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| <h1>Rousseau and American Educational Scholarship</h1>
| |
|
| |
| <h3>An Incomplete Working Draft</h3>
| |
|
| |
| <h3>by Robbie McClintock</h3>
| |
|
| |
| <blockquote>Unpublished: Written Fall 1980. The third section was published in
| |
| Spanish, "El nacimiento de la historia de la educación: Los antecedents alemanes
| |
| de la pedagogía historica." <i>Revista de Educación</i>. Fall 1985.</blockquote>
| |
|
| |
| </div>
| |
|
| |
| <h3>I—A Vaccine for the Virus</h3>
| |
| <div class="nums">
| |
| <blockquote>This unpublished essay was drafted in 1980/81. "Section
| |
| III—Historical Pedagogy, The German Background" was published in a Spanish
| |
| translation as "El nacimiento de la historia de la educación: Los antecedents
| |
| alemanes de la pedagogía historica." <i>Revista de Educación</i>. Fall
| |
| 1985.</blockquote>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>Jean-Jacques Rousseau. <i>Emile, or Education</i>. Allan Bloom, trans. New
| |
| York: Basic Books, 1979.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <p>To begin,
| |
| however, let us note a salient fact—in 1979, Allan Bloom, a political theorist,
| |
| published the first complete, high-quality translation of Rousseau's
| |
| <i>Émile</i>.<span class="cite"></span> That a political theorist did the
| |
| translation was not an accident, for in political thought Rousseau is a
| |
| significant presence, a problem, a stimulus, a fit subject for good minds. In
| |
| educational thought, the situation is entirely different. In schools of
| |
| education, Rousseau appears neatly niched; to his name are associated an epitome
| |
| of dead ideas that some occasionally draw on to embellish this or that current
| |
| cause. That the new translation of <i>Émile</i>, so long so sorely needed,
| |
| turned out to be the work of a political theorist, not an educational theorist,
| |
| betokens how scholars in schools of education have failed to care for the
| |
| humanistic heritage of their field. To improve the quality of education, to make
| |
| thoughtfulness and sensitivity the norm among teachers and professionals, this
| |
| situation needs to change, and such change will be no easy task.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>I have in mind here the following: Roger D. Masters, <i>The Political
| |
| Philosophy of Rousseau</i> (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968); Lester
| |
| G. Crocker, <i>Rousseau's Social Contract: An Interpretative Essay</i>
| |
| (Cleveland: The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1968); Judith N.
| |
| Shklar, Men and <i>Citizens: A Study of Rousseau's Social Theory</i> Cambridge:
| |
| Cambridge University Press, 1969); Anne M. Cohler, <i>Rousseau and
| |
| Nationalism</i> (New York: Basic Books, 1970); Ronald Grimsley, "Introduction,"
| |
| to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du Contrat Social (Oxford: Clarendon, Press, 1972);
| |
| David Cameron, <i>The Social Thought of Rousseau and Burke: A Comparative
| |
| Study</i> (Toronto:, University of, Toronto Press, 1973); John C. Hall,
| |
| <i>Rousseau: An Introduction to his Political Philosophy</i> (London: The
| |
| Macmillan Press, <i>1973);</i> Merle L. Perkins, <i>Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the
| |
| Individual and Society</i> (Lexington: The University of Kentucky Press, 1974);
| |
| John Charvet, <i>The Social Problem in the Philosophy of Rousseau</i>
| |
| (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974); Kennedy F. Roche, <i>Rousseau:
| |
| Stoic and Romantic</i> (London: Methuen & Co., 1974); Andrew Levine, <i>The
| |
| Politics of Autonomy : A Kantian Reading of Rousseau's Social Contract</i>
| |
| (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1976); Stephen Ellenburg,
| |
| <i>Rousseau's Political Philosophy: An Interpretation from Within</i> (Ithaca:
| |
| Cornell University Press, <i>1976);</i> Madeleine B. Ellis, <i>Rousseau's
| |
| Socratic Aemelian Myths: A Literary Collation of Emile and the Social
| |
| Contract</i> (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1977); Ramon M. Lemos
| |
| <i>Rousseau's Political Philosophy: An Exposition and Interpretation</i>
| |
| (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1977); Julius Steinberg, <i>Locke,
| |
| Rousseau, and the Idea of Consent: An Inquiry into the Liberal-Democratic Theory
| |
| of Political Obligation</i> (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1978); and Richard
| |
| Fralin, <i>Rousseau and Representation: A Study of the Development of His
| |
| Concept of Political Institutions</i> (New York: Columbia University Press,
| |
| 1978). In addition, the recent noteworthy translations of Rousseau have been by
| |
| scholars concerned with his social and political thought. See along with Bloom's
| |
| <i>Émile</i>, his other translation, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, <i>Politics and the
| |
| Arts: Letter to M. D'Alembert on the Theatre</i> (Allan Bloom, trans., Ithaca:
| |
| Cornell University Press, 1960); Jean-Jacques Rousseau, <i>The First and Second
| |
| Discourses</i> (Roger D. Masters, ed. and Judith R. Masters, trans. New York:
| |
| St. Martin's Press, 1964); Jean-Jacques Rousseau, <i>On the Social Contract with
| |
| Geneva Manuscript and Political Economy</i> (Roger D. Masters, ed. and Judith R.
| |
| Masters, trans., New York: St. Martin's Press, 1978); and Ben Barber's
| |
| translation of <i>Narcisse</i>.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>Mabel Lewis Sahakian and William S. Sahakian, <i>Rousseau as Educator</i>
| |
| (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1974). This is an unbelievably bad book. For a
| |
| sample of its acumen, try page 105: Rousseau "anticipated the Puritan ethic in
| |
| his statement that, rich or poor, everyone should work, for only a cheat does
| |
| not work." On being asked to review this work, I decided not to on having read
| |
| it with dismay, thinking that the less said about it the better--alas an error.
| |
| It has found its way, however, into the bibliography of <i>Doctrines of the
| |
| Great Educators</i> by Robert R. Rusk and James Scotland (5th ed. New York: St.
| |
| Martin's Press, 1979). There in a nut shell is the weakness of the field,
| |
| incompetent secondary studies and undiscriminating texts.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| </ref>See Terrence Edward Cook, "Rousseau: Educations and Politics" (Ph.D.
| |
| Dissertation, Princeton University, Department of Politics, 1971). This
| |
| dissertation deals with its subject well and is far more informative about
| |
| Rousseau's educational thought than William Boyd's long-dated, but never
| |
| replaced, study, <i>The Educational Theory of Jean Jacques Rousseau</i> (1911)
| |
| (New York: Russell & Russell, 1963). According to <i>Dissertation
| |
| Abstracts</i>, there have been relatively few dissertations on Rousseau
| |
| classified in Education, and some of these are of the type of Plato, Rousseau,
| |
| and Dewey and their Significance for Physical Education. Perhaps the strongest
| |
| of those done in Education on Rousseau is by Fred D Kierstead, Jr., "Education
| |
| for a Transitional Democracy: A Comparison of Jean Jacques Rousseau's Concept of
| |
| the General Will to John Dewey's Concept of Collective Intelligence" (Ph.D.
| |
| Dissertation, The University of Oklahoma, 1974). Although Kierstead's
| |
| dissertation is ambitious in the range of work mobilized in it, his treatment of
| |
| Rousseau is largely dependent on a rather limited secondary literature, and as a
| |
| result, however interesting it is, it breaks no new ground.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>Grace Goodyear Roosevelt. "Rousseau on War, Peace, and Education" (Ed.D.
| |
| Dissertation, Columbia University, Teachers College, 1987).</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>See Terrence Edward Cook. "Rousseau: Education and Politics" (Ph.D.
| |
| Dissertation, Princeton University, Department of Politics, 1971). This
| |
| dissertation deals with its subject well and is far more informative about
| |
| Rousseau's educational thought than William Boyd's long-dated, but never
| |
| replaced, study, <i>The Educational Theory of Jean Jacques Rousseau</i> (1911)
| |
| (New York: Russell & Russell, 1963). According to <i>Dissertation
| |
| Abstracts</i>, there have been relatively few dissertations on Rousseau
| |
| classified in Education, and some of these are of the type of Plato, Rousseau,
| |
| and Dewey and their Significance for Physical Education. Perhaps the strongest
| |
| of those done in Education on Rousseau is by Fred D Kierstead, Jr., "Education
| |
| for a Transitional Democracy: A Comparison of Jean Jacques Rousseau's Concept of
| |
| the General Will to John Dewey's Concept of Collective Intelligence" (Ph.D.
| |
| Dissertation, The University of Oklahoma, 1974). Although Kierstead's
| |
| dissertation is ambitious in the range of work mobilized in it, his treatment of
| |
| Rousseau is largely dependent on a rather limited secondary literature, and as a
| |
| result, however interesting it is, it breaks no new ground.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <p>In recent
| |
| years, scholars writing in English have contributed much significant commentary
| |
| on Rousseau's thought, his educational ideas included. Virtually none of it has
| |
| been by scholars based in schools of education. Almost all of it has been by
| |
| scholars concerned essentially with Rousseau's political and social thought,
| |
| most of whom have academic bases in departments of politics or government. For
| |
| instance, during the decade prior to publication of Bloom's <i>Émile</i>,
| |
| scholars published at least sixteen books in which they sought to illuminate
| |
| Rousseau's political and social thought, all serious, thorough studies in which
| |
| the authors marshal a full command of Rousseau's corpus.<span
| |
| class="cite"></span> In contrast, during this period, scholars in the field of
| |
| education published only one new book, <i>Rousseau as Educator</i> by Mabel
| |
| Lewis Sahakian and William S. Sahakian, an execrable essay fraught with errors,
| |
| dated scholarship, and trivial commentary.<span class="cite"></span> The
| |
| comparison is no better if one looks at dissertations the same period. Terrence
| |
| Edward Cook's "Rousseau: Education and Politics," a Ph.D. dissertation at
| |
| Princeton, is a lucid study, far more informative about Rousseau's educational
| |
| thought than William Boyd's long-dated, but never supplanted, study from 1911,
| |
| <i>The Educational Theory of Jean Jacques Rousseau</i>.<span
| |
| class="cite"></span> The few dissertation dealing with Rousseau and categorized
| |
| in the field of education show a thin command of the serious scholarship on
| |
| Rousseau and often scant command, for that matter, of the French language. The
| |
| author of the best dissertation done at a graduate school of education chose to
| |
| categorize her work under political science,<span class="cite"></span> and the
| |
| only dissertation in recent years devoted to a thorough assessment of Rousseau's
| |
| educational theory was done at Princeton University for a Ph.D. in the
| |
| Department of Politics.<span class="cite"></span> Although work on the history
| |
| of American education has improved in the past two decades, scholarship on the
| |
| Western heritage of educational thought remains decrepit. Why is Rousseau a
| |
| hollow shell in the study of education?</p>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>V. D. Musset-Pathay had edited what was then the best edition of Rousseau's
| |
| writings. His name did not appear on the title page of the first edition,
| |
| <i>Histoire de la Vie et des Ouvrages de J.-J. Rousseau</i>. (2 vols. Paris:
| |
| J.-M. Eberhart, 1821).</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>Marc Girardin (Saint-Marc Girardin), 1801-1873, was an influential critic
| |
| and Professor at the Sorbonne. His essays on Rousseau appeared posthumously in
| |
| book form, Saint-Marc Girardin, <i>Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Sa Vie et sea
| |
| Ouvrages</i> (2 vols. Paris: Charpentier, 1875).</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, 1804-1869, was a most influential critic. An
| |
| early appreciation of Romanticism, he cooled towards it in the 1830's. His
| |
| <i>Causeries du lundi</i> appeared weekly between 1849 and 1869. During the
| |
| 1850's, the time in which he had most to say about Rousseau, Sainte-Beuve
| |
| supported Louis Napoleon. The quotation comes from "Jean-Jacques Rousseau's
| |
| <i>Confessions," Causeries du lundi</i>, 4 November 1850, as translated by
| |
| Francis Steegmuller and Norbert Gutterman in <i>Sainte-Beuve: Selected
| |
| Essays</i> (Garden City: Doubleday & Co., 1963, p. 207).</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>See Madame D'Epinay, <i>Mémoires et Correspondance</i> (3 vols. Paris:
| |
| Brunet Librarie, 1818), particularly volume 2. For the textual history of this
| |
| work, see the introduction by Georges Roth to <i>Histoire de Madame de
| |
| Montbrillant: Les pseudo-Mémoires de Madame D'Epinay</i> (3 vols. Paris:
| |
| Gallimard, 1951) Vol. 1, pp. vii-xlii.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>In 1891, Henri Beaudouin published the last of this type of work in French,
| |
| striving with vast detail to give a full and dispassionate presentation in <i>La
| |
| vie et les oeuvres de Jean-Jacques Rousseau</i> (2 vols. Paris: Lamulle &
| |
| Poisson). Beaudouin's research was not really sufficiently thorough nor was his
| |
| presentation sufficiently artful for the work to have much impact, one way or
| |
| another, on the estimate of Rousseau's character and thought. In the early
| |
| twentieth century, more narrowly defined studies, particularly some of the great
| |
| thematic studies of Rousseau's work, would be much more significant.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <p>To begin
| |
| answering that question, we need to go back to the nineteenth century. Then,
| |
| <i>ad hominem</i> reactions to the man heavily influenced most interpretations
| |
| of Rousseau's work. Throughout the nineteenth century, the major French studies
| |
| appeared all with variations of a single title, Rousseau's life and work, and in
| |
| all of them, the assessment of Rousseau's work depended essentially on whether
| |
| the author found probity in Rousseau's life. The first of them, <i>Histoire de
| |
| la vie et des ouvrages de J.-J. Rousseau</i>, published in 1821, V. D.
| |
| Musset-Pathay articulated a very positive judgment of the life.<span
| |
| class="cite"></span> For a time it set the tone for criticism of Rousseau, but
| |
| even in his life, Rousseau had made many enemies, and as sensibility changed,
| |
| their animosity became renewed. Consequently, the second major assessment of
| |
| Rousseau's life and work, published between 1852 and 1856 in the <i>Revue des
| |
| Deux Mondes</i>, <i>Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Sa vie et sea ouvrages</i> by M.
| |
| Saint-Marc Girardin, reflected a much more negative estimate of the life.<span
| |
| class="cite"></span> As these essays showed, a general cooling towards Rousseau
| |
| had set in among French critics, a cooling which had taken hold as Romanticism
| |
| went out of fashion. Sainte-Beuve, a most influential tastemaker, recognizing
| |
| Rousseau's literary genius, had nevertheless expressed strong doubts about
| |
| Rousseau's character. "It is unfortunate, of course, that such achievements are
| |
| tinged with overweening pride and misanthropy, and that a note of cynicism
| |
| spoils many a passage of charm and beauty."<span class="cite"></span> Those
| |
| disposed to disparage Rousseau took the purported <i>Mémoires</i> of Madame
| |
| D'Epinay to be compelling, first-hand evidence of his failings.<span
| |
| class="cite"></span> To assess his ideas properly, the predominant critics
| |
| believed these memoirs needed be recognized and weighed as essential sources on
| |
| Rousseau's character.<span class="cite"></span></p>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>James Boswell, <i>The Life of Samuel Johnson</i> (3 vols., London:
| |
| Macmillan and Co., 1922), vol. 1, pp. 375-6. A good description of Rousseau's
| |
| stay in England will be found in Jean Guéhenno, <i>Jean-Jacques Rousseau</i>
| |
| (John and Doreen Weightman, trans., 2 vols., New York: Columbia University
| |
| Press, 1966), vol. 2, pp. 160-203. The stay and the resultant quarrel with Hume
| |
| has been covered extensively in the <i>Annales de la Société Jean-Jacques
| |
| Rousseau</i>. See Vol. 6, 1910, pp. 1-313 (Louis-J. Courtois; Vol. 17, 1926, pp.
| |
| 13-51 (Albert Schinz and Frederick A. Pottle); Vol. 18, 1927-28, pp. 1-331
| |
| (Margaret Hill Peoples); and Vol. 32, 1950-1952, pp. 143-154 (L.-A.
| |
| Boiteux).</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>Edmund Burke, "Letter to a Member of the National Assembly," in Burke,
| |
| <i>Reflections on the Revolution in</i> France (A.J. Grieve, ed., London:
| |
| Everyman's Library, 1910, 1960), p. 263; cf. pp. 262-268. For the enduring
| |
| influence of Burke's outburst on English views of Rousseau, see Sir Leslie
| |
| Stephen, <i>History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century</i> (2 vols.,
| |
| New York: Harbinger Books, 1962), vol. 2, pp. 156-165, 183-191, where he very
| |
| much takes Burkes part against Rousseau. Edmund Gosse contributed as useful
| |
| survey, "Rousseau en Angleterre au XIXe siècle," to <i>Annales Rousseau</i>,
| |
| Vol. 8, 1912, pp. 131-160. He is strongest on the early part of the nineteenth
| |
| century and writes, p. 156, "Ainsi Rousseau, qui, en 1800, était considers en
| |
| Angleterre meme par ses ennemis, comme le plus enchanteur des écrivains, était,
| |
| en 1835, tombé dans 1'opinion publique au point d'être regardé comme méprisable,
| |
| indigne d'être cité par les gens qui se respectaient et d'être lu autrement
| |
| qu'en cachette."</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>John Morley, <i>Rousseau</i> (2nd. ed., 1878, London: Macmillan and Co.,
| |
| 1910).</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <p>If the
| |
| French were having trouble appreciating Rousseau in the mid to late nineteenth
| |
| century, it would be improbable that the English would esteem him more highly.
| |
| Rousseau himself had left behind, on his departure from England in 1767, a
| |
| damaging impression on British opinion: to wit, Samuel Johnson—"If you mean to
| |
| be serious, I think him one of the worst of men; a rascal, who ought to be
| |
| haunted out of society.... Rousseau, Sir, is a very bad man. I would sooner sign
| |
| a sentence for his transportation, than that of any felon who has gone from the
| |
| Old Bailey these many years. Yes, I should like to have him work in the
| |
| plantations."<span class="cite"></span> Further, Edmund Burke had bitterly
| |
| castigated the principles of Rousseau's thought and the lack of principles in
| |
| his life, making both emblematic of the worst aspects of the French Revolution.
| |
| Burke's criticism was passionately <i>ad hominem:</i> "As I had good opportunity
| |
| of knowing his proceedings almost from day to day, he left no doubt on my mind
| |
| that he entertained no principle either to influence his heart, or to guide his
| |
| understanding, but <i>vanity.... </i>It was from the same, deranged, eccentric
| |
| vanity, that this, the insane <i>Socrates</i> of the National Assembly, was
| |
| impelled to publish a mad confession of his mad faults, and to attempt a new
| |
| sort of glory from bringing hardily to light the obscure and vulgar vices, which
| |
| we know may sometimes be blended with eminent talents."<span
| |
| class="cite"></span> Victorian thinkers could easily concur in such reactions.
| |
| Hence, in 1873, the most artful, telling of the <i>ad hominem</i> summations of
| |
| Rousseau's life and work appeared, not in French, but in English <i>Rousseau</i>
| |
| by John Morley.<span class="cite"></span> This book exerted tremendous
| |
| influence.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>Ibid., vol. 2, p. 192; cf., p. 151. On Morley, the fullest recent study is
| |
| by D.A. Hamer, John <i>Morley: Liberal Intellectual in Politics</i> (Oxford:
| |
| Clarendon Press, 1968). Edward Alexander's book, <i>John Morley</i> (New York:
| |
| Twayne Publishers, 1972), gives a concise exposition of Morley's major
| |
| works.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>Morley tried to show positive aspects in Rousseau's relation to Therese
| |
| Levaseur (Vol. 1, pp. 95-131), and he dealt sympathetically with Rousseau during
| |
| the years of persecution between 1762 and 1766. In these situations his man was
| |
| down, and propping him up would be safe. Morley did not, however, make a serious
| |
| effort to comprehend Rousseau's development during his early years, and, in
| |
| retrospect, Morley was insufficiently critical of apparent evidence concerning
| |
| Rousseau's relations to Diderot and Grimm. Overall, however, Morley succeeded in
| |
| creating an appearance of sound evenhandedness in writing on Rousseau. To some
| |
| in Morley's immediate audience, Rousseau was so beyond the pale that the act of
| |
| writing a book on his life, an ambitious book crafted to be read, was itself a
| |
| dangerous form of rehabilitation. Thus a reviewer in <i>The Saturday Review:</i>
| |
| "for our own part, we cannot help thinking that the personal history of this
| |
| unhappy creature belongs to the order of things which it is as well to leave
| |
| underground, and to stir as little as possible" (Jan. 31, 1874, p. 152). The
| |
| ground having been stirred, the reviewer proceeded to try to convince readers to
| |
| put Rousseau back underground, concluding, "done into plain prose, Rousseau
| |
| becomes not only an exceedingly contemptible, but really a very commonplace,
| |
| humbug.... He was a lazy, selfish, dirty, lying, canting, ill-conditioned
| |
| vagabond, who shirked honest work, accepted alms and snarled at the hands that
| |
| fed him, and whined and raved against the world because he was himself such a
| |
| nasty and ignoble creature" (p. 154). Against such a background, Morley's book
| |
| could easily appear as a standard work of dispassionate scholarship. As late as
| |
| 1912, Edmund Gosse could still praise it in the highest terms in "Rousseau en
| |
| Angleterre au XIXe siècle," op. cit. (n. 11), p. 159. Gosse did note, however,
| |
| that "ce qui est assez curieux, c'est que le livre de Morley, bien qu'il ait eu
| |
| un trés grand succés de vente, n'ait guére réussi—ranimer en Grande-Bretagne
| |
| l'intéret pour l'étude de Rousseau." A close reading of Morley's
| |
| <i>Rousseau</i>, however, shows that such a revitalization was not Morley's
| |
| intent.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <p>John Morley
| |
| believed that ideas have a great effect in history and that criticism is a form
| |
| of public action through which a man of strong will and sound intellect can
| |
| exercise leadership on the course of events. Further, he found the proper view
| |
| of government "in the magnificent and immortal pieces of Burke," and shared with
| |
| that commentator the conviction that Rousseau's work had had a pernicious
| |
| influence on the French Revolution.<span class="cite"></span> Moreover, Rousseau
| |
| was vulnerable: his works were no longer widely read and to Victorian
| |
| sensibilities, much that Rousseau bared in his <i>Confessions</i> was highly
| |
| prejudicial. Morley struck hard at Rousseau. He contrived <i>Rousseau</i> with
| |
| mastery; given his purpose, his control was perfect. He wrote like a very angry
| |
| boxer bent on meting mortal damage, delivering a series of punishing blows and
| |
| then propping up his opponent for a time so that the hated object can recover
| |
| sufficiently to absorb more punishment, again and again, until no more can be
| |
| absorbed. Morley's criticism thus flowed in waves of negation spaced by
| |
| interludes in which he recognized certain minor positive aspects of the man and
| |
| his work.<span class="cite"></span></p>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>There are some interesting reflections on what it would mean to hold
| |
| someone like Rousseau to be insane in a strict meaning of the word in a
| |
| three-part review of Morley's <i>Rousseau</i> in <i>The Literary World</i>,
| |
| April 11, 25, and May 2, 1873, esp. p. 265 (April 25).</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>Morley, <i>Rousseau</i>, op. cit. (n. 12), pp. 192-5.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <p>Over all,
| |
| the <i>ad hominem</i> tradition in the Rousseau scholarship of the late
| |
| nineteenth century cast his life and work in a very negative light. Rousseau
| |
| possessed genius, an idiosyncratic genius more significant for its effects, good
| |
| and bad, than for its substance. Rousseau's intellect was weak, his emotions and
| |
| intuitions strong, his was character flawed, his psyche unstable, if not
| |
| insane.<span class="cite"></span> His works, in the view of commentators like
| |
| Morley, do not stand up to criticism; they are significant, not in their own
| |
| right, but through the historical accident that they strengthened certain great
| |
| developments that were already underway and later to bear fruit. Typical is
| |
| Morley's final appreciation of the <i>Social Contract</i>, voiced with "no
| |
| attempt to palliate either the shallowness or the practical mischievousness of"
| |
| it. Yet, Morley granted, the book did help to encourage good people to strive
| |
| after freedom, to rekindle "the fire of patriotism," to seek the common social
| |
| good, and to oppose the exploitation of the weak. Credit not Rousseau, however:
| |
| "in these ways the author of the <i>Social Contract</i> did involuntarily and
| |
| unconsciously contribute to the growth of those new and progressive ideas, 4g
| |
| which for his own part he lacked all faith."<span class="cite"></span></p>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>Peter Gay, in his useful bibliographical essay, "Reading About Rousseau,"
| |
| <i>The Party of Humanity</i> (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964), esp. pp. 217-8
| |
| on Morley, notes the ill effects on the understanding of Rousseau's thought of
| |
| the nineteenth-century proclivity to partisanship, pro and con. See also the
| |
| remark by Gosse quoted above in n. 14. After the first wave of translations in
| |
| the 1760' and 1770's, there were virtually no translations of Rousseau into
| |
| English until the end of the nineteenth-century, judging from Jean Sénelier's
| |
| <i>Biblioqraphie générale des oeuvres de J.-J. Rousseau</i> (Paris: Presses
| |
| Universitaires de France, 1950), a not entirely reliable source. The intention
| |
| embodied in the late nineteenth-century translations of Emile will be discussed
| |
| below.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>Morley, <i>Rousseau</i>, op. cit. (n. 12), Vol. 1, p. 88-9: "Rousseau was a
| |
| man of singular genius, and he set an extraordinary mark on Europe, but this
| |
| mark would have been very different if he had ever mastered any one system of
| |
| thought, of if he had ever fully grasped what systematic thinking means.... In
| |
| short, Rousseau has distinctions in abundance, but the distinction of knowing
| |
| how to think, in the exact sense of that term, was hardly among them...." Ibid.,
| |
| p. 186: "Rousseau was always apt to think in a slipshod manner. He sensibly
| |
| though illogically accepted wholesome practical maxims, as if they flowed from
| |
| theoretical premises that were in truth utterly incompatible with them." Vol. 2,
| |
| p. 137: "Let us here remark that it was exactly what strikes us as the desperate
| |
| absurdity of the assumptions of the <i>Social Contract</i>, which constituted
| |
| the power of that work, when it accidentally fell into the hands of men who
| |
| surveyed a national system wrecked in all its parts. The <i>Social Contract</i>
| |
| is worked out precisely in that fashion which, if it touches men at all, makes
| |
| them into fanatics."</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <p>Throughout
| |
| Morley's <i>Rousseau</i>, and other works like it, the intended effect was to
| |
| discourage the close study of Rousseau's work.<span class="cite"></span>
| |
| Morley's own criticisms of Rousseau's books were extremely casual and
| |
| sententious. In writing about Rousseau's more substantial works, Morley
| |
| contented himself with brief, slipshod exposition, followed with rotund
| |
| disquisitions on the error of Rousseau's points, however misstated, all this, a
| |
| prelude to his own explanation of what Rousseau should have thought, had
| |
| Rousseau been capable of right thinking and right living. Rousseau could infect
| |
| others, owing to the gift of a brilliant style, and therefore the vaccine
| |
| against potential contagion needed to be developed. But Rousseau could not
| |
| reason systematically and there was no cumulative body of thought, carefully
| |
| wrought, for which he stood, for he lacked the disposition and training, the
| |
| character or intellect, to achieve such a work, and therefore Rousseau need not
| |
| be studied.<span class="cite"></span> Rousseau reduced to the involuntary and
| |
| unconscious voice of certain progressive movements is precisely where the
| |
| Rousseau of the schools of education has since remained.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <ref><i>The American Journal of Education</i>, Vol. 5, 1858, pp. 459. The
| |
| introductory material (pp. 459-462) is unsigned and not distinguished in format
| |
| from the translation from Raumer on Rousseau, pp. 463-485. It is clearly not
| |
| from Raumer's much more extensive and accurate introductory material; see, Karl
| |
| von Raumer, <i>Geschichte der Pädagogik vom wiederaufblühen klassischer Studien
| |
| bis auf unsere Zeit</i> (5th ed., 3 vols., Gétersloh: Verlag von G. Bertelsmann,
| |
| 1879), vol. 2, pp. 153-180. Richard Emmons Thursfield, in his excellent study,
| |
| <i>Henry Barnard's American Journal of Education</i> (Baltimore: The Johns
| |
| Hopkins Press, 1945), p. 145, n. 22, attributes it to Barnard. The exposition in
| |
| these pages is extremely compressed and the tone is prophylactic, and there are
| |
| quite a number of inaccuracies; for instance, Rousseau lived at the Hermitage
| |
| "about ten years" and he composed the <i>Discourse on Inequality</i> while
| |
| visiting Geneva; in Venice he lived "a shamelessly vicious life" and Madame de
| |
| Warens found Rousseau employment as a tutor because she was "disgusted by his
| |
| unfaithfulness" to her, and so on. If these pages were by Barnard, an eyebrow
| |
| might be raised in doubt over his ability as an historian.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <ref><i>The American Journal of Education</i>, Vol. 5, 1858, pp. 485.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <p>During the
| |
| latter half of the nineteenth century, Rousseau's educational thought received
| |
| considerable attention. In 1858, Henry Barnard published a partial translation
| |
| of the chapter on Rousseau from Karl von Raumer's <i>Geschichte der
| |
| Pädagogik</i>. Barnard himself prefaced it with a brief survey of Rousseau's
| |
| life, as survey full of misinformation and very hostile in tone "With these
| |
| wretched early habits, which had strengthened his natural evil tendencies, ...
| |
| he entered upon the vagrant and unhappy series of wanderings and adventures
| |
| which might have been expected."<span class="cite"></span> Raumer, too, was no
| |
| enthusiastic Rousseauist. <i>Émile</i> was a problem for nineteenth-century
| |
| educators. One could not ignore it; but even more, one could not follow it.
| |
| Raumer closed his exposition of <i>Émile</i> with a caution that would apply,
| |
| not only to his, but also to most ensuing presentations. "The sketch which I
| |
| have given of <i>Émile</i> will be made clearer by regarding it as a book at
| |
| once instructive and corrupting.... Rousseau is corrupting, because he mingles
| |
| truth and falsehood, good and evil, in the most cunning manner; so that good and
| |
| bad are to be distinguished only by an exceedingly watchful and critical reader.
| |
| I close with repeating my wish, that the proceeding sketch, and the subjoined
| |
| remarks, may assist the reader in such a critical separation."<span
| |
| class="cite"></span> All the early treatments of Rousseau in the history of
| |
| educational thought propounded this caution, this attempt to separate the
| |
| apparent good from the putative bad, this urge to domesticate
| |
| <i>Émile</i>.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>Jean Jacques Rousseau, <i>Emile: or, Concerning Education</i> (Jules Steeg,
| |
| ed., Eleanor Worthington, trans., New York: D.C. Heath & Co., 1883), pp.
| |
| 6-7. The selections from <i>Émile</i> are presented under numerous subheadings,
| |
| which broke up Rousseau's unfolding of his principles as he followed them
| |
| through a process of hypothetical practice, and the moral theory on which his
| |
| educational views were based is greatly de-emphasized.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>See R.L. Archer, ed., <i>Rousseau on Education</i> (New York: Longmans,
| |
| Green & Co., 1912), and William Boyd, ed., <i>Emile for Today</i> (London:
| |
| William Heinemann, 1956; reprinted as William Boyd, trans. and ed., The <i>EMILE
| |
| of Jean Jacques Rousseau: Selections</i> (New York: Teachers College Press,
| |
| 1962). Both Archer's and Boyd's versions are a considerable improvement of
| |
| Steeg's. They nevertheless still accentuate particulars of practice over the
| |
| informing principles. There is a basic dilemma for anyone trying to abridge
| |
| Emile: to preserve Rousseau's discussion of his ideas while cutting the book
| |
| radically in length, one would need to turn it into an abstract set of
| |
| reflections leaving out almost all Rousseau's exemplifying strategies of working
| |
| with Emile. <i>Émile</i> may seem digressive, but it is a work from which it is
| |
| hard to drop anything without serious loss to the whole.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <p>
| |
| Translations of <i>Émile</i> for use by educators embodied this caution.
| |
| <i>Émile</i> in its entirety is a richly textured, carefully woven, profound and
| |
| pregnant work, one that when read with care raises numerous questions of great
| |
| significance and admitting of no easy answers. In 1883, Jules Steeg published a
| |
| French abridgment of the first three books of <i>Émile</i> by in Heath's
| |
| Pedagogical Library. It typifies a line of radical abridgments that gut
| |
| <i>Émile</i> and turn it into a mere illustration of a new, sounder view of
| |
| childhood and of a preliminary pedagogy founded on the recognition and study of
| |
| the child as child. "To unfold the powers of children in due proportion to the
| |
| age; not to transcend their ability; to arouse in them the sense of the observer
| |
| and of the pioneer; to make them discoverers rather than imitators; to teach
| |
| them accountability to themselves and not slavish dependence upon the words of
| |
| others; to address ourselves more to the will than to custom, to the reason
| |
| rather than to the memory; to substitute for verbal recitations lessons about
| |
| things; to lead to theory by way of art; to assign to physical movements and
| |
| exercises a prominent place, from the earliest hours of life up to perfect
| |
| maturity; such are the principles scattered broadcast in this book, and forming
| |
| a happy counterpoise to the oddities of which Rousseau was perhaps most
| |
| proud."<span class="cite"></span> The radical abridgments, not Steeg's alone,
| |
| but also Archer's and Boyd's, both still in print, do little but illustrate such
| |
| points.<span class="cite"></span> And although the points are important, they
| |
| are far from the sum of <i>Émile</i>.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>William H. Payne, trans., <i>Rousseau's EMILE or Treatise on Education</i>
| |
| (1892) (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1911). See p. xxxviii for the degree of
| |
| abridgment. Ellwood P. Cubberley, <i>Syllabus of Lectures on the History of
| |
| Education</i> (2nd ed., New York: The Macmillan Co., 1904), p. 230 called this
| |
| the standard translation, although he preferred Steeg's for teaching
| |
| purposes.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>For Harris, see Ibid, pp. vii-xvi, esp. p. xv. For Payne, p. xxxvii.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>Payne did not clearly mark in the text where he made omissions; these can
| |
| be traced fairly easily, however, by making a paragraph by paragraph comparison
| |
| with Bloom's text, op. cit., n. 1. Payne's first major omission comes on page 12
| |
| of his <i>Émile</i>, where ten paragraphs in which Rousseau explained the moral
| |
| psychology basic to his view that mothers, not nurses, should nurse their
| |
| children. On page 28, Payne left out several paragraphs concerning infant
| |
| language, including an important line that shows that Rousseau was in fact
| |
| thinking, very early in the educational process, about education for sound
| |
| social involvement "from these tears that we might think so little worthy of
| |
| attention is born man's first relation to all that surrounds him; here is formed
| |
| the first link in that long chain of which the social order is formed." (Bloom,
| |
| trans., <i>Émile</i>, op. cit., n. 1, p. 65. On page 33, Payne omitted a
| |
| paragraph in which <i>amour-propre</i> was first introduced, and what follows,
| |
| which begins "this principle once known...," is unintelligible since the
| |
| principle referred to is in the omitted paragraph. On page 46, nineteen
| |
| paragraphs were omitted in which Rousseau started to explain his conception of
| |
| happiness, one of the most important concepts in the work. On page 58, Payne
| |
| omitted another paragraph dealing with <i>amour-propre</i> and amour de soi. On
| |
| page 63, fourteen paragraphs were dropped in which Rousseau discussed the
| |
| formation of the passions and introduced Emile to the idea of property. On pages
| |
| 65-7, there are numerous omissions, together some fifteen paragraphs, all of
| |
| which greatly weakens Rousseau's discussion of moral education. The general
| |
| effect of the omissions in pages 46-67 were to strip from <i>Émile</i>
| |
| Rousseau's moral philosophy, to trivialize the principle of negative education
| |
| into a mere precept against prematurely stocking the child's mind with knowledge
| |
| that he could neither use nor comprehend. From Payne's Emile, one cannot reflect
| |
| on the relation of education to happiness or to virtue, and one cannot
| |
| understand what Rousseau had to say about the dangers of a corrupting education.
| |
| On page 88, two paragraphs were excised again dealing with the corruption of
| |
| character. There then follows a long stretch in which most of the omissions
| |
| compress examples relating to the development of Emile's intellectual
| |
| capacities. On page 150, the conclusion to the long example of the magician and
| |
| the duck was dropped, a typical omission—the excised reprimand of the tutor by
| |
| the magician was very important to Rousseau's development of his ideas about how
| |
| Emile should be prepared to enter the moral world and such omissions made it
| |
| easier to uphold the cliché the Rousseau was an anti-social individualist.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <blockquote>[Book Four was thoroughly gutted by Payne. Not only was the
| |
| "Profession of Faith" avoided in its entirety, so too was the build up to it,
| |
| and the dialogue and exposition following it, see pages 228-236. In addition,
| |
| the extended discussion of the boy's entry into the moral world through the
| |
| early part of the Book was severely compressed, with much very important
| |
| material left out. For instance, on page 196, close to six paragraphs dealing
| |
| with the relation of sexuality to <i>amour -propre</i> were dropped. On page
| |
| 210, eight paragraphs on moral education were cut, and on pages 204-5, 28
| |
| important paragraphs were compressed into three, including Rousseau's maxims
| |
| about pity. On page 211, an important paragraph was found unworthy of
| |
| inclusion—namely a discussion of the difficulty of developing a sound concept of
| |
| justice in civil society, a discussion that set the level of aspiration that
| |
| ought to be pursued in the second stage of education, that which comes on entry
| |
| into the moral world. Toward the end of the Book, pp. 237-240, Rousseau's
| |
| examination of how pedagogical authority, hitherto hidden as an apparent natural
| |
| authority, must now emerge as a moral authority, was highly compressed, and the
| |
| concluding discussion of moral choice in relation to a corrupting world of
| |
| society and taste is subjected to severe cuts. Of the material in Book V, that
| |
| dealing with Sophie's education is covered reasonably fully, but what then
| |
| follows on their courtship and the concomitant problems of ethical action was
| |
| almost entirely left out, and the translation ended with Emile about to set out
| |
| on his travels, thus leaving out the place of political thought in
| |
| education.</blockquote>
| |
|
| |
| <blockquote>[How such omissions can cause serious misinterpretation was
| |
| evident from William Torrey Harris's "Preface." There (p. xiii) Harris referred
| |
| to a passage (page 5-6 of Payne's text) in which there was a major omission
| |
| concerning what Rousseau thought real citizenship consisted in. As it stood in
| |
| Payne's text, the passage could be made to illustrate a putative failure in
| |
| Rousseau to recognize the human value of social institutions, a use to which
| |
| Harris eagerly put the passage. Had the translation been complete, Harris would
| |
| not have been able to so use the quotation without subjecting himself to
| |
| criticism for completely distorting Rousseau's meaning by taking his words out
| |
| of context. A translation such as Payne's greatly facilitated polemic against
| |
| Rousseau by his critics by conveniently dropping the context of many important
| |
| things.</blockquote>
| |
|
| |
| <p>1In 1892,
| |
| the International Education Series published a somewhat more ambitious
| |
| abridgment and translation by William H. Payne. It merits some attention for it
| |
| stood for two decades as the "standard" translation. Actually, it compressed
| |
| <i>Émile</i> by about one half.<span class="cite"></span> In his "Preface,"
| |
| William Torrey Harris was stringently hostile to Rousseau. After dwelling on the
| |
| fundamental errors in Rousseau's thought, he concluded that despite Rousseau,
| |
| <i>Émile</i> gave a "great positive impulse" to education by making educators
| |
| "recognize the sacredness of childhood," a contribution well brought out in the
| |
| translation. Payne, in his "Introduction," summed up one of the main values
| |
| that early historians of education saw in the whole field, not only in a
| |
| domesticated Rousseau, namely, that it could inspire teachers. "If read with
| |
| kindly feeling and without prejudice, it can not fail to inspire teachers with
| |
| the noblest ambition, and to quicken their methods with living power.... There
| |
| is no other book which I can so heartily commend to teachers as a perennial
| |
| source of inspiration and kindly aid."<span class="cite"></span> But only after
| |
| suitably sterilizing the text: Payne attained some of his abridgment by
| |
| compressing Rousseau's examples, leaving out here, there, and everywhere,
| |
| sentences and paragraphs, but the bulk of his abridgment came by certain
| |
| systematic omissions. Payne's first substantial excision dropped Rousseau's
| |
| first discussion of the moral psychology underlying the whole work, and Payne
| |
| kept it up, dropping or compressing into insignificance the major passages in
| |
| which Rousseau reflected on the relation of education to morality, civic virtue,
| |
| the corruption of character, and politics.<span class="cite"></span> Readers
| |
| could not plumb the depths of a Rousseau, so expurgated.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <p>1As the
| |
| early translations avoided the complexities of Émile, so, too, did the critical
| |
| studies. Until about 1900, studies of Rousseau's educational thought were very
| |
| thin. In addition to the translation of Raumer's exposition of Émile, Robert H.
| |
| Quick devoted a chapter to Rousseau in <i>his Essays on Educational
| |
| Reformers</i>, but the treatment was slight, a compressed exposition of
| |
| <i>Émile</i>, occasionally 26 supplemented with material from the <i>New
| |
| Heloise</i>.<span class="cite"></span> At the turn of the century, however,
| |
| interest in Rousseau's educational thought increased among English and American
| |
| scholars concerned with the newly emerging educational profession. In 1898, that
| |
| very curious character, Thomas Davidson, published an acerb study, <i>Rousseau
| |
| and Education according to Nature</i>, to which we will turn shortly.<span
| |
| class="cite"></span> A few years later, a translation of Gabriel Compayré's
| |
| exposition of <i>Émile</i> appeared as <i>Jean Jacques Rousseau and Education
| |
| from Nature</i>. Compayré's essay we can pass over in near silence. It
| |
| dependably remains in print, evidence not of its strengths, but testimony to the
| |
| over-all weakness of the educational literature on Rousseau. It was a shallow
| |
| exposition of a deep and difficult book, harmful only in that it created
| |
| illusions of facile comprehension, for if these seem to suffice, they will
| |
| discourage the drive to serious study of Rousseau's work.<span
| |
| class="cite"></span> The same comment applies to the discussions of Rousseau in
| |
| the growing number of textbooks available at the turn of the century.<span
| |
| class="cite"></span></p>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>Robert Herbert Quick, <i>Essays on Educational Reformers</i> (1868) (2nd
| |
| ed., New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1890, 1917), pp. 239-272. Quick, pp. 272-4,
| |
| in keeping with the prevailing opinion, was careful to warn that Rousseau was
| |
| confused about morality.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>Thomas Davidson, <i>Rousseau and Education According</i> to Nature ("The
| |
| Great Educators," New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1898, 1902).</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>Gabriel Compayré, <i>Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Education From Nature</i>
| |
| ("Pioneers in Education," R.P. Jago, trans., New York: Thomas Y. Crowell &
| |
| Co., 1907). Despite the similarity of titles chosen for their books by Davidson
| |
| and Compayré, the two works were almost diametrically opposed in underlying
| |
| conception; Davidson's was a sustained effort to show what was wrong with
| |
| Rousseau, Compayré's study was written "less to criticize Rousseau than to bring
| |
| to light the treasures of abiding truth which he has, as it were, buried in a
| |
| book described truly by him as 'the most useful and considerable' of his
| |
| writings." (p. 4).</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>The best of the text-books from this era, and the best of the text-book
| |
| discussions of Rousseau, was Paul Monroe, <i>A Text-Book in the History of
| |
| Education</i> (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1905, 1920), pp. 547-577. Monroe
| |
| recommended Payne's translation of Emile, and relied heavily on Morley and
| |
| Davidson, see, bibliography, p. 584. The gist of Monroe's presentation was that
| |
| Rousseau was none too consistent and that his doctrine of negative education
| |
| would harmfully weaken moral education, but that Rousseau was of great
| |
| importance because he made people attend to education as a process of
| |
| development, to the possibility of simplifying education, and to put a positive
| |
| valuation on the child.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>Davidson, <i>Rousseau and Education According to</i> Nature, op. cit., n.
| |
| 27, p. 73.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>Ibid., p. 3.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <p>1Davidson's
| |
| diatribe, in contrast, is fascinating for it represented in fullest form what
| |
| one might call the stiff-necked rejection of any worth in Rousseau. Davidson was
| |
| Morley, taken to an extreme and applied to the study of Rousseau's educational
| |
| thought. Both commentators shared a profound antipathy for Rousseau's character,
| |
| both insisting that it was fundamentally flawed, weak, and unstable. "His
| |
| character, with its obtrusive independence, due to absence of all acknowledgment
| |
| of moral ties, is spongy, unmanly, and repellent. We might pity him, if he did
| |
| not pity himself so much; but we can in no case admire or love him."<span
| |
| class="cite"></span> Both held Rousseau, in himself so weak, to be significant
| |
| only through historical accident. "If true human greatness consists in deep
| |
| insight, strong and well-distributed affection, and free, beneficent will,
| |
| Rousseau was not in any sense a great man. His insight, like his knowledge, was
| |
| limited and superficial; his affections were capricious and undisciplined; and
| |
| his will was ungenerous and selfish. His importance in literature and history is
| |
| due to the fact that he summed up in his character, expressed in his writings,
| |
| and exemplified in his experience, a group of tendencies and aspirations which
| |
| had for some time been half blindly stirring in the bosom of society, and which
| |
| in him attained to complete consciousness and manifestation for the first
| |
| time."<span class="cite"></span> Both saw his work as a dangerous infection that
| |
| needed counter-action.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>Ibid., pp. 119-120.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <p class="bq sl">It would hardly be possible to form a more pitiful conception
| |
| of human life and education than Rousseau's. There is not a moral or noble trait
| |
| in it. The truth is, Rousseau was so purely a creature of sense and
| |
| undisciplined impulse that he never, for one moment, rose to a consciousness of
| |
| any moral life at all. He could not, therefore, take delight in it. <i>Noblesse
| |
| oblige</i>, the ruling maxim of the unselfish, moral, and social man, was in him
| |
| replaced by the maxim of the selfish, undutiful churl and reprobate, <i>Bonheur
| |
| invite</i>. But, in spite of all this, nay, by reason of it, Rousseau and his
| |
| theories are most interesting and fruitful objects of study. In days when
| |
| uncontrolled individualism still has its advocates, it is well fully to realize
| |
| what it means. And this is what Rousseau has told us, in a siren song of
| |
| mock-prophetic unction, which readily captivates and lures to destruction vast
| |
| crowds of thoughtless sentimentalists. He has told us, further, in the same
| |
| tone, how children may be prepared for a life of individualism; and his
| |
| sense-drunk ravings, in denunciation of all moral discipline, have been, and
| |
| still are, received as divine oracles by millions of parents and teachers, who
| |
| have the training of children in their hands.... Rousseau's education according
| |
| to Nature, starting from an utterly calumnious notion of child-nature, and of
| |
| human nature in general, and ignoring all that is characteristic and noble in
| |
| both, proves to be an education for pure, reckless individualism, destructive of
| |
| all social institutions, and all true civilization.<span
| |
| class="cite"></span></p>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>For the first <i>Discours</i>, see Morley,, <i>Rousseau</i>, op. cit., n. ,
| |
| vol. 1, pp. 132-154. Morley, of course, was not enthusiastic about the piece,
| |
| but he did give a reasonably full exposition of it, and noting its obvious
| |
| faults, stressed certain positive things in it. Morley's discussion of <i>La
| |
| nouvelle</i> Heloise is in vol. 2, pp. 20-55. It is interesting that Morley
| |
| separated his discussion of this work from the chapters devoted to the <i>Social
| |
| Contract</i> and Emile, which are quite different in tone, even though the three
| |
| works were published within a year or so of each other, and work on them
| |
| overlapped. Between <i>La nouvelle Heloise</i> and the other two great works
| |
| Morley gave an account of the persecution Rousseau underwent in the years
| |
| following publication of Emile. In this section, Morley spoke highly of the
| |
| ''Lettre—Monseigneur de Beaumont" (pp. 83ff) and the <i>Letters from the
| |
| Mountain</i> (pp. 103ff): the former was "a masterpiece of dignity and
| |
| uprightness" and the latter "a long but extremely vigorous and adroit
| |
| rejoinder." We see Morley here taking considerable liberty with the chronology
| |
| of his subject, a liberty that made sense only rhetorically in setting
| |
| <i>Rousseau</i> up for a climatic critique of Rousseau's major work and the
| |
| denouement of Rousseau's decline into paranoia.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>See Morley, <i>Rousseau</i>, op. cit., n. , vol. 1, pp. 154-186, esp. pp.
| |
| 171-180. That Rousseau had explicitly created a thought experiment in the second
| |
| <i>Discourse</i>, could only have been overlooked intentionally by Morley, in
| |
| order to set up his strictures, pp. 171-2, against purported weaknesses in
| |
| Rousseau's method. Had Morley included what Rousseau said about the
| |
| <i>Discourse</i> being <i>hypothetical</i> history, Morley would have been
| |
| forced to discuss Rousseau's method far more carefully, and what followed, pp.
| |
| 172-180, would have been patently gratuitous.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <p>1Vaccines
| |
| are made of attenuated viruses, and that was the danger to sound scholarship in
| |
| the intent to vaccinate an audience against the danger of infection by a writer
| |
| such as Rousseau—it seemingly legitimates a commentator's willful attenuation of
| |
| a writer's thought. Both Morley and Davidson did this; neither, when it came to
| |
| explaining what Rousseau wrote, had any intent to do justice to it. Morley was
| |
| subtle about it. Addressing himself to the whole life and work of Rousseau, for
| |
| the sake of appearances, he could do justice to the less dangerous works. Thus
| |
| he was gentle with the <i>Discourse on the Arts and Sciences</i>, quite careful
| |
| with the <i>New Heloise</i>, which changes in taste had rendered thoroughly
| |
| innocuous, and respectful of Rousseau's "Letter to Christophe de Beaumont" and
| |
| the <i>Letters from the Mountain</i>.<span class="cite"></span> With works still
| |
| likely to exert an influence, however, Morley's method of exposition was very
| |
| different. With the <i>Discourse on the Origin of Inequality</i>, Morley simply
| |
| made no mention, in explaining what Rousseau had to say about the state of
| |
| nature, of Rousseau's careful caution not to take the hypothesis he was
| |
| constructing as having anything to do with factual history. Having mentioned
| |
| nothing about Rousseau's caution, Morley proceeded throughout his criticism of
| |
| that <i>Discourse</i> to pillory Rousseau's method for vices it had only in
| |
| Morley's tendentious exposition and to adduce historical and anthropological
| |
| findings to call into question an historical validity that Rousseau never
| |
| claimed for his construct of the state of nature.<span
| |
| class="cite"></span></p>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>Morley, <i>Rousseau</i>, vol. 2, pp. 119-154 for the first movement, pp.
| |
| 154-183 for the second, and pp. 183-196 for the third, and p. 183 for the
| |
| quotation.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <p>1Likewise,
| |
| the long chapter on the <i>Social Contract</i>, was a travesty of exposition.
| |
| The chapter comprised three movements, the first a general one about the place
| |
| of the <i>Social Contract</i> in political thought, suggesting diverse
| |
| weaknesses in Rousseau's work without engaging Rousseau's argument seriously. In
| |
| the second, Morley made his motions at dealing with the argument, presenting six
| |
| of Rousseau's main concerns, each time devoting a paragraph or two to bare
| |
| restatements of Rousseau's points and then launching into long critiques of
| |
| them. The third movement concluded the chapter with a presentation of Morley's
| |
| own, Burkean view of politics as the view that right thinking people would
| |
| prefer to Rousseau's. Nowhere in the chapter did Morley explain Rousseau's
| |
| purpose in the <i>Social Contract</i>, namely to find the conditions under which
| |
| social bonds can be legitimate, and in the concluding movement, in which Morley
| |
| proceeded to "confront Rousseau's ideas with some of the propositions belonging
| |
| to another method of approaching the philosophy of government, that have for
| |
| their keynote the conception of expediency or convenience, and are tested by
| |
| their conformity to the observed and recorded experience of mankind...," he
| |
| showed that he never had any intention of seriously entertaining the basic
| |
| question that had given rise to the <i>Social Contract</i>.<span
| |
| class="cite"></span></p>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>Davidson, <i>Rousseau and Education According to</i> Nature, op. cit., n. ,
| |
| p. 177.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>Ibid., p. 147. It is interesting that Davidson did not criticize Pestalozzi
| |
| for similar illogicality and immorality, even though Pestalozzi argued it much
| |
| more explicitly, contending that social mores and insensitive legislation were
| |
| the real cause of a great deal of infanticide; see Thomas Davidson, A <i>History
| |
| of Education</i> (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1900), pp. 229-232. Neither
| |
| Rousseau nor Pestalozzi were seeking to substitute mere social engineering for
| |
| ethical action; they simply sought to define human situations so that the
| |
| ethical grounds for action could be put to the right people in the right way.
| |
| They would both hold that in many situations, Davidson's type of moralizing,
| |
| while ethically valuable, was directed smugly by those favored by unjust,
| |
| destructive, immoral conditions against those who paid the price—physician, heal
| |
| thyself! For Pestalozzi's views on this, see his <i>Über Gesezgebung und
| |
| Kindermord</i> (1783) in <i>Sämtliche Werke</i> (Vol. 9, Berlin: Verlag von
| |
| Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1930, pp. 1-181.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <p>1Davidson
| |
| also, in dealing with <i>Émile</i>, refused to take seriously the central
| |
| problem the work addressed. Davidson was convinced that Rousseau's working
| |
| purpose in writing <i>Émile</i> was to justify his own character flaws and to
| |
| convert them into the operative goals of education. "We know . . . through his
| |
| <i>Confessions</i> and otherwise, that morality meant nothing to him but a
| |
| careful calculation of the possibilities of undisturbed sensual enjoyment. We
| |
| may fairly conclude, therefore, that the aim of Émile's education, thus far, has
| |
| been to prepare him, not for a life of earnest, determined moral struggle and
| |
| self-sacrifice, but for a life of quiet, cleanly, assured sensuous delight; not
| |
| for a life of active enterprise, but for a life of passive dalliance."<span
| |
| class="cite"></span> Since Davidson was writing a commentary on <i>Émile</i>,
| |
| step-by-step he followed the text more closely than did Morley in writing about
| |
| any of Rousseau's works. Nevertheless, each time Davidson came close to
| |
| Rousseau's basic interest in the way that human corruption develops through
| |
| mis-education, he recoiled in a refusal to examine the issue "As if any one
| |
| could be forced to do wrong against his will! This illogical and immoral
| |
| doctrine has made dangerous fanatics without number, and encouraged criminals to
| |
| hold society responsible for their crimes. It has, further, led to numerous
| |
| attempts to moralize men by merely altering their surroundings, when the true
| |
| method would have been to strengthen their wills through discipline, and to
| |
| teach them that life without virtue is worthless."<span
| |
| class="cite"></span></p>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>Davidson, <i>Rousseau and Education According to</i> Nature, op. cit., n. ,
| |
| p. 138.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>Ibid., p. 168.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <p>1Even if
| |
| Davidson were right in his sentiments, his eagerness to use Rousseau as a
| |
| straw-man in proclaiming them seriously weakened the book, at least insofar as
| |
| he intended the book to help people understand Rousseau's ideas. To write an
| |
| effective commentary on another's thought, one cannot hold so strongly to one's
| |
| own sentiments that one becomes incapable of seriously entertaining the other's
| |
| argument. Repeatedly, Davidson backed away and refused to treat Rousseau's
| |
| thought seriously. "It is hardly worth while to comment upon this crude,
| |
| sensuous, chemical psychology. To have been condemned to it was the penalty paid
| |
| by Rousseau for his superficial acquaintance with philosophy, and his contempt
| |
| for it."<span class="cite"></span> Alternatively, "It would be vain to waste
| |
| time on these crudities. They are not due to any accurate thinking, or to any
| |
| real, enlightened desire for the truth, but to an effort to justify a lazy,
| |
| intellectual habit, in behalf of a foregone scheme of sensuous, unsocial
| |
| life."<span class="cite"></span> Davidson's book was not a study of Rousseau; it
| |
| was simply a proclamation that Rousseau was not worth studying.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>Ibid., p. 91.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <p>1In sum, at
| |
| the beginning of twentieth century, the predominant view of Rousseau held that
| |
| he was morally weak, intellectually fatuous, accidentally significant. The most
| |
| substantial work on him for educators propounded prophylaxis. "As the virus of
| |
| Rousseau's social theories, of which his educational system confessedly forms a
| |
| part, has not yet ceased to poison the minds of men and women of the dalliant
| |
| order, it may be well to bring out here the nature of this virus, and to show
| |
| its pernicious effects in social life."<span class="cite"></span> Morley's
| |
| Rousseau, then the most substantial work in English dealing heavily with
| |
| Rousseau's political thought, was equally dedicated to prophylaxis. The
| |
| nineteenth-century heritage in English in all fields was one of deep distrust of
| |
| Rousseau.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>See Gustave Lanson, <i>Histoire de la Littérature</i> Française (New
| |
| edition edited by Paul Tuffrau, Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1951, esp. pp.
| |
| 773-803; Eugene Ritter, <i>La famille et la jeunesse de J.-J. Rousseau</i>
| |
| (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1896); Frederika Macdonald, <i>Jean Jacques
| |
| Rousseau: A New Criticism</i> (2 vols., London: Chapman and Hall, 1906). These
| |
| three authors were among the life members of the Société Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
| |
| which began publishing it <i>Annales</i> in 1905, annual volumes which included
| |
| substantial articles and sometimes whole books, as well as a great deal of
| |
| bibliographical material. Of course, the willingness to read Rousseau with care
| |
| in an attempt to come to terms with his thought did not take hold suddenly and
| |
| universally. Jules Lemaitre's <i>Jean-Jacques Rousseau</i> (Paris: Colman-Lévy,
| |
| 1907) was very much in the <i>ad hominem</i> tradition.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <p>1In the
| |
| years preceding the bicentennial of his birth, however, this situation began to
| |
| change. In general, scholars began to take Rousseau's thought more seriously. In
| |
| 1894, the distinguished literary historian, Gustave Lanson, published his
| |
| monumental <i>Historie de la Littérature Française</i>, and his treatment of
| |
| Rousseau was substantial, a powerful suggestion that his thought needed to be
| |
| taken seriously. In 1896, Eugene Ritter's work, <i>La famille et la jeunesse de
| |
| J.-J. Rousseau</i>, appeared, a work that reawakened the effort to study
| |
| Rousseau's life, not to pass judgment on it, but to understand it. Early in the
| |
| twentieth century, the Société Jean-Jacques Rousseau formed and its
| |
| <i>Annales</i> began functioning as an effective, international clearinghouse
| |
| for careful scholarship such as Ritter's book. In England, Frederika Macdonald
| |
| made a concerted, impassioned effort to rehabilitate Rousseau's reputation.<span
| |
| class="cite"></span> New translations of Rousseau began to appear, which were,
| |
| at least, improvements on what was available. Scholars published more
| |
| substantial, serious studies, and Rousseau began again to be a presence worthy
| |
| of constructive attention. </p>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>See William Boyd, <i>The Minor Educational Writings of Jean Jacques
| |
| Rousseau</i> (1910) (New York: Teachers College Press, 1962); Jean Jacques
| |
| Rousseau, <i>Émile</i> (Barbara Foxley, trans., 1911) (New York: E.P. Dutton
| |
| & Co., 1961); William Boyd, <i>The Educational Theory of Jean Jacques
| |
| Rousseau</i>, op. cit., n. 4; and R.L. Archer, ed., <i>Rousseau on
| |
| Education</i>, op. cit., n. 22.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <p>1To
| |
| understand how the present-day sharp disjunction in the quality of work on
| |
| Rousseau being done by political theorists and by educational theorists
| |
| developed, we need to examine how political thinkers and educational thinkers
| |
| tried to break out of the ad <i>hominem</i> tradition of Rousseau scholarship.
| |
| Let us look first at what happened in the history of educational thought. In
| |
| 1910, William Boyd published his translation of <i>The Minor Educational
| |
| Writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau</i>, the next year Barbara Foxley's full
| |
| translation of <i>Émile</i> appeared in Everyman's Library and William Boyd
| |
| published his extended study, <i>The Educational Theory of Jean Jacques
| |
| Rousseau</i>. One year later, R. L. Archer's translation, <i>Rousseau on
| |
| Education</i>, came out in the series edited by J. W. Adamson, "Educational
| |
| Classics."<span class="cite"></span> It was quite a flurry of activity. The
| |
| translations were a considerable improvement on Steeg and Payne. Foxley's effort
| |
| in particular made something approximating Rousseau's text available in English.
| |
| Yet to understand the character of this burst of interest in Rousseau's
| |
| educational thought, we need to turn first to Boyd's study to see how it related
| |
| to the intensely hostile heritage of commentary that preceded it.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>William Boyd, <i>The Educational Theory of Jean Jacques Rousseau</i>, op.
| |
| cit., n. 4, p. v.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <p>2In his
| |
| "Preface," Boyd took note of the <i>ad hominem</i> tradition and professed a
| |
| response to Rousseau that ran against the current tide: "my interpretation of
| |
| his view of life is based on a discriminating but firm faith in the essential
| |
| nobility of the man and in the greatness of his thought."<span
| |
| class="cite"></span> Boyd was no disciple, but equally he was no believer in the
| |
| prophylactic mission. He sought to deal seriously with Rousseau's thought, but
| |
| unfortunately, his book was not solid enough to found a tradition of Rousseau
| |
| scholarship among English and American educators. Rather than fashioning the
| |
| tools for a significant departure from the <i>ad hominem</i> tradition, Boyd
| |
| merely softened it, while leaving intact its central point that Rousseau was an
| |
| historical accident whose work did not really merit serious study for its
| |
| deepest meanings. The upshot: Boyd's work, as much as Davidson's, attenuated
| |
| Rousseau's thought.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>Sir Henry Maine, <i>Ancient Law</i>, p. 76, quoted in Boyd, op. cit, n. 4,
| |
| p. 349-350, n. 1.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <p>2Boyd never
| |
| really freed himself from the <i>ad hominem</i> tradition. In addition to the
| |
| stiff-necked strand of that tradition, the tone of which came in large part from
| |
| a Victorian capacity to be shocked at Rousseau's sexual confessions, both the
| |
| normal and not so normal, there was a more forbearant strand. Criticism of this
| |
| type did not heavily rebuke Rousseau's transgressions against the straight-laced
| |
| virtues; it simply noted Rousseau's weaknesses with a certain ennui, letting
| |
| them affect the substance, but not the tone, of interpretation. Thus, if the
| |
| stiff-necked' tradition was informed by animus, resulting in fear of the work,
| |
| the forbearant was characterized by condescension, resulting in surprise at the
| |
| work. This forbearant tradition was well voiced by Sir Henry Maine, when he
| |
| described Rousseau as "that remarkable man, who without learning, with few
| |
| virtues, and with no strength of character, has nevertheless stamped himself
| |
| ineffaceably on history by the force of a vivid imagination, and by the help of
| |
| a genuine and burning love for his fellow-men for which much will always have to
| |
| be forgiven him."<span class="cite"></span></p>
| |
|
| |
| <p>2Boyd's
| |
| study really belonged to the forbearant strand of the <i>ad hominem</i>
| |
| tradition. The opening two chapters, which deal with Rousseau's education
| |
| through his late twenties, provide the first clue. A cliché in this time
| |
| described Rousseau lightly as a genius and left it at that, never probing
| |
| seriously the formation of that genius under the unusual circumstances in which
| |
| Rousseau grew up. Forbearant <i>ad hominem</i> criticism began on the assumption
| |
| that Rousseau had little learning or character, and as a result passed over with
| |
| a condescending indifference Rousseau's formative period. This was precisely
| |
| what Boyd did; his opening chapters reflected a stifling lack of curiosity about
| |
| Rousseau in the making. To be sure, they covered the necessary minimum,
| |
| following selectively Rousseau's account in the <i>Confessions</i>,
| |
| supplementing it occasionally with further information and comment.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>Ibid., pp. 1-7. Compare to this the ability of Ritter, fifteen years
| |
| earlier, in <i>La famille et la jeunesse de J.-J. Rousseau,</i>, op. cit., n.
| |
| 41, to bring these familial influences much more fully to the surface. Michel
| |
| Launay's first chapter, "L'éducation politique d'un enfant du peuple: le fils de
| |
| l'horloger (1712-1728)," in his marvelous study, <i>Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
| |
| écrivain politique (1712-1762)</i>, (Grenoble: A.C.E.R., 1971), pp. 13-65, sets
| |
| a standard of careful elucidation of influences that shows how much will be lost
| |
| by lazy scholars who pass easily over Rousseau's first years.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>Ibid., p. 14.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>See Ibid., pp. 29-38. Compare these pages by Boyd with the much richer
| |
| examination of chapter by Pierre Maurice Masson, "L'autodidacte et son 'Magasin
| |
| d'idées'," in his <i>La Religion de J.J. Rousseau</i> (3 vols., Paris: Librairie
| |
| Hachette, 1916), vol. 1, pp. 83-129.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>J.W.v. Goethe, <i>Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship</i> (1795) (Thomas
| |
| Carlyle, trans., New York: Collier Books, 1962) p. 492.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <p>2We get a
| |
| flavor of the complacency suffusing Boyd's book from these early chapters. Boyd
| |
| lacked the drive to fathom the young Rousseau. Thus Boyd said some interesting
| |
| things about the relation between Rousseau and his father, but did not really
| |
| try to get inside the intellectual and political climate of the household, to
| |
| comprehend from the inside the circumstances of Rousseau's childhood.<span
| |
| class="cite"></span> Thus, too, Boyd was easily satisfied about the extent of
| |
| Rousseau's childhood intellectual acquirements: "except for the two years spent
| |
| with M. Lambercier—no very serious exception—Rousseau had no teaching of the
| |
| kind commonly given in schools and colleges. Most of what he learned was learned
| |
| in a quite casual way without any consciousness of effort."<span
| |
| class="cite"></span> What was it, though, that Rousseau learned? What sort of
| |
| intelligence developed in him? Boyd neither asked nor answered such questions.
| |
| Thus, finally, Boyd supplemented Rousseau's account of his studies at Chambéry
| |
| and Les Charmettes with observations drawn from one of Rousseau's poems from the
| |
| time, "Le Verger de Madame de Warens," but the account of Rousseau's
| |
| autodidactic efforts did not go beyond indicating, selectively and
| |
| superficially, a few potential influences on him.<span class="cite"></span>
| |
| Again Boyd was content to leave unexplored the question of whether Rousseau's
| |
| developing intellect showed itself in this process of formation to be of unusual
| |
| power, whether Goethe's great observation "he in whom there is much to be
| |
| developed will be later in acquiring true perceptions of himself and of the
| |
| world" -- applies properly to Rousseau.<span class="cite"></span></p>
| |
|
| |
| <p>2Like most
| |
| in the <i>ad hominem</i> tradition, Boyd's account of Rousseau's development up
| |
| to the time, at thirty-seven, when Rousseau wrote his <i>Discourse on the Arts
| |
| and Sciences</i>, was a mystification: Rousseau was a genius, presumably
| |
| therefore someone capable of doing uncommonly much with whatever came his way,
| |
| yet the study of his formative period was something that could be quickly sped
| |
| over, despite the postulate of his genius, with the confidence that he was doing
| |
| uncommonly little with whatever came his way. Such procedure reflected,
| |
| ultimately, a condescending attitude in the critic toward his subject. Evidence
| |
| was available for use in a real effort to probe Rousseau's development, but Boyd
| |
| did not exploit because he, like other critics, presumed such probing would
| |
| yield results not worth the effort. Further, condescension by the critic
| |
| towards his subject could lead, not only to lazy exploitation of the available
| |
| material, but also to interpretations of a person's work that fall far from
| |
| doing justice to it. Boyd, in condescending toward Rousseau, set himself up as
| |
| understanding Rousseau better than Rousseau understood himself, with the result
| |
| that in his interpretation, Boyd attenuated Rousseau's work as surely as did
| |
| Morley and Davidson in confecting theirs from animosity.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>William Boyd, <i>The Educational Theory of Jean Jacques Rousseau</i>, op.
| |
| cit., n. 4, p. 120.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <p>2As Boyd
| |
| saw it, Rousseau articulated in his work two fundamentally incompatible views of
| |
| man, politics, and education. "Speaking broadly, the difference between the
| |
| two..., both in temper and in principles, is the difference between Cynicism and
| |
| Stoicism."<span class="cite"></span> In part, the difference between the cynical
| |
| and stoical Rousseau was one between the earlier and later Rousseau, between the
| |
| two <i>Discourses</i> and <i>Émile</i> and the <i>Social Contract</i>. Yet, the
| |
| cynical Rousseau, although less prominent in the later works, never completely
| |
| disappeared, and to extract the value in Rousseau's work, one needed
| |
| continuously to be aware that at any point cynicism could intrude into it. Like
| |
| Raumer half a century earlier, Boyd still sought to help readers learn to
| |
| separate the good and bad, the true and false, that Rousseau so artfully mixed
| |
| together in his works so to seduce the unwitting into error.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>Ibid., p. 66.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <p>2In Boyd's
| |
| judgment, the cynical Rousseau was profoundly destructive: "...the fundamental
| |
| motive of his thought in the discussion of culture and civilization in the
| |
| <i>Discourse</i> was a mere negation. He writes out of a deep sense of
| |
| dissatisfaction with all the institutional products of the human spirit, and the
| |
| result is criticism and condemnation unrelieved by any touch of idealism from
| |
| faith in a possible better."<span class="cite"></span> Fortunately, Boyd
| |
| suggested, Rousseau developed a more stoical alternative to this destructive
| |
| position, which began faintly to appear with the <i>Discourse on the Origin of
| |
| Inequality</i>, and emerged more fully with the nearly simultaneous article on
| |
| "Political Economy."</p>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>Ibid., p 69.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <p>2It is one
| |
| thing for a critic to show a writer in the process of rethinking a position and
| |
| articulating a new one; it is quite another for the critic to suggest that such
| |
| changes took place in a thinker who was quite oblivious to them and unaware that
| |
| an alternative view of things had developed in him. Yet that is what Boyd
| |
| claimed, a claim possible only if a thorough condescension suffuses the critic.
| |
| "It is obvious that with a mind like [Rousseau 's], which felt its way to the
| |
| truth rather than forced experience to yield up its meaning to the demands of
| |
| thought, the co-existence of two irreconcilable views of life was possible
| |
| without causing any serious inconvenience."<span class="cite"></span> Thus, the
| |
| condescending critic arrived at the conviction that he could speak more truly
| |
| for the good in Rousseau than Rousseau himself could, that Boyd was the
| |
| scholarly therapist appointed to redeem Rousseau from philosophic
| |
| schizophrenia.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>Ibid., p. 122.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>See Ibid., pp. 126, 129, 136, 144-6, 149-150, 154, 156, and so on.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>Ibid., p. 189.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <p>2Since
| |
| Rousseau could think for himself only imperfectly, Boyd has to do it for him,
| |
| carefully unraveling the sound from the unsound. "The fact is that he himself
| |
| never realized the fundamental change that had taken place in his thought, and
| |
| his approach to the constructive application of his modified views was hampered
| |
| by the extremeness of the opposition between the natural and the social which he
| |
| still formally maintained."<span class="cite"></span> Repeatedly, shielded by
| |
| his condescension towards Rousseau, Boyd dealt with aspects of Rousseau's mature
| |
| work inconsistent with his construction of the good Rousseau, by insisting that
| |
| Rousseau did not understand himself, never by questioning whether Boyd
| |
| understood Rousseau.<span class="cite"></span> Before long, Boyd had worked out
| |
| the rationale for his speaking authoritatively for whatever truth there was in
| |
| Rousseau. "In the illuminating phrase of Heel's, ...social contrivances are
| |
| 'mind objective', mind taking external form in institutions. By approaching
| |
| society too exclusively from the individual or psychological point of view,
| |
| Rousseau appreciates this very inadequately when he appreciates it at all. The
| |
| consequence is apparent in his condemnation of all but the simplest phases of
| |
| social life as artifices alien to the fundamental nature of man, and in the
| |
| failure to see that social man even at the worst is not less but more natural
| |
| than his animal and his savage progenitors. The truth indeed is in him—witness
| |
| the Fourth and Fifth Books of the <i>Émile</i class="par1 sl">—but it never gets
| |
| out into perfectly clear consciousness because of the subjective pre-occupation
| |
| that 'siklied o'er' his thought about man to the end of his life, and made him
| |
| suspicious of society in practice even after he had accepted it in theory."<span
| |
| class="cite"></span></p>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>Ibid., p. vii. On pp. 300-301, Boyd quoted Caird on the importance of
| |
| Rousseau in setting off the democratic movement in Europe, Rousseau's principal
| |
| positive contribution in the view of both, and on p. 335, Boyd quoted Caird to
| |
| support his basic criticism of Rousseau, that he did not adequately recognize
| |
| that spirit is distinctively human and because of it human life can not be
| |
| treated solely naturally. "Man belongs to the natural world.... But even then
| |
| [in childhood] he is more that natural. He is spiritual, and therefore not a
| |
| simple product of growth but the outcome of a free activity which curbs and
| |
| checks the natural impulses in the interests of a higher life." (p. 335) What is
| |
| Book Four of Emile all about if not the process by which, through free activity,
| |
| one enters the moral realm? In referring to Caird, Boyd was citing the essay
| |
| "Rousseau" in Caird's <i>Essays on Literature</i> (1892) (Port Washington, NY:
| |
| Kennikat Press, 1968), pp. 103-136, hardly the foundation of Caird's
| |
| reputation.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>Stanley E. Ballinger, "The Natural Man: Rousseau," in Paul Nash, Andreas M.
| |
| Kazamias, and Henry J. Perkinson, eds., <i>The Educated Man: Studies in the
| |
| History of Educational Thought</i> (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1965), p.
| |
| 234.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>So far as I have been able to trace, Boyd's book <i>keep working on
| |
| this</i> was not widely reviewed. There was a perfunctory notice of it in
| |
| <i>Annales</i>, 8(1912), p. 326. Lewis Flint Anderson gave it a positive review
| |
| in The <i>Journal of Educational Psychology</i>, Vol. 111, No. 9, November 1912,
| |
| pp. 531-3.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <p>2In his
| |
| "Preface," Boyd confessed his philosophic indebtedness to Edward Caird, and at
| |
| two important places in the text, in stating his basic appreciation of Rousseau
| |
| and his essential criticism, Boyd appealed to Caird's authority.<span
| |
| class="cite"></span> Thus, he defined himself as a progressive neo-Hegelian and
| |
| in such a context, there is a certain justification for attempting to separate
| |
| out in the work of a mere man what belongs to the objective process by which the
| |
| real and rational unfolds itself in history. Nevertheless, such an effort is
| |
| itself always the work of mere men, and the mere man Boyd asked too little of
| |
| Rousseau and too little of himself. With continuing consequences: a recent work
| |
| on educational history, in one of the better texts at that, still refers to Boyd
| |
| as "the noted Rousseau scholar."<span class="cite"></span> Boyd's study and
| |
| translations are still in print, yet it is hard to understand how his work ever
| |
| earned its repute among students of the history of educational thought.<span
| |
| class="cite"></span> </p>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>Macdonald extensively reviews the development of critical opinion on
| |
| Rousseau's character in the first two parts of her study, <i>Jean Jacques
| |
| Rousseau: A New Criticism</i>, op. cit., n. 41, Vol. 1, pp. 1-119. Georges Roth,
| |
| in his introduction to <i>Histoire de Madame de Montbrillant: Les
| |
| pseudo-Mémoires de Madame D'Epinay</i>, op. cit., n. 8, Vol. 1, pp. xxxiv-1,
| |
| gives a somewhat more dispassionate, but telling, review of the matter. In an
| |
| appendix to <i>The Political Writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau</i> (1915) (2
| |
| vols., New York: Burt Franklin, 1971), Vol. 2, pp. 537-559, gives a very good
| |
| summary of Macdonald's argument, calling attention to the significance of it for
| |
| interpretations of Rousseau. Gaspard Vallette, one of the leading figures in the
| |
| Société Jean-Jacques Rousseau, wrote an extensive review of Macdonald's work in
| |
| <i>Annales</i>, III (1907), pp. 256-267. The issue, at bottom, concerned
| |
| Rousseau's break with the Diderot-Grimm-d'Epinay circle in 1757 and Rousseau's
| |
| persecution complex that ever-after plagued him. It is an. extremely tangled
| |
| matter with respect to which the basic choice is to hold that Rousseau was an
| |
| impossible character to maintain personal relations with, a very unstable
| |
| ingratiate who took to accusing others of bad faith and the intent to defame in
| |
| order to maintain the appearance of his own probity, at least to himself, or
| |
| that, at a minimum, Frédéric-Melchoir Grimm, manipulated others, especially
| |
| d'Epinay and Diderot, into perceiving Rousseau as something of a malevolent
| |
| genius whose influence should be impeded and whose tranquility deserved to be
| |
| upset. Immediate posterity seemed to hold for Rousseau; his Confessions were
| |
| much more moving that Diderot's shrill accusations published soon after
| |
| Rousseau's death. Grimm's collected <i>Correspondance littéraire</i>, published
| |
| in 1812, and then six years later, the forged <i>Memoires</i> of Madame
| |
| d'Epinay, tipped the scales, however, and opinion began to swing toward favoring
| |
| the hypothesis that Rousseau was indeed fully at fault. Scrutiny of the
| |
| manuscript of the <i>Memoires</i> was successfully avoided by their publishers,
| |
| and by mid-century, Sainte-Beuve came out fully on the side of Grimm and
| |
| d'Epinay: "when we read Mme. d'Epinay's <i>Memoires</i> on the one hand, and the
| |
| <i>Confessions</i> on the other, it is clear that the letters quoted in these
| |
| works, which might help clarify the question, are differently reproduced in the
| |
| two books; they were altered by one of the parties: someone lied. I do not think
| |
| that it was Mme. d'Epinay. As for Grimm, his character emerges in a favorable
| |
| light because of his very indifference" (Sainte-Beuve, "Grimm," as translated by
| |
| Francis Steegmuller and Norbert Gutterman in <i>Sainte-Beuve: Selected
| |
| Essays</i>, op. cit., n. 7, p. 174). Once the critical assumption became
| |
| established that Rousseau's <i>Confessions</i> not only sometimes erred on
| |
| matters of recollected fact, inevitable under the circumstances of composition,
| |
| but were basically untrustworthy, having been composed subtly to alter the
| |
| historical record and that d'Epinay's <i>Memoires</i> were trustworthy, it
| |
| seemed to follow then that Grimm's accusations, and Diderot's accusations, and
| |
| the accusations by many others, were also trustworthy. In such a situation, the
| |
| <i>Confessions</i>, themselves, became very damaging to Rousseau, for they
| |
| added, through revelations such as the deposit of his infants in a foundling
| |
| home, to the evidence against Rousseau without contributing to a comprehension
| |
| of him on the part of critics who were entirely convinced that comprehending him
| |
| was impossible. See Arthur M. Wilson's excellent work <i>Diderot</i> (New York:
| |
| Oxford University Press, 1972), esp. pp. 254-9, 291-306, 608-11, and 691-2, for
| |
| a careful presentation of the problem from Diderot's point of view, taking full
| |
| account of presently available evidence.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>For such assessments see the work of Roth, Vaughan, and Vallette cited in
| |
| the previous note.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <p>3Before
| |
| leaving Boyd's example, let us look at one final problem in his work, a problem
| |
| that also stemmed most probably form his condescension toward his subject, and
| |
| perhaps toward his audience as well. This is the problem of Boyd's scholarly
| |
| standards. <i>The Educational Thought of Jean Jacques Rousseau</i> never was up
| |
| to date relative to the scholarship of its time, relative even to the
| |
| scholarship Boyd cited in his bibliography. Let us attend here to a peculiarity
| |
| in his use of an important work that he did cite, namely Frederika Macdonald's
| |
| <i>Jean Jacques Rousseau, A New Criticism</i>, published in two volumes in 1906.
| |
| Macdonald had taken on the <i>ad hominem</i> tradition head on. She struck at it
| |
| in the most fundamental way, by seeking to discredit the evidence on which it
| |
| rested. The <i>ad hominem</i> critics repetitively relied on two bodies of
| |
| damaging evidence, one stemming from Madame d'Epinay's <i>Mémoires</i>, Grimm's
| |
| <i>Correspondence litéraire</i>, and various allegations by Diderot, and a
| |
| second stemming from Rousseau's <i>Confessions</i>. The first body of evidence
| |
| had seemed to prove that Rousseau was an imbalanced ingratiate, suffering from
| |
| delusions of persecution; the second concerned Rousseau's children and their
| |
| notorious deposition at birth in a Parisian foundling hospital.<span
| |
| class="cite"></span> Macdonald sought to discredit both bodies of evidence. In a
| |
| chapter relative to the second, she maintained the proposition that Rousseau had
| |
| never in fact had any children. However, she devoted the bulk of her two
| |
| volumes to the first proposition, showing that d'Epinay's <i>Mémoires</i> had
| |
| been drafted as a novel and had been revised in the 1760's, and then again
| |
| shortly before their publication in 1818, to support the otherwise dubious
| |
| allegations of Grimm and Diderot. Rousseau scholars held that her case that
| |
| Rousseau died childless was not compelling, but that her demonstration that
| |
| d'Epinay's <i>Mémoires</i> are worthless as a historical source on Rousseau and
| |
| that d'Epinay and Grimm, and most probably Diderot, conspired to defame Rousseau
| |
| while he lived and after he died, is sound.<span class="cite"></span></p>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>Boyd, <i>The Educational Thought of Jean Jacques Rousseau</i>., op. cit.,
| |
| n. , pp. 52-3, and n. 1, p. 53 for the citation of Macdonald.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>Ibid., pp. 69-70, 108-117, 191 n. 1. In addition, Boyd, p. 68, n. 2, drew
| |
| on Grimm's <i>Correspondance littéraire</i> for testimony concerning Rousseau's
| |
| character with no hint that there may have been a strong bias to this
| |
| testimony.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>See William Boyd, <i>The Minor Educational Writings of Jean Jacques
| |
| Rousseau</i>, op. cit., n. 42, pp. 102-4.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <p>3What did
| |
| Boyd do with Macdonald's work? He cited her argument with respect to Rousseau's
| |
| children, declared against it, and remained silent with respect to all the rest
| |
| of the work.<span class="cite"></span> This procedure would be fine, if Boyd did
| |
| not make use of d'Epinay's <i>Mémoires</i>, but these were an important source
| |
| for his over-all treatment of Rousseau's educational thought, coloring his
| |
| estimate of Rousseau's stature and entering substantively into his
| |
| interpretation of Rousseau's educational ideas.<span class="cite"></span> In
| |
| <i>The Minor Educational Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau</i>, Boyd even
| |
| appended a translated excerpt from the <i>Mémoires</i>.<span
| |
| class="cite"></span> In none of his references to d'Epinay's <i>Mémoires</i> did
| |
| Boyd so much as hint that they had been exposed as a forgery. Either Boyd was
| |
| extremely casual in his reading of Macdonald-it is difficult to deal with her
| |
| forty pages on Rousseau's children without catching on to the gist of the other
| |
| 780 pages in the workéor Boyd knew the case against d'Epinay, confident that
| |
| neither his audience would pick him up on it nor that critical care really
| |
| mattered with a writer like Rousseau, a good part of whose thought had to be
| |
| jettisoned for the sake of world-historical truth in any case. Boyd's
| |
| performance here, whether it was a performance of sloppy scholarship or willful
| |
| evasion of complexity, belied a basic condescension toward subject and audience:
| |
| neither merited a painstaking work.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>Peter Gay, "Reading about Rousseau," <i>The Party of Humanity: Essays in
| |
| the French Enlightenment</i> (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964), pp. 211-238,
| |
| esp. pp. 222-223.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>See V.D. Musset-Pathay, <i>Histoire de la Vie et des Ouvrages de J.-J.
| |
| Rousseau</i>, op cit., n. 5; Gustave Lanson, <i>Histoire de la Littérature
| |
| Française</i>, op. cit., n. 41; Ernst Cassirer, <i>The Question of Jean Jacques
| |
| Rousseau</i> (Peter Gay, trans., Bloomington: Midland Books, 1954, 1963); C.E.
| |
| Vaughan, <i>The Political Writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau</i>, op. cit., n.
| |
| 58; Pierre Maurice Masson, <i>La Religion de J.J. Rousseau</i>, op. cit., n. 47;
| |
| Albert Schinz, <i>La Pensée de Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Essai d'interprétation
| |
| nouvelle</i> (2 vols., Northampton: Smith College, 1929); Robert Derathé,
| |
| <i>Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la science politique de son temps</i> (Paris:
| |
| Presses Universitaires de France, 1950); Martin Rang, <i>Rousseaus Lehre vom
| |
| Menschen</i> (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1959; Victor Goldschmidt,
| |
| <i>Anthropologie et Politique: Les Principes du Système de Rousseau</i> (Paris:
| |
| Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1974); and Michel Launay, <i>Jean-Jacques
| |
| Rousseau, écrivain politique (1712-1762)</i>, op. cit., n. 46.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>William Boyd, trans. and ed., <i>The EMILE of Jean Jacques Rousseau:
| |
| Selections</i>, op. cit., n. 22, p. 197.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <p>3Peter Gay
| |
| has rightly suggested that the breakthrough to effective scholarship on Rousseau
| |
| in the twentieth century has come through a willingness to consider potential
| |
| unity in Rousseau's thought, taking his corpus in its entirety.<span
| |
| class="cite"></span> Such consideration was precisely that which Rousseau
| |
| himself requested of his posterity. Such consideration was basic in the
| |
| sensitive, compassionate work of V. D. Musset-Pathay early in the nineteenth
| |
| century. Such consideration was renewed by Gustave Lanson at the turn of the
| |
| twentieth. Such consideration was defined clearly by Ernst Cassirer in <i>Das
| |
| Problem J.-J. Rousseau</i> (1932). Such consideration informs the major
| |
| interpretations of Rousseau's thought, those of C. E. Vaughan, Pierre Masson,
| |
| Albert Schinz, Robert Derathé, Martin Rang, and many others up to Victor
| |
| Goldschmidt and Michel Launay.<span class="cite"></span> By this criterion of
| |
| being willing to entertain the potential unity of Rousseau's thought, Boyd
| |
| remained pre-twentieth century throughout all his treatments of Rousseau. As
| |
| late as 1956 in his "Editor's Epilogue" to his version of <i>Émile</i>, Boyd
| |
| showed no inkling of a half-century of scholarship that had completely
| |
| transformed the interpretation of Rousseau. "There is truth in both [of
| |
| Rousseau's] points of view. Education must make good men: education must make
| |
| good citizens. Rousseau's mistake was to stop at <i>either-or:</i> either
| |
| education for individuality, or education for community."<span
| |
| class="cite"></span></p>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>To my mind, the best discussion of Rousseau in the general texts is that in
| |
| <i>Doctrines of the Great Educators</i> by Robert R. Rusk (now as revised for
| |
| the 5th edition by James Scotland, New York: St. Martin's Press, 19799, pp.
| |
| 100-135. It does not rely heavily on Boyd and draws from a wide range of
| |
| sources, although those sources do not indicate any systematic command of the
| |
| scholarship on Rousseau. Also see Robert Ulich's <i>History of Educational
| |
| Thought</i> (Revised edition, New York: American Book Company, 1968), pp.
| |
| 211-224. Good, but docile to Boyd's influence is Stanley E. Ballinger's "The
| |
| Natural Man: Rousseau," in Nash, Kazamias, and Perkinson, eds., <i>The Educated
| |
| Man: Studies in the History of Educational Thought</i>, op. cit., n. 56, pp.
| |
| 224-246.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>There are five studies from France and Germany that are important works on
| |
| Rousseau's educational thought that are almost never cited by American and
| |
| English writers on the subject: as a background work, Georges Snyders, <i>La
| |
| Pédagogie en France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles</i> (Paris: Presses
| |
| Universitaires de France, 1965); two French works on Rousseau's educational
| |
| theory—André Ravier, <i>L'éducation de l'homme nouveau</i> (2 vols., Lyon: Boasc
| |
| Frères M. & L. Riou, 1941) and Jean Chateau, <i>Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Sa
| |
| Philosophie de l'éducation</i> (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1962);
| |
| and two substantial studies of Rousseau by German educational historians—Hermann
| |
| Röhrs, <i>Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Vision und Wirklichkeit</i> (1956) (2nd ed.,
| |
| Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer, 1966) and Martin Rang, <i>Rousseaus Lehre vom
| |
| Menschen</i>, op. cit., n. 64. Ulich listed Chateau's work in his bibliography
| |
| in <i>History of Educational Thought</i>, op. cit., n. 66, p. 426, but outside
| |
| of that none of these appear anywhere that I have been able to locate.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>See the works cited in n. 2, above, especially those by Masters, Shklar,
| |
| Perkins, Ellenburg, and Ellis, as well as Cook's dissertation cited in n. 4.
| |
| Most of these, of course, are too recent to appear anywhere but in the new
| |
| edition of <i>Doctrines of the Great Educators</i>, op. cit., n. 66.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <p>3Boyd never
| |
| entered the realm of twentieth-century scholarship on Rousseau, and with Boyd,
| |
| the history of educational thought in English relative to Rousseau has remained
| |
| hopelessly dated. The field has stayed with Boyd. In close to seventy years
| |
| since Boyd's study, the field has generated no other sustained work on
| |
| Rousseau's educational thought, excepting the Shahikian's travesty. Basically,
| |
| most of the numerous chapters in the numerous texts follow Boyd, and where they
| |
| depart, they do so in <i>idiosyncratic ways that have little to do with the</i>
| |
| main developments in scholarship on Rousseau.<span class="cite"></span> None of
| |
| the ensuing summary treatments of Rousseau in texts indicates in any way that a
| |
| number of distinguished studies of Rousseau's educational thought in French and
| |
| German have supplanted Boyd's study.<span class="cite"></span> None indicates
| |
| that historians of political theory writing in English have conducted thorough
| |
| and profound examinations of Rousseau's educational ideas.<span
| |
| class="cite"></span> Boyd never freed himself from the <i>ad hominem</i>
| |
| tradition and dependent on Boyd, the field has remained bedeviled by that
| |
| incubus: Rousseau is dangerous, yet useful, and interpreters must tame and put
| |
| him to work by sundering what is safe from the corrupting corpus by tactics of
| |
| triage. Hence, educational scholarship makes less, not of Rousseau, but of
| |
| ourselves.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>See, C. E. Vaughan, <i>The Political Writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau</i>,
| |
| op. cit., n. 58.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <p>3Boyd
| |
| perpetuated the <i>ad hominem</i> critique, while muting its acrimonious tone.
| |
| Such was not the only way to shed the heritage of hostility toward Rousseau's
| |
| thought. At the same time that William Boyd was busy with Rousseau's educational
| |
| thought, another British scholar, C. E. Vaughan was preoccupied with Rousseau's
| |
| political thought. Vaughan's accomplishment stands out as an accomplishment of
| |
| an entirely different order in comparison to that of Boyd. In no small part has
| |
| the excellence of the work done on Rousseau's political thought throughout the
| |
| twentieth century derived from the excellence of Vaughan's major work, <i>The
| |
| Political Writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau</i>, published in 1915. Whereas Boyd
| |
| chose to write an interpretative study and to present certain writings of
| |
| Rousseau important to his interpretation in translation, Vaughan chose a very
| |
| different course, one in which he eschewed immediate effect for long-lasting
| |
| influence. Vaughan chose to present Rousseau in a way that forced those who were
| |
| going to comment on Rousseau's political thought to deal with it, carefully,
| |
| substantively, fully. The <i>Political Writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau</i>
| |
| were precisely that, a critical edition in Rousseau's French of most everything
| |
| that Rousseau wrote on politics, with thorough introductions to each piece, as
| |
| well as a long, general introduction sting out with care the problems of
| |
| interpretation.<span class="cite"></span> Vaughan did not speak for Rousseau
| |
| within a field; he simply ensured that Rousseau would have the opportunity to
| |
| speak for himself to a field; and since Vaughan's work, Rousseau has continued
| |
| to speak provocatively to political thinkers, however mush they may argue over
| |
| what it is he says.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>See Volume III of the Pléiade edition of Rousseau's <i>Oeuvres
| |
| complètes</i>, <i>Du contrat social -- écrits politiques</i> (Paris: Editions
| |
| Gallimard, 1964). This edition is the standard scholarly edition, and its notes
| |
| of immense use. One should also be aware, however, of Rousseau's <i>Oeuvres
| |
| complètes</i> published in the Collection l'Intégrale (3 vols., Paris: Editions
| |
| du Seuil, 1967, 1971). This edition usefully complements the Pléiade; it does
| |
| not have extensive critical and interpretative notes to the texts, but it does
| |
| present numerous texts and excerpts to which Rousseau was often responding, for
| |
| instance, many of the polemics against the first <i>Discourse</i> and the text
| |
| of Monseigneur de Beaumont's condemnation of Emile.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>Jean-Jacques Rousseau, <i>Oeuvres completes</i> (4 vols., Paris: Editions
| |
| Gallimard, 1959, 1964, 1964, and 196 ).</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <p>3We need
| |
| not here work our way through the substance of Vaughan's work; it is a living
| |
| work that anyone bent on coming to terms with Rousseau will own and use as the
| |
| occasion merits even though the editions of Rousseau's writings in have finally
| |
| been superseded by yet better ones.<span class="cite"></span> Yet we do need to
| |
| note how Vaughan's work brings us to the real question for understanding the
| |
| development of the history of educational thought, for seeing clearly what needs
| |
| to be done if something is ever to come of the field. This question is simply,
| |
| why was there no similar effort by educational historians? Why did no one put
| |
| out with care and thorough dedication a standard edition, well introduced, of
| |
| <i>The Educational Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau</i>? One can well imagine
| |
| such a work. It might open with the parts of the <i>Confessions</i> and
| |
| <i>Reveries</i> covering Rousseau's development, the two versions of his "Plan
| |
| for the Education of M. de Sainte-Marie," the <i>Discourse on the Arts and
| |
| Sciences</i> and some of Rousseau's rejoinders to criticism of it, excerpts from
| |
| The <i>Discourse on Inequality</i> and the article on "Political Economy," the
| |
| draft essay "On the Origin of Language," the <i>Letter to d'Alembert on the
| |
| Theater</i>. The centerpiece of it, of course, would be excerpts from <i>La
| |
| nouvelle Heloise</i>, the "manuscrit Favre" of Émile and <i>Émile</i> itself,
| |
| the "Lettre—Monseigneur de Beaumont." It would then conclude with excerpts from
| |
| Rousseau's reflections on the constitutions of Corsica and Poland, parts of
| |
| <i>Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques</i>, various letters bearing on education.
| |
| Throughout it all, a careful commentary would introduce each inclusion and
| |
| elucidate the problems of interpreting it reflectively in the context the whole.
| |
| Now, of course, we no longer need such a work, for it is there in the Pléiade
| |
| edition of Rousseau's <i>Oeuvres complètes</i>.<span class="cite"></span> All
| |
| the same, in Boyd's time, scholars did need it, and we should therefore ask why
| |
| some educational scholar did not then perform such a labor when the cognate
| |
| field of political thought so clearly demonstrated the possibility and value of
| |
| it.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>The first real effort along this line was James L. Axtell, ed., <i>The
| |
| Educational Writings of John Locke: A Critical Edition</i> (Cambridge: Cambridge
| |
| University Press, 1968).</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <p>3In a
| |
| trivial sense, the answer to this question is obvious—the labor was not
| |
| performed because no one stepped forward to perform it. Yet there is a deeper
| |
| sense to the question, for anyone at all acquainted with the history of the
| |
| history of educational thought in English will realize that it simply would not
| |
| have occurred to a scholar in the field that such a labor could be of value.
| |
| English and American historians of educational thought did not do this kind of
| |
| work; they produced no full and careful edition of the pedagogical corpus of any
| |
| major figure.<span class="cite"></span> To ask why the work was not done on
| |
| Rousseau is to ask why it was not done on any thinker, to ask why loose, partial
| |
| translations were the norm, why no educational thinker was dealt with in depth,
| |
| no holds barred. To begin answering this question, we need to look more
| |
| carefully at how the field developed in English from the mid nineteenth century
| |
| up approximately to the start of World War I, to see what its controlling aims
| |
| and standards were as these took shape, in order to understand how these have
| |
| continued ever since to cripple the field and to saddle it with stifling,
| |
| inadequate aspirations.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <h3 id="s2" class="sl">II—Beyond Bailyn, or the Task at Hand</h3>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>That historians continually rewrite history is part of the lore of
| |
| historiography. That the practice results from sound reasons is best explained
| |
| by the great historicist historiographers. See especially R. G. Collingwood,
| |
| <i>The Idea of History</i> (1946) (New York: Galaxy Books, 1956) and Wilhelm
| |
| Dilthey, <i>Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften: Versuch einer Grundlegung
| |
| für das Studium der Gesselschaft and der Geschichte</i> (1883) <i>(Gesammelte
| |
| Schriften</i>, Vol. 1, Stuttgart: B. G. Teubner, 1962).</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <p>3Historians
| |
| interpret the past and in doing that they become part of the account they give.
| |
| Since the concerns of living historians continually change, they continually
| |
| rewrite history and thus disclose new aspects of past experience, cumulatively
| |
| probing in essays at comprehension and evaluation. Thus, each generation of
| |
| historians rewrites history.<span class="cite"></span> One can observe this
| |
| process in most areas of historical interest, but not in the history of
| |
| educational thought. In English, the cumulative reinterpretation of past
| |
| educational thought has not begun.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>Bernard Bailyn, <i>Education in the Forming of American Society: Needs and
| |
| Opportunities for Study</i> (1960) (New York: Vintage Books, n.d.), pp.
| |
| 3-15.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>Lawrence A. Cremin, <i>American Education: The Colonial Experience,
| |
| 1607-1783</i> (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), passim., particularly, Book I,
| |
| Part 1. For a thorough review of recent literature in the field, see Geraldine
| |
| Joncich Clifford, "Education: Its History and Historiography," in Lee S.
| |
| Shulman, ed., <i>Review of Research in Education,</i>, Vol. 4, <i>1976
| |
| </i>(Ithaca, IL: F. E. Peacock, 1977) pp. 210-267. In <i>The Wonderful World of
| |
| Ellwood Patterson Cubberley: An Essay on the Historiography of American
| |
| Education</i> (New York: Teachers College Press, 1965), Lawrence A. Cremin
| |
| called attention to "the need for a radical revision in our understanding of
| |
| Western educational history, one that would bring education back into the
| |
| mainstream of more general developments. Thus, in place of Cubberley's emphasis
| |
| on the 'pedagogical' greats of the nineteenth century—an emphasis he, in turn,
| |
| borrowed from Barnard and Barnard's translations of Von Raumer—one might inquire
| |
| into the broader educational influence of such men as Marx, Darwin, Hegel,
| |
| Comte, Nietzsche, Ruskin, Fichte, Goethe, Arnold, and Mill." (n. 66, p. 70) In
| |
| order to do this, we need to recognize that the undertaking is more radical than
| |
| simply revising the field as it exists in English. Even as it pertains to "the
| |
| pedagogical greats," scholarship in English has been sporadic and out of touch
| |
| with far better work being done in German, French, Italian, and Spanish. To
| |
| mount the inquiry Cremin calls for a field needs to be created, and for that to
| |
| happen, a set of generating questions need to be put and means for the pursuit
| |
| of them defined.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <p>3What
| |
| passes for the history of educational thought in English is a series of
| |
| repetitive and static textbooks, a small repertoire of more specialized studies
| |
| written long ago and continuously reprinted, and a few more recent studies, some
| |
| good, some bad, but in the aggregate, insufficient to nurture a scholarly field.
| |
| Such a criticism sounds much like the one that Bernard Bailyn so effectively
| |
| mounted in <i>Education in the Forming of American Society</i>, showing the
| |
| insufficiencies of the history of American education.<span class="cite"></span>
| |
| The criticism here mounted is a reiteration of Bailyn's critique, but not simply
| |
| a reiteration, which will become apparent as we probe some ways in which
| |
| weaknesses in the traditional history of American education differ from those in
| |
| the traditional history of educational thought. First, let us simply note that
| |
| the reawakening of American educational history during the past twenty years has
| |
| largely passed over the history of educational thought. Lawrence A. Cremin is
| |
| devoting a considerable portion of his <i>American Education</i> to the history
| |
| of educational ideas in America, but other than that, the great range of work
| |
| that now underway concentrates on the social causes and effects of changes in
| |
| American education.<span class="cite"></span> Bailyn did not call for a
| |
| rewriting of the history of educational thought, and scholars have not yet begun
| |
| systematically rewriting it.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>There is no sustained discussion of the historiography of educational
| |
| thought in English. At first glance, William K. Medlin's <i>The History of
| |
| Educational Ideas in the West</i> (New York: The Center for Applied Research in
| |
| Education, 1964), appears to be one, but it turns out to be more of a survey of
| |
| the subject. Sir John Adams devoted a chapter to "The Historical Aspect of
| |
| Educational Theory" in <i>The Evolution of Educational Theory</i> (London:
| |
| Macmillan and Co., 1912), pp. 72-103, but this chapter, and the whole book, was
| |
| more concerned with the philosophy of history than it was with historiography
| |
| and its effects in defining the field have been modest. Of the general studies
| |
| of the history of educational thought, most jump into a survey of the subject
| |
| after, at most, brief prefaces that do little to illuminate the field. E. B.
| |
| Castle's <i>Educating the Good Man: Moral Education in Christian</i> Times
| |
| (1958) (New York: Collier Books, 1962) is an historiographically interesting
| |
| work, but Castle said nothing more about its relation to the field than to
| |
| indicate its kinship to <i>The Growth of Freedom in Education: A Critical
| |
| Interpretation of some Historical</i> Views by W. J. McCallister, 2 vols.,
| |
| (1931) (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1971). Of fairly general works, the
| |
| two last mentioned, along with Christopher Dawson's <i>The Crisis of Western
| |
| Education</i> (1961) (Garden City: Doubleday Image Books, 1965), are the most
| |
| significant attempts in English to pursue significant questions through the
| |
| history of educational thought, but they do not give shape to a field of
| |
| scholarship. A related area, of considerable significance to the history of
| |
| educational thought, has taken on clear, scholarly form in English, namely the
| |
| history of the classical tradition, and a sense of the difference between a
| |
| field in definition and one out of it can be attained by comparing the above
| |
| works and general texts in the history of educational thought with <i>The
| |
| Classical Heritage and its Beneficiaries</i> by R. R. Bolgar (1954) (New York:
| |
| Harper Torchbooks, 1964) and <i>The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman
| |
| Influences on Western Literature</i> (1949) (New York: Galaxy Books, 1957). For
| |
| the advanced state of the historiography of educational thought in German, see
| |
| Klaus Schaller and Karl-H. Schafer, eds., <i>Bildungsmodelle and
| |
| Geschichtlichkeit: Ein Reportorium zur Geschichte der Pädagogik</i> (Hamburg:
| |
| Leibniz-Verlag, 1967), esp. 128-169.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <p>3By the
| |
| history of educational thought, I mean the study of past thinking about
| |
| education, of inquiry into its limits and possibilities, of assessment of its
| |
| repertoire of worthwhile goals and available means, of reflection on the
| |
| significance of educational achievements for life, personal and collective. As
| |
| early as men ceased living by instinct alone, as soon as men became cultural
| |
| beings, defined by qualities not completely transmitted by genetic inheritance,
| |
| education, the acquisition of character and culture, became a necessary
| |
| component of life. There is a history of what people have thought concerning
| |
| this component of life, of their hopes, expectations, and worries concerning it,
| |
| their aspirations and plans for it, their reflections and regrets about it. All
| |
| this is the history here in question. Scholars should make such a history of
| |
| educational thought a significant part of the history of education, and since
| |
| the late nineteenth century, when educators began to write a history of
| |
| education began in English, they devoted a fair amount of attention to the
| |
| history of educational thought.<span class="cite"></span> Yet the area has not
| |
| become a real field of sustained and systematic scholarship, and our problem is
| |
| to find out why that has been the case.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>In discussing the available literature in the field, I will mix together
| |
| works done by British and American scholars, for most significant work has been
| |
| available to anyone interested in it on both sides of the Atlantic. In
| |
| discussing the institutionalization of the field, the definition of its uses, I
| |
| will be primarily concerned with American patterns, although through the early
| |
| stages of the process, approximately to World War I, the differences between the
| |
| English and American patterns seem to me rather insignificant. It is my basic
| |
| conviction that neither in America nor Great Britain is the history of
| |
| educational thought a healthy field of scholarship and that the critique here
| |
| mounted, although primarily directed at the situation in the United States, is
| |
| basically valid for that in England as well. My impression, however, is that
| |
| British scholars have contributed more solid work in the history of educational
| |
| thought than have American, I suspect because British educationists fairly early
| |
| became less isolated from high-level scholarship than did American
| |
| educationists. I hold, however, that the field of educational history has not
| |
| developed on either side of the Atlantic as it might for one basic reason, a
| |
| failure to pursue a sufficiently demanding purpose for the field.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>These emphases overlap within the early texts in the field. E. L. Kemp's
| |
| <i>History of Education</i> (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1901) reflects
| |
| a primary concern with the history of educational institutions, as does Frank
| |
| Pierrepont Graves' more extended <i>History of Education</i>, 3 vols., (New
| |
| York: Macmillan Co., 1909, 1910, 1913). Of works primarily concerned with the
| |
| history of ideas about educational aims and practices, Grabriel Compayré's
| |
| <i>History of Pedagogy</i>, W. H. Payne, trans., (Boston: D. C. Heath & Co.,
| |
| 1886), long held the field. So too, Robert Herbert Quick's <i>Essays on
| |
| Educational Reformers</i> (1868, 2nd ed., 1890) (New York: D. Appleton and Co.,
| |
| 1917) created the type concerned primarily with educational biographies. Joseph
| |
| Payne's <i>Lectures on the History of Education</i> (London: Longmans, Greene,
| |
| and Co., 1892) were primarily concerned with the history of didactic method.
| |
| Ellwood P. Cubberley, in his <i>Syllabus of Lectures on the History of
| |
| Education</i> (New York: Macmillan Co., 1902), emphasized national school
| |
| systems, particularly in the second half of the work. F. V. N. Painter, in <i>A
| |
| History of Education</i> (1886) (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1908), made the
| |
| rise of Protestantism an essential development in his account. Levi Seeley's
| |
| <i>History of Education</i> (New York: American Book Company, 1899) and Thomas
| |
| Davidson's <i>History of Education</i> (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1900)
| |
| both depicted the history of education as the story of mankind's conscious
| |
| evolution, although Seeley's account was much more cluttered than was
| |
| Davidson's. Of the pre-twentieth-century syntheses, the most balanced in its
| |
| coverage was <i>The History of Modern Education</i> by Samuel G. Williams (1892)
| |
| (Syracuse: C. W. Bardeen, 1886). Early in the twentieth century, Paul Monroe's
| |
| <i>Text-Book in the History of</i> Education (New York: Macmillan Co., 1905)
| |
| became the dominant text, at least in the United States.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>Bailyn, <i>Education in the Forming of American Society</i> (1960), pp.
| |
| 5-8, contrasted Davidson's <i>History of Education</i> and Eggleston's
| |
| <i>Transit of Civilization</i>, remarking that the latter "was laid aside as an
| |
| oddity, for it was irrelevant to the interests of the group then firmly shaping
| |
| the historical study of American education," while the former was greeted with
| |
| enthusiasm. Harry Hutton and Philip Kalisch have pointed out that Bailyn's
| |
| comparison has at best rhetorical value, for Davidson's book, except in the eyes
| |
| of Paul Monroe, was a dud; see "Davidson's Influence on Educational
| |
| Historiography," <i>History of Education Quarterly</i>, VI, 4 (Winter 1966), pp.
| |
| 79-87. The point here is simply that the early historians of education, who may
| |
| have, as a sidelight to their work, firmly shaped the historical study of
| |
| American education, really had an historical concern quite different from
| |
| Bailyn's. To point this out is not to defend the quality of their achievements,
| |
| but to define accurately their undertaking. Their main concern, for better or
| |
| for worse, was not with the history of American education, but with the history
| |
| of Western education, which was the staple course, the year-long introductory
| |
| history of education, that they were all seeking to make the vehicle for
| |
| enthusing educators with a sense of the dignity of their profession. The extent
| |
| to which this course was taught can be gauged from Arthur 0. Norton, "The Scope
| |
| and Aims of the History of Education," <i>Educational Review</i>, Vol. 27, May
| |
| 1904, pp. 443-455, and Henry Suzzallo, "The Professional Use of the History of
| |
| Education," <i>Proceedings of the Society of College Teachers of Education</i>,
| |
| 1908, pp. 29-67.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>See Jesse B. Sears and Adin D. Henderson, <i>Cubberley of Stanford</i>
| |
| (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957), p. 119: 79,623 copies of <i>Public
| |
| Education</i> through <i>1934;</i> 66,121 for <i>The History of Education</i>
| |
| through 1939. It is unclear whether the latter figure includes sales for the
| |
| <i>Brief History of Education</i> published in 1922. During these years, <i>The
| |
| History of Education</i> had considerable competition, not only from Monroe's
| |
| <i>Text-Book</i>, but also from William Boyd's <i>History of Western
| |
| Education</i>, published in 1921, and Edward H. Reisner's <i>Historical
| |
| Foundations of Modern Education</i>, published in 1931.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <p>4As
| |
| educators began to study the history of education in English, writers in the
| |
| field mixed together all sorts of material.<span class="cite"></span> Hence, in
| |
| viewing the early development of the history of educational thought, we need to
| |
| start with the history of education in general; this was in part the history of
| |
| educational institutions throughout Western history; in part the history of
| |
| ideas about educational aims and practices; in part a sequence of educational
| |
| biographies devoted to the great pedagogical reformers; in part a history of
| |
| didactic rigidity and change; in part a history of national school systems and
| |
| policies.<span class="cite"></span> Bailyn, in his <i>Education in the Forming
| |
| of American Society</i>, anachronistically projected a specific interest in the
| |
| history of American education upon the first American historians of
| |
| education.<span class="cite"></span> To begin with, the field was much more
| |
| amorphous than that and the most widely taught variant was a grand survey of
| |
| Western education, susceptible internally to several emphases -- cultural,
| |
| biographical, and institutional. Well into the twentieth century, this survey
| |
| was the staple course: Cubberley's <i>History of Education</i>, published in
| |
| 1920, sold almost as many copies as did his <i>Public Education in the United
| |
| States</i>, and the former shared the market early on with a number of other
| |
| successful texts.<span class="cite"></span> Thus to understand the early
| |
| development of the history of educational thought, we need to follow critically
| |
| the emergence of the history of education, an often, but still imperfectly
| |
| studied phenomenon.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>Bernard Bailyn, <i>Education in the Forming of American Society</i>,
| |
| (1960), pp. 3-15, 53-58.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <p>4
| |
| Consequently, let us start our effort to find the reasons why the history of
| |
| educational thought has not become a field of scholarship by criticizing certain
| |
| aspects of Bailyn's argument in <i>Education in the Forming of American
| |
| Society</i>, for there are points at which Bailyn's critique was too
| |
| impassioned, with the result that significant distinctions were blurred. The
| |
| blurring of these distinctions made it difficult to understand precisely what
| |
| caused the traditional history to be weak and what constituted Bailyn's real
| |
| achievement, what gave his critique its leavening power. The main points of that
| |
| critique are by now well known: the history of American education had been a
| |
| repetitive, anachronistic search for the origins of the twentieth-century
| |
| educational system, particularly the system of public schooling; it had been
| |
| based on a narrow definition of education as schooling, one of interest to a
| |
| narrow professional audience but unsuited to guide investigation of the role of
| |
| education in American history; the tone of the whole endeavor arose from the
| |
| effort to dignify and enthuse the educational profession, not to speak
| |
| truthfully to the disinterested intellect; and the main workers in the field
| |
| were set apart, institutionally and intellectually, from other American
| |
| historians, content with their isolation from history as long as what they wrote
| |
| had an audience in education.<span class="cite"></span></p>
| |
|
| |
| <p>4One need
| |
| only survey the fruits that have followed to be convinced of the substantial
| |
| validity in Bailyn's critique, and we shall see all the problems that he
| |
| identified in the history of American education richly exemplified in the
| |
| history of educational thought. But two questions need to be raised about
| |
| Bailyn's forays into the history of education, one concerning his assessment of
| |
| what caused the weaknesses in the traditional history of education, and another
| |
| concerning what it was in his critique that proved so liberating, so
| |
| constructive, what quality in <i>Education in the Forming of American
| |
| Society</i> provoked so much further work. Let us turn to the first of these
| |
| problems and probe it with some care, with particular reference to the early
| |
| history of educational thought, with the hope of coming to a more precise
| |
| comprehension of how and why the characteristic limitations of that history
| |
| arose. Having done that, we will be able to return to Bailyn's book and better
| |
| understand the reasons for its intellectual influence.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>Ibid., p. 9.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>Bernard Bailyn, "Education as a Discipline, Some Historical Notes," in John
| |
| Walton and James L. Kuethe, eds., <i>The Discipline of Education</i> (Madison:
| |
| University of Wisconsin Press, 1963), p. 131.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <p>4Why did
| |
| the early history of education in English develop with such an anachronistic
| |
| interest in formal schooling and with such a parochial audience and evangelical
| |
| tone? Bailyn essentially contended that these qualities developed because
| |
| professional historians did not write the early histories, which were instead
| |
| the work of professional educators, who often lacked training as historians and
| |
| who almost invariably allowed certain educational goals to guide their work.
| |
| "The main emphasis and ultimately the main weakness of the history written by
| |
| the educational missionaries of the turn of the century derived directly from
| |
| their professional interests."<span class="cite"></span> This statement, I
| |
| think, is true, but not quite precise; it leaves unclear whether the problem
| |
| arose because early educational historians had paramount educational interests
| |
| at all, or because they had professional educational interests of a particular
| |
| nature, as distinct from other possible professional educational interests, that
| |
| caused their history to be weak. Bailyn seems to have held the former, general
| |
| diagnosis, for he did not try to resolve out the particular professional
| |
| interests at work and he wrote elsewhere that "one cannot avoid concluding that
| |
| a process of desiccation set in as the result of the emphasis upon the peculiar
| |
| concerns of education, reinforced by institutional barriers that served for two
| |
| generations to limit contacts between the general practitioners of history and
| |
| the specialists in education."<span class="cite"></span></p>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>Lawrence A. Cremin, <i>The Wonderful World of Ellwood Patterson
| |
| Cubberley</i> (New York: Teachers College Press, 1965), pp. 43-6.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>Ibid., pp. 46-52.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>Recent educational historians have failed to address the question of the
| |
| relationship of the history of education to education effectively, with
| |
| potentially serious results. As the argument of this study unfolds it will
| |
| become increasingly clear that history, and the related disciplines in which
| |
| real human activities are studied in real human settings, to wit, anthropology,
| |
| sociology, politics, economics, social psychology, philosophy, are the best
| |
| means for developing knowledge, purpose, and skill with respect to educational
| |
| work. To anticipate the argument: from the very start, historians of education
| |
| accepted a trivial conception of the relation of their endeavor to the study of
| |
| education and to the education of educators. In the recent revitalization of the
| |
| history of education, that trivial conception has been perpetuated, perhaps even
| |
| trivialized further, and not only the historians, but all the practitioners of
| |
| the human sciences, are laboring, and are being belabored, without an adequate
| |
| conception of the significance of their work for the work of education. As a
| |
| result, the questions they put in their research and teaching are less
| |
| demanding, of themselves and others, than they could be, and the influence of
| |
| their work, on themselves and others, is far less than it should be.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <p>4Cremin has
| |
| already objected that Bailyn was too pat in suggesting that the traditional
| |
| history of education was anachronistic, parochial, evangelical, and isolated
| |
| because educationists, not historians, wrote it. Some historians showed the same
| |
| faults when addressing educational topics, and some educationists very pointedly
| |
| objected to these faults.<span class="cite"></span> But Cremin, too, did not
| |
| really search out the causes of the problem. He merely pointed out that
| |
| professional historians were as much responsible for the weaknesses of
| |
| traditional educational history as were educationists and turned to the task at
| |
| hand, revealed by Bailyn's achievement, of thoroughly revising the traditional
| |
| interpretation of American educational history.<span class="cite"></span> That
| |
| historians of education based in schools of education can write good history is
| |
| patent. What remains unclear, and it is becoming a matter of some urgency to
| |
| clarify, is the proper relationship of good educational history to the study of
| |
| education.<span class="cite"></span> Scholars have performed only half of the
| |
| critical task: we have become well aware of the shortcomings of traditional
| |
| educational history as history. The question remains, however: what was the
| |
| relation of traditional educational history to <i>education</i> and how did that
| |
| relation affect the quality of work in the field both as history and as
| |
| education?</p>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>William W. Brickman complains of this parochialism in "Revisionism and the
| |
| Study of the History of Education," <i>History of Education Quarterly</i>,
| |
| 4(1964), p. 220.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>Brickman, Ibid., pp. 211-4, rather disjointedly points out various
| |
| classical, renaissance, and early modern trials at the history of education.
| |
| These works, however interesting, are not what is important here. As a field of
| |
| scholarship, the history of education started to develop in
| |
| late-eighteenth-century Germany and took substantial form early in the
| |
| nineteenth century. A scholarly field is not static, for its driving questions
| |
| and leading sources can change as practitioners of it mutually develop and
| |
| criticize their work, but a scholarly field is coherent and trans-personal, for
| |
| at any time there must be at least partial consensus within a group of
| |
| practitioners over what questions are relevant, what procedures are acceptable,
| |
| and what purposes are significant. The field is, in a sense, the transpersonal,
| |
| coherent cultivation, discussion, and development of the questions, procedures,
| |
| and purposes in force at any time. The first two chapters of Carl Diehl's
| |
| excellent study, <i>Americans and German Scholarship 1770-1870</i> (New Haven:
| |
| Yale University Press, 1978 , pp. 7-48, give a good sense of how German
| |
| philology came to cohere into a field of scholarship. Stephen Toulmin's <i>Human
| |
| Understanding</i> is a very important discussion, in a much broader context, of
| |
| the concept of a field in relation to the very possibility of knowledge.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <ref>These generalizations anticipate results that will be documented in the
| |
| ensuing chapters. Suffice it for now to note here that Werner Jaeger wrote
| |
| <i>Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture</i>, 3 vols., (Gilbert Highet, trans.,
| |
| Vol. 1, 2nd ed., New York: Oxford University Press, 1945, 1943, 1944) with
| |
| definite educational purposes in mind, stated clearly in the introduction to
| |
| Vol. 1, pp. xiii-xxix, and that these were the same purposes he had voiced
| |
| speaking directly to the educational issues of the time in "Humanismus and
| |
| Jugenbildung" (1921) in Jaeger, <i>Humanistische Reden and Vortrage</i> (2nd
| |
| ed., Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1960), pp. 41-67.</p><div
| |
| class="container"><p class="parabox">¶{{#counter:in1}}</p>—4One
| |
| characteristic of <i>Education in the Forming of American Society</i> is itself
| |
| extremely parochial—all the works cited in it are in English.<span
| |
| class="cite"></span> Bailyn, so fascinated by the transit of civilization in the
| |
| colonial period, showed no curiosity about it in the emergence of educational
| |
| history in the United States. The history of education, however, was one of the
| |
| many academic fields created in nineteenth-century Germany and imported into the
| |
| United States and England.<span class="cite"></span> Bailyn's study of the early
| |
| writing of educational history in the United States is like a study of the
| |
| nineteenth century emergence of the American university that made no mention of
| |
| the German university. If Bailyn had put the emergence of American educational
| |
| historiography at all into context, if he had compared it with the development
| |
| of German educational history, the need to probe more deeply the causes of
| |
| deficiencies he found in American work would have been evident. German
| |
| educational history, far from perfect, nevertheless did not prominently manifest
| |
| the characteristic failings of the American. For the most part, anticipating
| |
| significant exceptions, German educational history was the work of scholars
| |
| primarily concerned, not with history, but with education; it was nevertheless,
| |
| by and large, good history; and however good as history, whether written by
| |
| historians or educators, it was almost always written with an educational
| |
| purpose as its <i>raison d'être</i>.<span class="cite"></span> That early
| |
| American educational historians were primarily educators who made their
| |
| professional educational interests preeminent in their work did not itself cause
| |
| the weaknesses in their work. The real causality was more complicated.</ref>
| |
|
| |
| <p>4In search
| |
| of that causality, let us follow with some care the transit of civilization; let
| |
| us observe how scholars imported the history of education into the
| |
| English-speaking world. In doing that, three things should become evident.
| |
| First, educators incorporated the history of education into the university
| |
| curriculum in a most peculiar way: they defined its pedagogical function prior
| |
| to the creation any body of scholarship in English in the field, with the result
| |
| that for several generations they specially tailored the scholarship, if you
| |
| will, to this pre-determined teaching function. Here was the source of
| |
| anachronism. Second, the timing of the original transfer of the field from
| |
| Germany to England and America was such that the transfer brought with it a very
| |
| unproductive, trivial conception of the role of history in the study of
| |
| education. Ironically, educational scholars institutionalized this trivial role
| |
| in the United States and England precisely at the time in Germany and elsewhere
| |
| that scholars were replacing it with a more significant function. Here was the
| |
| source of evangelicalism. Third, the special field of the history of education
| |
| was transported from Germany without importing as well the cultural source of
| |
| the field itself, namely, the more general philosophic, literary, and academic
| |
| proclivity to take education, self-cultivation, <i>Bildung</i>, as a matter of
| |
| fundamental importance, one that should command the attention of all engaged in
| |
| serious cultural work. Here was the source of parochialism. The upshot of these
| |
| peculiarities of the early history of education was that the area never became a
| |
| field of scholarship in the proper sense. Here was Bailyn's real achievement.
| |
| But let us turn to the beginning.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <h3>III—Historical Pedagogy: The German Background</h3>
| |
|
| |
| <p>4In
| |
| Germany, around 1800, two significant transitions were underway, each of which
| |
| deeply affected the emergence of the history of education as a field of study.
| |
| The first involved scholarship: leaders in the steady reform of the German
| |
| universities had invented and were developing the humanistic disciplines as
| |
| defined fields of scholarship. The second involved education: greater
| |
| flexibility, the expectation of change in material and cultural conditions of
| |
| life, weakened the hold of the traditional education through ascribed rank and
| |
| great interest built up in finding means to educate people for
| |
| self-determination. We cannot here do justice to either of these transitions,
| |
| but a few things should be noted about each.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <p>4
| |
| Scholarship is an ancient phenomenon, but scholarly disciplines are a recent
| |
| invention. Traditionally, the university trained practitioners of three learned
| |
| professions—theology, law, and medicine. The arts were a propaedeutic.
| |
| Humanistic and scientific scholarship, while not excluded from the university,
| |
| did not center in it. Libraries, institutes, academies, publishing houses,
| |
| patrons, and salons were their foci until recent times. The work of Elizabeth L.
| |
| Eisenstein has made us well aware of how the development of printing was a
| |
| necessary condition for the development of modern scholarship, both scientific
| |
| and humanistic. Yet printing, alone, did not do the trick. The broad
| |
| availability of dependable printed texts powerfully stimulated work in history,
| |
| philosophy, the criticism of literature, all the human sciences. Yet another
| |
| problem impeded their systematic development, namely the happenstance emergence
| |
| at any particular time of people able to exploit the available materials. As
| |
| long as scholarship was a labor of love, an amateur endeavor, its progress would
| |
| be dependent on the accidents of genius and interest. Reforms in the German
| |
| universities, first at Halle and Göttingen, then with the new University of
| |
| Berlin, strengthened the arts faculties, and the interaction of institutional
| |
| imperatives, certain social needs, and important intellectual advances led to
| |
| the systematization of scholarly disciplines. With these, scholarship became
| |
| much less dependent on the accidents of genius, for they provided a dependable
| |
| means of recruitment, if not of genius, at least of talent, by making possible
| |
| systematic, professional training for prospective scholars in defined
| |
| fields.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <p>4In this
| |
| process, the major step was that of defining the fields -- someone had to set
| |
| forth, clearly, authoritatively, rigorously, the problems and skills to be
| |
| mastered in philology, philosophy, history, geography, geology, chemistry,
| |
| psychology, economics, sociology, physics, and so on. This occurred first in the
| |
| oldest, least Baconian, of subjects, in the study of classical languages, which,
| |
| one can say without too much exaggeration, the powerful but inelegant work of F.
| |
| A. Wolf turned through a stroke into philology. Wolf clearly defined a problem,
| |
| "the Homeric question," and indicated authoritatively the genesis of the problem
| |
| and the materials and methods relevant to pursuit of its resolution. With that,
| |
| a recurrent occupation for learned men became a field of scholarship; the study
| |
| of classical languages became a discipline with definite boundaries, tested
| |
| techniques of inquiry, standards of argumentation, and a restricted audience of
| |
| scholars who shared a mastery of the sources and methods of the field. With the
| |
| field so defined, its practitioners could develop a new form of advanced
| |
| education, a university training that inducted the prospective scholar into the
| |
| pursuit of the discipline. As fields of scholarship emerged around the turn of
| |
| the nineteenth century, serious educators perceived opportunities to reform the
| |
| universities with the arts faculty offering an apprenticeship through active
| |
| research that prepared people for the professional creation of knowledge across
| |
| a broadening spectrum of disciplines.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <p>5This
| |
| invention of disciplines was the technological basis for the reform of German
| |
| higher education. Without the disciplines, scholarship could not have displaced
| |
| preparation for the learned professions as the main concern of the universities.
| |
| Closely associated with the creation of the disciplines was a new teaching
| |
| technique, the seminar. One attended lectures to learn about a major figure's
| |
| findings; one worked in a seminar with a major figure to learn how to pursue
| |
| such findings for oneself. The seminar was the pedagogical expression and
| |
| presence of the discipline in the university; it was the means by which
| |
| apprentice and master joined in the continuous enterprise of creative
| |
| scholarship. The traditional learned professions had been relatively static
| |
| fields and the traditional university dominated by them had been strictly an
| |
| agency for the transmission of knowledge, not for its creation. The arts and
| |
| sciences, so long a propaedeutic, now became the vanguard of a new kind of
| |
| university, one through which the research imperative would make it a
| |
| dependable, productive source of new knowledge.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <p>5At the
| |
| same time that the creators of academic disciplines were transforming the
| |
| institutions and activities of higher education, another, more general
| |
| transition was occurring in Germany and throughout the Western world. Social,
| |
| technical, economic, political change was becoming a predictable feature of
| |
| personal experience across the social grades. The educational implications were
| |
| immense, particularly in Germany where people expressed the implications of
| |
| anticipated change in the conditions constraining the possibilities of life
| |
| almost exclusively through education. The traditional European culture was an
| |
| ascribed culture; across functions and ranks, from peasants and artisans through
| |
| burgers and nobles, the operative education was a complicated, traditional
| |
| system of conscious acculturation. We take for granted a culture of acquired
| |
| characteristics; what traditionally existed was a culture of ascribed
| |
| characteristics in a relatively stable environment, all the features of which
| |
| had evolved to work from birth on, according to each person's station, as a
| |
| powerful acculturating mechanism inducting each generation into its place, the
| |
| place of its forbearers. Everything was pedagogical drama—a public hanging,
| |
| harvest work and harvest festival, market days, the liturgies of religious
| |
| observation, the codified content of song and conversation, the journeyman's
| |
| travels, the lore of each local, the family tradition, das ganzes Haus, the
| |
| hearth and home. The stages of life were marked, not by psychological stages of
| |
| development, but by the traditional, social rituals celebrating the rites of
| |
| passage-baptism rite, confirmation ceremony, marriage festival, funeral
| |
| procession. In this context, schooling too served ascribed functions: minimal
| |
| literacy for the many and mastery of the necessary tools for those destined to
| |
| the learned professions.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <p>5As the
| |
| pace of movement, innovation, communication accelerated in the eighteenth
| |
| century, as people began to anticipate experiencing significant changes in their
| |
| social and cultural surroundings, they began to see the pedagogical problem in a
| |
| radically different light. Traditionally, the infinite repertoire of pedagogical
| |
| dramas, which all performed continuously for each other, worked to insinuate and
| |
| enforce the social determination of each person according to station and rank.
| |
| During the eighteenth century, particularly among burgers of more than modest
| |
| means, the primary agents of accelerating change, a radically new idea of
| |
| education developed, one that aimed, not at the formation of a pre-determined
| |
| self, but one that would eventuate in a sustained capacity for
| |
| self-determination. In many areas of the Western world, people expressed their
| |
| growing awareness of the possibilities of self-determination primarily in the
| |
| pursuit of new political and economic aspirations, but in the German lands, they
| |
| channeled this awareness primarily through cultural and educational efforts.
| |
| This transition occurred, at first, not so much through the creation of new
| |
| educational agencies, but by the revitalization of existing agencies, by finding
| |
| ways to imbue them with the novel ideal of self-determination. This is perhaps
| |
| most evident in the wave of <i>Bildungsromane</i>, starting with Goethe's
| |
| <i>Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre</i>, in which the traditional modes of
| |
| acculturation to an ascribed character were shown to be a potential context for
| |
| a many-sided, slow and wonderful self-creation of character.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <p>5Not only
| |
| through the <i>Bildungsromane</i>, however, were established agencies of
| |
| ascriptive education reinterpreted as potential means of self-determination, of
| |
| consciously acquired education. The enterprise was omnipresent. A host of works
| |
| for household educators propounded this principle, aiming to inform parents,
| |
| tutors, and pastors first with a better understanding of the processes by which
| |
| a person develops and matures to moral and intellectual autonomy and second with
| |
| a better comprehension of the cultural resources of proven use in that endeavor.
| |
| The early nineteenth-century reform of the traditional classical secondary
| |
| education in the <i>Gymnasium</i>, and its popularity among the bourgeoisie,
| |
| arose, in part, from the ideal of self-determination; the new classical
| |
| curriculum aimed not simply at mastery of Greek and Latin, but at substantial
| |
| involvement with the culture of Greece and Rome, precisely because people
| |
| believed such involvement to be conducive to autonomy in thought and action.
| |
| Structures of law, traditionally mechanisms of imposing ascriptive patterns of
| |
| conduct on people, were analyzed by Beccarria, Pestalozzi, Bentham, and others
| |
| as mechanisms influencing, often destructively, the acquisition of character by
| |
| many caught in anomalous situations, and the idea spread that laws should be
| |
| reformed so that they would function, at worst as neutral influences, at best as
| |
| positive influences, in each person's task of self-formation. Pestalozzi's
| |
| <i>Leonard and Gertrude</i> best summed up the whole vision: this educational
| |
| novel showed humble, local initiatives transforming, slowly but surely, the
| |
| entire repertoire of traditional, static, ascriptive acculturation into a new
| |
| configuration of agencies conducing to self-definition for all the members of
| |
| the community through humane education.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <p>5Among
| |
| those interested in the improvement of education for self-determination were
| |
| figures active in the academic world. Traditionally teachers, both familial
| |
| tutors and gymnasium instructors, were recruited from graduates of the theology
| |
| faculties, who would put in time as teachers while awaiting appointment as
| |
| pastors, a wait that could sometimes be quite long in a situation where the
| |
| supply exceeded demand. In theological faculties responsive to the new climate
| |
| of concern, a trend toward offering work in pedagogy, the theory and practice of
| |
| education, developed. This initiative was part of the general reform of the
| |
| university then underway. The pedagogical seminars that developed offered work
| |
| on a high academic level: a student performed a certain amount of what we would
| |
| now call practice teaching along with a thorough study of the accumulated
| |
| knowledge about education, generally organized through categories of
| |
| anthropology and history. As pedagogical seminars began to be established, a
| |
| significant question arose: at a time when university professors were
| |
| preoccupied with the newly emerging, disciplinary bases for their work, so too,
| |
| those initiating pedagogical seminars had to pay considerable attention to the
| |
| methodological basis for the study of education. During the early nineteenth
| |
| century, educational scholars thought the most promising grounding for the
| |
| systematic study of education was historical and philological: one could best
| |
| advance the understanding of education by the careful, critical inquiry into
| |
| past educational experience.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <p>5August
| |
| Hermann Niemeyer (1754-1828), a theologian and educational reformer who was a
| |
| descendant of August Hermann Francke, first widely, albeit tentatively, voiced
| |
| this role for the history of education. Niemeyer grew up in highly cultured
| |
| surroundings, and he was at home throughout his life in the intellectual elite
| |
| of the German world. Trained in theology and philology, he started publishing,
| |
| at 21, an influential, multi-volume theological study, <i>Charakteristik der
| |
| Bibel</i>, the fifth volume of which appeared in 1782, the whole thereafter
| |
| going through several later editions. At 23, he became professor of theology (at
| |
| 30, <i>ordinarius)</i> at the University of Halle, then one of the most advanced
| |
| universities. Throughout his life, it remained a center of his activity and he
| |
| served as its rector from 1808 to 1816. From 1784 on, he maintained a life-long
| |
| administrative role in the Francke Stiftung, a large complex of schools founded
| |
| by his forbearer and on which Niemeyer exerted most effective leadership. In
| |
| 1796, Niemeyer published his <i>Grundsätze der Erziehung and des
| |
| Unterrichts</i>, which became a very popular book on education, valued for its
| |
| warm humanity and the wealth of educational experience it communicated. Starting
| |
| with the third edition in 1799, Niemeyer appended to it an historical outline,
| |
| Überblick der allgemeinen Geschichte der Erziehung and des Unterrichts. In
| |
| addition, in 1813, Niemeyer published a compilation of <i>Originalstellen
| |
| grieschischer und römischer Klassiker über die Theorie der Erziehung and des
| |
| Unterrichts</i>. To Niemeyer, neither of these efforts was more than a start
| |
| towards "a complete history of what, from earliest times up to our own, has been
| |
| thought theoretically and done practically with respect to education and
| |
| instruction, of the men who have had the most significant influence, of the
| |
| institutions which have been dedicated to this end, of the literary works which
| |
| have been written to this purpose. . . . The materials for the whole lie
| |
| dispersed in the most heterogeneous writings. Niemeyer suggested that educators
| |
| would find his outline informative and that presenting it might occasion further
| |
| investigation and treatment of the subject.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <p>5We should
| |
| note two qualities in Niemeyer's work. First, his conception of education was a
| |
| large one. The <i>Grundsätze</i> specifically addressed parents, tutors, and
| |
| educators, and although Niemeyer paid substantial attention to the particulars
| |
| of instruction, he set that in a full discussion of cultivation and education.
| |
| Education cultivated the moral and functional autonomy of the real person living
| |
| in real conditions, and to do that well one had to work at each part of the
| |
| process effectively, ever alert to the relation of particulars to the whole
| |
| endeavor. Hence, he concentrated on the principles of education, for by
| |
| comprehending these, one would have the capacity to comprehend better how
| |
| particular aspects of education related to the whole. Although he did not
| |
| develop his historical overview fully enough to be sure, the way he approached
| |
| topics in it suggests that he viewed the history of education as an opportunity
| |
| to search out the principles of education as they operated in the real contexts
| |
| of human experience and to learn how better to use such principles to understand
| |
| the interworking of pedagogical particulars in the whole of people's educations.
| |
| This brings us to the second, notable quality: however sketchy Niemeyer's
| |
| outline was, the bibliographical <i>Anmerkung</i> to each section were the work
| |
| of a man in command of classical and biblical philology and a great deal of
| |
| cultural history. They started the history of education off as a serious
| |
| intellectual undertaking.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <p>5Niemeyer
| |
| based this undertaking on an important conception of the relation between
| |
| history and education. Education took place in concrete situations in which an
| |
| extremely complicated interaction of developing personal capacities for both
| |
| good and bad interacted with the manifold particulars of the surrounding
| |
| cultural environment, which particulars were likewise an all-too-human mix of
| |
| the constructive and the destructive. To be helpful in this process, the
| |
| educator needed experience and insight, which one built up from three sources,
| |
| from pedagogical introspection concerning one's own educational situation as it
| |
| had unfolded in one's experience, from pedagogical reflection on the historical
| |
| experience of the educational process that had been accumulated, observing how
| |
| individuals and groups had, faced with diverse cultural configurations,
| |
| succeeded and failed to make these conduce to their human development, and from
| |
| pedagogical consideration of whatever other thinkers one could find who had
| |
| thought deeply about educational experience, their own and that of others. Thus,
| |
| history was an essential source of knowledge for the educator. Basic pedagogical
| |
| principles existed, but the educator could not understand them in the abstract,
| |
| for they were principles that existed and functioned only in the full texture of
| |
| historical life. (See esp. iii, 429-30)(trans in fn.)</p>
| |
|
| |
| <p>5A few
| |
| years later, F. H. C. Schwarz (1766-1857) started to fulfill Niemeyer's hope
| |
| that his "Überblick" might engender further efforts, for Schwarz wrote the first
| |
| full and coherent history of education in German. Like Niemeyer, Schwarz was
| |
| both theologian and educational reformer. He acquired extensive experience as a
| |
| pastor, teacher, and professor; he possessed learning, both deep and broad; he
| |
| had a mind at once clear, deeply religious, open, and suffused with a simple
| |
| optimism about human potentiality. In 1804 Schwarz became a theology professor
| |
| at the University of Heidelberg, where for many years he ran the <i>pädagogische
| |
| Seminar</i>, which for the first ten years or so met jointly with the philology
| |
| seminar. In 1808, he spent some time visiting and working with Pestalozzi, whose
| |
| pedagogy he greatly respected, albeit with some reservation for its excessive
| |
| reliance on method. Schwarz wrote two major works on education,
| |
| <i>Erziehungslehre</i> and <i>Lehrbuch der Pädagogik and Didaktik</i>. The first
| |
| edition of the <i>Erziehungslehre</i>, which appeared in four volumes between
| |
| 1802 and 1813, culminated with a two part, <i>Geschichte der Erziehung nach
| |
| ihrem Zusammenhang unter den Volkern von den alten Zeiten bis auf die
| |
| neuste</i>.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <p>5In the
| |
| second edition of 1829, Schwarz expanded this history and moved it to the
| |
| beginning of the whole work, having come to the conviction that a theory of
| |
| education should be based on an historical foundation, that a sound theory of
| |
| education should rest on the cumulative educational experience of mankind. The
| |
| program he set forth for a history of education was ambitious: "whoever should
| |
| now want to write such a history must show us, first how the endeavor of
| |
| education itself has developed, second how education has been conducted through
| |
| the instructional and cultural institutions for the young, and third what has
| |
| been learned about the activity of these institutions, which the most important
| |
| theories on them were, and what literature there is on them. Schwarz's
| |
| conception of the endeavor of education led not to narrow school histories.
| |
| "Thus family, state, religion, morals, law, the entire people, and other
| |
| peoples, in brief the whole infinity of life is indeed needed in order to grasp
| |
| the being and becoming of a single man. Such a proper history was unattainable,
| |
| then, perhaps now, yet Schwarz proposed to make a start by somewhat more
| |
| narrowly defining the task, "namely as <i>Geschichte der
| |
| Erziehungsidee."</i></p>
| |
|
| |
| <p>6I leave
| |
| untranslated Schwarz's phrase, "history of the educational idea," in order to
| |
| call attention to the peculiarities of the phrase. For Schwarz it was a single
| |
| idea, the history was not to be the history of educational ideas in their
| |
| multiplicity, but of one idea, the idea of education. The human capacity to
| |
| educate had unfolded in history as people had acted, generation after
| |
| generation, in manifold concrete situations, guided by the idea of education.
| |
| The achievements and possibilities wrought with reference to this idea were by
| |
| no means immediately manifest to anyone. To find what the possibilities of
| |
| education were, to bring an optimal repertoire of these possibilities to bear in
| |
| educational effort, and to understand the problems of formative development,
| |
| people needed a history of the idea of education, a history that would enable
| |
| them to comprehend the sum of activity the educative idea had guided. Thus, the
| |
| history of education did more, for Schwarz, than illustrate sound and unsound
| |
| methods; it did more than inspire educators with professional pride. The history
| |
| of education empowered people to think and act educationally; it enabled people
| |
| to grasp the range of educational possibilities that had taken hold in their
| |
| experience and to achieve further possibilities, they would have to do so by
| |
| extending further the historical actualities of education. Education existed in
| |
| history; therefore, scholars could best study it through history.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <p>6Like
| |
| Niemeyer, Schwarz thought that history was the source of knowledge from which
| |
| the educator could gain substantive insight into the principles and practices of
| |
| his endeavor. Men did not discover or derive the idea of education from
| |
| reflection or speculation, from acquired knowledge or science. The idea of
| |
| education was implicit, inherent in the human condition, "with the first family
| |
| on the earth this idea is met in life. (Ballauf 559) The possible
| |
| concretizations of the idea of education have come into being, not through
| |
| thought alone, but through human experience, through thoughtful action.
| |
| Pedagogical surprise will always be possible, and the full potentiality of the
| |
| idea of education will come only when the history of man's self-creation has
| |
| reached a completion in eternity. (ELIi7) We are ever on the way, creating
| |
| ourselves anew, and we cannot know the end, we can at best only interpret and
| |
| understand past achievements, to draw on them creatively in our own task of
| |
| self-creation. It was insufficient to turn to the history of education simply to
| |
| draw inspiration for a pre-determined course: "we must first see what has up to
| |
| now happened and how we have been brought to our own education before we can
| |
| know what we have to do in order to form and educate our children well. (Ibid.,
| |
| p. xiii) To learn from history properly, one had to approach it with a dual
| |
| expectation: first that it should delineate precisely the stage at which
| |
| humanity stands at each point and second that it should function instructively
| |
| in the immediate present with everything submitted to reflection; that it should
| |
| not only give historical instruction about the past, but that it should also
| |
| yield us more insight into the present educational task. (Ibid., p. 7)</p>
| |
|
| |
| <p>6Schwarz
| |
| gave a significant start to historical pedagogy, an effort to form a sound
| |
| theory of education through thorough inquiry into the history of education and
| |
| careful reflection on the results of this inquiry. Such a history of education
| |
| was more than an ancillary specialty within the broader, university level study
| |
| of education. Historical pedagogy was the methodological grounding for the early
| |
| university level study of education. The major contemporary criticism of
| |
| Schwarz's work took it to task precisely on these methodological grounds. This
| |
| criticism was the work of none other than J. F. Herbart, who wrote a long review
| |
| of the 1829 edition of Schwarz's <i>Erziehungslehre. </i>It is instructive
| |
| about the tensions affecting the ensuing development of historical pedagogy and
| |
| the methodological grounding of the study of education to note certain of
| |
| Herbart's criticisms.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <p>6Herbart
| |
| began and ended his review by stating his conviction that two systematic
| |
| disciplines were helpful in constructing a sound pedagogy: ethics, which gave
| |
| guidance concerning educational ends, and psychology, which helped determine
| |
| sound educative means. Herbart recognized, very grudgingly at times, that
| |
| Schwarz had something to contribute to both pedagogical ethics and psychology,
| |
| but Herbart contended that the empirical density of Schwarz's work marred the
| |
| usefulness of these contributions. For Herbart, extensive historical inquiry
| |
| "contributes neither to the resolution, nor even to the illumination, of
| |
| present-day pedagogical questions. (350) Herbart found that Schwarz not only
| |
| spent precious time with irrelevant matters, but that he was often
| |
| insufficiently critical where matters were relevant, that he did not explain
| |
| past errors in the light of later findings clearly enough. It was not that
| |
| Schwarz was uncritical of past pedagogical thinkers, but that he explained their
| |
| failings historically, when, in Herbart's view, "the deficiencies of previous
| |
| speculative knowledge largely bore the guilt. (362)</p>
| |
|
| |
| <p>6Herbert
| |
| and Schwarz disagreed over the function of educational history within the study
| |
| of education. Both recognized that to make education a practical endeavor, one
| |
| could never reduce it to a closed, internally consistent, abstract system. Both
| |
| recognized the importance of seeking some kind of coherence in the complicated
| |
| texture of educational experience. Herbart suggested, however that they
| |
| disagreed over the intellectual source of that coherence. "Pedagogy is a
| |
| practical science in which it is important that one recognize the continuity of
| |
| its development so that no unnecessary mistrust of it works against it. For
| |
| pedagogy, however, there is a different continuity that is still more important
| |
| for it than any historical continuity, namely, the psychological. (371) Herbart
| |
| welcomed a useful history of education, but he criticized Schwarz's for
| |
| excessive detail and scope, which would divert the attention of the practical
| |
| educator from more important matters, and he suggested that Schwarz failed to
| |
| make his history as practically useful as it might have been had he been more
| |
| active in turning past practice into exempla of psychologically sound and
| |
| unsound procedures. For Schwarz, education was a human activity that unfolded in
| |
| history and had ultimately to be understood through history, without reference
| |
| to supra-historical constructs valid for all times and places; for Herbart, in
| |
| contrast, ethics and psychology, properly pursued by speculative reason, could
| |
| yield a supra-historical pedagogical knowledge, which then could be applied to
| |
| history to demonstrate its relevance and value for the present.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <p>6Herbart's
| |
| criticisms would have marked effects on German students of education and
| |
| educational history, but they did not take hold immediately. The next major
| |
| figure in the development of historical pedagogy was Friedrich Cramer
| |
| (1802-1859), who in 1832 published the first volume of his <i>Geschichte der
| |
| Erziehung and des Unterrichts im Alterthume</i>, devoted to educational
| |
| practice, and who followed it in 1838 with a second volume on educational theory
| |
| in antiquity. One sees in this work, as well as in Cramer's ensuing book on the
| |
| <i>Geschichte der Erziehung and des Unterrichts in den Niederlanden während des
| |
| Mittelalters</i> (1843), the start of greater specialization in the treatment of
| |
| the subject. From 1830 to his death, Cramer devoted himself to educational and
| |
| cultural activity in the Prussian coastal city of Straslund, where he directed
| |
| the gymnasium. Through his work, Cramer remained true to Schwarz's aim to
| |
| develop good educational theory and practice through inquiry into the history of
| |
| education. "The history of education is a requisite of education, and as there
| |
| is no true and complete philosophy without the history of philosophy, and
| |
| generally no science without the history of it, in the same way there is no true
| |
| educational theory without a basic examination of the history of education. . .
| |
| . (xxv) Cramer had prepared well for this work. His father was a teacher, and
| |
| by the age of fourteen, the son decided on an educational career. Musically
| |
| talented, he supported his studies at the University of Berlin by teaching
| |
| music. At the university, he studied with many of the leading figures,
| |
| Schleiermacher, Ranke, Alexander von Humboldt, the philologists, Boeckh and
| |
| Lachmann, and many others. Perhaps most influential of these was August Boeckh,
| |
| to whom Cramer dedicated his study of ancient education, and the full mastery of
| |
| the classical corpus displayed in that work demonstrates that indeed Cramer's
| |
| philological training had been excellent.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <p>6Cramer's
| |
| historical pedagogy, informed by a firm commitment to education and based on a
| |
| solid competence in philology and history, indicated one path that the whole
| |
| effort would follow, namely that of a painstaking effort to inform practice
| |
| through historical inquiry and reflection. Soon, however, another figure began
| |
| to publish a history of education, one that indicated a very different path of
| |
| development. He was Karl von Raumer (1783-1865) whose extensive, somewhat
| |
| disjointed <i>Geschichte der Pädagogik vom Wiederaufblühen klassischer Studien
| |
| bis auf unsere Zeit</i> began to appear in 1843. Raumer was the younger brother
| |
| of the great member of the Berlin "historical school," Friedrich von Raumer.
| |
| Both were many-sided men, but Friedrich seemed to achieve a unity of his
| |
| qualities that Karl never did. Karl von Raumer set out to study law, but passed
| |
| from that into a somewhat haphazard study of geology. While completing his
| |
| geological studies he became enthused with education on reading Pestalozzi and
| |
| Fichte, and spent some months in 1810 at Iferton acquainting himself with
| |
| Pestalozzian methods. Between 1811 and 1823, he published quite a bit in the
| |
| field of geology and taught mineralogy at Breslau and Halle. One would expect
| |
| from his commitment to geology that his views would have been secular, but
| |
| throughout his life a strong Lutheran, Augustinian commitment dominated his
| |
| outlook. In 1823, his superiors suspected him of harboring democratic political
| |
| views and made his professorial position difficult. He resigned to work in a
| |
| school in Nuremberg with a strongly religious curriculum, so strongly religious
| |
| that it progressively lost pupils, having to close in 1826. In 1827, through the
| |
| intercession of friends, he received a call to be professor of mineralogy at the
| |
| University of Erlangen, where he remained for the rest of his career. There, in
| |
| addition to his history of education, he wrote a textbook on geography, edited
| |
| Augustine's <i>Confessions</i>, and published several collections of hymns.
| |
| Ultimately, his religiosity was primary: "what he called for," one writer
| |
| observed, was "simple education on the basis of the Bible and the catechism
| |
| according to paternal, evangelistic mores. (679)</p>
| |
|
| |
| <p>6Raumer's
| |
| <i>Geschichte der Pädagogik</i> was a substantial work, but one that shows the
| |
| markings of an amateur historian. It filled certain needs that were beginning to
| |
| be felt, however. For one, the coverage in it answered the criticism Herbart had
| |
| mounted against Schwarz, for Raumer wasted no time with the crusty middle ages
| |
| or the ancients. In the first two volumes, Raumer covered the educational
| |
| history from the renaissance through Pestalozzi, emphasizing education in the
| |
| German areas, through "a sequence of biographies" of varying length according to
| |
| his sense of the importance of each leading figure. In this way, he sought to
| |
| personify the historical development of the <i>"Bildungsideale . . .</i> through
| |
| which a people, in the sequence of their developmental epochs, are ruled," and
| |
| at the same time, he aimed to show how, in each epoch, the mature strove to
| |
| realize the formative ideal in the young. In the third volume, Raumer dealt with
| |
| the pedagogy of the recent past in Germany under four headings: 1) Family,
| |
| School, Church, 2) Instruction, 3) Schools of Science and Art, and 4) the
| |
| Education of Girls. At the end of the section on Instruction, he inserted what
| |
| had been a short, separate book, with its own Foreword, on <i>Instruction in
| |
| German</i>, and a long set of aphorisms on the teaching of history. The final
| |
| volume, which appeared in 1854, was an incomplete but informative study of
| |
| German universities, highly autobiographical in parts.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <p>6Through
| |
| Raumer's <i>History of Pedagogy</i>, one senses an urge to achieve encyclopedic
| |
| fullness. The first two volumes read as a collection of separate essays. Great
| |
| men lurch upon the stage, each in his individuality, and the coherence of the
| |
| whole story derived, not from Raumer's capacity to explain the interconnections,
| |
| but from the consistent pattern of evaluation that he applied to each figure
| |
| with whom he dealt. Raumer wrote, in effect, a series of biographical
| |
| encyclopedia articles, and so too the third volume comprised a series of
| |
| substantial articles on different aspects of recent practice. The incipient
| |
| encyclopedism in Raumer's work connected to another, even more important,
| |
| quality, a changed sense of the use of history. To Raumer, history was not an
| |
| arena of inquiry to which scholars seeking better answers to open questions
| |
| turned. Raumer had a definite set of convictions, which he derived not from his
| |
| study of history, but which he brought as an external framework to his study of
| |
| history.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <p>6Raumer
| |
| forewarned his readers: "free from love and hate, I am not, nor will I be; I
| |
| will by the best knowledge and scruple hate evil and adhere to the good, just as
| |
| I neither call the sweet sour nor the sour sweet. (I, vii) Raumer may well have
| |
| been addressing these remarks to his brother as a self-conscious apology for his
| |
| own departure from the canons of the historical school, for he introduced his
| |
| avowal of love and hate by recognizing that historians normally pursue an
| |
| "objective presentation," although he would not. The history of education in
| |
| Raumer's hands became a great morality play, illustrative of what he sincerely
| |
| believed to be pedagogically right and pedagogically wrong. If a reader did not
| |
| share Raumer's premises, that was the reader's problem "from a church historian
| |
| who expresses his puritanical convictions dogmatically, no sensible reader
| |
| expects a nonpartisan evaluation of the Middle Ages. If the reader shared
| |
| Raumer's premises, he would find the work to be of practical value. "When in
| |
| this history the ideals and methods of diverse pedagogues are described,
| |
| readers, particularly practical schoolmen, will be forced to compare their own
| |
| opinions and procedures to them. When these coincide with those of a reader, he
| |
| will be gratified and have a feeling of satisfaction; when these diverge, he
| |
| will be moved to examine both his own and the others, with the result, either
| |
| that he will preserve his own with even more conviction or that he will change
| |
| them. I gladly confess that it is, above all, a <i>practical</i> end, as I here
| |
| describe it, that has driven me to this work and guided me in performing it.
| |
| (Ibid.)</p>
| |
|
| |
| <p>7A subtle
| |
| shift in the purpose of educational history had occurred with Raumer's work.
| |
| Knowledge of the past rather than inquiry into the past had become the prime
| |
| desideratum. There was, his account suggested, a practical value in acquiring
| |
| this knowledge of the past, for it would strengthen the convictions of
| |
| present-day educators, whether or not they agreed with past practices and ideas.
| |
| This was essentially the view of educational history Herbart had formed. He
| |
| thought knowledge about the educational past was useful, especially knowledge
| |
| about the relevant past. Herbart did not want history, however, to become a
| |
| source of knowledge about proper educational practice; this knowledge was to
| |
| come from ethics and psychology. In the Herbartian view, the history of
| |
| education could have practical worth when used precisely in the way Raumer
| |
| suggested, when past practice was presented to the present educator in such a
| |
| way that he could bring a general pedagogy, derived from ethics and psychology,
| |
| to bear, analyzing what was right and wrong in past practice, thus strengthening
| |
| his mastery of educational science. Pedagogically, Raumer was not a Herbartian,
| |
| but his assemblage of knowledge about pedagogy since the renaissance lent itself
| |
| very well to Herbartian uses, and as a result, the Herbartian movement of the
| |
| nineteenth century was able to incorporate the history of education into its
| |
| pedagogical system.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <p>7For forty
| |
| years following Raumer's <i>Geschichte der Pädagogik</i>, no history of
| |
| education appeared in which there was a powerful effort to develop an
| |
| understanding of educational purpose and practice from a careful, reflective
| |
| study of the past. Instead, many educational historians busily worked building
| |
| up information about the educational past. Various groups and individuals wrote
| |
| textbooks; they published source collections; and they conducted diverse
| |
| specialized studies. All this activity followed naturally from Raumer's
| |
| encyclopedic tendencies and it fit well with the Herbartian idea that the
| |
| history of education should serve as an instructional aid for systematic
| |
| pedagogy, illustrating sound and unsound developments for prospective educators.
| |
| Late in the century, K. A. Schmid directed a mammoth synthesis bringing all
| |
| these diverse contributions together into the <i>Geschichte der Erziehung vom
| |
| Anfang an bis auf unsere</i> Zeit. With this work, the encyclopedic culmination
| |
| of the early German history of education was unmistakable, for Schmid's
| |
| <i>Geschichte</i> really presented in chronological format, materials that
| |
| Schmid was simultaneously developing for the ten-volume <i>Encyklopädie des
| |
| gesammten Erziehungs- und Unterrichtswesens</i>, which he published at the same
| |
| time. Both parts of the enterprise, the <i>Geschichte</i> and the
| |
| <i>Encyklopédie</i> reflected the conviction that what practical educators
| |
| needed was not disinterested inquiry into the nature and effects of education in
| |
| historical experience, but access to practical knowledge about the conduct of
| |
| education. The <i>Geschichte</i> gave a vast range of information with little
| |
| effort by the historians to make pedagogical sense of it all: that was the work
| |
| of systematic pedagogy, not historical pedagogy.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <p>7Late in
| |
| the century, Wilhelm Rein gave a clear, pointed statement of the relation of
| |
| historical and systematic pedagogy. Rein was the last of the great Herbartians,
| |
| systematizer of the tradition of systematic pedagogy, editor of the
| |
| <i>Encyklopädisches Handbuch der Pädagogik</i> and author of a three-volume
| |
| <i>Pädagogik in systematischer Darstellung</i>. These authoritative works were
| |
| the fulfillment of nineteenth-century German educational science and had great
| |
| influence over those initiating educational scholarship in the United States and
| |
| England. Consequently, although Rein was not an historian of education, his
| |
| treatment of it became the program for educational history imported into the
| |
| United States and England. In both his book and his plan for the encyclopedic
| |
| handbook, Rein divided pedagogy into two parts, the systematic and the
| |
| historical. The table displaying his conception is rather comical: he organized
| |
| all positive knowledge pertinent to education under the heading of systematic
| |
| pedagogy; Rein left historical pedagogy, a division nominally equivalent to
| |
| systematic pedagogy, completely empty, for he held that however informative it
| |
| might be, it yielded no positive knowledge about education. History was purely
| |
| illustrative of knowledge achieved through other means. In explaining this
| |
| conception in the <i>Pädagogik</i>, Rein quoted Schwarz without citation "it is
| |
| still a widely voiced opinion that we must first see what has up to now happened
| |
| and how we have been brought to our own education before we can know what we
| |
| have to do in order to form and educate our children well. . . . We hold this
| |
| sequence to be false. (i, 100)</p>
| |
|
| |
| <p>7For Rein,
| |
| exactly the opposite was true. To write history well, the historian had to
| |
| master systematic, scientific pedagogy first, before looking at the past, for
| |
| only then could the historian judge rightly what he found in the past, for only
| |
| then would the historian have the knowledge requisite to discriminate soundly
| |
| between what was right and wrong in past practice. "One must first have
| |
| acquired through speculation and experience a solid, all-around theory before
| |
| the history of previous efforts can be studied with success. Without such a
| |
| theory grounded in the systematic study of education and a rigorous ethics and
| |
| psychology, the student will lack "the standard with which to judge previous
| |
| efforts. Without an external grounding in systematic pedagogy, the complexity
| |
| of educational history will discourage the student, who will fall into an
| |
| "unprincipled eclecticism. It is different for those who seek to create for
| |
| themselves an entirely grounded standpoint through ethics and psychology "for
| |
| them, history will really be able to be a veracious teacher. (i, 100-1) One
| |
| could not imagine a much more authoritative rational for the characteristic
| |
| weaknesses in the early history of education written in English, both their
| |
| historical weaknesses and their educational weaknesses.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <h3>IV—Further Material</h3>
| |
|
| |
| <blockquote>[The following material will be expanded into section "4
| |
| -- Inspiration for an Oppressive Pedagogy," and some of it into the germ of
| |
| section 5, for which 1 do not yet have a title, perhaps "the foundation of
| |
| <i>geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik</i>"]</blockquote>
| |
|
| |
| <p>7In England
| |
| and the United States, the history of education began to develop in the middle
| |
| of the nineteenth century. This was the time of Raumer's ascendancy in German
| |
| educational history and his work provided the inspiration and raw materials for
| |
| the first histories of education in English, particularly in the first wave of
| |
| work in educational history, occurring in the 1850's and 1860's. Thus in 1868,
| |
| Robert Herbert Quick remarked in the first edition of his <i>Essays on
| |
| Educational Reformers</i>: "'Good books are in German,' says Professor Seely. I
| |
| have found that on the history of education, not only good books, but all books
| |
| are in German or some other foreign language." The book that Quick averred to
| |
| be the best, and in this his judgment was shared by his American colleague,
| |
| Henry Barnard, who had been encouraging interest in the history of education
| |
| through his American Journal of Education, was, of course, Raumer's
| |
| <i>Geschichte der Pädagogik</i>.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <p>7Like
| |
| Raumer, Barnard and Quick attributed practical value to educational history.
| |
| They were key participants in the effort to extend schooling, to improve its
| |
| quality, to professionalize teaching. From roughly 1840 on, the reform of
| |
| schools was one of the great causes moving people in Europe and America, and the
| |
| professionalization of teachers was one of the major means through which
| |
| reformers proposed to improve the schools. To professionalize teachers, they
| |
| needed formal training in their craft, one major component of which became the
| |
| history of education. Texts for teachers on the subject became a common staple.
| |
| Several appeared in German in the 1850's and more followed, their titles
| |
| specifying, "for pupils in the teachers' seminars," "for clergymen and teachers
| |
| of both confessions," "for German common school teachers," "for student-teachers
| |
| in the higher teaching institutions." Barnard and Quick, along with many others,
| |
| believed the history of education could serve as a useful tool in the
| |
| preparation of teachers and educators. In 1859, Barnard wrote the Introduction
| |
| to a <i>History and Progress of Education from the Earliest Times to the
| |
| Present</i>, a text much like those in German, "a manual for teachers and
| |
| students. It was important, Barnard suggested, that educators learn something
| |
| of the history of their craft so that they do not continually repeat errors and
| |
| reinvent sound practices. Quick had almost exactly the same rationale in mind in
| |
| writing his <i>Essays</i>. "Practical men in education, as in most other things,
| |
| may derive benefit from the knowledge of what has already been said and done by
| |
| the leading men engaged in it, both past and present. (Quick, xiv) Barnard and
| |
| Quick developed the history of education in English to perform practical
| |
| functions for the nascent educating profession. Their histories became part of
| |
| the stock of professional resources, taught to teachers and popularized to the
| |
| public. The type of educational history Raumer had developed and Schmid had
| |
| brought to fulfillment exactly suited this purpose. The aim was to build up a
| |
| broad repertoire of information about past practices and ideas and to put it in
| |
| a form that would illustrate good practices, enabling teachers and educators to
| |
| absorb essential norms of their profession. </p>
| |
|
| |
| <p>7A second
| |
| wave of contributions to the history of education in English started in the
| |
| 1880's and continued until the onset of World War I. The authors of these
| |
| histories had purposes similar to those of Barnard and Quick, and their agenda
| |
| for the history of educational thought was entirely consistent with that set
| |
| down by Schmid and Rein. Through this second wave, an extensive set of
| |
| historical materials for use in the preparation of teachers appeared in English.
| |
| From the mid 1880's on, year by year scholars published numerous texts,
| |
| translations, selections from great thinkers on education, and studies of
| |
| particular periods and institutions. True, there was nothing like K. A. Schmid's
| |
| comprehensive, detailed <i>Geschichte der Erziehung</i>, unless one counts as
| |
| such the vast, varied, mish-mash of historical materials Henry Barnard had put
| |
| out in mid century. Nevertheless, by 1902 there were at least a dozen general
| |
| texts on the history of education or the development of educational thought. In
| |
| addition a passel of books on particular periods were available, diminutive
| |
| little books like George Clark's <i>Education of Children at Rome</i> and thick
| |
| detailed books like Augusta T. Drane's <i>Christian Schools and Scholars</i>.
| |
| Most important for the history of educational thought was the endless stream of
| |
| books devoted to individuals and groups renowned for their educational theories.
| |
| By 1902, students would find available books on the educational writings and
| |
| work of a considerable range of figures, among them Alcuin, Aristotle, Richard
| |
| Busby, Comenius, Descartes, Erasmus, Fénelon, Froebel, Hartlib, Herbart, Loyola
| |
| and the Jesuits, Luther, Melanchthon, Milton, Montaigne, Mulcaster, Pestalozzi,
| |
| Plato, Rousseau, and Vittorino da Feltre.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <p>7A few of
| |
| these were of high quality, a good instance being <i>Philip Melanchthon, the
| |
| Protestant Preceptor of Germany, 1497-1560</i> by James William Richard.
| |
| Although introductory in style, this book was thoroughly researched, and
| |
| although appearing in a series called "Heroes of the Reformation," it was
| |
| objective in presentation, crafted to inform curiosity, not to convert opinion.
| |
| More typical of the whole lot was F. V. N. Painter's <i>Luther on Education</i>.
| |
| This was a partisan tract, partisan for Luther and partisan for state supported
| |
| popular education. Luther's letter to the mayors and aldermen of the cities of
| |
| Germany on behalf of Christian Schools, Painter held, "must be regarded the most
| |
| important educational treatise ever written. (iii) As part of the "historical"
| |
| background needed to comprehend Luther on education, Painter included a chapter
| |
| on the Papacy and popular education, which dealt almost entirely with late
| |
| nineteenth-century matters. It concluded: "1. we should carefully observe the
| |
| insidious movements of the Papacy; 2. recognizing the separation of Church and
| |
| State . . . , we should nowhere tolerate sectarian legislation; 3. maintaining
| |
| the right of the State to educate its citizens, we should forbid the
| |
| appropriation of any public funds to sectarian schools; 4. all public school
| |
| offices should be filled with recognized friends of popular education. . . .
| |
| (51) And twenty-three pages later, we learn of course who these recognized
| |
| friends of popular education were: "in principle and in fact Protestantism is
| |
| the mother of popular education and the friend of culture. (74)</p>
| |
|
| |
| <p>7Painter's
| |
| strong sectarian bias was slightly atypical, although not as much as one might
| |
| think. Raumer's history, perhaps more subtly, nevertheless rested as fully on a
| |
| Lutheran faith, as did Painter's. Raumer had closed his third volume with a
| |
| credo, an elevated statement of a Lutheran pedagogy. "Christ spoke: be perfected
| |
| as your father in heaven is perfected. Thus he put before us the highest model
| |
| and reminded us of the lost paradise where man's still unfallen image remained.
| |
| (III, 443) The difference between Raumer and Painter was simply in the
| |
| opposition they chose; what the Papacy was for the latter, Rousseau was for the
| |
| former, the insidious exponent of Pelagian pedagogy. "Already the comparison of
| |
| the two [Christ and Rousseau] can convince anyone that the division of pedagogy
| |
| into Pelagian and antipelagian is fundamental and of the greatest practical
| |
| significance."(III, 442) If a bit distinct in its sectarian bias, the structure
| |
| and intellectual standards in Painter's book certainly typified numerous
| |
| contributions to the history of educational thought in English. It included
| |
| several introductory chapters, which superficially set the scene for
| |
| translations of two of Luther's short texts on education. We might best
| |
| characterize the work as a "terminal introduction," written on the assumption
| |
| that the reader could profit from knowing something about the subject, but
| |
| making no effort to raise problems for further inquiry or to orient the reader
| |
| in the sources or literature that might sustain further inquiry.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <p>7Early
| |
| studies in English in the history of educational thought convey the overwhelming
| |
| impression that the whole field was a terminal introduction for prospective
| |
| teachers and pedagogical practitioners. Numerous studies and
| |
| translations—Oliphant's <i>Mulcaster</i>, Lupton's <i>Fénelon</i>, Holman's
| |
| <i>Pestalozzi</i>, Mackenzie's <i>Hegel</i>, Compayré's <i>Spencer</i>, Jolly's
| |
| <i>Ruskin</i>, and Crosby's <i>Tolstoy</i class="par1 sl">—appeared with
| |
| virtually no critical apparatus. The better works, often those in Nicholas
| |
| Murray Butler's series, "The Great Educators," or in William Torrey Harris',
| |
| "International Education Series," or in Edward Franklin Buchner's "Lippincott
| |
| Educational Series," were nevertheless introductions for use in courses in
| |
| teacher training. Most of these would convey to the reader that there was a body
| |
| of thought about the man in question, but give no real access to it. The
| |
| treatment was superficial; it would make a figure's accomplishments relevant to
| |
| contemporary education paramount while glossing over the difficulties of setting
| |
| the figure's work in the context of his time. Such studies generally segmented a
| |
| person's pedagogical ideas and activities from the rest of his or her life and
| |
| work and concentrated on those elements that one could specifically present as
| |
| educational. So simplified and capsulized, diverse historical figures became
| |
| predictable and homogeneous, all illustrating variations on the set ideas that
| |
| reformers believed were useful to teachers and a supportive public --
| |
| informative, broadening, inspiring.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <p>8In its
| |
| early stages, the history of education, particularly the history of educational
| |
| thought, consisted almost exclusively of efforts at popularization. The field
| |
| did not exist as a field of disciplined inquiry. There were no clearly defined
| |
| problems or research questions in it. Historians of educational thought wrote
| |
| numerous justifications of it as part of the teacher-training curriculum; none
| |
| that I have been able to find discussed a research agenda for its practitioners.
| |
| In early discussions of the history of education, writers would sometimes
| |
| complain about the poor quality of texts and studies in the field, but such
| |
| complaints made clear that the standard of quality was the suitability of the
| |
| texts and studies as teaching instruments in history of education courses.
| |
| Justifications of the field dealt with it as an area of inquiry only in passing.
| |
| The field had value in training professional educators; that was its reason for
| |
| being. "To the teacher the study of the history of education brings three
| |
| valuable results. It widens his professional horizon and makes him feel the
| |
| dignity of his calling. It gives him true pedagogic perspective and enables him
| |
| to estimate accurately the value of courses of study and methods of teaching. It
| |
| inspires him, for the great teachers with whom it makes him acquainted were
| |
| sacrificial high priests who mediated to the world its higher life, and they
| |
| themselves were sacrifices. ("E. L. Kemp. History of Education, vi-vii)</p>
| |
|
| |
| <p>8Since
| |
| authors were pursuing no real research questions, they produced work that gave
| |
| very spotty coverage of the relevant past. Quirks of interest and fashion
| |
| determined the patterns of coverage, and the tendency to concentrate on single
| |
| figures in relative isolation from their intellectual and educational context
| |
| created an impression that educational thought developed by a type of
| |
| spontaneous generation from a series of unrelated reformers and thinkers.
| |
| Multiple studies, none of which stood out as truly distinguished, surveyed the
| |
| educational work of Herbart, Pestalozzi, and Comenius. Other figures like Hegel
| |
| and Kant were occasional subjects of studies. Edward Franklin Buchner's The
| |
| <i>Educational Theory of Immanuel Kant</i> gives a good sense of the strengths
| |
| and weaknesses of this literature. The book comprises close to a hundred pages
| |
| of introductory material, a translation of <i>Über Pädagogik</i>, and
| |
| translations of selected fragments from Kant's corpus dealing with education.
| |
| Buchner's introductory material gives an adequate orientation, a brief survey of
| |
| Kant's life and work, the textual history of <i>Über Pädagogik</i>, a very brief
| |
| discussion of some of the sources Kant drew on in forming his educational
| |
| theory, capsule discussions of Kant's philosophical outlook, his psychological
| |
| ideas, his concept of development, followed by a summary and then a critique of
| |
| his theory of education, concluding with a four-page bibliography.(Buchner 1904)
| |
| The book, like many others of the genre, had a basic weakness: it would give a
| |
| reader a good sense of what Kant said about education, but a very uncertain
| |
| comprehension of Kant's significance for education. Neither the discussion of
| |
| Kant in relation to his predecessors nor of Kant in relation to later
| |
| developments in educational thought is adequate. The few paragraphs devoted to
| |
| Rousseau and Kant deal entirely with superficial similarities and differences
| |
| between their pedagogical prescriptions; they did not reflect a close reading of
| |
| Rousseau or a sense of the possible basis for the close intellectual sympathy
| |
| Kant felt for Rousseau. In the same way, in the annotations Buchner made to
| |
| Kant's texts, he pointed out similarities and differences between Kant's
| |
| positions and those of later German educational writers, but there was no
| |
| serious attempt to uncover, define, and explain Kant's impact.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <p>8Buchner's
| |
| work condescended towards both the reader and its subject in a way typical of
| |
| the entire early literature in the history of educational thought. Every field
| |
| needs an exoteric corpus, which scholars write by leaving aside certain
| |
| complexities, but no healthy field of study can consist in only an exoteric
| |
| corpus. Such a situation can come about only when scholars assume that their
| |
| audience cannot take too much, and that the subject of the field, in the end,
| |
| really does not merit a thorough probing <i>au fond</i>. The impetus towards
| |
| writing educational history in the late nineteenth century came from the desire
| |
| to build effective national school systems staffed by professionals. Leaders of
| |
| this effort saw themselves culminating a long tradition of educational
| |
| aspiration; they were at the historical summit. From this perspective,
| |
| everything was essentially a problem of mobilization; they needed to mobilize
| |
| resources, to mobilize teachers, to mobilize the public too, and even to
| |
| mobilize the educational past. How could the past serve their purposes? If the
| |
| pedagogical present was the summit, the pedagogical past was at best a
| |
| preparation, and they dealt with it as such. The history of educational thought
| |
| should inform, caution, and inspire; it should serve the work at hand and when
| |
| the historical repertoire was suited to this task, it would essentially be
| |
| complete. As long as educational history served present needs effectively, what
| |
| they ignored or misinterpreted in it seemed to matter little. An educational
| |
| history that went too deep, that asked too many questions, that provoked too
| |
| many reflections, doubts, and unexpected initiatives would not serve well the
| |
| basic task of mobilization. Informed, cautioned, inspired teachers were wanted;
| |
| reflective, critical, independent teachers might be too much to absorb into the
| |
| overriding task of mobilizing effective educational organizations.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <p>8Ellwood
| |
| Patterson Cubberley's very ambitious <i>Syllabus of Lectures on the History of
| |
| Education</i> indicated well how the field as a subject of instruction for
| |
| prospective teachers and educators completely preoccupied early historians of
| |
| education. Cubberley sought to mobilize an informative body of knowledge without
| |
| going too deep into the matter. Through the <i>Syllabus</i>, Cubberley made an
| |
| extraordinary effort to assemble the field, largely leaving out the history of
| |
| American education. The work comprised forty outlines, forty-two in the revised
| |
| version of 1904, which were extremely detailed and comprehensive, but dry and
| |
| unreflective. The lecture outlines organized a vast amount of information, but
| |
| posed no questions. For instance, the outline on Rousseau stuck just to the
| |
| facts—one page sketching his life, half a page on his times, two pages on
| |
| <i>Émile</i>, and a half a page on his influence. None of it gave any indication
| |
| that Rousseau presented readers with challenging problems of
| |
| interpretation.(Cubberley 1904)</p>
| |
|
| |
| <p>8Each
| |
| outline incorporated bibliographies, the most valuable part of Cubberley's
| |
| <i>Syllabus</i>. These cited hundreds of different titles, often with
| |
| considerable precision and discrimination according to the topic at hand. In the
| |
| second edition, Cubberley added critical commentaries to these bibliographies,
| |
| and in them what he had to say about the books always concerned their
| |
| usefulness, or lack of such, for the study and teaching of the subject at hand.
| |
| Most of the literature on educational history as it was then available in
| |
| English, French, and German was there at hand, and what an opportunity Cubberley
| |
| missed! With almost the entire repertoire of the field assembled coherently, he
| |
| had nothing to say about what needs and opportunities there were in it for
| |
| further research and writing. He was uninterested, strikingly uninterested, in
| |
| conflicts between authorities, concerned instead to identify the resources that
| |
| would best give the student the proper and seemly information about professional
| |
| practice. Again, from the section on Rousseau: "of the sources, the translation
| |
| of the <i>Émile</i> by Payne is the standard translation. . . . The abridged
| |
| edition, translated by Eleanor Worthington . . . will probably answer the needs
| |
| of the general student better than the complete [<i>sic</i>] edition. The
| |
| <i>Confessions</i>, a study in mental pathology, while a valuable side-light . .
| |
| . , are of little value to the average student and may be passed by with
| |
| advantage. Davidson gives as much on Rousseau's life as the student will ever
| |
| need. (Cubberley 1904) Such comments indicate that Cubberley did not care about
| |
| the history of education as an area of inquiry. Instead, its purpose was to
| |
| broaden teachers' minds, to caution them against past mistakes, to inspire them
| |
| to professional pride. He did not need to think about opportunities for needed
| |
| research because the existing works in the field were quite adequate for his
| |
| purposes. The task was to organize them for presentation through an efficient
| |
| course of instruction. Hence, the <i>Syllabus</i>. The closest he came there to
| |
| suggesting new scholarship in the history of education was to call, to this day
| |
| unanswered, for the translation into English of <i>La réforme de l'éducation en
| |
| Allemagne en dix-huitième siècle</i> by Auguste Pinloche.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <p>8
| |
| Cubberley's characteristic lack of any driving historical curiosity in seeking
| |
| to mobilize an informative history of education shows up in certain perplexing
| |
| omissions in the <i>Syllabus</i>, omissions that the whole field as written in
| |
| English has shared and perpetuated. For instance, in K. A. Schmid's
| |
| comprehensive <i>Geschichte der Erziehung</i>, Friedrich Schleiermacher's
| |
| educational thought and work was covered in 118 pages, and only Pestalozzi,
| |
| dealt with in 133, and Herbart, in 129, received more extensive
| |
| treatment.(Schmid 1884-1902) In Rein's <i>Encyklopädisches Handbuch der
| |
| Pädagogik</i>, the entry on Schleiermacher was one of the longest allotted to a
| |
| single person.(Rein 1895-1899) In currently standard German histories of
| |
| education and pedagogy, the coverage of Schleiermacher is always among the most
| |
| substantial, and there are extensive editions of his pedagogical writings and
| |
| numerous studies of his educational thought. Cubberley did not mention
| |
| Schleiermacher, and there has been virtually no mention of Schleiermacher in any
| |
| of the literature on the history of educational thought in English. Monroe's
| |
| <i>Cyclopedia of Education</i> allotted a bit over one column to him(Monroe
| |
| 1968), and in R. Freeman Butts's <i>Cultural History of Western Education</i>,
| |
| Schleiermacher is mentioned once in passing(Butts 1947). A brief paragraph in
| |
| The <i>Educational Theories of Herbart and Froebel</i> by John Angus MacVannel
| |
| deals with Schleiermacher(MacVannel 1905), and that is about it on
| |
| Schleiermacher's educational thought in English. <i>Dissertation Abstracts</i>
| |
| lists no dissertation on Schleiermacher in the field of education from 1861
| |
| through 1977. There are no books in English on his educational thought; no
| |
| articles that I have been able to locate; no discussions, however brief, in any
| |
| of the texts on educational philosophy, educational thought, or the history of
| |
| Western education. A field animated by a driving sense of curiosity, in which
| |
| genuine into its subject controlled the patterns of work, would not so
| |
| completely miss a figure of Schleiermacher's stature.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <p>8Further,
| |
| Schleiermacher was not the only omission, and a close look at Cubberley's
| |
| bibliographies, however, shows that his command of the literature was not as
| |
| good as it might have appeared at first. Not considering his bibliographies of
| |
| minor authorities, sources, and general works, concentrating instead on the
| |
| major secondary authorities pertinent specifically to the educational matters
| |
| covered in the <i>Syllabus</i>, he cited almost as many books in German as in
| |
| English. Thus, he appeared fully in command of German pedagogical scholarship.
| |
| Yet, within the outlines themselves, the coverage of German educational thought
| |
| slighted significant developments and the scholarship cited reveals important
| |
| oversights. Within the outlines, Cubberley gave Frederick August Wolf, Wilhelm
| |
| von Humboldt, Fichte relatively brief coverage; he mentioned Klopstock, Wieland,
| |
| Lessing, Herder, Goethe, and Schiller mentioned only in passing; most
| |
| importantly, he entirely omitted Richter and Schleiermacher. In brief, the
| |
| educational thought of <i>Neuhumanismus</i> received short shrift. Furthermore,
| |
| Cubberley did not cite certain important German essays and books that, in the
| |
| late nineteenth-century, were deepening and broadening educational history by
| |
| resuscitating the idea of historical pedagogy.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <p>8Here was
| |
| an important juncture. At the time that American educational scholars
| |
| uncritically imported the German scholarship of the mid to late nineteenth
| |
| century, German historians of education adopted a far more ambitious agenda for
| |
| their work. It is possible here to give only a most general picture of what
| |
| happened in German educational scholarship, but that general picture is of great
| |
| importance. In the late nineteenth century, scholars posed a basic question, and
| |
| with it, they adumbrated a pedagogical alternative, with yet uncertain results.
| |
| The question in its simplest form was <i>what educates</i>? Following
| |
| immediately any answer to this question, be it tacit or explicit, was another
| |
| question <i>in view of what educates, what knowledge will enable educators to
| |
| set and achieve worthwhile pedagogical goals</i>? The neo-Herbartian agenda
| |
| assumed a largely tacit answer to the first question: what educated were the
| |
| intentional efforts of parents, teachers, and institutions to impart learning
| |
| and virtue to the young. With this answer, the answer to the second question
| |
| followed along lines of systematic pedagogy so clearly laid out by Rein: in
| |
| imparting learning and virtue to the young, an ethics prescribing pedagogical
| |
| ends and a psychology providing effective means was the knowledge that would
| |
| enable parents, teachers, and institutions make their instructional practice
| |
| effective in achieving worthwhile goals.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <p>8Critical
| |
| historians perceived a serious weakness in these answers to the basic questions,
| |
| however. Real human experience was full of ironies; intentions were not
| |
| tantamount to results; what educates was not simply the intentional efforts of
| |
| parents, teachers, and institutions to impart qualities to the young, but rather
| |
| the historic actualities of those efforts and all that was pertinent to them.
| |
| Thus, a simple, confident answer to the first question was not possible, some
| |
| held, for in many cases, the results of intentional efforts to impart things to
| |
| the young went far beyond what people had intended or sought and in other cases,
| |
| they fell far short. In this view, what educates was continuously problematic,
| |
| and any answer to the second question, how best to deploy that which educates,
| |
| was at best tentative, uncertain, conditioned by the infinite complexities of
| |
| historic experience. Hence, to find what educates and to understand how it
| |
| educates, one needed to turn, not to psychology and ethics, but to history, to
| |
| reflect on the sum of human experience with educative effort. With this
| |
| conviction, a number of significant educational thinkers departed from the
| |
| dominant, neo-Herbartian view of education, and through their work, a remarkable
| |
| resurgence of historical pedagogy, of <i>Geisteswissenschaftlich Pädagogik</i>,
| |
| occurred, which has been the most vital, productive side of educational inquiry
| |
| in German during the twentieth century.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <p>8In order
| |
| to understand the strength of this departure from the Herbartian program for
| |
| pedagogy, we need to recognize that Herbart's program, itself, had been a
| |
| departure from the main educational concerns of <i>Neuhumanismus</i>, as well as
| |
| from the predominant educational concerns of Western humanism as a whole, for
| |
| that matter. Education involves a learner, some form of teacher, and some form
| |
| of cultural content. The Herbartian program stressed ethics in order to
| |
| legitimate the ends pursued by the teacher, and most of all psychology in order
| |
| to sophisticate the means used to impart things to the learner. Relatively
| |
| little attention was paid in it to the cultural content. Herbart departed from,
| |
| or at least the Herbartian program as it developed from his work departed from
| |
| the deep, widespread concern for the educative value of cultural content
| |
| characteristic of <i>Neuhumanismus</i> and the German classics.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <p>9During the
| |
| late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, diverse German writers and
| |
| thinkers had been preoccupied with how human character and intellect forms
| |
| itself through involvement with different cultural activities and works.
| |
| Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Schelling, Fichte, Hegel, the von Humboldts,
| |
| Richter, and numerous others made this one of the great eras of educational
| |
| reflection. We can perhaps best sum up their concern economically by quoting a
| |
| line from Walter Kaufmann: "Plato's central importance for a humanistic
| |
| education—and 'humanistic education' is really tautological—is due to the fact
| |
| that a prolonged encounter with Plato changes a man. (Kaufmann 1961) How do
| |
| diverse prolonged encounters with cultural activities and works change people
| |
| and what is the use and value for life of the various potential prolonged
| |
| encounters? These fundamental questions gave rise to the rich educational
| |
| reflections of this period. In this manner, scholars queried all sides of
| |
| life—languages, customs, occupations, religions, literary works,<i>Allgemein
| |
| Pädagogik</i>, held that sound pedagogical inquiry and practice required the
| |
| historical, critical evaluation of the cultural contents and contexts of
| |
| education.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <p>9With such
| |
| a heritage, which well-educated German scholars shared as part of their general
| |
| education, there was at the turn of the century a ready ground for response to
| |
| the program of <i>Geisteswissenschaftlich Pädagogik</i>. In 1883, the Catholic
| |
| educational theorist, Otto Willmann, published <i>Didaktik als Bildungslehre
| |
| nach ihren Beziehungen zur Sozialforschung and zur Geschichte der Bildung</i>.
| |
| This book was the first fully developed attempt at an historical pedagogy,
| |
| which, at the conclusion of a series of lectures at the University of Prague
| |
| twelve years earlier, Willmann had sketched in one of his concluding
| |
| aphorisms.</p>
| |
|
| |
|
| |
| <blockquote>Historical Pedagogy:<br> 1) It seeks to define the concept of
| |
| education from history. What was educating for various peoples? The subject and
| |
| substance of education is historically determined.<br> 2) It seeks the
| |
| constituent parts of our education in history. This or that must be dealt with
| |
| in our education because they are there in our culture. We are historically
| |
| conditioned, hence we must be historically educated.<br> 3) It puts history in
| |
| its widest sense at the center of instructional subjects.<br> 4) It interlaces
| |
| other instructional areas with history: the history of discoveries, geography,
| |
| and so on.<br> 5) It requires a system of instruction, which traces the
| |
| historical development of its subjects.<br> 6) It values earlier modes of
| |
| education and denies the presumption, which many systems begin, that with it the
| |
| first sunrise of education has dawned. Freedom rests on the knowledge of
| |
| dependence through transposition of our unconscious conditioning into conscious
| |
| conditions.</blockquote>
| |
|
| |
| <blockquote>Here was a set of purposes far more demanding and ambitious than
| |
| those guiding the writing of educational history in English.</blockquote>
| |
|
| |
| <p>9We can get
| |
| a good sense of how Willmann was departing from the dominant pedagogy by
| |
| comparing the structure of his didactic to the Herbartian program embodied in
| |
| Wilhelm Rein's plan for the <i>Encyklopädisches Handbuch der Pädagogik</i>. Rein
| |
| identified ethics and psychology as the basic sciences on which pedagogy rested,
| |
| ethics establishing the end of pedagogy, psychology the means. Most of his
| |
| efforts at conceptualization concerned what he called systematic pedagogy, which
| |
| he divided into a theoretical and a practical branch. Then further, he divided
| |
| the theoretical branch into two—a theory of ends and a theory of means. In the
| |
| former, he applied ethics to establish an educational teleology, and through the
| |
| latter, by far the must extensive side of systematic pedagogy, he stipulated
| |
| that psychology would establish an educational methodology, with the primary aim
| |
| of devising effective methods of instruction for all the branches and levels of
| |
| human knowledge. The second main division of systematic pedagogy, complementing
| |
| the theoretical, was the practical, again divided into two parts, one dealing
| |
| with the various forms of education, a second dealing with the direction of
| |
| schools. In addition to systematic pedagogy, with its theoretical and practical
| |
| branches, Rein recognized historical pedagogy, but put it in an entirely
| |
| subsidiary role. "It puts a picture of past educational conditions forward and
| |
| pursues the development of pedagogical ideas from their origins to the present
| |
| in close connection with economic and general cultural developments. With that,
| |
| historical pedagogy turns into a tutor for the systematic; and vice versa the
| |
| systematic, seeking certain norms for the present and future, can also sharpen
| |
| the view of what happened in the educational matters of the past. (VI, 492)
| |
| Here was the rationale for the systematic anachronism of so much of the
| |
| educational history written in the service of systematic pedagogy.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <p>9Willmann
| |
| set out from the premise that neither ethics nor psychology could establish
| |
| certain norms validly controlling pedagogical activity in the present and future
| |
| because education was a dimension of the social and historical lives of people.
| |
| Purposes and practices inhered in the historical conditions of experience. After
| |
| a long introduction in which he dealt thoughtfully with the implications of the
| |
| social and historical character of education, he devoted the first volume of the
| |
| <i>Didaktik</i> to a study of "<i>Die geschichtlichen Typen des
| |
| Bildungswesens</i>" in which he paid very close attention to the educative power
| |
| of the cultural content of different historical patterns of human formation. In
| |
| dealing with each type of human formation—primarily the Greek, Roman, early
| |
| Christian, medieval, renaissance, enlightenment, and modern—Willmann sought to
| |
| empathize with each, to take it on its own ground, to show how it worked as an
| |
| historical, educational ethos. Willmann divided the second volume into four
| |
| parts, dealing with Bildungszwecke, Bildungsinhalt, Bildungsarbeit, and
| |
| Bildungswesens—that is, the ends, the content, the work, and the organization of
| |
| human formation. In all the sections, his discussion was closely linked with his
| |
| historical analyses, and the longest, most significant section was that on the
| |
| work of human formation. This concentration on the work of education, rather
| |
| than on its methods, grew out of the convictions that education exists as
| |
| historical actuality and that it comes about through the work of student and
| |
| teacher, of family and school, of the whole culture and all its participants.
| |
| Good theory of education would come through the careful interpretation of this
| |
| process, and it must center on the realities of work at human formation, for
| |
| education, human formation, occurred only as people worked with cultural
| |
| contents, created them, selected them, organized them, and appropriated them
| |
| under the complex constraints of their historical conditions.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <p>9Willmann's
| |
| <i>Didaktik</i> had little influence in England or the United States; it was not
| |
| even the major source for <i>Geisteswissenschaftlich Pädagogik</i> in Germany,
| |
| for Willmann was somewhat peripheral, a Catholic professor at the University of
| |
| Prague, somewhat distanced from the center of German academic life. At the same
| |
| time, however, Wilhelm Dilthey took certain initiatives along parallel
| |
| lines.</p>
| |
|
| |
| <ul><li>Boyd, W. (1963). <i>The Educational Theory of Jean-Jacques
| |
| Rousseau</i>. New York: Russell & Russell.</li>
| |
|
| |
| <li>Buchner, E. F. (1904). <i>The Educational Theory of Immanuel
| |
| Kant</i>. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company.</li>
| |
|
| |
| <li>Butts, R. F. (1947). <i>A cultural history of education:
| |
| reassessing our educational traditions</i>. New York: McGraw-Hill Book
| |
| Company.</li>
| |
|
| |
| <li>Cameron, D. (1973). <i>The Social Thought of Rousseau and Burke: A
| |
| Comparative Study</i>. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.</li>
| |
|
| |
| <li>Charvet, J. (1974). <i>The Social Problem in the Philosophy of
| |
| Rousseau</i>. New York: Cambridge University Press.</li>
| |
|
| |
| <li>Cohler, A. M. (1970). <i>Rousseau and Nationalism</i>. New York:
| |
| Basic Books.</li>
| |
|
| |
| <li>Cook, T. E. (1971). Rousseau: Education and Politics. <i>Political
| |
| Science</i>. Princeton: Princeton University Press<b>: </b>361.</li>
| |
|
| |
| <li>Crocker, L. G. (1968). <i>Rousseau's Social Contract: An
| |
| Interpretative Essay</i>. Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve
| |
| University.</li>
| |
|
| |
| <li>Cubberley, E. P. (1904). <i>Syllabus of Lectures on the History of
| |
| Education, with Selected Bibliographies and Suggested Readings</i>. New York:
| |
| Macmillan Company.</li>
| |
|
| |
| <li>Ellenburg, S. (1976). <i>Rousseau's Political Philosophy: An
| |
| Interpretation from Within</i>. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.</li>
| |
|
| |
| <li>Ellis, M. B. (1977). <i>Rousseau's Socratic Aemilian Myths: A
| |
| Literary Collation of <i>Émile</i> and the <i>Social Contract</i></i>. Columbus:
| |
| Ohio State University Press.</li>
| |
|
| |
| <li>Fralin, R. (1978). <i>Rousseau and Representation: A Study of the
| |
| Development of His Concept of Political Institutions</i>. New York: Columbia
| |
| University Press.</li>
| |
|
| |
| <li>Grimsley, R. (1972). "Introduction". <i>Du Contrat Social</i>.
| |
| J.-J. Rousseau. New York: Oxford University Press<b>: </b>1-95.</li>
| |
|
| |
| <li>Hall, J. C. (1973). <i>Rousseau: An Introduction to his Political
| |
| Philosophy</i>. London: Macmillan Press.</li>
| |
|
| |
| <li>Kaufmann, W. A. (1961). <i>Critique of religion and
| |
| philosophy</i>. Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books.</li>
| |
|
| |
| <li>Lemos, R. M. (1977). <i>Rousseau's Political Philosophy: An
| |
| Exposition and Interpretation</i>. Athens: University of Georgia Press.</li>
| |
|
| |
| <li>Levine, A. (1976). <i>The Politics of Autonomy: A Kantian Reading
| |
| of Rousseau's Social Contract</i>. Amherst: University of Massachusetts
| |
| Press.</li>
| |
|
| |
| <li>MacVannel, J. A. (1905). <i>The educational theories of Herbart
| |
| and Froebel</i>. New York: Teachers College, Columbia University.</li>
| |
|
| |
| <li>Masters, R. D. (1968). <i>The Political Philosophy of
| |
| Rousseau</i>. Princeton: Princeton University Press.</li>
| |
|
| |
| <li>Monroe, P., Ed. (1968). <i>A cyclopedia of education</i>. Detroit:
| |
| Gale Research Company.</li>
| |
|
| |
| <li>Perkins, M. L. (1974). <i>Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the Individual
| |
| and Society</i>. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.</li>
| |
|
| |
| <li>Rein, W., Ed. (1895-1899). <i>Encyklopädisches Handbuch der
| |
| Pädagogik</i>. Langensalza: H. Beyer.</li>
| |
|
| |
| <li>Roche, K. F. (1974). <i>Rousseau: Stoic and Romantic</i>. London:
| |
| Methuen & Company.</li>
| |
|
| |
| <li>Roosevelt, G. G. (1987). Rousseau on War, Peace, and Education.
| |
| <i>Philosophy and the Social Sciences</i>. New York: Teachers College, Columbia
| |
| University<b>: </b>319.</li>
| |
|
| |
| <li>Rousseau, J.-J. (1979). <i>Émile: or, On Education</i>. New York:
| |
| Basic Books.</li>
| |
|
| |
| <li>Sahakian, M. L. and W. S. Sahakian (1974). <i>Rousseau as
| |
| Educator</i>. New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc.</li>
| |
|
| |
| <li>Schmid, K. A., Ed. (1884-1902). <i>Geschichte der Erziehung vom
| |
| Anfang an bis auf unsere Zeit</i>. Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta'sche
| |
| Buchhandlung.</li>
| |
|
| |
| <li>Shklar, J. N. (1969). <i>Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau's
| |
| Social Theory</i>. New York: Cambridge University Press.</li>
| |
|
| |
| <li>Steinberg, J. (1978). <i>Locke, Rousseau, and the Idea of Consent:
| |
| An Inquiry into the Liberal-Democratic Theory of Political Obligation</i>.
| |
| Westport, CN: Greenwood Press.</li></ul>
| |
