Part 234

"Any description of popular education in Europe would be incomplete, which should not give prominence to the Institute of the Christian Brothers—or the Brothers of the Christian Doctrine—including in that term the earliest professional school for the training of teachers in Europe; one of the most remarkable body of teachers devoted exclusively and without pay to the education of the children of the poor that the world has ever seen. … The Institute was established as a professional school in 1681, and to Abbe John Baptist de la Salle, belongs the high honor not only of founding it, but of so infusing into its early organization his own profound conviction of the Christ-like character of its mission among the poor, that it has retained for nearly two centuries the form and spirit of its origin. This devoted Christian teacher was born at Rheims on the 30th of April, 1651. … He was early distinguished for his scholarly attainments and maturity of character; and at the age of seventeen, before he had completed his full course of theological study, he was appointed Canon in the Cathedral church of Rheims. From the first, he became interested in the education of the young, and especially of the poor, as the most direct way of leading them to a Christian life;—and with this view before he was twenty-one years old, he assumed the direction of two charities, devoted to female education. From watching the operation of these schools, conducted by teachers without professional training, without plan and without mutual sympathy and aid, he conceived the design of bringing the teachers of this class of schools from the neighboring parishes into a community for their moral and professional improvement. For this purpose, he invited them first to meet, and then to lodge at his house, and afterwards, about the year 1681, he purchased a house for their special accommodation. Here, out of school hours and during their holy days, they spent their time in the practice of religious duties, and in mutual conferences on the work in which they were engaged. About this period, a large number of free schools for the poor were established in the neighboring towns; and applications were constantly made to the Abbe for teachers formed under his training, care, and influence. To meet this demand, and make himself more directly useful in the field of Christian education, he resigned his benefice, that he might give his whole attention to the work. To close the distance between himself, having a high social position and competence from his father's estate, and the poor schoolmasters to whom he was constantly preaching an unreserved consecration of themselves to their vocation—he not only resigned his canonry, with its social and pecuniary advantages, but distributed his patrimony, in a period of scarcity, in relieving the necessities of the poor, and in providing for the education of their children. He thus placed himself on a footing of equality—as to occupation, manner of life, and entire dependence on the charity of others—with the schoolmasters of the poor. The annals of education or religion show but few such examples of practical self-denial, and entire consecration to a sense of duty. … Having completed his act of resignation and self-imposed poverty, he assembled his teachers, announced to them what he had done, and sung with them a Te Deum. After a retreat—a period set apart to prayer and fasting-continued for seventeen days, they devoted themselves to the consideration of the best course to give unity, efficiency, and permanence to their plans of Christian education for the poor. They assumed the name of 'The Brothers of the Christian Doctrine,' as expressive of their vocation—which by usage came to be abbreviated into 'Christian Brothers.' They took on themselves vows of poverty, celibacy, and obedience for three years. They prescribed to themselves the most frugal fare, to be provided in turns by each other, They adopted at that time some rules of behavior, which have since been incorporated into the fundamental rules of the order. … In 1702 the first step was taken to establish an Institute at Rome, under the mission of one of the brothers, Gabriel Drolin, who after years of poverty, was made conductor of one of the charitable schools founded by Pope Clement XI. This school became afterwards the foundation of the house which the brothers have had in Rome since the pontificate of Benedict XIII., who conferred on the institute the constitution of a religious order. In 1703, under the pecuniary aid of M. Chateau Blanc, and the countenance of the archbishop, M. de Gontery, a school was opened at Avignon. … In 1789, the National Assembly prohibited vows to be made in communities; and in 1790, suppressed all religious societies; and in 1791, the institute was dispersed. At that date there were one hundred and twenty houses, and over one thousand brothers, actively engaged in the duties of the school room. The continuity of the society was secured by the houses established in Italy, to which many of the brothers fled. … In 1801, on the conclusion of a Concordat between the Pope and the government, the society was revived in France by the opening of a school at Lyons; and in 1815, they resumed their habit, and opened a novitiate, the members of which were exempt from military service. At the organization of the university in 1808, the institute was legally reorganized, and from that time has increased in numbers and usefulness. … In 1842, there were 390 houses (of which 326 were in France), with 3,030 brothers, and 585 novices. There were 642 schools with 163,700 children, besides evening schools with 7,800 adults in attendance, and three reformatory schools with 2,000 convicts under instruction."

_Henry Barnard, National Education in Europe, pages 435-441._

"In 1878 their numbers had increased to 11,640; they had 1,249 establishments, and the number of their scholars was 390,607."

_Mrs. R. F. Wilson, The Christian Brothers, their Origin and Work, chapter 21._

EDUCATION: A. D. 1762. Rousseau.

"Rousseau, who had educated himself, and very badly at that, was impressed with the dangers of the education of his day. A mother having asked his advice, he took up the pen to write it; and, little by little, his counsels grew into a book, a large work, a pedagogic romance ['Emile']. This romance, when it appeared in 1762, created a great noise and a great scandal. The Archbishop of Paris, Christophe de Beaumont, saw in it a dangerous, mischievous work, and gave himself the trouble of writing a long encyclical letter in order to point out the book to the reprobation of the faithful. This document of twenty-seven chapters is a formal refutation of the theories advanced in 'Emile.' … In those days, such a condemnation was a serious matter; its consequences to an author might be terrible. Rousseau had barely time to flee. His arrest was decreed by the parliament of Paris, and his book was burned by the executioner. … As a fugitive, Rousseau did not find a safe retreat even in his own country. {741} He was obliged to leave Geneva, where his book was also condemned, and Berne, where he had sought refuge, but whence he was driven by intolerance. He owed it to the protection of Lord Keith, governor of Neufchâtel, a principality belonging to the King of Prussia, that he lived for some time in peace in the little town of Motiers in the Val de Travers. … The renown of the book, condemned by so high an authority, was immense. Scandal, by attracting public attention to it, did it good service. What was most serious and most suggestive in it was not, perhaps, seized upon; but the 'craze' of which it was the object had, notwithstanding, good results. Mothers were won over, and resolved to nurse their own infants; great lords began to learn handicrafts, like Rousseau's imaginary pupil; physical exercises came into fashion; the spirit of innovation was forcing itself a way. … Three men above all the rest are noted for having popularized the pedagogic method of Rousseau, and for having been inspired in their labors by 'Emile.' These were Basedow, Pestalozzi, and Froebel. Basedow, a German theologian, had devoted himself entirely to dogmatic controversy, until the reading of 'Emile' had the effect of enlarging his mental horizon, and of revealing to him his true vocation. … Pestalozzi of Zurich, one of the foremost educators of modern times, also found his whole life transformed by the reading of 'Emile,' which awoke in him the genius of a reformer. … The most distinguished among his disciples and continuators is Froebel, the founder of those primary schools … known by the name of 'kindergartens,' and the author of highly esteemed pedagogic works. These various attempts, these new and ingenious processes which, step by step, have made their way among us, and are beginning to make their workings felt, even in institutions most stoutly opposed to progress, are all traceable to Rousseau's 'Emile.' … It is true that 'Emile' contains pages that have outlived their day, many odd precepts, many false ideas, many disputable and destructive theories; but at the same time we find in it so many sagacious observations, such upright counsels, suitable even to modern times, so lofty an ideal, that, in spite of everything, we cannot read and study it without profit. … There is absolutely nothing practicable in his [Rousseau's] system. It consists in isolating a child from the rest of the world; in creating expressly for him a tutor, who is a phœnix among his kind; in depriving him of father, mother, brothers, and sisters, his companions in study; in surrounding him with a perpetual charlatanism, under the pretext of following nature; and in showing him only through the veil of a factitious atmosphere the society in which he is to live. And, nevertheless, at each step it is sound reason by which we are met; by an astonishing paradox, this whimsicality is full of good sense; this dream overflows with realities; this improbable and chimerical romance contains the substance and the marrow of a rational and truly modern treatise on pedagogy. Sometimes we must read between the lines, add what experience has taught us since that day, transpose into an atmosphere of open democracy those pages, written under the old order of things, but even then quivering with the new world which they were bringing to light, and for which they prepared the way. Reading 'Emile' in the light of modern prejudices, we can see in it more than the author wittingly put into it; but not more than logic and the instinct of genius set down there. To unfold the powers of children in due proportion to their age; not to transcend their ability; to arouse in them the sense of the observer and of the pioneer; to make them discoverers rather than imitators: to teach them accountability to themselves and not slavish dependence upon the words of others; to address ourselves more to the will than to custom, to the reason rather than to the memory; to substitute for verbal recitations lessons about things; to lead to theory by way of art; to assign to physical movements and exercises a prominent place, from the earliest hours of life up to perfect maturity; such are the principles scattered broadcast in this book, and forming a happy counterpoise to the oddities of which Rousseau was perhaps most proud."

_J. Steeg, Introduction to Rousseau's 'Emile.'_

EDUCATION: A. D. 1798-1827. Pestalozzi.

In Switzerland, up to the end of the eighteenth century, the state of primary instruction was very bad. "The teachers were gathered up at hazard; their pay was wretched; in general they had no lodgings of their own, and they were obliged to hire themselves out for domestic service among the well-off inhabitants of the villages, in order to find food and lodging among them. A mean spirit of caste still dominated instruction, and the poor remained sunk in ignorance. It was in the very midst of this wretched and unpropitious state of affairs that there appeared, towards the end of the eighteenth century, the most celebrated of modern educators. … Born at Zurich in 1746, Pestalozzi died at Brugg in Argovia in 1827. This unfortunate great man always felt the effects of the sentimental and unpractical education given him by his mother, who was left a widow with three children in 1751. He early formed the habit of feeling and of being touched with emotion, rather than of reasoning and of reflecting. The laughing-stock of his companions, who made sport of his awkwardness, the little scholar of Zurich accustomed himself to live alone and to become a dreamer. Later, towards 1760, the student of the academy distinguished himself by his political enthusiasm and his revolutionary daring. At that early period he had conceived a profound feeling for the miseries and the needs of the people, and he already proposed as the purpose of his life the healing of the diseases of society. At the same time there was developed in him an irresistible taste for a simple, frugal, and almost ascetic life. To restrain his desires had become the essential rule of his conduct, and, to put it in practice, he forced himself to sleep on a plank, and to subsist on bread and vegetables."

_G. Compayré, The History of Pedagogy, chapter 18._

"In spite … of Pestalozzi's patent disqualifications in many respects for the task he undertook; in spite of his ignorance of even common subjects (for he spoke, read, wrote, and cyphered badly, and knew next to nothing of classics or science); in spite of his want of worldly wisdom, of any comprehensive and exact knowledge of men and of things; in spite of his being merely an elementary teacher,—through the force of his all-conquering love, the nobility of his heart, the resistless energy of his enthusiasm, his firm grasp of a few first principles, his eloquent exposition of them in words, his resolute manifestation of them in deeds,—he stands forth among educational reformers as the man whose influence on education is wider, deeper, more penetrating, than that of all the rest—the prophet and the sovereign of the domain in which he lived and laboured. … {742} It was late in life—he was fifty-two years of age—before Pestalozzi became a practical school-master. He had even begun to despair of ever finding the career in which he might attempt to realize the theories over which his loving heart and teeming brain had been brooding from his earliest youth. … At fifty-two years of age, then, we find Pestalozzi utterly unacquainted with the science and the art of education, and very scantily furnished even with elementary knowledge, undertaking at Stanz, in the canton of Unterwalden, the charge of eighty children, whom the events of war had rendered homeless and destitute. … The house in which the eighty children were assembled to be boarded, lodged, and taught, was an old tumble-down Ursuline convent, scarcely habitable, and destitute of all the conveniences of life. The only apartment suitable for a schoolroom was about twenty-four feet square, furnished with a few desks and forms; and into this were crowded the wretched children, noisy, dirty, diseased, and ignorant, with the manners and habits of barbarians. Pestalozzi's only helper in the management of the institution was an old woman, who cooked the food and swept the rooms; so that he was, as he tells us himself, not only the teacher, but the paymaster, man-servant, and almost the housemaid of the children. … 'My wishes [he writes] were now accomplished. I felt convinced that my heart would change the condition of my children as speedily as the springtide sun reanimates the earth frozen by the winter. Nor,' he adds, 'was I mistaken. Before the springtide sun melted away the snow from our mountains, you could no longer recognise the same children.' … 'I was obliged,' he says, 'unceasingly to be everything to my children. I was alone with them from morning to night. It was from my hand they received whatever could be of service both to their bodies and minds. All succour, all consolation, all instruction came to them immediately from myself. Their hands were in my hand; my eyes were fixed on theirs, my tears mingled with theirs, my smiles encountered theirs, my soup was their soup, my drink was their drink. I had around me neither family, friends, nor servants; I had only them. I was with them when they were in health, by their side when they were ill. I slept in their midst. I was the last to go to bed, the first to rise in the morning. When we were in bed I used to pray with them and talk to them till they went to sleep. They wished me to do so.' … 'I knew,' he says, 'no system, no method, no art but that which rested on the simple consequences of the firm belief of the children in my love towards them. I wished to know no other.' … Gradually … Pestalozzi advanced to the main principles of his system of moral education. … He says:—'Nature develops all the human faculties by practice, and their growth depends on their exercise.' 'The circle of knowledge commences close around a man, and thence extends concentrically.' 'Force not the faculties of children into the remote paths of knowledge, until they have gained strength by exercise on things that are near them.' 'There is in Nature an order and march of development. If you disturb or interfere with it, you mar the peace and harmony of the mind. And this you do, if, before you have formed the mind by the progressive knowledge of the realities of life, you fling it into the labyrinth of words, and make them the basis of development.' 'The artificial march of the ordinary school, anticipating the order of Nature, which proceeds without anxiety and without haste, inverts this order by placing words first, and thus secures a deceitful appearance of success at the expense of natural and safe development.' In these few sentences we recognise all that is most characteristic in the educational principles of Pestalozzi. … To set the intellectual machinery in motion—to make it work, and keep it working; that was the sole object at which he aimed; of all the rest he took little account. … He relied upon a principle which must be insisted on as cardinal and essential in education. He secured the thorough interest of his pupils in the lesson, and mainly through their own direct share in it. … Observation, … according to Pestalozzi (and Bacon had said the same thing before him), is the absolute basis of all knowledge, and is therefore the prime agent in elementary education. It is around this theory, as a centre of gravity, that Pestalozzi's system revolves."

_J. Payne, Lectures on the History of Education, lecture. 9._

"During the short period, not more than a year, which Pestalozzi spent among the children at Stanz, he settled the main features of the Pestalozzian system. Sickness broke out among the children, and the wear and tear was too great even for Pestalozzi. He would probably have sunk under his efforts if the French, pressed by the Austrians, had not entered Stanz, in January, 1799, and taken part of the Ursuline Convent for a military hospital. Pestalozzi was, therefore, obliged to break up the school, and he himself went to a medicinal spring on the Gurnigel in the Canton Bern. … He came down from the Gurnigel, and began to teach in the primary schools (i. e., schools for children from four to eight years old) of Burgdorf, the second town in the Canton. Here the director was jealous of him, and he met with much opposition. … In less than a year Pestalozzi left this school in bad health, and joined Krüsi in opening a new school in Burgdorf Castle, for which he afterward (1802) obtained Government aid. Here he was assisted in carrying out his system by Krüsi, Tobler, and Bluss. He now embodied the results of his experience in a work which has obtained great celebrity—'How Gertrude Teaches her Children' [also published in England under the title of 'Leonard and Gertrude]. In 1802 Pestalozzi, for once in his life a successful and popular man, was elected a member of a deputation sent by the Swiss people to Paris. On the restoration of the Cantons in 1804. the Castle of Burgdorf was again occupied by one of the chief magistrates, and Pestalozzi and his establishment were moved to the Monastery of Buchsee. Here the teachers gave the principal direction to another, the since celebrated Fellenburg, 'not without my consent,' says Pestalozzi, 'but to my profound mortification.' He therefore soon accepted an invitation from the inhabitants of Yverdun to open an institution there, and within a twelvemonth he was followed by his old assistants, who had found government by Fellenburg less to their taste than no-government by Pestalozzi. {743} The Yverdun Institute had soon a world-wide reputation. Pestalozzian teachers went from it to Madrid, to Naples, to St. Petersburg. Kings and philosophers joined in doing it honor. But, as Pestalozzi himself has testified, these praises were but as a laurel-wreath encircling a skull. The life of the Pestalozzian institutions had been the love which the old man had infused into all the members, teachers as well as children; but this life was wanting at Yverdun. The establishment was much too large to be carried on successfully without more method and discipline than Pestalozzi, remarkable, as he himself says, for his 'unrivalled incapacity to govern,' was master of. The assistants began each to take his own line, and even the outward show of unity was soon at an end. … Thus the sun went down in clouds, and the old man, when he died at the age of eighty, in 1827, had seen the apparent failure of all his toils. He had not, however, failed in reality. It has been said of him that his true fortune was to educate ideas, not children, and when twenty years later the centenary of his birth was celebrated by school-masters, not only in his native country, but throughout Germany, it was found that Pestalozzian ideas had been sown, and were bearing fruit, over the greater part of central Europe."

_R. H. Quick, Essays on Educational Reformers, chapter 8._

EDUCATION: A. D. 1804-1891. Co-education and the Higher Education of Women in the United States.