Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 06.djvu/753

* EDUCATION. 655 EDUCATION. public schools. He had in mind the education of an En-flish countiy gentleman of his time, and gave little attention to the philosophical aspect of his education. This is treated in the more general work on The Human L'luicrstamling, and its inlluence passed throufili the writings of the empirical school of philosophy until it reached Kousseau. Jean Jacipies Rousseavi (q.v.) is the most commanding educational (igure in the eigh- teentli eenturv. In 17lj2 appeared his Emilc, which was destined to direct the current of educational thought for a century. His dominant thought was ■education according to nature,' a shibboleth which had a variety of interpreta- tions; it meant, primarily, that the inlluence of human society is evil, that education should seek to eliminate all social inlluence, that education should shield the mind from error and the heart from evil, and this largely by isolating the child; it meant, further, that the "nature" to be consid- ered in education was the nature of the child, not nature in the Comenian and Baconian sense of the general processes and j)henomena of the physical and biological worlds, and this is its most important educational meaning: but it also meant nature in this latter sense as well, the world of things, since it was only the education that came from things that was wholly good. This last interpretation of the naturalistic doctrine led to the complete rejection of literary and lin- guistic education, and in time to the organization, for elementary education, of a curriculum more suited to the needs of the child, drawn from those phases of his environment with which it came into immediate contact, such as geography, na- ture study, number work, and manual occupa- tions. While Rousseati's ideas were most radical and were often stated in such paradoxical form that they provoke dissent and violent opposition, he more than all others is responsible for these fundamental conceptions of modern education: that all educational processes must start from the child's own interests and activities: that educa- tion is a process having several distinct stages, and that the subject matter and methods of education should be appropriate to each stage: that the age of adolescence is the vital period in education : that education is moral, physical, and social rather than a merely intellectual process : that knowledge of child nature in general and of the children dealt with in particular is the most important part of the equipment of a teacher: that manual labor or trades should be taught for their educational as well as for their moral and practical value. The exaggerated, somewhat visionarj-. and often erroneous ideas of Rousseau were syste- matized and made practical during the latter part of the eighteenth century and first half of the nineteenth by groups of educators led by such men as Pestalozzi (q.v.). Herbart (q.v.), and Friibel (q.v.). There is a wide divergence in the inter- ests and the character of the work of these various groups, but they agree in one ftmda- mental principle, which characterizes and unifies all their efforts and all this period of educational advance. This principle is th.at the 'nature' which is to control education is the nature of the child. Pestalozzi states the aim of the entire group when he says that his whole purpose is to ■psychologize education.' Pestalozzi's approacli was empirical, and his efforts were wholly prac- tical. Herbart's approach was both philosophical and scientific, though it is in this latter aspect that his influence has been permanent, through the development of the scientific stuily of psycho- logical phenomena of late, in its c.vpcrimcnlal and l)hysiological aspects. Froebcl's approach was I)rimarily philosophical through the connection of the theory of evolution with education, as seen in his i:(liirution of Man and Kdiicrition by De- itlopiiiciit. However, his great inlluence was on the practical side, and it is for tlic ap])lication of these new theories of education to the first few years of the child's life by means of a new educa- tional institution, the kindergarten (q.v.), that the name of Froebel will always stand. But whether this conception of education was stated in philosophical or even metaphysical terms, as with Kant, Herbart, and other-;, or in practical or. empirical terms and concrete methods, the imderlying conception and the general infiuencc were the same. The psycliological tendency in education was based upon a more intimate knowl- edge of child nature, and a study of child ac- tivities: it was characterized by a broader sym- pathy with childhood and child nature: it turned attention from the advanced phases of education, and centred it upon the elementary stage; it tended to break down the bookish character of education, and substituted the objective side of the child's immediate environment (see Object Te.vciiixo) : it furnished a great stimulus to the movement for universal education: it concen- trated educational interests in the problems of method, both psychological and practical. The beliefs of many, especially of those under the if>- fluenee of Pestalozzi, were extreme in this re- spect. Pestalozzi's thought was that any mother, with the methods which he had formulated, could, despite no special training or knowledge, educate her own children without the assistance of books or any of the usual paraphernalia of the school- room. This is extreme reaction from that con- ception of education, dominant since the Renais- sance, in which education was the acquisition of knowledge, es])ecially linguistic and literary. Pestalozzi defined education to be ""the harmo- nious development of all of the powers of the child," a definition which expresses the central thought of the entire psychological tendency — that education is the process of the development of the individual. During the second and third quarters of the nineteenth century the reaction against the ex- treme individualism of the earlier period af- fected educational thought as well. In contradis- tinction to the ijsychological. this may be termed the sociological conception of education, and em- phasizes the thought that education is not only the development of the individual, but that it is also the fitting of the individual to his social environment, actual and idealized, and hence that it is the development of society as well as of the individual, Auguste Comte in his I'dsitire Polily (1851-.54) and Herbert Spencer in his Education (1861) may be taken as the leaders in this movement, though Pestalozzi in his Leonard and (Jertrude, published from 17S0 to 17i)0. also emphasized this aspect of education. This socio, logical interest has centred in two points: (1) in .a broader educational purpose than that ex- pressed in psychological terms, and in this it has but put into educational terms the developing ethical, political, and social thought of the nine- teenth century; (2) in a revision of the school