... ... ... More than science needed for complete living... Objections to Spencer's curriculum From indefinite to definite: concrete to abstract... The Individual and the Race. Empirical beginning ... ... ... ... Arouse interest. Dr. Arnold's historical primer. A Macaulay, not Mangnall, wanted ... Influence through the Sixth. Day schools wanted Teaching religion in England and Germany 496 Rousseau exposed "school-learning I EFFECTS OF THE RENASCENCE. § 1. The history of education, much as it has been hitherto neglected, especially in England, must have a great future before it. If we ignore the Past we cannot understand the Present, or forecast the Future. In this book I am going to speak of Reformers or Innovators who aimed at changing what was handed down to them; but the Radical can no more escape from the Past, than the Conservative can stereotype it. It acts not by attraction only, but no less by repulsion. There have been thinkers in latter times who have announced themselves as the executioners of the Past and laboured to destroy all it has bequeathed to us. They have raised the ferocious cry, "Vive la destruction! Vive la mort! Place à l'avenir ! Hurrah for destruction! Hurrah for death! Make room for the world that is to be!" But their very hatred of the Past has brought them under the influence of it. "Do just the opposite of what has been lone and you will do right," said Rousseau; and this rule of negation would make the Past regulate the Present and the Future no less than its opposite, "Do always what is usual." If we cannot get free from the Past in the domain of thought, still less can we in action. Custom is to all our No escape from the Past. activities what the mainspring is to the watch. We may bring forces into play to make the watch go faster or slower, but if we took out the mainspring it would not go at all. For our mainspring we are indebted to the Past. § 2. In studying the Past we must give our special attention to those periods in which the course of ideas takes, as the French say, a new bend.* Such a period was the Renascence. Then it was that the latest bend was given to the educational ideal of the civilized world; and though we seem now again to have arrived at a period of change, we are still, perhaps far more than we are aware, affected by the ideas of the great scholars who guided the intellect of Europe in the Revival of Learning. § 3. From the beginning to the end of the fifteenth century the balance was trembling between two kinds of culture, and the fate of the schoolboy depended on the result. In this century men first got a correct conception of the globe they were inhabiting. Hitherto they had not even professed to have any knowledge of geography; there is no mention of it in the Trivium and Quadrivium which were then supposed to form the cycle of things known, if not of things knowable. But Columbus and Vasco da Gama were grand teachers of geography, and their lessons were learnt as far as civilization extended. The impetus thus given to the study of the earth might, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, have engrossed the mind of Europe with the material world, had not the leaning to physical science been encountered and overcome by an impulse derived from another discovery. About the The rest of this chapter was published in the September, 1880, number of Education. Boston, U.S.A. |