The History of Pedagogy

Gabriel Compayré, W. H. Payne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317307020
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Payne's translation of Compayré's The History of Pedagogy was initially published in 1886 due to a general lack of historical texts on education in the late nineteenth century. Compayré provides a thorough account of the doctrines and methods used by educators throughout history from educators of antiquity to the early nineteenth century. This text focusses on key thinkers and teachers such as Locke, Luther and Kant as well as considering the educational methods of the Greeks and the Romans. This title will be of interest to students of Education and Philosophy.

THE HISTORY OF PEDAGOGY.—♦—Chapter I. Educational in Antiquity.

DOI: 10.4324/9781315650449-1

Preliminary Considerations; Education Among The Hindoos, Political Caste And Religious Pantheism; Effects On Education; Buddhistic Reform; Conversation Of Buddha And Purna; Educational Usages; Education Among The Israelites; Primitive Period; Religious And National Education; Progress Of Popular Instruction; Organization Of Schools; Respect For Teachers; Methods And Discipline; Exclusive And Jealous Spirit; Education Among The Chinese; Formalism; LÂO-tsze And Khung-Tsze (Confucius); Education Among Other People Of The East;The Egyptians And The Persians; Analytical Summary.

1. 1. preliminary considerations.— A German historian of philosophy begins his work by asking this question: “Was Adam a philosopher?” In the same way certain historians of pedagogy begin by learned researches upon the education of savages. We shall not carry our investigations so far back. Doubtless from the day when a human family began its existence, from the day when a father and a mother began to love their children, education had an existence. But there is very little practical interest in studying these obscure beginnings of pedagogy. It is a matter of erudition and curiosity.¹ Besides the difficult of gathering up the faint traces of primitive education, there would be but little profit in painfully following the slow gropings of primeval man. In truth, the history of pedagogy dates but from the period relatively recent, when human thought, in the matter of education, substituted reflection for instinct, art for blind nature. So we shall hasten to begin the study of pedagogy among the classical peoples, the Greeks and the Romans, after having thrown a rapid glance over some Eastern nations considered either in their birthplace and remote origin, or in their more recent development.
   ¹ A knowledge of the mental and moral condition of savages serves the invaluable purpose of showing what education has accomplished for the human race. There would be much less grumbling at the tax-gatherer if men could clearly conceive the condition of societies where no taxes are levied. To know what education has actually done we need to know the condition of societies unaffected by systematic education. Such a book as Lubbock's Origin of Civilization is a helpful introduction to the history of education. Whoever reads such a book carefully will be confronted with this problem: How is it that intellectual inertness, amounting almost to stupidity, is frequently the concomitant of an acute and persistent sense-training? Besides, savage tribes are historical illustrations of what has been produced on a large scale by “following Nature.” (P.)
2. 2. the pedagogy of the hindoos.— It would not be worth our while to enter into details respecting a civilization so different from our own as that of the Hindoos. But we should not forget that we are in part the descendants of that people, and that we belong to the same ethnic group, and that the European languages are derived from theirs.
3. 3. political caste and religious pantheism.— The spirit of caste, from the social point of view, and pantheism, from the religious point of view, are the characteristics of Hindoo society. The Indian castes constituted hereditary classes where social rank and special vocation were determined, not by free choice, but by the accident of birth. The consequence of this was an endless routine, with no care either for the individuality, or the personal talents, or the inclination of children, and without the possibility of rising by personal effort above one's rank in life.¹ On the other hand, religious ideas came to restrict, within the limits where it was already imprisoned, the activity of the young Hindoo. God is everywhere present; he manifests himself in all the phenomena of heaven and earth, in the sun, and in the stars, in the Himalayas and in the Ganges; he penetrates and animates everything; the things of sense are but the changing and ephemeral vestments of the unchangeable being. “With this pantheistic conception of the world and of life, the thought and the will of the Hindoo perished in the mystic contemplation of the soul. To become master of one's inclinations; to abandon every terrestrial thought; after this, life to lose one's identity, and to be annihilated by absorption in the divine nature; to prepare one's self by macerations and expiations for complete submersion in the original principle of all being, — this is the highest wisdom, the true happiness of the Hindoo, the ideal of all serious education.”²
   ¹ There is an argument for caste in the modern fiction of a “beautiful economy of Nature,” which plants human beings in society as it does trees in the earth, and thus makes education consist in the action of environment upon man and in the reaction of man upon his environment. To support existence, man needs certain endowments; but the force of circumstances creates these very endowments. One man is predestined to be a Red Indian, another a Bushman, and still another an accountant; and in each case the function of education is to adapt the man to the place where Nature has fixed him. This modern justification of caste is adroitly worked out by Mr. Spencer in the first chapter of his Education. (P.)
   ² Dittes, Histoire de l'education et de l'instruction, translated by Redolfi, 1880, p. 38.
4. 4. effects on education.— It is easy to predict what education would become under the weight of these double chains, social and religious. While the ideal in our modern societies is more and more to enfranchise the individual, and to create for him personal freedom and self-consciousness, the effort of the Hindoo Brahmins consisted above all in crushing out all spontaneity, in abolishing individual predilections, by preaching the doctrine of absolute self-renunciation, of voluntary abasement, and of contempt for life. Man was thus born doubly a slave, — by his social condition, which predestinated him to the routine apprenticeship of his ancestral caste, and by his mysterious dependence on the divine being who absorbed in himself all real activity, and left to human beings only the deceptive and frail appearance of it.
5. 5. buddhist reform.— The Buddhist reform, which so profoundly affected Brahmanism at about the sixth century b.c., did not sensibly modify, from the educational point of view, the ideas of the Hindoos. Buddha also taught that the cause of evil resides in the passions of men, and that in order to attain moral peace, there is no other means to be employed than that of self-abnegation and of the renouncement of everything selfish and personal.
6. 6. conversation of buddha and purna.— One of the traditions which permit us the better to appreciate the original character, at once affecting and ingenuous, of Indian thought, is the conversation of Buddha with his disciple Purna about a journey the latter was going to undertake to the barbarians for the purpose of teaching them the new religion:—

“They are men,” said Buddha, “who are fiery in temper, passionate, cruel, furious, insolent. If they openly address you in words which are malicious and coarse, and become angry with you, what will you think?”

“If they address me to my face in coarse and insolent terms, this is what I shall think: they are certainly good men who openly address me in malicious terms, but they will neither strike me with their hands nor stone me.”

“But should they strike you with their hands and stone you, what will you think?”

“I shall think that they are good men, gentle men, who strike me with their hands and stone me, but do not beat me with a club nor with a sword.”

“But if they beat you with a club and with a sword?”

“They are good men, gentle men, who beat me with a club and with a sword, but they do not completely kill me.”

“But if they were really to kill you?”

“They are good men, gentle men, who deliver me with no little pain from this body encumbered with defilements.”

“Very good, Purna! You may live in the country of those barbarians. Go, Purna! Being liberated, liberate; being consoled, console; having reached Nirvâna thus made perfect, cause others to go there.”¹

¹ Burnouf, Introduction á l'histoire du Bouddhisme, p. 252.

Whatever there is to admire in such a strange system of morals should not blind us to the vices which resulted from its practical consequences: such as the abuse of passive resignation, the complete absence of the idea of right and of justice, and no active virtues.

1. 7. effects on education.— Little is known of the actual state of educational practice among the Hindoos. It may be said, however, that the Brahmins, the priests, had the exclusive charge of education. Woman, in absolute subjection to man, had no share whatever in instruction.

As to boys, it seems that in India there were always schools for their benefit; schools which were held in the open country under the shade of trees, or, in case of bad weather, undersheds. Mutual instruction has been practised in India from the remotest antiquity; it is from here, in fact, that Andrew Bell, at the close of the eighteenth century, borrowed the idea of this mode of instruction. Exercises in writing were performed first upon the sand with a stick, then upon palm leaves with an iron style, and finally upon the dry leaves of the plane-tree with ink. In discipline there was a resort to corporal punishment; besides the rod the teacher employed other original means of correction; for example, he threw cold water on the offender. The teacher, moreover, was treated with a religious respect; the child must respect him as he would Buddha himself.

The higher studies were reserved for the priestly class, who, long before the Christian era, successfully cultivated rhetoric and logic, astronomy and the mathematics.

1. 8. education among the israelites.— “If ever a people has demonstrated the power of education, it is the people of Israel.”¹ In fact, what a singular spectacle is offered us by that people, which, dispossessed of its own country for eighteen hundred years, has been dispersed among the nations without losing its identity, and has maintained its existence without a country, without a government, and without a ruler, preserving with perennial energy its habits, its manners, and its faith! Without losing sight of the part of that extraordinary vitality of the Jewish people, which is due to the natural endowments of the race, its tenacity of temperament, and its wonderful activity of intelligence, it is just to attribute another part of it to the sound education, at once religious and national, which the ancient Hebrews have transmitted by tradition to their descendants.
   ¹ Dittes, p. 49.
2. 9. education, feligious and national, during the primitive period.— The chief characteristic of the education of the Hebrews in the earliest period of their history is that it was essentially domestic. During the whole Biblical period there is no trace of public schools, at least for young children. Family life is the origin of that primitive society where the notion of the state is almost unknown, and where God is the real king.

The child was to become the faithful servant of Jehovah. To this end it was not needful that he should be learned. It was only necessary that he should learn through language and the instructive example of his parents the moral precepts and the religious beliefs of the nation. It has been very justly said¹ that “among all nations the direction impressed on education depends on the idea which they form of the perfect man. Among the Romans it is the brave soldier, inured to fatigue, and readily yielding to discipline; among the Athenians it is the man who unites in himself the happy harmony of moral and physical perfectio...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Origile Title Page
• Origile Copyright Page
• Contents
• Translator's Preface
• Introduction
• A Sketch of the Life of Gabriel Compayré
• Chapter I. Educational in Antiquity
• Chapter II. Education among the Greeks
• Chapter III. Education At Rome
• Chapter IV. The Early Christians and The Middle Age
• Chapter V. The Renaissance and Thetheories of Education in the Sixteenth Century
• Chapter VI. Protestantism and primary instruction. —lutheh and comenius
• Chapter VII. The Teaching Congregations. —Jesuits and Jansenists
• Chapter VIII. Fenelon
• Chapter IX. The Renaissance and Thetheories of Education in the Sixteenth Century
• Chapter X. The Education Of Women in the Seventeenth Century
• Chapter XI. Rollin
• Chapter XII. Catholicism and Primary in Struction. — La Salle and The Brethren of The Christian Schools
• Chapter XIII. Rousseau and the Émile
• Chapter XIV. The philosophers of the eighteenth century.— condillac, diderot, helyetius, and kant
• Chapter XV. The Origin Of Lay And National Instruction.— La Chalotais And Rolland
• Chapter XVI. The French Revolution.—Mirabeau, Talleyrand, Condorcet
• Chapter XVII. The Convention Lepelletier Saint-Fargeau Lakanal, Daunou
• Chapter XVIII. Pestalozzi
• Chapter XIX. The Successohs of Pestalozzi.— Frœbel and the Père Girard
• Chapter XX. Women as Educators
• Chapter XXI. The Theory And Practice Of Education In The Nineteenth Century
• Chapter XXII. The Science of Education.—Herbert Spencer and Alexander Bain
• Index