EDUCATION

IN THE SECOND VOLUME of this series we illustrated the education of the Spartans, and the contributions to the science by Plato and Aristotle. In all of this the child was subordinated to the state. The Spartans made him a Stoic: Plato and Aristotle would have made him a philosopher. Rome, on the other hand, as we saw in the essays of Quintilian and Plutarch (volume III.), trained her youth to be orators. They were either born statesmen, generals, jurisconsults, or got their skill in these fields by actual practice; in eloquence alone were they given any formal training.

The education of the Middle Ages was either that of scholasticism in the monasteries or of knighthood in the tournament. The two forms were in strong contrast. The young knight was brought up to serve his mistress, the monk was taught to think woman a temptation from the devil. The knight learned to ride, joust, swim, shoot with the bow, hawk, play chess, and make verses in Italian or Provençal. The monk learned grammar, logic, rhetoric, Latin, mathematics, philosophy, astrology, and perhaps alchemy and music. The knight's training was mostly physical. The monk's was intellectual, but narrow, bigoted, harsh, and formal.

With the Renaissance came a new interest in the classical authors studied in the original. Universities sprung up all over Europe, and the higher classes, who had been intellectually the most ignorant during the Middle Ages, became the most enlightened. The Reformation did much to bring this education within the reach of the middle orders.

EDUCATION

IN THE SECOND VOLUME of this series we illustrated the education of the Spartans, and the contributions to the science by Plato and Aristotle. In all of this the child was subordinated to the state. The Spartans made him a Stoic: Plato and Aristotle would have made him a philosopher. Rome, on the other hand, as we saw in the essays of Quintilian and Plutarch (volume III.), trained her youth to be orators. They were either born statesmen, generals, jurisconsults, or got their skill in these fields by actual practice; in eloquence alone were they given any formal training.

The education of the Middle Ages was either that of scholasticism in the monasteries or of knighthood in the tournament. The two forms were in strong contrast. The young knight was brought up to serve his mistress, the monk was taught to think woman a temptation from the devil. The knight learned to ride, joust, swim, shoot with the bow, hawk, play chess, and make verses in Italian or Provençal. The monk learned grammar, logic, rhetoric, Latin, mathematics, philosophy, astrology, and perhaps alchemy and music. The knight's training was mostly physical. The monk's was intellectual, but narrow, bigoted, harsh, and formal.

With the Renaissance came a new interest in the classical authors studied in the original. Universities sprung up all over Europe, and the higher classes, who had been intellectually the most ignorant during the Middle Ages, became the most enlightened. The Reformation did much to bring this education within the reach. of the middle orders.

John Sturm (1507-1589) of Strasburg introduced the study of pure Ciceronian Latin into the schools in place of the spoken Latin of the scholastics. The influence of this act has been enormous both for good and bad. He was an embodiment of true scholarship, but his work led to euphemism and artificial refinements.

Montaigne (1533-1592) gives a good picture of the education of his time. He makes a strong plea for the fostering and development of the originality of the child. His essay on education is given in volume V.

Wolfgang Ratke (1571-?) did a great deal to systematize teaching. His principal rules are these: 1. Begin everything with prayer. 2. Do all things in order, following nature. 3. Do one thing at a time. 4. Emphasize by frequent repetition. 5. Teach first in the mother tongue. 6. Proceed from the mother tongue to the other languages. 7. Do not beat children (as did the monastic schools) to make them learn. Give time for play. Do not teach more than two hours at a time. Teach pupils to love their masters. Let them learn the substance, not the words. 8. Let there be uniformity in teaching and text books. 9. Teach things first, then the reasons for them. Give examples before rules. Teach languages from the authors themselves. 10. Teach inductively and by experiment.

As a counterpoise to the new development of Protestant schools, the Jesuits established schools all over Catholic Europe. Lower education they made include grammar and syntax. Then followed rhetoric and the languages. The pupils were taught not only to read and write but to speak classical Latin. The higher studies began with Aristotle's science and followed with his philosophy. The climax of the course was a four years' training in theology.

The educator most influential on the future developments of the science was probably, however, Comenius. His great principle was to follow nature closely, for example, in learning a dead language to learn words and things together as we do the mother tongue. His outline of the principles of education is given below.

COMENIUS

JOHN AMOS COMENIUS (KOMENSKI) was born in Moravia, 1592. His parents, who belonged to the Moravian Brethren, died when he was a child. He went to an elementary school at Stassnick, and entered the Latin school at the rather late age of sixteen. After attending the universities of Amsterdam and Heidelberg, he was appointed to the Moravian Brethren's school at Prerau. In 1618 he was placed over the church and school at Fulneck. In 1621 the Spanish troops swept away his property. Three years later the persecution of the Protestants in that locality began and in 1627 Comenius felt compelled to seek peace in Poland. He was summoned to England in 1641 to superintend the improvement of the public schools, but the civil war was on and he had to leave with his work unaccomplished. For a while he found a home with Louis de Geer, a rich Dutch merchant, but in 1648 returned to Poland to be head bishop of his church. The next few years were spent in his church work and in the founding of a model school.

Trouble broke out between the Moravians and Poles and Comenius again lost all his possessions, finding a home at last with Lawrence de Geer, the son of his former patron. He died in 1670. He helped to open education to the lower classes and continually sought to find a method of instruction that would follow the example of

nature.

EDUCATIONAL IDEAS

THE PRINCIPLES OF FACILITY IN TEACHING AND IN LEARNING

I. We have already considered the means by which the educationist may attain his goal with certainty, we will now proceed to see how these means can be suited to the minds of the pupils, so that their use may be easy and pleasant.