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290 afterward that science became even meagerly available for school purposes. A new method had also been discovered, a method not more important in the search for truth than in the attainment of intellectual freedom; but the schoolmasters did not know it, or thought less of intellectual freedom than of more obvious results in linguistic proficiency. A new need for universal education had begun to be foreseen; but to the schoolmasters of the seventeenth century democracy was not even a Utopian promise. Schools remained, therefore, narrow in curriculum and authoritative in method, and education the opportunity of the privileged. Writers on practical school keeping, such as John Brimsley and Charles Hoole, were more concerned over improvements in the teaching of the classics than over fundamental changes in programs of study, in the spirit of instruction and discipline, or in the extension of educational opportunity.

COMENIUS AND "THE GREAT DIDACTIC"

To dream, therefore, in that time, of an educational system, state-administered, state-supported, compulsory, and hence democratic; a system serving the varying need of all individuals, yet aiming in the education of each at a socially valuable result; a system culminating in great academies of research and experiment, with parallel graduate schools for professional training, including the training of teachers; a system, finally, in which all subjects were to be taught and learned by the mind-freeing method of science, and all schools, classes, and subjects to be ordered and managed in natural yet effective ways: this was an achievement, even among reformers. This dream and a life of effort to realize it must be credited to the greatest educator of the century, who was neither John Locke nor John Milton, but the Moravian bishop, John Amos Comenius.

SCOPE OF THE TREATISES OF LOCKE AND MILTON

It cannot be denied that neither Locke's "Thoughts on Education" nor Milton's "Tractate on Education" is a document of such historical importance as the chief work of Comenius, "