[147. Analytical Summary.—1. Decisive changes in human opinion, political, religious, or scientific, involve corresponding changes in the purposes and methods of education.
2. The Reformation was a breaking with authority in matters of religion, as the Baconian philosophy was a breaking with authority in matters of science; and their joint effect on education was to subject matters of opinion, belief, and knowledge to the individual reason, experience, and observation.
3. In holding each human being responsible for his own salvation, the Reformation made it necessary for every one to read, and the logical consequence of this was to make instruction universal; and as schools were multiplied, the number of teachers must be increased, and their grade of competence raised.
4. The conception that ignorance is an evil, and a constant menace to spiritual and temporal safety, led to the idea of compulsory school-attendance.
5. In the recoil from the intuitions of the intellect sanctioned by Socrates, to the intuitions of the senses sanctioned by Bacon, education passed from an extreme dependence on reflection and reason, to an extreme dependence on sense and observation; so that inference has been thrown into discredit, and the verdict of the senses has been made the test of knowledge.
6. In adapting the conception of universal education to the social conditions of his time, Comenius was led to a gradation of schools that underlies all modern systems of public instruction.]
[95] Dittes, op. cit. p. 127.
[96] Luther’s argument for compulsion should not be omitted: “It is my opinion that the authorities are bound to force their subjects to send their children to school.... If they can oblige their able-bodied subjects to carry the lance and the arquebuse, to mount the ramparts, and to do complete military service, for a much better reason may they, and ought they, to force their subjects to send their children to school, for here it is the question of a much more terrible war with the devil.” (P.)
[97] Names for treatises on grammar and philosophy respectively. Donatus was a celebrated grammarian and rhetorician who taught at Rome in the middle of the fourth century A.D.; and Alexander, a celebrated Greek commentator on the writings of Aristotle, who taught the Peripatetic philosophy at Athens in the end of the second and the beginning of the third centuries A.D. (P.)
[98] Michelet, Nos fils, p. 175 et seq.
[99] This is, perhaps, the earliest appearance of the conception that learning should be a process of discovery or of re-discovery. Condillac (1715-1780) has elaborated this idea in the introduction to his Grammaire, and Spencer (Education, p. 122) makes it a fundamental law of teaching. If this assumed principle were to be rigorously applied, as, fortunately, it cannot be, progress in human knowledge would be impossible. Mr. Bain’s comment on this doctrine (Education as a Science, p. 94) is as follows: “This bold fiction is sometimes put forward as one of the regular arts of the teacher; but I should prefer to consider it as an extraordinary device, admissible only on special occasions.” (P.)
[100] It may not be generally known that Comenius was once solicited to become the President of Harvard College. The following is a quotation from Vol. II., p. 14, of Cotton Mather’s Magnalia: “That brave old man, Johannes Amos Commenius, the fame of whose worth hath been trumpetted as far as more than three languages (whereof every one is indebted unto his Janua) could carry it, was indeed agreed withal, by our Mr. Winthrop in his travels through the low countries, to come over into New England, and illuminate this Colledge and country, in the quality of a President, which was now become vacant. But the solicitations of the Swedish Ambassador diverting him another way, that incomparable Moravian became not an American.” This was on the resignation of President Dunster, in 1654. (P.)
[101] The most complete account ever written of Comenius and his writings is, “John Amos Comenius,” by S. S. Laurie (Boston: 1885). It is an invaluable contribution to the philosophy and the history of education. (P.)
[102] Buisson’s Dictionnaire de Pédagogie, Article Comenius.
[103] In the French Lycées and Colleges the grades are named as follows, beginning with the lowest: “ninth, eighth, seventh, sixth, fifth, fourth, third, second, rhetoric, philosophy, preparatory mathematics, elementary mathematics, special mathematics.” Latin was formerly begun in an earlier grade.
[104] The public school of the European type may be represented by a series of (3) pyramids, the second higher than the first, and the third higher than the second, each independent and complete in itself; while the public school of the American type is represented by a single pyramid in three sections. While in an English, French, or German town, public education is administered in three separate establishments, in an American town there is a single graded school that fulfills the same functions. (P.)
[105] Platter, a Swiss teacher of the sixteenth century (1499-1582).
[106] For this quotation, as for all those which we borrow from the preface of the Janua linguarum, a French edition of which (in three languages: Latin, German, and French) appeared in 1643, we copy from the authentic text.
[107] There is a misleading fallacy in all such illustrations. What analogy is there between the learning of history or geology and the learning of a trade like carpentry? Should a physician and a blacksmith be educated on the same plan? In every case knowledge should precede practice; and the liberal arts are best learned by first learning their correlative sciences. (P.)
[108] “A process of instruction which consists in placing beside the elements of human speech thirty-three onomatopoetic gestures, which recall to the sight the same ideas that the sounds and the articulations of the voice recall to the ear.”—Grosselin. (P.)