The History Of Education, Ellwood P. Cubberley [motivational novels .TXT] 📗

that it be not revealed to others. Two professors were appointed to examine Ratke, and they reported very favorably on his plan.

 

In 1617 Ratke published, in Leipzig, his Methodus Nova, which was the pioneer work on school method, and is Ratke’s chief claim to mention here.

In this he laid down the fundamental rules for teaching, as he had thought them out. They were as follows:

 

1. The order of Nature was to be sought and followed.

 

2. One thing at a time, and that mastered thoroughly.

 

3. Much repetition to insure retention.

 

4. Use of the mother tongue for all instruction, and the languages to be taught through it.

 

5. Everything to be taught without constraint. The teacher to teach, and the scholars to keep order and discipline.

 

6. No learning by heart. Much questioning and understanding.

 

7. Uniformity in books and methods a necessity.

 

8. Knowledge of things to precede words about things.

 

9. Individual experience and contact and inquiry to replace authority.

 

We see here the essentials of the Baconian ideas, as well as the foreshadowings of many other subsequent reforms in teaching method.

 

During the next half-dozen years Ratke was a much-interviewed person, as the idea of a more general education of the people, advanced by the Protestant reformers, had appealed strongly to the imagination of many of the German princes. Finally the necessary money was raised to establish an experimental school, [4] printing-presses were set up to print the necessary books, the people of the village of K�then, in Anhalt, were ordered to send their children for instruction, and the school opened with Ratke in charge and amid great expectations and enthusiasm. A year and a half later the school had failed, through the bad management of Ratke and his inability to realize the extravagant hopes he had aroused, and he himself had been thrown into prison as an impostor by the princes. This ended Ratke’s work. He is important chiefly for his pioneer work as the forerunner of the greatest educator of the seventeenth century.

 

JOHANN AMOS COMENIUS. We now reach not only the greatest representative of sense realism, both in theory and practice, before the latter part of the eighteenth century, but also one of the commanding figures in the history of education. Comenius was born at Nivnitz, in Moravia, in 1592. As a member, pastor, and later bishop of the Moravian church, and as a follower of John Huss, he suffered greatly in the Catholic-Protestant warfare which raged over his native land during the period of the Thirty Years’ War. His home twice plundered, his books and manuscripts twice burned, his wife and children murdered, and himself at times a fugitive and later an exile, Comenius gave his long life to the advancement of the interests of mankind through religion and learning. Driven from his home and country, he became a scholar of the world.

 

While a student at the University of Nassau, at the age of twenty, he read and was deeply impressed by the “Address” of Ratke. Bacon’s Novum Organum, which appeared when he was twenty-eight, made a still deeper impression upon him. He seems to have been familiar also with the writings of the educational reformers of his time in all European lands. He traveled extensively, and maintained a large correspondence with the scholars of his time. He was master of a Latin school in Moravia from the age of twenty-two to twenty-four, when he was ordained as a pastor of the Moravian Church. Eight years later, in 1632, he was banished, with all Protestant ministers, from his native land, and while an exile for a time took charge of a school at Lissa, in Poland. Here he worked out, in practice, the great work on method which he later published. In 1638 he was invited to reform the schools of Sweden; in 1641 he visited England, in connection with a plan for the organization of all knowledge; he spent the next eight years working at school reform in Sweden; from 1650 to 1654

he was in charge of a school at Saros-Patak, in Hungary, where he worked out his famous textbooks for teaching language; he was consulted with reference to the presidency of Harvard College, in 1654; the same year he returned to Lissa, and once more lost his books and manuscripts and was made a homeless exile; and finally he found a patron and asylum in Amsterdam, where he died in 1671, at the age of seventy-nine. The verse beneath his portrait seems an especially appropriate commentary on his life.

 

COMENIUS AND EDUCATIONAL METHOD. While teaching at Lissa, in Poland, Comenius had formulated for himself the principles underlying school instruction, as he saw it, in a lengthy book which he called The Great Didactic. [5] The title page (R. 218) and the table of contents (R. 219) will give an idea as to its scope. In this work Comenius formulated and explained his two fundamental ideas, namely, that all instruction must be carefully graded and arranged to follow the order of nature, and that, in imparting knowledge to children, the teacher must make constant appeal through sense-perception to the understanding of the child. We have here the fundamental ideas of Bacon applied to the school, and Comenius stands as the clearest exponent of sense realism in teaching up to his time, and for more than a century afterward.

 

Deeply religious by nature and training, Comenius held the Holy Scriptures to contain the beginning and end of all learning; to know God aright he held to be the highest aim; and with true Protestant fervor he contended that the education of every human being was a necessity if mankind was to enter into its religious inheritance, and piety, virtue, and learning were to be brought to their fruition. Unlike those who were enthusiasts for religious education only, Comenius saw further, and held an ideal of service to the State and Church here below for which proper training was needed. Still more, he believed in the education of human beings simply because they were human beings, and not merely for salvation, as Luther had held.

 

Comenius was the first to formulate a practicable school method, working along the new lines marked out by Bacon. He had no psychology to guide him, and worked largely by analogies from nature. A great idea with him was that we should study and follow nature, and this led him to the conclusions that education should proceed from the easy to the difficult, the near to the remote, the general to the special, and the known to the unknown, and that the great business of the teacher was imparting and guiding, and not storing the memory. These conclusions seem commonplaces to us of to-day, but what is commonplace today was genius three hundred years ago. To select the subject-matter of instruction carefully and on the basis of utility, to eliminate needless materials, not to attempt too much at a time, to use concrete examples, to have frequent repetitions to fix ideas, to advance by carefully graded steps, to tie new knowledge to old, to learn by observing and doing, and to learn by use rather than by precept—were still other of the present-day commonplaces which Comenius worked out and formulated in his Didactica Magna. [6] His plea for a mild and gentle discipline in place of the brutality of his time, his emphasis of the vernacular and the realities of life, his conception as to the importance of early education, his careful gradation of the school, and his ability to see the usefulness of Latin without over-emphasizing its importance—all stamp him as a capable and practical schoolmaster who saw deeply into the nature of the educational process.

 

[Illustration: PLATE 10. JOHN AMOS COMENIUS (1592-1671) The Moravian Bishop at the age of fifty. (After an engraving by Glover, printed as a frontispiece to Hartlib’s A Reformation of Schooles.

London, 1642.)

 

Loe, here an Exile, who to serve his God, Hath sharply tasted of proud Pashurs Rod Whose learning, Piety, & true worth, being knowne To all the world, makes all the world his owne. F.Q.]

 

COMENIUS’ IDEAS AS TO THE ORGANIZATION OF SCHOOLS. In his Didactica Magna Comenius divided the school life of a child into four great divisions. The first concerned the period from infancy to the age of six, which he called The Mother School. For this period he wrote The School of Infancy (1628), a book intended primarily for parents, and one of such deep insight and fundamental importance that parents and teachers may still read it with interest and profit. In it he anticipated many of the ideas of the kindergarten of to-day. The next division was The Vernacular School, which covered the period from the ages of six to twelve. For this period six classes were to be provided, and the emphasis was to be on the mother tongue. This school was to be for all, of both sexes, and in it the basis of an education for life was to be given. It was to teach its pupils to read and write the mother tongue; enough arithmetic for the ordinary business of life, and the commonly used measures; to sing, and to know certain songs by rote; to know about the real things of life; the Catechism and the Bible; a general knowledge of history, and especially the creation, fall, and redemption of man; the elements of geography and astronomy; and a knowledge of the trades and occupations of life; all of which, says Comenius, can be taught better through the mother tongue than through the medium of the Latin and Greek. In scope this school corresponds with the vernacular school of modern Europe.

 

The next school was The Latin School, covering the years from twelve to eighteen, and in this German, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew were to be taught, by improved methods, and with physics and mathematics added. This school he divided into six classes, named from the principal study in each, as follows: (1) Grammar, (2) Physics, (3) Mathematics, (4) Ethics, (5) Dialectics, (6) Rhetoric. He also later outlined a plan for a six-class Gymnasium for Saros-Patak (R. 220), culminating in a seventh year for preparation for the ministry, which was an improvement on the Latin School and very modern in character. Had such a school become common, secondary education in Europe might have been a century in advance of where the nineteenth century found it. The Latin school was to be attended only by those of ability who were likely to enter the service of Church or State, or who intended to pass on to the University. This last was to cover the period from eighteen to twenty-four. Unlike all educational practice of his time and later, Comenius here provides for an educational ladder of the present-day American type, wholly unlike the European two-class school system which (p. 353) later evolved.

 

COMENIUS’ WORK IN REFORMING LANGUAGE TEACHING. At the time Comenius lived and wrote, the languages constituted almost the only subject of study, and Latin grammar was the great introductory subject. The mediaeval grammars (Donatus; Alexander de Villa Dei; pp. 156, 155) had been so poor that the instruction was difficult and, in consequence, long drawn out. Lily’s Latin Grammar (p. 276), published in 1513, and Melanchthon’s Latin Grammar, published in 1525, had represented marked advances. Still the subject remained difficult, even when taught from these new types of grammars. Comenius early became convinced, as a result of his teaching and studies in educational method, that the ancient classical authors were not only too difficult for boys beginning the study of Latin, but that they also did not contain the type of real knowledge he felt should be taught in the schools. He accordingly set