Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 7.djvu/695

673 EDUCATION 673 of school books and his practical labours in education, earned the title of Prseceptor Germanise. Aristotle had been dethroned from his pre-eminence in the schools, and Melanchthon attempted to supply his place. He appreciated the importance of Greek, the terror of the obscurantists, and is the author of a Greek grammar. He wrote elementary books on each department of the trivium grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric. He made some way with the studies of the ouadrivium, and wrote Initia doctrines Physicce, a primer of physical science. He lectured at the university of Wittenberg, and for ten years, from 1519 to 1529, kept a schola privata in his own house. Horace was his favourite classic. His pupils were taught to learn the whole of it by heart, ten lines at a time. The tender refined lines of his well-known portraits show clearly the character of the painful, accurate scholar, and contrast with the burly powerful form of the genial Luther. He died in 1560, racked with anxiety for the church which he had helped to found. If he did not carry Protestantism into the heart of the peasant, he at least made it acceptable to the intellect of the man of letters. We now come to the names of three theoretical and practical teachers who have exercised and are still exercis ing a profound effect over education. The so-called Latin school, the parent of the gymnasium and the lyce&quot;e, had spread all over Europe, and was especially flourishing in Germany. The programmes and time tables in use in these establishments have come down to us, and we possess notices of the lives and labours of many of the earliest teachers. It is not difficult to trace a picture of the education which the Reformation offered to the middle classes of Europe. Ample materials exist in German histories of educa tion. We must confine ourselves to those moments which were of vital influence in the development of the science. One school stands pre-eminently before the rest, situated in that border city on the debatable land between France and Germany, which has known how to combine and reconcile the peculiarities of French and German culture. Strasburg, besides a school of theology which unites the depth of Germany to the clearness and vivacity of France, educated the gilded youth of the 16th century under Sturm, as it trained the statesmen and diplomatists of tae 18th under Koch. John Sturm of Strasburg was the friend of Ascham, the author of the Scholemaster, and the tutor of Queen Elizabeth. It was Ascham who found Lady Jane Grey alone in her room at Bradgate bending her neck over the page of Plato when all the rest of her family were following the chase. Sturm was the first great head master, the progenitor of Busbys if not of Arnolds. He lived and worked till the age of eighty-two. He was a friend of all the most distinguished men of his age, the chosen repre sentative of the Protestant cause in Europe, the ambassador to foreign powers. He was believed to be better informed than any man of his time of the complications of foreign politics. Rarely did an envoy pass from France to Germany without turning aside to profit by his experience. But the chief energies of his life were devoted to teaching. He drew his scholars from the whole of Europe ; Portugal, Poland, England sent their contingent to his halls. In 1578 his school numbered several thousand students ; he supplied at once the place of the cloister and the castle. What he most insisted upon was the teaching of Latin, not the conversational lingua franca of Erasmus, but pure, elegant Ciceronian Latinity. He may be called the intro ducer of scholarship into the schools, a scholarship which as yet took little account of Greek. His pupils would write elegant letters, deliver elegant Latin speeches, be familiar, if not with the thoughts, at least with the language of^ the ancients, would be scholars in order that they might be gentlemen. Our space will not permit us to trace the whole course of his influence, but he is in all probability as much answerable as any one for the euphuistic refinement which overspread Europe in the 16th century, and which went far to ruin and corrupt its literatures. Nowhere perhaps had he more effect than in England. Our older public schools, on breaking with the ancient faith, looked to Sturm as their model of Protestant education. His name and example became familiar to us by the exertions of his friend Ascham. Westminster, under the long reign of Busby, received a form which was generally accepted as the type of a gentleman s education. The Public School Commission of 1862 found that the lines laid down by the great citizen of Strasburg, and copied by his admirers, had remained unchanged until within the memory of the present generation. Wolfgang Ratke or Ratke. Ratichius was born in Holstein in 1571. He anticipated some of the best improvements in the method of teaching which have been made in modern times. He was like many of those who have tried to improve existing methods in advance of his age, and he was rewarded for his labours at Augsburg, Weimar, and Kb then by persecution and imprisonment. Can we wonder that education has improved so slowly when so much pains has been taken to silence and extinguish those who have devoted themselves to its improvement 1 ? His chief rules were as follows. 1. Begin everything with prayer. 2. Do everything in order, following the course of nature. 3. One thing at a time. 4. Often repeat the same thing. 5. Teach everything first in the mother tongue. 6. Proceed from the mother tongue to other languages. 7. Teach without compulsion. Do not beat children to make them learn. Pupils must love their masters, not hate them. Nothing should be learnt by heart. Sufficient time should be given to play and recreation. Learn one thing before going on to another. Do not teach for two hours consecutively. 8. Uniformity in teaching, also in school books, especially grammars, which may with advantage be made comparative. 9. Teach a thing first, and then the reason of it. Give no rules before you have given the examples. Teach no language out of the gram mar, but out of authors. 10. Let everything be taught by induction and experiment. Most of these precepts are accepted by all good teachers in the present day ; all of them are full of wisdom. Unfortunately their author saw the faults of the teaching of his time more clearly than the means to remove them, and he was more successful in forming precepts than in carrying them out. Notwith standing these drawbacks, he deserves an honourable place among the forerunners of a rational education. John Amos Comenius was the antithesis to Sturm, and Comeni a greater man than Ratke. Born a Moravian, he passed a 1592- wandering life, among the troubles of the Thirty Years War, in poverty and obscurity. But his ideas were accepted by the most advanced thinkers of the age, notably in many re spects by our own Milton, and by Oxenstiern the chancellor of Sweden. His school books wei e spread throughout Europe. The Janua Linguarum Keserata was translated into twelve European and several Asiatic languages. His works, espe cially the Didascalia magna, an encyclopaedia of the science of education, are constantly reprinted at the present day; and the system which he sketched will be found to foreshadow the education of the future. He was repelled and disgusted by the long delays and pedantries of the schools. His ardent mind conceived that if teachers would but follow nature instead of forcing it against its bent, take full advantage of the innate desire for activity and growth, all men might be able to learn all things. Languages should be taught as the mother tongue is taught, by conversations on ordinary topics ; pictures, object lessons, should be freely used; teaching should go hand in hand with a cheerful, elegant, and happy life. Comenius included in his course VII, 85