The Philanthropinum criticised.

Horace were introduced, it would soon be seen what was the value of Philanthropinist Latin." After the examination, two comedies were acted by the children, one in French, the other in German.

Most of the strangers seem to have left Dessau with a favourable impression of the Philanthropin. They were especially struck with the brightness and animation of the children.

17. How far did the Philanthropinum really deserve their good opinion? The conclusion to which we are driven by Fred's narrative is, that Basedow carried to excess his principle-"Treat children as children, that they may remain the longer uncorrupted;" and that the Philanthropinum was, in fact, nothing but a good infant-school. Surely none of the thirteen children who were the subjects of Basedow's experiments could have been more than ten years old. But if we consider Basedow's system to have been intended for children, say between the ages of six and ten, we must allow that it possessed great merits. At the very beginning of a boy's learning, it has always been too much the custom to make him hate the sight of a book, and escape at every opportunity from school-work, by giving him difficult tasks, and neglecting his acutest faculties. "Children love motion and noise," says Basedow: "here is a hint from nature." Yet the youngest children in most schools are expected to keep quiet and to sit at their books for as many hours as the youths of seventeen or eighteen. Their vivacity is repressed with the cane. Their delight in exercising their hands and eyes and ears is taken no notice of; and they are required to keep their attention fixed on subjects often beyond their comprehension, and almost always beyond the range of their interests. Everyone who

B.'s improvements in teaching children.

has had experience in teaching boys knows how hard it is to get them to throw themselves heartily into any task what ever; and probably this difficulty arises in many cases, from the habits of inattention and of shirking school-work, which the boys have acquired almost necessarily from the dreariness of their earliest lessons.* Basedow determined to change all this; and in the Philanthropin no doubt he succeeded. We have already seen some of the expedients by which he sought to render school-work pleasurable. He appealed, wherever it was possible, to the children's senses; and these, especially the sight, were trained with great care by exercises, such as drawing, shooting at a mark, &c. One of these exercises, intended to give quick perception, bears a curious likeness to what has since been practised in a very different educational system. A picture, with a somewhat varied subject, was exhibited for a short time and removed. The boys had then, either verbally or on paper, to give an account of it, naming the different objects in proper order. Houdin, if I rightly remember, tells us that the young thieves of Paris are required by their masters to make a mental inventory of the contents of a shop window, which they see only as they walk rapidly by. Other exercises of the Philanthropinum connected the pupils with more honourable callings. They became acquainted with both

* "Who has not met with some experience such as this? A child r with an active and inquiring mind accustomed to chatter about everything that interests him is sent to school. In a few weeks his vivacity is extinguished, his abundance of talk has dried up. If you ask him about his studies, if you desire him to give you a specimen of what he has learut, he repeats to you in a sing-song voice some rule for the formation of tenses or some recipe for spelling words. Such are the results of the teaching which should be of all teaching the most fruitful and the most atuactive!" Translated from Quelques Mots, &c., by M. Bréal.

Basedow's successors.

skilled and unskilled manual labour. Every boy was taught a handicraft, such as carpentering and turning, and was put to such tasks as threshing corn. Basedow's division of the

twenty-four hours was the following: Eight hours for sleep, eight for food and amusement, and, for the children of the rich, six hours of school-work, and two of manual labour. In the case of the children of the poor, he would have the division of the last eight hours inverted, and would give for school-work two, and for manual labour six. The development of the body was specially cared for in the Philanthropinum. Gymnastics were now first introduced into modern schools; and the boys were taken long expeditions on foot-the commencement, I believe, of a practice now common throughout Germany.

18. As I have already said, Basedow proved a very unfit person to be at the head of the model Institution. Many of his friends agreed with Herder, that he was not fit to have calves entrusted to him, much less children. He soon resigned his post; and was succeeded by Campe, who had been one of the visitors at the public examination. Campe did not remain long at the Philanthropinum ; but left it to set up a school, on like principles, at Hamburg. His fame now rests on his writings for the young; one of which "Robinson Crusoe the Younger "-is still a general favourite.

Other distinguished men became connected with the Philanthropin-among them Salzmann, and Matthison the poet-and the number of pupils rose to over fifty; gathered we are told, from all parts of Europe between Riga and Lisbon. But this number is by no means a fair measure of the interest, nay, enthusiasm, which the experiment excited. We find Pastor Oberlin raising money on his wife's earrings

Kant on the Philanthropinum.

to send a donation. We find the philosopher Kant prophesying that quite another race of men would grow up, now that education according to Nature had been introduced.

$ 19. These hopes were disappointed. Kant confesses as much in the following passage in his treatise "On Pædagogy":

"One fancies, indeed, that experiments in education would not be necessary; and that we might judge by the understanding whether any plan would turn out well or ill. But this is a great mistake. Experience shows that often in our experiments we get quite opposite results from what we had anticipated. W'e see, too, that since experiments are necessary, it is not in the power of one generation to form a complete plan of education. The only experimental school which, to some extent, made a beginning in clearing the road, was the Institute at Dessau. This praise at least must be allowed it, notwithstanding the many faults which could be brought up against it-faults which are sure to show themselves when we come to the results of our experiments, and which merely prove that fresh experiments are necessary. It was the only School in which the teachers had liberty to work according to their own methods and schemes, and where they were in free communication both among themselves and with all learned men throughout Germany."

§ 20. We observe here, that Kant speaks of the Philanthropinum as a thing of the past. It was finally closed in 1793. But even from Kant we learn that the experiment had been by no means a useless one. The conservatives, of course, did not neglect to point out that young Philanthropinists, when they left school, were not in all respects the superiors of their fellow-creatures. But, although no one could pretend that the Philanthropinum had effected a

Influence of Philanthropinists.

tithe of what Basedow promised, and the "friends of humanity" throughout Europe expected, it had introduced many new ideas, which in time had their influence, even in the schools of the opposite party. Moreover, teachers who had been connected with the Philanthropinum founded schools on similar principles in different parts of Germany and Switzerland, as Bahrd's at Heidesheim, and Salzmann's celebrated school at Schnepfenthal, which is, I believe, still thriving. Their doctrines, too, made converts among other masters, the most celebrated of whom was Meierotto of Berlin.

§ 21. Little remains to be said of Basedow. He lived chiefly at Dessau, earning his subsistence by private tuition, but giving offence by his irregularities. In 1790, when visiting Magdeburg, he died, after a short illness, in his sixty-seventh year. His last words were, "I wish my body to be dissected for the good of my fellow-creatures."

Basedow has a posthumous connexion with this country as the greatgrandfather of Professor Max Müller. Basedow's son became "Regierungs Präsident," in Dessau. The President's daughter, born in 1800, became the wife of the poet Wilhelm Müller, and the mother of Max Müller. Max Müller has contributed a life of his great-grandfather to the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie.

Those who read German and care about either Basedow or Comenius should get Die Didaktik Basedows im Vergleiche zur Didaktik des Comenius von Dr. Petru Garbovicianu (Bucarest, C. Gobl), 1887. This is a very good piece of work; it is printed in roman type, and the price is only Is. 6d.

Since the above was in type I have got an important book, L'Education en Allemagne au Dix-huitième Siècle: Basedow et le Philan thropinisme, by A. Pinloche (Paris, A. Colin, 1889.)