1600-1700 by JOHN WILLIAM ADAMSON, CAMBRIDGE: 1921 367 Wahr 10-29-36 32936 T PREFACE. 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. But 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 |