Page:Comenius and the beginnings of educational reform (IA cu31924014272656).pdf/9



present volume is an effort to trace the reform movement in education from Vives, Bacon, and Ratke to Comenius, who gave the movement its most significant force and direction; and from him to the later reformers,—Francke, Rousseau, Basedow, Pestalozzi, Fröbel, and Herbart. A variety of ideas, interests, and adaptations, all distinctly modern, are represented in the life-creeds of these reformers; and, in the absence of a more satisfactory term, the progressive movement which they represent has been styled realism, sometimes called the “new education.”

It has been well said that “the dead hand of spiritual ancestry lays no more sacred duty on posterity than that of realizing under happier circumstances ideas which the stress of age or the shortness of life has deprived of their accomplishment.” Many of the reforms represented by the realists occupy no inconsiderable place in the platforms of modern practitioners of education; and in the belief that a history of the movement might contribute toward the ultimate reforms which realism represents, it has seemed expedient to focus such a survey on the life and teachings of the strongest personality and chief exponent of the movement.

The condition of education in Europe during the sixteenth century is briefly told in the opening chap-