8
Introduction
Post-Reformation Protestant attitudes and beliefs, including the growth of individualism, had profound effects not only on religious institutions and practices, but also on social, political and economic ideas and ways of thinking, including educational thought. Scientific advances, especially those of Isaac Newton, impressed an increasing number of people throughout the seventeenth century; by the beginning of the eighteenth century a combination of scientific and philosophical thinking was beginning to produce a different world view, partly as a reaction against the Counter-Reformation which we discussed in Chapter 7.
The eighteenth century has sometimes been referred to as the Age of Reason. Intellectual ideas, stemming directly from the Renaissance and Reformation were encapsulated in the term 'Enlightenment'. Unlike words such as Renaissance or Gothic, which were much later inventions, the notions of light and enlightenment became current during the eighteenth century in several languages: the French Le Steele des Lumieres became Aufklarting in German from about 1780.1 The English word Enlightenment did not become current until the nineteenth century but the idea of the light of knowledge shining through the darkness of ignorance was popular during the eighteenth century:
Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night.
God said, let Newton be! and all was light.
(Alexander Pope, Essay on Man)
Significant advances in science continued from the seventeenth century into the eighteenth. The illumination, or Enlightenment, provided by science was gradually but consciously extended to political, social and economic issues. On both sides of the Atlantic questioning the political status quo contributed to the causes of the War of Independence in America and the Revolution in France. It is always dangerous to make causal links between intellectual theories and political events, and later in this chapter we shall attempt to describe a much more complex set of interactions between ideas and actions, including those in the field of education, but it is difficult not to be impressed by the power of ideas in the eighteenth century.
There is another important strand running through eighteenth-century history which also interrelates with the world of ideas: the continuing process of technological development which is conventionally, but somewhat misleadingly, labelled 'The Industrial Revolution'. The title is misleading because the process had started long before the eighteenth centuiy and had continued steadily over many years rather than happening suddenly and dramatically. Yet the word 'revolution' does help to convey the tremendous impact that technological development was having on many aspects of life in the final quarter of the century.
Despite the drama of the two kinds of revolution in the second half of the eighteenth century, however, the general background of the first half of the century was largely peace and tranquility. In England the 'Glorious Revolution' or non-revolution of 1688-89 had led to the dull but comparatively stable reigns of William and Mary, and Queen Anne, and then the artistic and architectural harmony of the Georgian era which can still be seen in such buildings as the Bath Crescent and Carlton House Terrace in London. In France the long reigns of Louis XIV and Louis XV, extending over 130 years, almost gave the impression of a permanent regime with no imaginable alternative. There were occasional succession disputes and wars of rivalry between the great European powers, but on the whole the background could be described as peaceful and prosperous. There were, of course, danger signs: emerging nationalism, the gap between rich and poor; and the rapidly rising populations with food shortages and famines.
The Enlightenment
It is difficult and perhaps unwise to attempt to summarise the main features of an era as complex as the Enlightenment, but in a book of this kind we must attempt to pick out what seem to be the most important attitudes and beliefs, even at the risk of simplification. There are many problems in describing the Enlightenment. The first is that the process of Enlightenment thinking carried with it the seeds of its own destruction: early on in the application of critical thinking to traditional beliefs it became apparent that the Enlightenment itself would be subject to hostile attacks of a similar kind. For example, we shall see that Rousseau began as a supporter of Diderot and d'Alembert's great Encyclopaedia and other examples of advanced thinking, but soon reacted strongly against the Enlightenment. It is still difficult to decide whether Rousseau should be seen as one of the Enlightenment thinkers or as an early exponent of Romanticism, or both. The second difficulty is that although Enlightenment is generally accepted as a useful term to describe an important process in history, there have been endless debates about exactly what should be included and also what is the most appropriate date for the beginning of the Enlightenment.2 It is not difficult for historians to identify early signs of the Enlightenment long before the eighteenth century; nevertheless we use the Enlightenment as an appropriate term for the eighteenth century.
We select five major features of the Enlightenment for discussion in slightly more detail; belief in the power of scientific reasoning; faith in progress; human rights; freedom of thought and enquiry; and finally, the desire to promote education as a means of furthering the 'Enlightenment project'.
Reason: As we saw in Chapter 7, seventeenth-century Europe was dominated by two kinds of 'authority', the Bible and the Greek and Roman Classics. Both involved looking back to a previous age for moral inspiration: a sort of Garden of Eden and Golden Age attitude. The Renaissance and Reformation had each reinforced that view: the Renaissance building up a fuller picture of classical antiquity, the Reformation reinterpreting the Bible and recommending individual attention to it rather than group acceptance of the authority of an abstract 'Church'. One of the intellectual triumphs of the later Middle Ages had been the fusion of classical philosophy - especially Aristotle - with Christian theology. We observed in Chapter 5 how Thomas Aquinas had succeeded in this task, but the Reformation tended to upset the balance.
Most early proponents of the Enlightenment were not opposed to religion but they were critical of many of the religious practices of traditional Christianity which they regarded as irrational superstitions. Many Enlightenment thinkers, such as Voltaire, were Deists who were greatly impressed by Newton's discoveries in physics which they took to be evidence of a supreme intelligence of some kind, a God, who created a universe which operated according to the physical laws discovered by Newton. They strongly objected to belief in miracles, shrines devoted to saints and doctrines such as the transubstantiation of the bread and water in the mass into Christ's body and blood. They saw their epoch as the age of reason and believed that the application of reason to personal and social life would lead to the perfectibility of human beings and of society itself: the ills of society such as injustice, crime and cruelty were due to unreasonable beliefs, institutions and practices. Most Enlightenment thinkers were rationalists in the non-atheistic sense of the word, but some wanted to dispense with the supernatural and metaphysical altogether.
Progress: Belief in progress was clearly connected with the idea that the application of science and reason would result in improvements of various kinds, but progress meant more than that. Whereas traditional Christianity had looked back to a golden age, and the Renaissance had recalled the glories of Greece and Rome, Enlightenment thinkers saw history as a relentless process of moving from superstition to science and from the supernatural to the natural as a sequence of linear development. Certain kinds of rationality would inevitably come, but could be speeded up or slowed down by human actions: there was a strong element of determinism or historicism in much Enlightenment thinking.
Rights: A quite separate line of development was a general humanitarian concern for human beings. Enlightenment thinkers tended to look back on the Middle Ages as a time of barbarity, cruelty and injustice. Most did not question the institution of property itself but questioned the exploitation of some human beings by their supposed superiors. Some went further and questioned the whole idea of the privilege of rank; others were satisfied with the notion that privileges included duties as well as rights. The Age of Reason was not an age of equality, but some questions of social justice were raised, including the whole issue of slavery.
Freedom: The question of freedom was seen as complex. Some limitation of individual freedom was accepted as the price paid for living in a society (Rousseau and others saw this as a kind of social contract). The freedom that was advocated was freedom of thought which was then extended to freedom of expression. Censorship was generally seen as part of traditional, irrational and repressive authority, and intellectuals tended to be clearer on what they disliked about traditional authority than on the acceptable limitations of individual freedom. They were sure that the practices of the Inquisition, by which unorthodoxy could be punished by torture and execution, were intolerable, as was the persecution of individuals for heretical beliefs, religious or otherwise. Some of them, no doubt, had in mind such examples as the fate of Galileo who was punished for his scientific enquiries, or at least for publishing his interpretation of the results. Others criticised the whole notion of inhibiting freedom of enquiry by 'authorities' who feared the consequences of allowing controversial ideas to be discussed.
Education: The Enlightenment not only changed traditional beliefs about what should be taught and the most effective ways of teaching the young, but also saw education as a means of encouraging greater progress on the road to reason. Ignorance and superstition were the twin evils which could be eliminated, it was hoped, by education. Fatalism, or the acceptance of one's lot in life, was to be replaced by the notion that much could be achieved by improved educational programmes, although the exact kind of education was open to debate, as was the question of the control of education: while most intellectuals wanted educational institutions removed from Church control, not all agreed that the State should take over that responsibility. We shall return to a fuller discussion of education later in this chapter.
Other Features of the Enlightenment
There were many other features of the Enlightenment view of a good society which were interesting and which, in the much longer run, affected educational thought. For example, while many historians have pointed to the rise of nationalism as a characteristic of the nineteenth century with its origins in the eighteenth, most Enlightenment thinkers were universalistic in their outlook. Many explicitly proclaimed that they were European rather than French or German; others saw human progress in terms of world-wide peace.
Another characteristic of the Enlightenment philosophes was that they advocated toleration, for example, toleration of the Jews and of other faiths and ways of life. Not only did they dislike persecution for humanitarian reasons, but they saw toleration as a positive virtue in its own right: our reason should enable us to understand and to respect other cultures and other individuals.
Educational Ideas before and after Rousseau
We saw in Chapter 7 that some significant educational ideas were developing in the seventeenth century. For example, Hartlib's views on education for the whole of society; the contribution made by Comenius to educational theory and practice; the philosophical thinking of Locke which, as we shall see in a later chapter, led to some aspects of the development of psychology. All of these trends were to make further progress during the eighteenth century, but at the beginning of the century educational practices were generally extremely backward and lagging behind the needs of rapidly developing societies such as that in England. Schools in general were unenlightened places in most respects; universities were generally not much better, but were less oppressive.
Salons, Societies and Academies
Salons in the eighteenth century, essentially groups of like-minded friends meeting together to discuss important issues, had developed from the kind of salon which became famous during the reign of Louis XIV. Women were often at the centre of such informal groups: for example, Madame de Sevigny or Ninon de Lenclos had salons which became notorious meeting places for sceptics and free thinkers. During the 1760s, Encyclopaedists, including d'Alembert, met at the house of Mademoiselle de Lespinaire.3 Salons also existed outside France - in Vienna and Berlin, for example, and particularly in London where they tended to be much more political.
A slightly more formal organisation might be called a literary society or a reading society. Some of these were established specifically to disseminate Enlightenment ideas; others indulged in practical, moral activities such as raising funds for a school or poor relief; many were purely for the enlightened entertainment of its members. One of the earliest was the Dublin Society, founded in 1724 to provide relief for a famine, but which continued to exist well into the twentieth century with a much wider agenda. In 1754, London copied Dublin with the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, later known as the Royal Society of Arts. Many societies were also founded about that time in Spain and Latin America.
Other societies were modelled on Plato's Academy in Athens. Many of these were devoted exclusively to discussions about science. The Royal Society in London, which was founded before the beginning of the eighteenth century, was of this kind and was copied in many parts of Europe. Some societies and academies were ephemeral; others still exist.
The reasons for discussing these groups in the context of the Enlightenment are two-fold: first, they indicate the great thirst for knowledge and discussion in the eighteenth century; second, they were important because they stimulated the development of intellectual activities, including reading and writing about science, reform and education. They also helped to promote the idea that discussion itself could be an educational activity, even in schools.
The Encyclopaedia (Encyclopédie Ou Dictionnaire Raisonné Des Sciences, Des Arts Et Des Métiers)
Another name that was given to the eighteenth century was 'The Philosophical Age'. Then, as now, philosophical could be used loosely to mean the general pursuit of wisdom, or in a more restricted way to indicate a more rigorous intellectual discipline, as studied at universities. In France the word philosophe could have either meaning, and it was also used to refer to the group of intellectuals who contributed to the great Encyclopaedia edited by Diderot, assisted by d'Alembert.
Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopaedia, a central publication of the Enlightenment, was itself an ambitious educational project, intended not only to wage war upon superstition and ignorance but also to provide a new map of knowledge and an outline of all existing knowledge. It was a tremendous task which took 21 years and 28 massive volumes to accomplish. Denis Diderot (1723-84) devoted much of his adult life to the Encyclopaedia, which had begun as a translation of Chambers' English Cyclopaedia, but developed into a much more ambitious project: Diderot's vision was a definitive text on all known scientific and technical knowledge which would provide a basis for further enquiries and discoveries. It also became a collection of Enlightened opinions on politics, economics, philosophy and religion. It was not anti-religious but it was anti-clerical. It was sold on a subscription basis and became an almost immediate success not only in terms of critical acclaim but also commercially: the print run of 4,000 copies sold out quite quickly, despite the high cost.
The Encyclopaedia was attacked by traditionalists of various kinds, was subjected to censorship by the Jesuits and repressed completely in some countries. Diderot was advised to leave France but he stayed to complete his task. The first volume appeared in 1751 and the project was finished in 1772. A revised, enlarged edition, appeared in 1782 and work continued throughout the Revolution. Diderot died in 1784 and his last words were said to be 'The first step towards philosophy is scepticism.'
The Encyclopaedia was influential throughout Europe and also gave its name to a way of thinking about the place of knowledge in the curriculum. The word 'encyclopaedism' is derived from the Greek term meaning a whole system of learning. The encyclopaedist view of curriculum lasted much longer in France, but it was for a while fashionable in teacher education in England, and was parodied by Charles Dickens in Hard Times.
Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-78)
Rousseau soon became critical of both the Encyclopaedia and of the various activities of the Academies and Societies. He wrote an article on Political Economy for the Encyclopaedia in 1755 (and several items on music), but in 1761 he published La Nouvelle Heloise which is regarded as an early example of Romanticism, His own view of education is set out at length in Emile, which was published in 1762, the same year as The Social Contract. It was a remarkable, even sensational, book which was an immediate success and has featured in discussions of educational theory ever since. It preached an approach to education totally different from that of the Encyclopaedists. At the time, Emile was banned by the Catholic Church, partly because Rousseau made some explicit critical references to Catholic doctrine, but also because it was regarded as dangerously subversive; Emile was also seen as immoral and potentially revolutionary. It was, for example, debated and condemned by the Paris Parlement. Rousseau prudently left France and returned to his native Geneva, but there the Council also signalled its disapproval of the book. Rousseau left for England where he was helped by David Hume and other English sympathisers, until he quarrelled with them and returned to France in 1770.
Rousseau's Educational Ideas
It is important to see Rousseau's writings on education in the context of the kind of schools that he was familiar with, and also in the context of his social and political ideas. It would also be a mistake to ignore La Nouvelle Heloise which was written in the form of a novel before Emile. In the novel, Rousseau describes the education of children not in a school but at home, protected from the corrupting influences of society. It provides us with one of Rousseau's fundamental articles of faith: that children are born naturally good, but become infected by the evils of society unless measures are taken to keep the child away from them.
There is a problem here: a tension exists between Rousseau's desire for children to be free from the evils of society whilst accepting the notion of a 'contract' between people and society whereby individuals give up some liberty in return for the protection of the State. Nothing should be imposed by the State that was in conflict with 'the general will' of the people, but who was to decide what was the general will? This revolutionary aspect of Rousseau's political philosophy is difficult to reconcile with Rousseau's educational views which preached that children should be free from society's corrupting influence. We should also note that in one of Rousseau's later publications, Considerations on the Government of Poland (1772), he came to quite different conclusions: he argued for a State system of education on the grounds that the State had a right to form the character of its citizens so that their tastes and morals would be different from those of other nations. So much for individual freedom and education according to nature!
Many educationists have chosen to ignore this contradiction and move on to Rousseau's major educational principle: that it is more important to understand the nature of the child than to be concerned with what knowledge to inculcate. This principle has given rise to two kinds of debate about the education of young children: the first recognising that children are not miniature adults but develop by going through a sequence of stages of development. This was not a new idea in education - we have in earlier chapters referred to Quintilian and Erasmus in this connection; but Rousseau took the idea of stages in a different direction, as we shall see later in this chapter. The second debate provoked by Rousseau concerns the idea of children's 'needs'. In Emile, Rousseau advocated a child-centred approach to education rather than a teacher-centred or curriculum-centred programme. The teacher's task was to observe the child, identify needs and provide experiences to meet those needs. As we shall see, there are problems about this interpretation of needs: there is inevitably a social dimension to 'needs' - meeting needs is not simply a question of individual differences. It may be easier to accept Rousseau's emotional reaction against the harsh and repressive treatment of children during the eighteenth century than it is to accept Emile as a fully thought out systematic philosophy of education.
Emile (de l'Education): This book is Rousseau's attempt to square the circle: how to provide a good education for the innocent child and protect him from the evils of a corrupting society. Rousseau avoids the problem of presenting a logical philosophical argument by putting forward his ideas in the form of narrative, the story of an orphan, Emile, who is cared for by an ideal tutor. Emile is divided into five Books, each dealing with a stage of development:
(There are some similarities with Rousseau's stages of development and those proposed by twentieth-century psychologists, including, as we shall see in Chapter 12, the stages postulated by Piaget and Bruner.)
We should also note that some of the terms used by Rousseau, for example, discovery, experience, readiness, child-centred, natural, have become sources of conflict between traditional and progressive educationists throughout the twentieth century. We must also remember that Rousseau was an admirer of Plato's Republic, but in Emile dismissed it as an impossible contemporary model because he thought that no such community as envisaged by Plato existed in the eighteenth century having been replaced by corrupt 'civilisations' such as eighteenth-century France. Yet in his later advice to Poland, Rousseau returned to a set of recommendations much more like Plato's Republic than his own Emile.
Rousseau's work on education was packed with brilliant insights into childhood and what was wrong with traditional education; it is, unfortunately, also scattered with false assumptions, ignorance of some aspects of children's behaviour as well as amazing internal contradictions. For example, he preached the doctrine of 'natural' freedom for children, but his writing is full of commands about what children must not be allowed to do. His method of exposition, fictional narrative, allowed him to assume that all his methods would be successful, and he therefore described the adolescent Emile as having grown up in just the way that Rousseau predicted. His writings show all the arrogance of someone who was certain the he was right; one of the problems is to distinguish the brilliant insights from the nonsense.
Our task in this book is not to evaluate all of Rousseau's life and ideas; it is merely to give him credit for the remarkable insights he had into some aspects of the process of educating the young. These include ideas about stages of human development, learning from discovery and personal experience, the danger of formal instruction, the idea of readiness, including reading readiness, and teacher-pupil contracts. Rousseau often overstated his case, but many of his ideas, stripped of exaggeration have withstood the test of time and will need to be discussed in several later chapters.
We have talked about giving Rousseau credit for ideas many of which have become part of the agenda for progressive education in the twentieth century. We can be sure, however, that even had Rousseau never existed these ideas would have emerged as part of the Enlightenment or post-Enlightenment debate on education. Some of them existed long before Emile; others were developed by writers such as Pestalozzi. What Rousseau certainly did was to express the ideas in a way that made them accessible to large numbers of readers from the 1760s onwards, but in the longer run, that may not have been an advantage.
Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746-1827)
Pestalozzi was clearly influenced by Emile but the major difference between Pestalozzi and Rousseau was that Pestalozzi was a self-critical practitioner who developed his ideas experimentally rather than being satisfied with dogmatic assertions based on opinions or strong emotional reactions. As well as Pestalozzi there were others in the eighteenth century who felt strongly about the prevailing educational practices and who tried to find better alternatives. The enlightened educators included such names as David Manson (1726-92) who ran his own private school in Belfast which had no corporal punishment and used various 'play way' techniques to encourage the children of the poor to achieve. In Alsace, there was Jean Frederic Oberlin (1740-1826), a Protestant pastor who established a group of five schools for the poor in his large parish, trained teachers for them, and not only improved the level of education of the parents and their children but also raised the standards of agriculture. His life was occasionally threatened by opponents. As we have seen, those with progressive views on education ran the risk of being perceived as politically subversive, and this was sometimes true of Pestalozzi.
Pestalozzi was born in the prosperous city of Zurich in Switzerland which possessed some of the features later associated with a welfare state: some provision was made for the poor and the sick; libraries were maintained at public expense but schooling was comparatively neglected. Pestalozzi's family were middle-class Protestants of Italian origin; his father was a successful surgeon who died when Pestalozzi was young leaving insufficient funds to continue the family's lifestyle. Pestalozzi's early memories included genteel poverty and unhappy school days. At the age of 15, his high school provided a more satisfactory regime, but still one which Pestalozzi later criticised for its lack of concern for practical abilities. At this time Pestalozzi was developing political interests, and he gave up the idea of becoming a clergyman; instead when he left college he experimented with farming. In 1769 he married, and following the birth of his son, he developed his educational theories, combining this with observing his child's development. Later he also experimented with methods of teaching science and other subjects from practical experiences. He had read Rousseau and was initially impressed, but soon became critical of some aspects of the 'theory' in Emile: for example, he disagreed with Rousseau's extreme ideas on liberty, preferring a balance between freedom and obedience.
Pestalozzi defined education as the process or art of assisting natural development; his theory included the idea that the child's mind receives impressions from outside itself and makes sense of those impressions by trying to make them fit with previous learning. Pestalozzi saw education as a means of assisting this natural process in a variety of ways - the child learns to think by thinking and to speak through speaking - these are natural developments which can be assisted by a good teacher, or impeded by a bad one.
In How Gertrude Teaches Her Children (1801), Pestalozzi talks of assisting in the learning process in the development of language, observation and mental skills which proceed from the three elementary powers of making sounds, forming images and constructing concepts. From these fundamental principles Pestalozzi elaborated his theory of teaching and learning. He saw the mind as a natural sorting device, classifying new objects by number, shape and name. In terms of modern learning theories, this classification process would seem far too simplistic, but Pestalozzi was on the right lines, developing techniques of teaching that were advanced for the time and more 'scientific' than those of Rousseau, for example.
Among other advanced ideas were the importance of children working in groups for some purposes, proceeding from the familiar to the unfamiliar and devising a curriculum in accordance with the achievements and development of individual children. Pestalozzi also saw the political importance of educating the poor, as well as the humanitarian benefits. He divided his curricular aims into three: head, body and heart or intellectual, physical (including vocational training) and moral which he considered to be the most important. Although his educational programme was analysed in this three-fold way, he stressed that it should be taught as an integrated whole.
Pestalozzi's practical efforts to put his ideas into practice in classroom situations often met with difficulties: sometimes financial, sometimes lack of business acumen, sometimes local opposition. His most successful enterprise was the boarding school at Yverdon which kept going for about 20 years from 1805. This school was visited by many reformers interested in education, including Froebel, Herbart and Mayo who stayed three years and then started a school in England. By the twentieth century many of the ideas became part of teacher training orthodoxy. His influence was considerable in Prussia and Saxony but took longer to take hold in England. In Switzerland, his ideas continued to develop with his former pupil, Philippe de Fellenberg. In the longer run his influence was also seen in the work of such major theorists as John Dewey, Maria Montessori and Jean Piaget. In 1826 his Swansong was published which ends with a challenging idea for a teacher: 'Life itself educates.'
Conclusion
The Enlightenment was in many ways a reaction against certain aspects of the seventeenth-century world: religious intolerance, superstition and magic were replaced by humanitarian, scientific reasoning and a belief in progress. The implications for education were enormous, but before they really began, as we have seen, counter tendencies began to operate such as the Romanticism of Rousseau and others. This will be explored in Chapter 9.
The long-term effects of the Enlightenment on education were numerous and very important: apart from advocating a more humanitarian treatment of the young, the philosophes encouraged a more scientific attitude to the study of education - the development of child psychology, an interest in careful observation which influenced pedagogy, and an approach to curriculum which encouraged matching content with the developing abilities of individual pupils.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century, science was seen as a way of understanding how Nature worked. Nature included the human mind, and investigating that area was no longer forbidden territory, but rather a legitimate subject for enquiry. The key to answering such difficulties was Reason, and in particular scientific reasoning. It was inevitable that some enthusiasts for Reason would over-state their case: one of the reactions to this was Romanticism, not only in art, music and literature but also in education. A key figure in this was Rousseau who began by being a supporter of the Encyclopaedia but later made a highly emotional, but brilliant, response to the problem of education. In addition, the Industrial Revolution created a working class which would have to be educated and tamed. They would need to be literate and numerate as well as obedient. These requirements would in turn present further difficulties for the nineteenth century.
Above all, the Enlightenment virtually destroyed for ever the idea that education was primarily concerned with memorising sacred texts, or indeed any other books. The Age of Reason demanded that education should be concerned with developing the powers of the mind to criticise the status quo and to think rationally. In retrospect it is easy to parody the philosophes for their optimism about human reason and for underestimating the power of emotions; but it was a very important lesson to be learned. Those responsible for planning national curricula are still trying to get the balance right between educating the intellect, moral education and educating the emotions.
References
1. U. Im Hof, The Enlightenment (Blackwell. Oxford, 1994), p. 5.
2. Some writers would like to date the Enlightenment from the second half of the seventeenth century.
3. U. Im Hof, op.cit., pp. 114-15.
Further Reading
Hampson, N., The Enlightenment (Penguin, 1968).
Porter, R., Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 2000).