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PREFACE.

But

O the objection that the current century is the twentieth, a writer who craves attention to a book on seventeenthcentury education may very fairly reply that in his field at least there is no such incongruity between the two periods as the objection would insinuate. He might, it is true, either allege the general truth that the study of "origins" is often most fruitful in practical results, or he might base himself upon the particular assertion that the two centuries share in a peculiar manner certain great tendencies of thought and action. his best defence lies in pointing to the relationship, direct and unmistakeable, between the theory and practice of the modern school-room and the changes which were suggested or actually brought about by men who laboured in the earlier time. Not a few of the conceptions, small as well as great, which we are apt to consider characteristic of our own, or of the generation or two immediately senior to us, are but re-statements of principles and devices which took their earliest modern shape in that same seventeenth century.

For example, the wide recognition of Education as a social force, and the consequent expediency of state-provided systems of instruction, universal and compulsory, are commonly set down as nineteenth-century convictions. The attempt to include within the ordinary school-curriculum those branches of study which have been more especially advanced by scien

tific research is often spoken of as inspired solely by the progress which the Experimental Sciences have recently achieved; and, similarly, the spirit of an age pre-eminently commercial is credited with the introduction of modern languages into the same curriculum. Again, from different quarters comes the demand for a closer association between the tasks of the school-room and the every-day life outside its walls, that there may no longer exist "la disconvenance entre l'école et la vie" against which Taine protested. Amongst teachers themselves there is to-day an evident desire to attack the problems of method from a base more or less scientific, and, particularly, through a more discriminating study of the mental powers of children. With these reforms it is usual to connect the names of Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Froebel, Herbart and others who flourished during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; it is one purpose of this book to show how great was the share of the seventeenth century in formulating these and the like fundamental ideas of the pedagogy of our time.

The main theme is the introduction of "modern studies" into the school-course and the breaking-down of the monopoly vested, by force of circumstance and not always with express intention, in the ancient languages. Many causes, not all scholastic, conspired to overthrow that monopoly in the end; the following pages endeavour to set out the three most influential causes of the more directly scholastic kind which came into play during the period under consideration. The most potent was undoubtedly the "New Philosophy," to use the co-temporary phrase designating the beginnings of modern inductive science. Even more immediately operative was the desire for a type of instruction especially suitable to the courtier, the soldier, the diplomatist and the man of affairs, a desire which called into being the "Academies," schools, or colleges, French in origin, but by no means confined to French soil. The third influence in modernizing the studies of the school-room has not attained that general recognition which

its importance deserves. During the last twenty years of the seventeenth century, movements in favour of popular education on the large scale took place in France, in Germany and in England; chiefly religious and moral in origin, they also reveal signs of the commercial and industrial motives which usually, in part, actuate proposals for educational change. The three movements attained different measures of success; but they made popular instruction possible at a later time and founded the traditional curriculum of the elementary school, while contributing to establish new studies in schools of a higher grade.

Of course, it is not asserted that the conception of State school-systems, etc., began ab ovo with Comenius and his contemporaries. The Republic of Plato alone is a sufficient confutation of such a thesis, were there no sign remaining of the world-wide educational activity of the Church. Moreover, while Plato was forgotten, or ignored, and Churchmen often took too restricted a view of what was educationally necessary, men contemporary, or almost so, with Comenius, anticipated him not only in the design of a popular organization of schools, but even in some of his projected reforms in both the matter and manner of instruction. Martin Luther,

John Knox, Richard Mulcaster are names which readily occur to the mind. But the educational schemes of Luther and of Knox were not effectively realised in their own life-time, and Mulcaster, even to his fellow-countrymen, remained but a voice, and one not always listened to with pleasure.

Compared with these men, Comenius had two supreme advantages. He reached a much wider audience than did either Knox or Mulcaster, and, above all, he wrote in days when the educational system was ripe for reform and circumstances had begun to make reform possible. The publication of the Advancement of Learning and the Novum Organum gave a cogency to his pleas which had been wanting in the sixteenth century. The man's genius and character co-operated with

the state of affairs to make him in a very real sense the founder of modern pedagogy.

While much of the story gathers about the thought and activity of Comenius, there were also educational pioneers in England now forgotten, or, if not forgotten, remembered by reason of achievements in other fields. To these, and especially to Samuel Hartlib, a name which should be honoured by all friends of Education, some of the following chapters are devoted; it is hoped that excerpts from their writings, no longer generally accessible, will not unduly tax the reader's patience. They speak a language expressing modes of thought nearer akin to our own than those natural to a Pestalozzi, a Froebel, or a Herbart; and, expression apart, the characteristic "practicality" of these followers of Bacon ought to commend them to the national idiosyncrasy.

The book, however, aims at a wider survey than a purely English one; and in the foreign section the writer has tried to indicate the great services (too seldom even named in textbooks of educational history) which were rendered to the world by St Jean-Baptiste de la Salle. As a foil to the ideals of education or of instruction presented by the innovators, the actual practice of the seventeenth-century school-room, reformed and unreformed, is described on the authority of those who knew it at first hand. It is hoped that a full index, bibliography and tables of contents and of "dates" will increase the usefulness of the book to students of the history of Education.

August 1, 1905.