The Jesuits cared for more than classics.

they love the teacher,") and one bad or at least doubtful the spur of emulation.

However, the attempt to lead, not drive, was a great step in the right direction. Moreover as they did not hold with the Sturms and Trotzendorfs that the classics in and for themselves were the object of education the Jesuits were able to think of other things as well. They were very careful of the health of the body. And they also enlarged the task of the schoolmaster in another and still more important way. To the best of their lights they attended to the moral and religious training of their pupils. It is much to the credit of the Fathers that though Plautus and Terence were considered very valuable for giving a knowledge of colloquial Latin and were studied and learnt by heart in the Protestant schools, the Jesuits rejected them on account of their impurity. The Jesuits wished the whole boy, not his memory only, to be affected by the master; so the master was to make a study of each of his pupils and to go on with the same pupils through the greater part of their school course.

The Jesuit system stands out in the history of education as a remarkable instance of a school system elaborately thought out and worked as a whole. In it the individual schoolmaster withered, but the system grew, and was, I may say is, a mighty organism. The single Jesuit teacher might not be the superior of the average teacher in good Protestant schools, but by their unity of action the Jesuits triumphed over their rivals as easily as a regiment of soldiers scatters a mob. § 7. The schoolmaster's theory of the human mind made of it, to use Bartle Massey's simile, a kind of bladder fit only to hold what was poured into it. This pouring-in theory of education was first called in question by that

Rabelais for "intuition."

strange genius who seems to have stood outside all the traditions and opinions of his age,

"holding no form of creed,

But contemplating all."

I mean Rabelais.

Like most reformers, Rabelais begins with denunciations of the system established by use and wont. After an account of the school-teaching and school-books of the day, he says "It would be better for a boy to learn nothing at all than to be taught such-like books by such-like masters." He then proposes a training in which, though the boy is to study books, he is not to do this mainly, but is to be led to look about him, and to use both his senses and his limbs. For instance, he is to examine the stars when he goes to bed, and then to be called up at four in the morning to find the change that has taken place. Here we see a training of the powers of observation. These powers are also to be exercised on the trees and plants which are met with out-of-doors, and on objects within the house, as well as on the food placed on the table. The study of books is to be joined with this study of things, for the old authors are to be consulted for their accounts of whatever has been met with. The study of trades, too, and the practice of some of them, such as wood-cutting, and carving in stone, makes a very interesting feature in this system. On the whole, I think we may say that Rabelais was the first to advocate training as distinguished from teaching; and he was the father of Anschauungs-unterricht, teaching by intuition, i.e., by the pupil's own senses and the spring of his own intelligence. Rabelais would bestow much care on the body too. Not only was the pupil to ride and fence; we find him even shouting for the benefit of his lungs.

Montaigne for educating mind and body.

§ 8. Rabelais had now started an entirely new theory of the educator's task, and fifty years afterwards his thought was taken up and put forward with incomparable vigour by the great essayist, Montaigne. Montaigne starts with a quotation from Rabelais-"The greatest clerks are not the wisest men," and then he makes one of the most effective onslaughts on the pouring-in theory that is to be found in all literature. His accusation against the schoolmasters of his time is twofold. First, he says, they aim only at giving knowledge, whereas they should first think of judgment and virtue. Secondly, in their method of teaching they do not exercise the pupils' own minds. The sum and substance of the charge is contained in these words "We labour to stuff the memory and in the meantime leave the conscience and understanding impoverished and void." His notion of education embraced the whole man. Our very exercises and recreations," says he, "running, wrestling, music, dancing, hunting, riding, fencing, will prove to be a good part of our study. I would have the pupil's outward fashion and mien and the disposition of his limbs formed at the same time with his mind. 'Tis not a soul, 'tis not a body, that we are training up, but a man, and we ought not to divide him.”

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§ 9. Before the end of the fifteen hundreds then we see in the best thought of the time a great improvement in the conception of the task of the schoolmaster. Learning is not the only thing to be thought of. Moral and religious training are recognised as of no less importance. And as "both soul and body have been created by the hand of God" (the words are Ignatius Loyola's), both must be thought of in education. When we come to instruction we find Rabelais recommending that at least part of it

17th century reaction against books.

should be "intuitive," and Montaigne requiring that the instruction should involve an exercise of the intellectual powers of the learner. But the escape even in thought from the Renascence ideal was but partial. Some of Rabelais' directions seem to come from a "Verbal Realist," and Montaigne was far from saying as Joseph Payne has said, "every act of teaching is a mode of dealing with mind and will be successful only in proportion as this is recognised," "teaching is only another name for mental training." But if Rabelais and Montaigne did not reach the best thought of our time they were much in advance of a great deal of our practice.

§ 10. The opening of the sixteen hundreds saw a great revolt from the literary spirit of the Renascence. The exclusive devotion to books was followed by a reaction. There might after all be something worth knowing that books would not teach. Why give so much time to the study of words and so little to the observation of things? "Youth," says a writer of the time, "is deluged with grammar precepts infinitely tedious, perplexed, obscure, and for the most part unprofitable, and that for many years." Why not escape from this barren region? "Come forth, my son," says Comenius. "Let us go into the open air. There you shall view whatsoever God produced from the beginning and doth yet effect by nature." And Milton thus expresses the conviction of his day: "Because our understanding cannot in this body found itself but on sensible things, nor arrive so clearly to the knowledge of God and things invisible as by orderly conning over the visible and inferior creature, the same method is necessarily to be followed in all discreet teaching."

This great revolution which was involved in the Baconian

Reaction not felt in schools and UU.

philosophy may be described as a turning from fancy to fact. All the creations of the human mind seemed to have lost their value. The only things that seemed worth studying were the material universe and the laws or sequences which were gradually ascertained by patient induction and experiment.

§ 11. Till the present century this revolution did not extend to our schools and universities. It is only within the last fifty years that natural science has been studied even in the University of Bacon and Newton. The Public School Commission of 1862 found that the curriculum was just as it had been settled at the Renascence. But if the walls of these educational Jerichos were still standing this was not from any remissness on the part of "the children of light" in shouting and blowing with the trumpet. They raised the war-cry "Not words, but things!" and the cry has been continued by a succession of eminent men against the schools of the 17th and 18th centuries and has at length begun to tell on the schools of the 19th. Perhaps the change demanded is best shown in the words of John Dury about 1649: "The true end of all human learning is to supply in ourselves and others the defects which proceed from our ignorance of the nature and use of the creatures and the disorderliness of our natural faculties in using them and reflecting upon them." So the Innovators required teachers to devote themselves to natural science and to the science of the human mind.

§ 12. The first Innovators, like the people of the fifteen hundreds, thought mainly of the acquisition of knowledge, only the knowledge was to be not of the classics but of the material world. In this they seem inferior to Montaigne who had given the first place to virtue and judgment.