, which indicated an "intUi
tive" knowledge of numerical relationships instead of a mere
knowledge of rules, acquired an important place in the sch'oo
All arithmetical relations were reduced to the fundamen
processes of the combination and separation of units, ~dd
tion and subtraction. The object was to give the child
thorough understanding of the properties and proportio_ns o
numbers, and not merely formal methods of "ci herin '

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reached and greater ir'nprovement in the method of the schools
was made in the instruction in this subject than in any other.
Great attention was paid to drawing, of which subject writip.g formed a part. In both writmg and drawing the child,
~starting with a mastery of simple elements, straight lines,
angles, curves, by slow processes of combinations through
thorough exercises, was led to a real mastery of these arts
throu gh the synthetic process, and not by mere imitation.
In fact, all mere memory and purely imitative processes
"were theoretically at least to be eliminated from the school
in favor of this training in "intuitive " or vitalized obser- ·
. :vation.
· In the language studies similar advances were made, though
·.~ith the usual accompanying errors.
The old method of
l~tter spelling and reading was replaced by the phonetic and
·syllabic method. Great effort was put forth to reduce this to
. its simplest form, with much greater success, from the nature
of the languages, in German than in French and in English.
Nevertheless, the endless and meaningless repetition of elemental syllables, "ab, ib, ob, ub," etc., that formerly con.'s tituted so large a part of spelling and reading books, was
sanctioned by Pestalozzi's methods. A notable feature was
the use of objects as the basis of language lessons in
all their phases in substitution for the purely meaningless
·prill in words v:·!1ich were beyond the understanding or interest of the child.
if The methods of geography were similarly transformed, at
least in theory; though here, as in other subjects, many schools
_yet await the arrival of the century-old reform. The school
yard or the village was to furnish the simple elements of this
_subject and these · ;vere to be combined and expanded, step by
step, until the st · cture of the whole earth and its relation to
man were develvped from the simple elem~nts. Geography
was made the basis of, or at least closely connected with,
instruction in nature studies (natural history) and agriculture.
"

-620

History of Educatz'on

In fact the nature-study moveme:it, being closely related .to:
object study, was an outgrowth of these new methods, thougli
as in most other subjects great advance has been made since ·
then in special methods and in the very conception of this
study. Singing and gymnastics formed important parts of
th e newly organized schoolroom activities; the latter was~ a
complete innovation, the former was of an entirely different
character from that previously dominated by religious spirit.
But it was not for proficiency in music that this great emphasis was made, but for its influence on the feelings and on m·oraC.
training. In g eneral, the arrangement of all modern t~xt­
1
books is a direct thou gh not necessarily an immediate 9u~-.
growth of Pestalozzi's efforts at analyzing the subject· into
its simplest elements and proceeding then 'by a .gradual ifi·
crease in the complexity of th e material to build up a con•
nected and s mmetrical understandin . of the sub' _c_t. ·
e _
n
·'

( 1) 0 bservation, or sense-perception (intuition), is the bas
of instruction. (2) Language should a lways be linked 'w1tll
observation (intuition), i.e. with an object or content.
. time for learnin g is not the time for judgment and criticism.
(4) In any branch teaching should begin with the sill!plpst
ele ments and proceed gradually according to th e develo
ment of th e ch ild, that is, in psycholog ically co nn ected order,
(5) Suffici ent time should be devoted to each point of .tli
teachin g in order to secure th e complete mastery of it by th
pupil. (6) T eachin g should aim a t d evelopment, and "
at dog matic exposition. (7) The teacher should respect.t
individuality of the pup il. (8) Th e chief encl of eleme'q
teaching is not to impart knowled ge and talent to the learner.
but to develop and increase th e powers of his intclligenc
. ,.,

Psychologz"cal Tendency in Educatz"on

621

: (9)° Power must be linked to knowledge, and skill t o learning. · (IO) The relation between the teach er and the p upil,
especially as to discipline, should be based upon and ruled by
love. (I 1) Instru ction should be subordinate to the higher
· aim of education.

· , ( d) 111:fluence on t!te General Spirft of the Sclwolroom . There remains one further point to be noted,--'-that contained
; ~n th e tenth princi. ple stated above. In
, rega r<l to method,
· as Pes talozzi himag gera ted way,
!! half the world "
~ .'was workin g on the
same problem. The
.' new purpose in education was held by
man y others - public men, relig ious
le aders , p h ilosoph ers, a nd educators. ·
:-·In defi nin g the new
of educabut
makin g more explicit th e ideas of
_Rousseau, Basedow,
His
pnd others.
~ peculi ar excelle nce
was in ma king eviA TYl'ICAL GERMAN SCHOOLROO~ I OF THE
dent, th ro ug h all
E I GHTEENTH CENTU RY •
. his writin gs and all
his work, that a n
spirit must pervade the schoolroom,
that both teacher a nd pupil must breathe a new atmosphere,

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622

History of .Education

Psychological Tendency

- the atmosphere of the home. What cannot be
away from him is the credit fo r demonstration from
very nature of the educational process that when the end J
development and not mere acquisition of formal principles;
the only basis for the relation of teacher and pupil is sym:
pathy. The contrast is clearly indicated by a comparison of - '
accompanying illustrations; one of the typical German schools
0

_

PESTALOZZ! IN II!S SCHOOLROOM AT STANZ.

before Pestalozzi's time, the other of Pestalozzi's
Stanz. - In other lines, more recen t times have developed the
germs of the idea~ suggested by the unlettered reformer; but'
in this one respect, every modern schoolroom is so direct!
indebted to him that he may yet be called, as he was by hi
own teachers and followers, " Father Pestalozzi."

THE HERBARTIAN MOVEMENT.
lozzianism. - Herbart built upon and supplemented the wor
of Pestalozzi. But he soon reached an elaboration of educ

in

Education

623

tional thought far beyond that of Pestalozzi.
The latter
tlnsisted always in his theoretical statements that instruction
-was to lead from sense-perception to "clear ideas." But his
- practical work went little beyond the formulation of the train,...~ ing in sense-perception through exercises in observation.
Except as he accomplished it with a few children through
the genius of his own personality, he did not show either
theoretically or practically how mental ass imilation and
.;;--growth take place from this starting point, or how moral
"'character was to be made the outcome.
Herbart carried
. this further and showed huw the product of sense-perception
could be converted into ideas, through the <ipperccptive pm-·
' cess, and how knowledge in turn could thus be made to bear
upon moral character throu g h the processes of instruction .
"As Pestalozzi would substitute his method for the forn1al
:. verbal meth ods in memory training of the ex isting sc hools,
"'making this latter method wholly subordinate to m ethods of
'training in sense-perception, so H erbart would use Pesta- lozzi's method rnerdy as an initial one. In a discussion of
· the Pestalozzian method, H erbart says: -

- •• c'

- "The whole field of actual and possible sense-perception is
open to th e Pestalozzian method; its movements in it will
, grow constantly freer and larger. Its pecu li ar merit consists
~ in having laid hold more boldly ancl more zealously than any
";,, former method of the duty of building up the child's mind, of
·'· constructing in it a definite experic.! ncc in the light of clc<ir
sense-perception ; not acting as if the child h<icl <ii ready an ex3perience, but taking care that he gets one ; hy not chatt ing
.with him as though in him, as i11 an adult, there a lready were
~.: · a need for communicating a ncl elaborating his acquisitions ,
·7 ut, in the very first place, giving him that which later on can
e, _and is to be, discussed , The Pestalozzian method, therefore, is by no means qualified to crowd out any other method,
"ut to prepare the way for it. It takes care of the earliest
e that is at all capable of receiving instruction . It tre<its
with the seriousness and simplicity which are appropriate
hen the very first raw materials are to be procured. But we

J

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Psychological Tendency in . Education
History of Educatz'on

.,

~an be no more content with it than we can regard _the hu~

mind as a dead tablet on which the letters remam . as ·oi;i
nally written down."
: <5.'1 ~
Consequently, in one other main point, Herbart · differs ,.
radically from Pestalozzi, again by way of addition. A.s
Pestalozzi made the presentation of the physical ·world
through sense-perception the chief aim of instruction, if no.t ·
of education, Herbart made the moral (resthetic) presentatio,
of the universe the chief end of education: Sense-perce
tion is no longer sufficient. " Experience, human-conver_
and instruction taken all together constitute the presentati
As a r!:!sult, tpe emphasis which P_e!!.
of the universe\"
.\
•' . lozzianism" tended to place ~'n arithmetic, geography, and t.
nature studies is replaced in Herbartianism by an empha
on pure mathematics on the one hand and more especiall 1
the other by that on the classical languages, literature,
history.
. ,,•
At one other point Herbart's work takes its initiativeJJOm
Pestalozzi's. The latter reiterated his purpose of "psy~po
gizing education" ; but while rejecting the old psych~l
he did not and could not construct any system of his~o
Herbart did quite as notable work in this line as in cons~ .
t_ive er1ucational thought. However, his psychologica~ ~d "
much sooner served their purpose than have the e<lucatioll
and gave way to more accurate knowledge.
"'
In general, Herbart's w·ork was the antithesis of Pestalg ._
in that it was . logical and philosophical in character,.~w
Pestalozzi's possessed no logical form or system and.,li
definitely formulated philosophical basis. The one pos~e
the comprehensive view and calm logic of the philosgp
the other the intense emotionalism and strong purpos~ 'o
reformer working toward immediate betterment, th,oug
no adequate view of the ultimate encl.
·
Life and Works of John Frederick Herbart (1776-18,
There is little in the life activities of the man that- t
I

\

,·light upon his educational doctrines, and hence little that can
_c oncern us here. Passing through the traditional educational
_co~~se of the .g~mn_asium and university, he gave evidence of
ability and ongmahty at every point. At the age of twenty• on.e he left the university for a three years' experience as
' ~nvate tut~r, from which he formulated much of his educa. tional doctrme. He later enunciated the belief that any real
.knowledge of the psychology of education can be gained not
from the study of children in masses and from brief acqt/aint:ance, but only from a prolonged intimate study of the mental
~evelopment of a very few individuals.
He returned later to
stu?y a~d then to give instruction in philosophy and in educati.on l~ the University of Gottingen. Here and at the
_Umvers1ty of Konigsberg he spent the remainder of his life.
'A.~ the latt~r place he .e stablished his pedagogical seminar
- ~1th a practice school attached, the forerunner of the university . ty~e of instr_uction ·::..nd experimentation in the subject of
educat10n. Wh1.le as a member of school commissions he
_ook some part .m ~ducational reform, his life for the most
art wa~. spent i_n mvestigation, lecturing, and publication.
...,Refenm~ to his approach to educational problems, he says
In ~me of his essays, - Observations on a Pedagogical Essay:
.~? havedfoi: twenty years employed metaphysics and n-lathe_a ics, an s1d~ by side with them self-observation, ex eri·. c\a;1d .e xpe.nn;ents, merely to find the foundations of
~.llc 0 ~gical .111 s 1.ght. And the motive for these not exactly
~~ti~s~ ~west1gat10ns has been and is, in the main, my con,.. . t at a large part of the enormous gaps in our edaog1cal knowledge results from lack of psycholorry andp that
e must first have. this science - nay, that we ~t;st first of
.· remove the nurage which to-day goes by the name of
yc~ology - bef:ire we shall be able to determine with some
rtamty conc~rnmg even a single instruction period what in
Yl,as done anght and what amiss."

~rue

•

. erbart's Psychology. - This then is Herbart's great con·
'bution to education. The m~ven1e' nt w luc
. l1 L oc 1(e began

r!l'ii··

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. Hi'story of l:.aucatz'on

Psychological Tendency

in

Educatz'on

to concepts, and by similar processes of interaction to
in making the child the center of educational endeavor ~a""n='""""';::,;
,_acts of judgment and reasoning. What the teacher has to
pedagogical theory; which Rousseau established in gener
_ work with is a mass of presentations, coming from two main
form through his brilliant critical and destructive work in th
sources, - experience, contact with nature; and intercourse,
form of investigative literature; which Pestalozzi brought
down to the schoolroom and made concrete in the hands :O
contact with society. Through the expansion of the one
every teacher; that movement Herbart made permanent :cb
,, origin.al power the teacher has to develop knowledge from
giving it an actual scientific basis in place of the imaginativ
experiences and SJ111t.pat!ty from intercourse, by processes
which are to be noted in the following sections.
one of Rousseau and the empirical one of Pestalozzi.
are here concerned only with the main educational application
The min<l or soul is built up, acquires a content, not through
. the development of inherent faculties, but through presenta. not with an exposition of Herbart's psychology, which
most points has received development and modification wi
~io.ns, - through ideas resulting from its own experiences. It
._ts mherently neither good nor bad, but develops one way or
the investigation of the intervening century, and at ma
important points has been entirely superseded.
-:,
,the other according to external influences, that is according
The fundamental point is that he established educational
to what it receives in the way of presentations and the manwork upof?. the basis of a unified mental life and developme. ~
~ ner of their combinations. Two corollaries of tremendous
As previously noted, the psychology prevailing even in the ni
~dmportance to education follow: (I) The chief characteristic
teenth century- popular even to-day - was the Aristoteli
" . of the mind is its power of assimilation; (2) education, which
_determines what presentations the mind receives, and also the
"faculty" psychology, but slightly modified even by mod .
thought. The soul was endowed with high er and lo~e
:;z- !llanne~ in whic'.1 they are combined into higher mental pro-_ ~cesses, JS the chief determining force in shapi ng the mind and
capacities, entirely distinct, each class of mental phenoll!~!l
character.
being considered as the product of the appropriate faculf
· ":.-~ Herbart's educational doctrines are thus founded upon this
The more important were those of knowledge, feeling, :an
_.:assimilative function of the mind, - a pperception. So far as
will, which were in turn divided into an elaborate systeI1}'f
capacities or sub-faculties. With this diversity of mentaCUf
.the immediate importance of this doctrine to the teacher is
as a basis, the work of the school possessed a similar divers1
' .1 concerned it is immaterial, as hati often been pointed out
: <.whether one agrees with Herbart in rejecting all inheren~
of aims, for each separate faculty demanded its appropr~
and distinct training through some form of discipline '.._(s
·constitutive powers of the mind or not, for such original
Chapter IX). In place of this Herbart substituted the~
powers are beyond control, and the best that the teacher can
ception that the soul is a unity, not endowed with intui!iy
. do under any circumstances is to direct the development of
inborn faculties, but a blank at birth, possessing bu ·
- the mind through control of this assimilative process. From
power, - that of entering into relation with its environ
.this point of view De Garmo thus states the work of the
teacher :through the nervous system. Through these rclationmind is furnished )with its primary "presentations" of s_
-- "His J?rimary function i.s to impart knowledge in such a
perception ; and from these the whole mental life is dey~lOp
·y;ay that it can. be_ most rapidly, securely, and profitably assimThe interaction of these presentations lead through gene
1,lated, and this JS the problem of concrete apperception.
'~ \

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+rib¥

H£story of Educatz'on

Psycholog£cal Tendency z'n Educatz'on

Whether the mind be a germ or a series of germs to be deve};,
oped, or whether it is a structure to be erected, the process is .
still the same from the teacher's standpoint. He must know
something of the child's previous knowl.e dge and interests in
order to utilize them; he must select his materials of instruc;~ ·
tion with respect to ultim ate purposes and the pupil's comprehending powers ; he must arrange the subject-matter, not only ,
with respect to the pupil's acqu ired experience, but also with
respect to that which he is going to acquire, i. e. the studies
must be brought into the best coordinate relation to one
another, and he must adapt his teaching processes so as to
secure the quickest apprehension and the longest retention of
the matter taught. All this has to do with the acquisition of
new experience upon the basis of that already acquired."

held, the determining cause of action. The apperceptive process is fundamental, because ideas lead to action, action
determin es character. The aim of education, according to
Herbart, is ethical. "The one and the whole work of education may be summed up in the concept, - morality," is the
opening sentence of the ./.Est!tet£c Presentation. Again, "The
term 'virtue' expresses the whole purpose of education," is a
.statement in his Educational Doctrilies. To him virtue was
"the idea of inner freedom which has developed into an
abiding actuality in an individual." That is, it is an evo lufionary pr~duct in each individu al, resulting from a cumulative
series of experiences, because each relationship calls forth an
'independent judgment of· approval or disapproval. Since
these judgments are without proof, but spring immediately
f.rom a contemplation of th e rel~Jionship and are thus like
those of taste, Herbart called them ~sthetic judgments.
His first philosqphical treatise on education is entitled The
Wistltetic Presentation of the Universe as the Cltief Aim of Educat£on. Herbart, carrying Pestalozzi's analysis of the alphab~t of perception - number, form, language- much further,
found the necessity for various other elements, notably those
f t.a ste and obligation. Rather, he combined th e two und er
he norm of what is 1lOt necessarily so, but what oug!tt to be.
hcse arc called (l!sthctic prcsmtations. Such presentations
n~lude "the fittin g, the beautiful, the moral, the just; in
one word,· that which in its perfect state pleases after perfect
contem plation." To develop this attitude of prefere nce for
at which- constitutes "inner freedom" into an "abiding actuality in the individual" is the chief aim of education. The
pr~cess of doin g this constitutes the "~sthetic presentation
f. the universe," through "experience, human converse, and
,struction."
Herbart's analysis of virtue, or of moral character, went
urther; it was not left in formal terms, but was reduced to
Ve moral relationships or ideas. The fundam ental one was

Apperception, then, - the assimilation of ideas by means of
ideas already acquired -is the basal psychological principle
of Herbart when applied to education; the theoretical expo·
sitio~ of this idea is his chief work; its practi_<::al elaboration,
that of his followers.
Conception and Purpose of Education. - Herbart derived his
conception of education from philosophy as he derived its a~~ .
from ethics. On the one hand he opposed determinism 'or
fatalism, which rendered education impossible or at least
mechanical, since character according to this view is shaped .
by forces entirely beyond control. On the other hand ·Ile
opposed the doctrine of the transcendental freedom of the wil11
which made moral education useless, since according to this ·
view the will chooses entirely ind ependent of such would-be
determining influences. The will, then, is not any independ*
.. ent faculty of the mind that can originate actions that are
independent of ideas or thought processes, but it is a func.
tioning of the mind, growing out of and wholly dependent
upon the ideas or presentations possessed by the mind. This
conception of the will is fundamental and must be kept 'in
mind throughout any consideration of Herbart's doctrines.
The will is the product of action or experience, not, as usuallj ·

I

629
,.
...

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HistfJry o.f Educat£on
Both appear in every completed educational process as stage
preliminary to, or incidental to, the expression or constructiv
process.
, ·~·
The forms of expression of the child's nature which Froebe
seized upon as ·of importance in this training were first ge
ture, sj'!cond song, third language. Through these meahs
Froebel sought to have the child express his feelings and
ideas. He devoted th e remainder of his life to the organization
of material in such forms of play, games, constructive activi
ties, stories, and the like, as would assist the child and would
· furnish material to the teacher for directing the child's inte~
ests and actions. So far as possib1e these means were totb .
coordinate. The story, for example, when told ·by the teache~,
was to be expressed by the child, not only in his own Ian.
guage, but throug h song, or gesture or pictures, or constructi<i
of simple articles from paper, clay, or other convenient mate.
rial. In this way ideas would be given, thought stimulated ,
th.e imagination vivified, the hands and eyes trained, the
muscles coordinated, the moral nature strengthened througli
. the effort to put into concrete objective form the highe
motives ara:i sentiments aroused. Thus the aim of educa.
tional, many-sided development was to be secured. The
chief materials of the kindergarten, aside from the songs,
the Mutter wzd Kose-!£eder, Froebel organized into a serie11
. of "gifts and occupations." These are introduced gradual.l)l
and in order. · As the child becomes familiar with the proJ}:'·
erties of the one . gift or the activities called forth by the ·
occupation, he is led on to the next, which grow out of the pre~
ceding, each introducing new impressions and repeating old
ones. The distinction between the gifts and occupations;
though commonly made, is an arbitrary one. Froebe I himself
called all the activities occupations, and the materials for thein,
gifts. · But the distinction seems to bring out a most promi~
nent tendency in the development of the · Froebelian princ'
ples; namely, that a much greater stress has come to , Be

Psycholog-£cal Tendency .£n Educatz'on
.,.

\1 .

"placed upon the occupations than upon the gifts. While
«Froebel rendered the greatest service to education in thus
) ransforming his principles into concrete schoolroom proced' ures, yet it is evident that many of these, including the songs,
were appropriate only to his age and to the people with whom
he was familiar, and that to keep his principles effective
modificati~n may be necessary in the present and future.

. ·: EFFECTS OF THE*SYCHOLOGICAL MOVEMENTS ON
'· SCHOOLS.
he Pestalozzian Movemen .-While yet at Burg· ·aorf, Pestalozzi's institute was frequented by numerous
investigators, public men interested in education, students,
even groups of students from various countries of Europe.
~ The institute had been made a normal school, subsidized
." .by the Swiss government. · At Yverdun these conditions
' were intensified.
Pestalozzian institutes were founded in
•'. Madrid, Naples, St. Petersburg. The monarchs of Russia,
-'· Prussia, Austria, and of the Italian states were personally
·interested in the reforms; and, as Pestalozzi said, any hedge
schoolmaster, in order to succeed, had but to prbclaim the use
of Pestalozzian ~ethods. In Switzerland itself: the adoption
/ of the new ideas was slow, owing partly to the fact that
· : many of the cantons were under Roman Catholic control and
·.partly to the fact that the Protestant cantons were now dami. :nated by reactionary governments, naturally ultra-conserva. tive, while Pestalozzi and his ideas had ever been associated
. ·with the revolutionary propaganda. After the revolutionary
. "· movement of 1830 a more liberal spirit prevailed, normal
·1 schools were established, several under the principalship of
. former pupils or assistants of Pestalozzi, and the new ideas
. were gradually but generally adopted.
Among the German states Wi.irtemberg first fell under the
· ' new influence. During the first decade of the century Pes, talozzian enthusiasts had been appointed school inspectors
principals of normal schools. Prussia followed. The

...
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Psychological T endency in Education
History of Education

668

philosopher Fichte, in his address to ~he Gernia n people after,
the defeat at Jena in 1806, pointed out Pestalozzian education ·
as the means of regeneration for the nation. The minister of,-_
education and the royal family were deeply concerned in the
new educational movement. Picked young men were sent to
Yverdun, and through them and the German a.s sistants of"
Pestalozzi, who left Yverdun during the unfortunate disagreements among the staff, the new ideas were incorporated in ' '
the training of the teachers for the Prussian elementa.ry' •
schools.
Though students from France, Spain, and other nations
were trained at Yverdun and though some progress was made ,
in popularizing the new method;;, the spirit of absolutism wa(
unfavorable to their rapid development. It was not until af_ter,
the revolution of 1830 that the educational reform movement
made any p rogress in France. Then, especially under Victor
Cousin, mi~1ister of education, great advance was mad¢,
notably in the trainin g of teachers.
In England, that which received acceptance was a modified
form of Pestalozzianism resulting from its combination with'
the prevailing monitorial and infant schools (see PP· 7z4727). Consequently it was the more formal aspects of spe· ·
cial methods rather than the real spirit of the reforms th~t
dominated. This was chiefly through the work of '. the ·
Mayos, brother and sister, who worked during the second
1

quarter of _the century.
·
Through England came much of the Pestalozzian influence ,
cxertcd ,on the United States, and to this is largely : due. the
formal and even superficial character of much of it, r~lating
as it does or did to petty methods. However, not all of. it ·
was of this character, for the movement for the training ·. of :
teachers, as well as the character of this training, were :·oµt· "
growths of the Pestalozzian ideas. From the time of N e~f, ".
one of Pestalozzi's assistants, who was induced by a phil~µ·"
thropic American to settle in Philadelphia in 1808, sporadic\
.
. ~·-

/

instances of the transplanting of the new ideas
. d Th
translation
(1835)
of
Cousin
's
Re11ort
th
Soccmre
Jmt
.
r
on ze tate of .Public~

s n~ctzon tn Prussi ' which did so much for the reform of
schools
· fl uence upon educational
It h ed :P. rench
.
.
' Iia d great m
ea e1 s m ~menca. From the results of the reform movement, espe:1a.lly as he saw it in Germany, Horace Mann drew
many of his ideas and much of his inspiration. His Seventlz
Amzual R eport, ?ne of. the most influential educational documents ev~r published m America, e mbodies the results of h.
personal mvesfiga f10n. Th e most specific source of this influts
ence, however,
was what is known as the 0 swego movement
.
, fbe gun m r 860· The id ea s 0 f th·is move ment came indirectly'
rom the Mayo movement in England and cenf ered ·lar el
about the n:c of obj_ects as the basis of instruction. The
was
unknown attention to the tee "'
.
f a prev10usly
l
u111que
o f e cl uca 1011 a n: t.o th e details of special method tha t was the chief
. c.ha1 actens~1c of norm al school instruction cl uri ng the generat10n follo;vmg. Hence it comes that, for the most pa ·t S•
as pr.mcip le .is concerned, our schools are yet
'tli,
estaloz~1a1: basts, though the special methods of appl in '
y
th ese pnnc1ples have been much improved.
One oth er practical effect of the Pestalozzian method or
: ~chools deserves at least mention; that is the new basis which
, it ga''.e for the care of social dependents and defectives
' especially
· · · 1s, dea f-m ··tes and the bl" d '
. paupers
. ' sem1-cnrnma
Pestalozzi's
institutions
for the poor
s t' --:i
g th e agncu
·m 1:"-v{
_From
tur 1 I ·
.
,
. a c? Ollles, es~ecially those for juvenile offenders. The:y ·
mdustnal. occ.u pat:o~s furni shed a reform atory element hitherto wantmg m cnmmal punishment. Guided by th
_. .
pies of h ·
e p1111c11s master, one of Pestalozzi's assistants established
. ~ school for. deaf-mutes. The object method of teachin
mtroduced hitherto unknown possibilities of dev I .
hg
defective J
h·
e op mg sue
th
c asses, w !le the industria l element gave them
. e pros~ect of ec?nomic indep endence, which was both a
great gam for society and a basis for self-respect and self-

re~uit

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History of Education

670

PsJ1c!tologfra! Tendency in Education

67 1

confidence hitherto denied these unfortunates . . Ftt>m
- studies also suggested in priuciµle by Herbart. Around each
methods have developed the modern care anf the methoas. .
center has grown up a very extensive literatu re. From these
of education of these classes.
.:~
~
·
, two universities have gone out th e most widespread inftuThe Herbartian Movement, being, as we have noted,
en~es, .thr~ugh trained teache rs a nd normal schools and
largely one of principle, is not to be traced with any exac~itud~f
umversity rnstructo rs. Throu g h these combined means the
The Herbarti a n propaganda, however, further~d as 1t ~~s
~ c rm;rn sclwuls have respond ed to th ese more advanced
been by groups of educators devoted to the developm_eriL~
, id eas a nd have, so far as the c hara cter of instruction is conthe popularization of his thoug ht, is readily described . . It: i'
'. cerncd, reached a higher degree of exce llence th an any other
the former which has specific interest in the history of educ~a~fili\ sch oo ls.
. .-::
tion, and here we must be content w.ith indicating the exten
' Ii~ the. United States the dates of publication of the Herto which Herbart's thought has entered into th e educational
)Jartia1~ literature will indicate of how recent origin the moveconsciousness of to-day, as that consciousness is determin~?~· .
:~1 ent is, thoug h, to be sure, there is an extended magazine
in a practical way, the work of our schools. Undoubtedly, in,.
literature of somewhat earlier date.
Though there were
this sense the H erbartia n thoug ht has entered very largely. ...
many. oth: r contributing forces, the most imm ediate response
into the
work of the ordinary school, for the progressive.
to this discussion was the R etort of the Committee of Fifteacher everywhere, however unconscious he may be of th.e
t:en on ElementmJ' Schools made to the National Educaultimate: origin of those influences, shares to some extent in 't10~al ~ssociation in I 895. The aim of this report was to
the educational purposes and endeavors of the time.
. :t. ,
umfy t~e ':ork of the elementary school, to find a. basis for
The establishment of pedagogical seminaries and expe.ri.;,
. t?at muty rn a curric ulum em bodying somk'form of correlamental or practice schools in connection with th e universities
t'.on of stu~li~s , and to prompt to better ~ethods of instrucwas one of the more important educational works of Herbart, "
tron.,, 1:- sim ilar report five years earlier ,by a "Committee of
and at th e same time th e chief means by which his ideas and
Ten ~1med to perf~rm this work of unification for secondary
methods were brought to bear on the public schools. Th~
ed1,1ca t10n, and to bnng about a closer articulation of elementseminaries at the Universities of J ena, Leipzi g, and Halle ,
ary, secondary, .and higher education . .· Through such means
were the mo~e famous of these, a nd espec ially developed t.lie
a very general mflu ence is being exE'J'.ted on the schools of
Herbartian doctrines and applied th e m to practical wor,k·
o~1r country towar? placing the charctc ter of instruction on a
At the first ~f th ese, Professor Stoy, later Professor Rei~,
high er basis th a n tha t reached throug h the Pestalozzian
have done most in applying the se principles to ele~en
movem ents of some half century Gr mor , ago.
ary school work through. the elaboration of genAeral. '.a,9d
~· The Froebelian . Move~ent. -A( has l ''n suggested, the
special methods. It is from this course that the mencan
i.~ftue~ce of the Froebehan principles is practically coexteninfluence has proceeded. From Professor Tuiskon Ziller, at
s~ve with. the most imp? rtant educational tendencies of the
Leipzig, came the more independent development of Herb11rt'~
present tune. An analysis of these will make evident the
original doctrine, especially its elaboration as the basis.of the.
fundame~tal.character of the influence of Froebe! on schools.
school curriculum, of the culture epoch theory suggeste~ by.
ffhe applicat10n which Froebe! himself made of l .
. . 1
·
·
t
h
k"
.
.
.
us
pnnc1p
es
Herbart and the details of the theory of concentrat.1on o
0, t e mdergarten is bemg made by ot hers to more advanced

b~st

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!

·llistory of Education

Psychologz'cal T endency in Educq,tz'on

?e

I

~.

phases of education. All that c~n
.sketched here is', ~pc,
spread of the kindergarten as an mstitut10n.
..~ . . .•
· In Germany a number of institutions similar to that al .
Keilhau were established before Fro~bel's death. But. in .
l 8 5 l, a year before that event, kinderga.r tens wer~ prohibited,
by the Prussian government on account of their suppose.cl
revolutionary character. The Baroness Bertha von Maren·
holtz-BUl~w, to whom the actual popularization of the kinde
arten was largely due, transferred her activities, for the.
~ime being, to England. Though this prohibition w~s re;
moved after ten years, kindergartens have not yet been mcor·
porated into the public school systems. While m~ny private .'.
ones exist, they are not consid~red schools. Their t~ach;rs.,:,
are not required to comply with the standards required o.f
elementary teachers and, though they are under the su~er:·
vision of Jschool inspectors, they may not teach anythmg
which will duplicate the work of the elementary. school~.
Conseque~tly in the work of these schools there has be.e1!_ .'
1
comparatively little development.
' · '~; .''\Y.
France best illustrates the extensive development of schools
for very young children. But these infant schools -tli,e
lcoles maternelles - are rather a development of the in~an
school movement than of the kindergarten. · To a very sh.g.b t
degree do they embody the princi~l~s of Fro:bel- certa1~lX
not his fundamental one of self-activity. Wlule these scl~ools
have developed for the most part since thy War of 1870, and .
while their establishment is optional with the communes; ye
. in them are trained half .a million children of th~ ages J~o
two to six.
•
First introduced into England in 18 54, and advocated by. a .
number of prominent men, such as !he novelist Dickens,~ tli~
kindergarten was established only in a ~ew instances and the? ·
as a private institution for the wealthier cl~sses. No~ 1,mtil '.
1 3 74 did the ideas of the kiudergarten begm to modify the
work of the infant schools (seep. 726), which by this time.~ad
•

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',

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67 3

been incorporated as a part of the public school system. It
was the procedure and methods rather than the principles and
spirit of the kindergarten that were grafted on to this dominant institution.
· The first kindergarten in the United States was established
by Elizabeth Peabody in Boston in 1860, thou g h it was not
. until 1868 th at she s ucceeded in embodying the spirit and
purpose of Froebel's work. A number of private kindergartens were soon established. Under the leadership of Dr. W.
H. Harris and Miss Susan Blow, - among the most prominent
· of Froebelian exponents in this country, - the kind ergarten
was first mad e a part of th e public school system in St. Louis
in 1873. Since that time the movement has developed until
there is scarcely a city of any size but what has incorporated
the kindergarten as a component part of its public schools.
REFERENCES
Pestalozzi.
Barnard, Pestalozzi and Pestalo:![zianism. (New York, 1859.)
De Guimps, Pestalozzi. (Syracuse, 1889.)
Kruesi, Life and vVorks of Pestalozzi. (New York, 1875.)
' Neef, Sketcli of a Plan and Metlwd of Education. (Philadelphia, 1808 .)
Pestalozzi, Leonard and Gertrude. (Eng. Abstract, Boston, 1885.)
Pestalozzi, How Gertrude Teacltes lier Cluldren. (Syracuse, 1898.)
' Pestalozzi, Evening flours of a H ermit, in Barnard's journal, Vol. VI,
P· 169.
Pinloche, Pestalozzi. (New Y'.ork, 1901.) .----.
~· ·~··

l

'\

Herbart .
De Gurmo, Herbart and Herbartia11s. (New York, 1895.)
De Garmo, Essentials of Metlwd. (Boston, 1889.)
Eckoff, Herbart's AB C of Sense Perception. (New York, 1896.)
Felkin, Herbart's Science of Ed11catio11. (London, 1892.)
' Herbart, Psyclwlogy. (New York, 1891.)
' Herbart, Outlines of Pedagogical Doctrines (Lange & De Garmo).
York, 1901 .)
Herbart, in Eckoff and Felkin, as above.
Lange, Apperceptirm. (New York, 1892.)
2X

I

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(New

-:-

Rein, Outlines of Pedagogics.

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Psycholog·ical Tendency m Education

1-fistory of Educat/on

674

(New York, 1893.)

5· State in greater detail th e educational philosophy of Kant.

....____,i[ ·'

Of

lJ.fer, bitr-oduction-to the Pedagogy of -Herbari. -(..Boston,_1894.)1~:4~~ill~:_JF~rocbcl. Df Ro senkranz .
Van Liew, · Herbart and tlie Development of his Pedagog1(;al Doctr~n~s
6. \Vh at criticism of Pes talozzi does H erb:irt offer in his A B c of
(London, 18 3.)
,.
Sense Pei·ception .~
9
Report of the Committee.
of Ten.
7· 'vVhat practices in your own or in any selected schoolroom are due
3 .)
to the influence of Pestalozzi? Of H erbart? Of Froebel?
1
Report of90tlu Commzitee of Fifteen, in Educational Review, Vol. IX,_p. 2~:,
8. vVh at agree ment do you find be t \\'een the psychological th eo ri es
\
, .•
of H erbart as applied to education and those of Pestalozzi? Those of
Froebe!. ,
..• "'
Froebel?
13low, Symbolic Education. (New York, 1894.)
Blow, Letters to a llfother on tlze Plzilosoplzy of Froebe!.
Bowen, Froebe/ and Education tltrouglz Self-activity.
Froebel, Education of Man. (N ew York, 1894. )
Froebel, Education by Development. (New York, 1899.)

J"

675

9· What did Froebe! owe to Pestalozzi?
· 10 · What cont rast exists between the fundamental conception .of the
mind held by Herbart and th at held by Froebe}?
1I. To what extent is th e work of the eleme ntary schools of our country now controlled by the principle formulated by Pestalozzi? By H t~bart?

Froebel, Autobiography. (Syracuse, 1889.)
Froebel, Pedagogics of tlze Kindergarten. (New York, 1902.)
Hughes, Frpebel 's J::.aucational Laws. (New York, 1899.)
Marenholtz Biilow, Reminiscences oj Froebe/. (Boston, 1887.)
MacVannel~7 The Plzilosoplzy of 1'roebel, in Teaclzers' College R ecord, Vol. IV,
No. 5. (New York, 1903 .)
Quick, Edlteational R eformers, pp. 384-413.

By Froebe}?
12 · To what extent is it the duty of the school to give instruction in
morals? To what extent is formation of character its aim?
13· To what extent can th e work of instruction be made to bear
directly upon conduct according to th e I-Ierbartian theory?
. 14· To w_hat e~te~t is the constructive work of the school based up~n
the 1-I erbartian pnnc1ple? To what extent is this justified?
15. What is the rela tion of interest to this process of character-forming
General.
instruction?
Buchner, Educational Tlzeory of Kant. (Philadelphia, 1904.)
i6. To what ex tent can interest 'be made the basis of school work?
Churton, Kant on Education. (London, 1899.)
• · 17· What harmoni zation, if any, can be made between interest and the
Rosenkranz, Plzilosoplzy of Education. (New York, 1894.)
! disciplinary conception of education?
Is the idea of interest as the controlling principle of education incompatible with a trainin g in will power?
· 18. To what extent does th e importance of interest in ed ucation depend upon Herbart's doctrine · of the precedence of ideas over volitions?
TOPICS FOR FURTHER INVESTIGATION
· 19. To what extent is there a conflict between individuality and characI. What similarity is th ere discoverable .between the educatio nal id
ter as stated by Herbart?
·' . 20. T o wl1at extent then can development of individuality be made the
of Rousseau ·and those of Pestalozzi? Of Herbart? Of Froebe!? · ' 0
Kant? Of Richter?
aim of education?
_ __ ,_.....\
2. vVas there a consistent scheme of psychological
~~ii~ 21. vVhat is the basis of cur-re1a:ion of studies according to Herbart?
lozzi's teachings?
,.
· Wh at further reaso n ca n be assig nee!?
3. What general conclusions concerning the chatte in the conception
. 22. Which has the g rea ter m erit, th e plan of concentration of studies
of education can you form from a compariso n of cl rnitions drawn from
or th at o f coordination of s tudi es?
23· vVJ la t ·is t lle _c1·rr
111 e1:ence in th e psychological theory underlying
the later eighteenth and early nineteenth century, 1 1th those formulat~!,
during the last quarter century?
the two? In the soc10log1cal th eory?
4. Point out some of the errors in practice in highe r stages of educa•
24. Desc ribe any particular concrete plan of concentration. Of
tion resulting from applying principles formulated from a consideration of--.0..,,,,,...,,--

i

the elementary stages alone .

/

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722

History of Education

PHILANTHROPIC-RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS FOR EDU- - -- &A-'F-ION-;-- The g-rowt-h- of t-he systems of public schools, now
supported by all advanced nations, has been along two lines
of developm ent, or rather through two successive stages.
The first of th ese was the stage in which schools were supplied chiefly by private voluntary enterprise, from motives of
religious and philanthropic character. While leaving the
management in private or in quasi-public control, the state
yet came to contribute to these very generally. The second
. of these stages is that in which the political and economic
bearing of education receives general recognition and states
accept the responsibility for general education of all of the
people as one of th e functions of government. The importance of this philanthropic stage varied with different countries. The more prominent of these philanthropic-religious
school movements, as they entered as constituent elements into
the formation of our own public school system, des'e rve notice.
Philanthropic-Educational Movement originating among the
German Peoples. - Mention has already been mad e of the
various philanthropic in stitutions founded by Francke at
Halle, beg inning with 1694, that developed into training
schools for teach ers, educational institutions of a practical
character for orphans, and finally into the na/-schools of the
German states. The philanthropic movement i-mder Basedow
which, beginning with private institutions, led through the
training of teachers and the production of a voluminous literature to the introduction of a study of natural phenomena, of
more agreeable methods, and of a new and better spirit into
the schoolroom, has also been noticed. Similarly the Pestalozzian movement had its philanthropic aspect. But with the
establishment of the school at Yverdun, the chief attention ot
Pestalozzi, under the influence of his assistants, was directed
toward the improvem ent of methods. The philanthropic
aspect of th e work was carried on by Emanuel von Fellenberg (1771-1844).

Socz'ological T endency

in

Education

723

The Fellcnberg Movement. -At H ofwy l, nea r Burgdorf,
Fellenberg eond ucted most successfully, from 1806 to 1844, a
school th a t was pronounced by so competent an authority
as Dr. Barnard to have been the most influential school that
ever existed. The pedagogical principles und erlying th<..:
work of the. school were similar to those of Pestalozzi, with
whom Fellenberg had bee n previously associated in a school
experiment. The sociological purpose of the Hofwyl school
was twofold: first, to educate the youth of the peasant class
in agricultural a nd technical pursuits, and in connection with
these industries to give them the elements of an intellectual
education; second, to bring the upper class into closer sympathy and understanding with the peasant class by educating
th e m together. Therefore, two schools were established on
an es tate of some six hundred acres; the literary institute,
which gave the ordinary classical education, and the practical
institute, which gave the education of the peasant boys for
more intelligent farmwork.
Both groups of boys had school
gardens, both were expected to work on the farm, one for
training in future management, the other for future service.
There was an agricultural school for scientific instruction, a
printing press where th e literature and music of the school
were printed by the boys of the school, workshops where they
made their clothing and agricultural and scientific instruments,
and other similar institutions. In time there were established
a school for girls and a normal school for teachers, where for
a time all of the teachers of the adjacent city of Berne were
trained. In almost every respect the schools seemed to be a
parallel of those at Hampton, Tuskegee, and other places that
are attempting a similar solution of social problems in the
present.
From 182 S to I 840 scores of these "manual labor institutes" were establis heel all over the United States. All, or
very nearly all, th e institutions of academic or collegiate rank
that were established within these time limits, were found ed

i·' .·
i'

I

History o/ Education
upon this basis. Many of th ese, such as Oberlin, soon devel_ _ _ _ _,o f>@El.-i-n-t0-t0Ueges ~l'-he---1:na~ oi:iL)l--oLthem_wer_e__fosier_ed__by_ _
some r elig ious denomin ation . vVhile in th ese institutions
philanth ro pic and reli gious motives were promin ent, th e pedagogical principl es of Fell enberg were minimized. In the
American literature th at g rew out of this move ment but two
,,
motives were emphasized: one, the opportunity afforded by
these instituti ons for a hi g her education at a lessened expense ;
second, the better h ealth and co nsequ e ntly more active intel-.
lec tual life produced by the co urse of life followed. With the
\l
improveme nt of th e economic conditions of the country and
the deve lopment of more of the formalities of social life, toward the middle of the century, the ma nual la bor feature was
dropped from most of these institutions. This f eature had
served one purpose, however, - th at of ma king th ese institutions possible. The sociolog ica l aspec t of the Pestalozzian
move ment th a t related to th e develo pm e nt of educa ti onal instituti ons for th e deaf, dumb, blind, maimed, a nd orph a ns, and
of edu cation al-reformatory in stitutions for juvenile offenders
an d first offenders, can on ly be mentioned .
The Monitorial Systems of Bell and Lancaster. - In l 797
Dr. Andrew Bell introduced into Eng land a system which
he had e mploye d in an orphan asy lum, th at of using the
older boys for the instru ction of the younger. By h~m, and
especiall y by Joseph L a ncaster (1778-1838 ), the system was
dev e loped until it became for Engla nd a so mewhat inad e-r' ·
quate substitute for a national system of sc hools. Throu g h
the use of a few conduct monitors a nd a sufficient number of
· teaching monitors drawn fr om th e more advanced students,
and th rough a system of organization a nd of method, it was
possible for one teac her to direc t a large numb er of pupils:
With Lancaste r the ideal, which he himself realized before
he was twenty years of age,_was for one teac her to control
a school of one thousand boys. Thu s in th e absence of any
willingness on the part of the people adequately to support

Socz"ologz"cal Tendency in Educatz"on
schools, with the government opposed on principle to contributing- for su&h- purposes, and- with the reJigious bodies
wholly unable to cop e with th e n eeds of the tim es, the monitoria l system made possib le some ge neral attenti on to public
ed ucat ion. Th e Bell system found little or no footing in
A merica, since it was connected w holly with th e Church of
Eng la nd schools. The great service which the L ancasterian
system rendered in our own co untry was in acc ustoming the
people to schoo ls for the masses of the people, to contributing

A L AN CASTERIAN MONITO IUAT. S C H OO i ., W ITH REC ITATI O N SEM IC IR C LES AND
LESSON BOARDS ARRANl:ED AROUND THE ROOM.

to th eir supp ort as individu als, and in gradually educating the
peop le to look upon educ ation as a function of th e state. In
addition to this it introduced a better system of grading, since
all L a ncas terian schools were rigidly graded on the basis of
arithm etic work, and also on the basis of spelling and reading.
Hence it was possib le to promote in the one subject without in
the other. Moreover, it brou ght in a better arrange men t and
classification of material and a better organization and discipline of the school. The great defects of t his system were
that the work was most form a l ; th a t most of th e instruction
was extremely sup erficial; that the discipline was rigid and

. ·• lDUllllg lU

ij\J

.

~U\...H

1-'u.J. _lJV'O<J--,

.

.

_

··.

·i'Holly unable to cope with the needs of the tin1es, the n1oni·. fiaI ~ystem made 'possible some generil attentio~ · to public
!t _c ation. The Bell _system found . little or . no f ooting -- in
' I. . -:erica~ since it was· connected wholly with the Church- of
gIJ nd schools. -The great service which the Lancasterian
. teth rendered in our own country was in accustoming thE
. e~Pl~ to schools for the masses of the people, to contributing
111

~

j.

LAr CASTERIAN . MONITORIAL SCHOOL, WITH R .ECITATION SEMICIRCLES ANI

:Jf: I
p tlieir support as individuals, and in gradually educating thE
LESSON BOARDS ARRANGED AROUND THE ROOM.

'I

tf

1

eoP1e to look upon education as a function of the state. Iu
,ad~tion to this it introduced a better system of grading, since
~,p ~ancasterian schools were rigidly graded on the basis oi
fitj1 metic work, and also on the basis of spelling and reading.
;~ e ~1 ce it was possible to promote in the one subject without iu
t~e /other.
Moreover, it brought in a better arrangement and
elassification of material and a better organization and disci:1! ......I..-.. ...... C 4-1-..-.. .... ..-..l.....-....-..1 .'"rl-..-..
..J..-..C ......
..-...C 4-l-! .... . .... - ..... "- ....
___ .... __
•

_

1

1

--..-..~"-

..-..4- ....

~

"J)uting for such purposes~ and with the religious bodies
~~·ally unable to cope· with the needs of the times,_the moni.fJal system made 'possible some general attentio~ to pi1b.lic
, ~c~tion: The Bell system found . litt~e or no footing in .
, ~ etica, since it was- connected wholly with the Church ~ of
rg lknd schools. -The great service which the Lancasterian !~tern rendered in our owri country was in accustoming the
i 1ople to schools for the masses
of the people, to contributing
•
.
,..·~ '

~r-

., LANCASTERIAN
•

MONITORIAL SCHOOL, WITH RECITATION SEMICIRCLES AND

LESSON BOARDS ARRANGED AROUND THE ROOM.

I

~

.

?th~ir support as individuals, and in gradually educating the
·,_eop ~ e

to look upon education as a function of the state. _In
~dit~on to this it introduced a better system of grading, since
~anc~sterian schools were rigidl_y graded .on the basi~ of
rithmetic work, and also on the basis of spelling and reading.
'. enJe it was .possible to pron1ote in the one subject without in
t!1e qther.. Moreover,_ it brought in a better _arr~ngement ~n~
lasstficat1on of material and a better organization and disc1-

p

1

.

1-iz'story o/ l!..{iucation
mechanical; and that the in formation gained was the result
of formal memory work. There was absolutely no conception of the psychological aspect of the work and no intimation whatever of the newer, broader, and truer conception of
education that was clevcloping on the continent.
In 1805 the Lancastcrian method was introduced in to New
York City _ \Vitl1in a few years al111ost n·cry city from Boston :to Charleston, in the South, aud Cincinnati, in the vVest, bad ) its monitorial or Lancaster ian schools. Lancaster himself i czunc to this country and assisted i:1 the N cw Y urk, Drooklyn , and Philadelphia schools. In the third clecacle of the
century, the system was introduced in New Yurk and Boston
into a new type of schools, the newly founded high schools.
For this and th e two following decades the system was widely
popular in the many academies throughout the country." As
in the case of the Fellenberg system, with which it was often
combined, the system disappeared in consequence of the
arousing of public opinion on the subject of education, with
the growing material prosperity of the people and their willingness to contribute more liberally to the cause of education.
The Infant School Movement was of similar import.. Originating with a French country mrl in I 769, these schools
were soon introduced into Paris and became the progenitors
of the maternal sc!tools, so common in all French cities at
present.
In England the infant schools originated independently with Robert Owen about 1799 at New Lanark,
Scotland, as a means of checking the evil effect of the factory
system on children. The factories of England at that period
employed a large number of children that were bound out to
them by the poor commissioners, at five, six, and seven years
of age for a period of nine years. As these children were
employed from eleven to thirteen hours a day in the factory,
and at the end of th e ir apprenticeship ~vere turned free into
the ignorant mass of the city population, their educational
condition can be imagined. The infant schools were con·

1

Sociological T cndm cy in E ducation
_ ___,,_

\

727

trived to meet this situa tion.
In I 8 I 8 th e ne w idea was
t-a-rried to-Lond ou- by James Bucha na n,__the teacher of Owen's_
sch ool, a nd soo n in th e person of Sa muel Wilderspin fouad an ·
ente rprising exponent wh o was at the sam e tim e a voluminous
write r. In 1834 "The Hom e and Colonial Infant School
Socie ty " was fo rmed for the multiplication of sc hools b ased
upo n Wilderspin's ideas. Alm ost ten years before 'this time
the sch ools ha d appeared in N ew York, and were soon imitated in most of th e oth er large cities of the country. Even
wh ere public schools were established n o provision ·was made
for children of th e earlies t years; the · monitorial · schools in
most -p laces simila rly r estricted th eir clientele. In the early
ninetee nth century the public schools of Boston were forbidden to receive c hil~re_n who could not r ead ~~
Th e In fa nt School Societies found abunda nt wo.rk ·to a o m
most cities. In ma ny pl aces, as in N ew York ' City, they
were th e progenitors of th e prim ary dep artm ent of the public
schools; and to th e present day, th e ind e pendent organization
of the primary dep artm ent and the sharp division drawn for
it in the sch ool buildin g is but a survival of the distinct
orig in s of the g ramm ar a nd prim a ry grades.
Public School Societies in the United States. - A ll of these
education a l interests we re promoted an d by far the g reater
p art of educationa l opportunity was fuh1i shed, by the organization of citi zens into quasi-public societies. The history of
schoo ls in on e city will serve as a type. W ith the exception of
Church sc hools, a nd a scho ol for neg roes fo unded in I 787 and
su pp or ted by th e A frican Free School Society, th ere we re no
fr ee schools in N e w York City until 1805. During that year,
und er the leadership of D e \Vitt Clinton, the mayor of the
city, a free school society, later called the Public S chool
Society, was organized. Th e a im of this institution was to
offer educatio;rnl op portunities g ratis to· the children of the
poor who were not p rovided fo r by the existing Church ·
schools. The L a ncasteria n m eth od of organization and in-

734

I-fistory o_f Educatz'on

Socz"ologz"cal Tendency z'n Educatz'on

735
·t''

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11
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grants. Until 1903 no voluntary or Church school was per.
sprang up in great numbers. The government of the
mitted to participate in funds from local rates. By the law
En g land towns was a pure democracy, and the control of ·:""· ·
of 1870 compulsory attendance regulations might ·be adopted
schools remained for a long time in the hands of the town
by district school boards; but until th ere were schools,--5..Ll!Lll- -"f---- __, @e-t.ci1~ g-it-s e-lf:--EJ11i y graoually were powers delegated first
- - - - -laws-wou-J-d- be anomalous. By the law of 1880 compulsory
to the selectm e n and then, in the eighteenth century, to a school
attendance under ten was provided for; by that of 1899 the
committee. Then the n ecessity for tuition fees from the pupil
age was rai sed to twelve, and by that of 1900 the local bbards
was re pl aced by a more gen e rous assessment upon the town.
were permitted to raise the age limit to fourteen. Until 1903
Thus it happened that in Massachusetts by the middle of the
these two syste ms of state or" board schools" a1:d .Church or
eig htee nth i::eq.tury, and in other New England commonwealths
"voluntary scho ols" re ma in ed sid e by side. vVhile the volunshortly after~vard, elementary schools were for the most part
tary schools were yet more than twice as numerous as the
free. These early systems of public or free schools were
i
board schools, in th e number of tea chers the latter had outrun
largely clue to the religious devotion of the New England
the former;
people a nd to th e practical id entity of Church and State.
the same.
Tiu Educational R ev£val of tlte Early Ninetecntft Century.
_:.._With the decline of the religious fervor and of the uriani mity of religious belief in the later eighteenth century,
interest in education declined also; the Latin grammar
schools disappeared (p. 395); private schools-the academies
- took their place; and the elementary sch?ols became more
~~.:::J.~,..........._.~"""'-"-"-'-"-".-....!."'-',_,,,'-"-'-'~"' · - It appears that
minutely subdivided and. less gen e rously supported.
The
from the latter half of th e seventeenth century some of the town
.
establishment
of
schools
upon
a
politico-economic
basis
wa~
a
schools of Massachusetts we re free in the modern sen se of the
term in that they were supported wholly by public taxation.
growth of the nineteenth century. Although this transition
Many of the early New England schools received their supwent on during the entire half century, it was concentrated
port from a vari ety of sources, such as the sale or rental of
in the period from 1835 to 1850, to which has been given the
public lands, rental from fish weirs, from ferries, from beriame of its leading agitator,
ace
ann JN~l 8)9).
Since schools were very generally supported by local taxation
quest and private gift, from subscription, from local rates, and
in nearly all cases from tuition of students. Wherever in
in Massachusetts, the reforms striven for by Mann as secrethe colonies it was customary for the local or colonial governtary of the Massachusetts School Board (1837- 1849) were the
ment to assist schools by grants or by taxes, it was also
abolition of the small district schools in favor of the bettercustomary for the schoolmaster to supplement this small
supported, better-taught, better-equipped and more centralized
town schools, a better preparation for teachers, the establishallowance by tuition charges reguiated for the most part by
common custom. As the schools established by the towns
ment of normal training schools, a longer school term, school
librarie ~ , an. enriched curriculum, improved methods of inrequired some previous training on the part of those <entering
them, usually the knowledge of. the alphabet or the ability
struction, and the building up of a spirit of educational
enthusiasm among the people and of professional 'spirit
to read, "dame schools" of a most rudimentary character

•

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1

I

11

l/'1 , 1

j1,\
·· ill\'

... ;
'/

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Hi'story of EducatZ:on
among th e teachers. The immedjate result of the labors of
thi first :rea rganizer of American e ucational forces was
that c unn g his secretarysh ip the appropriati ons for the common schools were do u bled,_ th.e_jv.ag:es -of m en- teaclrerS - in creased 62 per cent and those of women teachers 5 l per
·
cent; the rela tive number of women teache rs increased 54
per cent; the annual school term was increase d by one
month; the ratio of private to public school expe nditure fell
from 75 to 36; compensation for school supervision was
made compulsory, and hence both compensation and supervision increased and impro ved; fifty n ew hig h schools were ·
.1
established; the fir st normal schools in America were
founded; school attendance increased; meth ods, discipline, and
spirit of the schoolroom were changed vastly for th e better.
One great object which Mann sought for - th e abolition of
the district school system - was not accomplished ( l 8 59)
until after his retirement from office, and not permanently
until 1882.
This educational revival was not confined to Massachusetts;
there were man y leaders as able and'· some, suc h as Henry
Barnard, as prominent as I-lorace Mann. Chairs of ed ucation
were established in several colleges. Th ough there had been
one state superintendent of education before this time (in
N e w York from l 8 l 3 ), many states now established such an
office. A movement toward the concentration of ad ministration of school affairs began. 'Education al magazines were
established and a voluminous literature appeared . Educational commissioners were sent abroad by several states;
common school funds were established ; and, above all, some
progress was made, by th e leaders at least, toward a n appreciation of mod ern methods and the modern spirit in
ed ucation. This la tte r came largely throu g h a greater knowledge of and appreciation for the ideas and methods of Pestalozzi and of th e German schools.
Modem State SJ1stems of Education. - As with Germany,

Sociological T eudency zn Educatz'on ·

737

there ·s o sing:l . sy.st~rn 0f eElueat:ion h
ited States,
bu a1 rnaeP.en·clent s stem 0 ea-eh state. yet the outline
a nd gcn_er.aLchar..acteri-stics of- these-systems-arem iic nf~
sa me. The amalgamation, or development into consistent
state systems, was an outgrowth of the revival pre~iously discussed and of the establishment of the free school idea. The
final esta blishment of th e idea of free sclfools in tlie moaenl
sense of the term was of qujy! recent occurre1~ce. In ew
York tfue liolition o tuition in RuBlic sdiools was made by
law in 1867. .In New J ersey, and Michigan it did not occur
u ii th e following year.
n Pennsylvania the law was passed
in 18
1d in Indiana it was em bodied in the constitution of
18 5 r. The free school system, thus developed, is constituted
as follows: In every state th e system of elementary schools
offers instruction for seven, eight, or nine years, from the fifth
or sixth year of age. In most states a secondary or high school
course provides instruction for three or four additional years.
In all except a few of the extreme eastern commonwealths,
state universities offering free tuition to 'all, or to all from
within the state, are to be found. In only a few states are the .
local communities compelled by law to furnish high schools
or to provide in neig hborin g schools for all children who
desire the advantages of a secondary school. Varying degrees of unification a mon g th ese parts of th e school system
or in the administration of any particular part of it, as that
of the elementary schools, exist.
The same forces that
worked toward the development of this system now work
for the closer unification in admini stration. First among
th ese is the influence of th e gene ral governmetrt exerted
throu gh the very genero us gifts which constitute a bond of
interest for all institutions that participate in the privileges.
Thus since 1785 the government has given to the common
school system 78,659.439 acres of land, valued at .about. on~
hundred million dollars, and for agricultural educational mstltutions ~n annual endowment which capitalized would amount
3B

r
S ociolog-ical T endency in Educatz"on

H istory of E ducation

739

Ii:-.

to a sum equal to th e form er one. A second factor is the
influence exerte_d by th e state gove rnm e nt tl1roug h th e distribution of th e revenue deri ved from common school fund s
-~----=--=----~'·-~-+-~
in_mosLca-S@-s- tlrnse- grnwnTg outo ft h e gifts of land from
the g e neral governm e nt and of th e funds from state taxation. Such distribution has usually been so condu cted as to
call forth a greater effort of th e local co mmu nity in the
\
ma tter of loc al taxes a nd t o maintain hi g her stand ard s of
teaching effi ciency th a n mere local control wo ul d have
secured. The influence of state uni ve rsities as th e c ulmination of the public school syste m has bee n a yet furth er ca us e
f
of unification. Undoubtedly th e g reater influence resultin g . I ' )t
f\om th e buildin g u p of th ese state sys te ms of public
schools h as bee n th e education of th e p eo ple th e mselves to
a belief in the effica cy of education as a solution for many
social proble ms, in th e necessity of education as a basis of
p olitical stability and economic progress, and to a de pe ndence
upon educa tion as th e chief means of soc ial an d nati onal
progress ; in other word s, to an accep tance of th e sociological conception of edu cation. Al ong with this has developed a willing ness to tax th emselves heavily fo r th e most
ge neral support of th e p ublic sc hoo ls and a consequent
tende ncy to g reater ce nt rali zation of administrati on a nd
supervision as a means to greater effi cie ncy. Durin g th e
earlier pa rt of the century th ere prevailed th e id ea th at ·
free sch oolin g was a matter of c harity a'ncl th at it was
pa up erizing in its eff ect. A lth oug h th at p rejudice has disappeared with th e growt h of th e fr ee school syste m, t here
yet remains t o be thorou g hly inculc ated t he idea th at for the
welfare of the gro up as well as of th e individu al, th e state may
and sh ould compel th e attendance of every child fo r a period
of six or eig ht full years. A furth er developm ent of compulsory attendance laws, which have nowhere r eached th e stage
of efficiency found in th e leadin g Euro pean na ti ons ; a better .
preparation of teachers and a better supervision of their work;

a perfectin g of th e p rocess of in struction and of the technique
of in stru ction th at th ese new ideas may be realized- such
are the lines of d.evelopm ent- 0pen- t0- th e-pub-lic sch-o-olsy s~
of the prese nt.
·
THE INDUSTRIAL TENDENCY. - The politico-economic
te nd e ncy until ve ry rece ntly has been dominantly political;
it is now becomin g domin a ntly economic. In order to understand one of th e most p romin e nt characteristics of present
education al acti viti es, this fac t needs some further explanation.
The agreement of th e scientific and the sociological movement in th eir earlie r effects on educati on has .b een mentioned .
T he fa ct th a t th e basis fo r this early sociolog ical movement
was chiefly political a nd military can be illustrated by this one
series of facts : with th e exception of the school in connection
with th e royal mines at Freiburg , Saxony, the first institution
for the hig he r education in engineering and other scientific
lines was th e A ustrian Milita ry School a t Vienna, established
by Mari a Th eresa in r 747; the French monarch followed with
the school at Menzieres within a year or two; and Frederick
th e G reat estab lished a Ritter-Academ ie of a similar character
in r 764. Th e fi rst sc hool for scientific and engineering instruction in our own co untry was at West Point (1802). The first
technical in stru ction of a public character in England was
th e outg rowth of the trainin g of naval and military officers,
' a nd th e n not u ntil the middle of the nineteenth century.
Until r ecently th e training for citizenship that has always
been ass ig ned as a chief functi on of sta te systems of schools
has been along political and social lines. The aim of education was to prepare th e individual to exercise the right of
suffrage intellige ntly, t o p erform the duties of citizenship
full y and hon estly, to discha rge the duties of office satisfac torily. At least in our own country, with its democratie
social structure, th e e mphasis in public education has been
larg ely from this point of view. For several decades past in

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