Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/74

62 marked the Dessau Educational Institute as the one that displays the evidences of excellence."

Kant's commendatory words refer to the School of the Philanthropists, founded December 27, 1774, at Dessau, under the direction of Basedow. This reformer represented Comenius and Rousseau. A few sentences from his writings are significant in this connection:

"The great aim of education should be to prepare the youth for a useful, patriotic, and happy life. Instruction should be rendered as agreeable as is consistent with its nature. Practice in the memory of things is far more important than in the memory of words.

"But this knowledge of things must furnish new representations to the understanding; must not simply fill out the memory with words. Paintings and engravings are of great service in instruction. Experience teaches how everything which resembles a picture pleases children."

A public examination of Basedow's work was held in May, 1776. The reformer's invitation contained the following passage: "This affair is not Catholic, Lutheran, or Reformed, but Christian. We are philanthropists, cosmopolitans. Russia's or Denmark's sovereignty is not, in our teachings, placed after Switzerland's freedom. Our textbooks are free from theological bias for the Christian as against Jews, Mohammedans, deists, or the dissenters, called, in some places, heretics. Very little memorizing is done by us. The students are not forced to be industrious. Still, we promise by the excellence of our method of instruction, and by its agreement with all philanthropic education, twofold as much progress as can be secured by the best schools or gymnasia." The public examination was favorable, and many influential men approved the undertaking in highest terms. There were bitter enemies, however. Most of the directors of the gymnasia opposed Basedow to the utmost, and Herder expressed a feeling more or less prevalent when he wrote: "The whole thing appears to me horrible. They tell of a new method for raising oak-forests in ten years. I wouldn't give Basedow calves to raise, much less men!"

We have considered a slow and complex movement, yet one steadily tending to definite result. The movement has been away from classical training as a necessary part of education. Montaigne, Bacon, Ratich, Comenius, the pietists, the philanthropists, have led education into new courses. The tendency was clearly revealed in the Dessau Institute. Education has been emancipated from scholasticism, and this with such force as to threaten the future supremacy of Greece and Rome.

As matter of fact, we have now before us, in the historical development of our subject, two sharply contrasted ideas. Whether these ideas are necessarily antagonistic is not the present question. We are concerned with the forces actually at work, and with the manner of