Great Names

But let me return briefly to the "great names" in education, who in the main precede what we now call scientific method. They endure, and command our respect, chiefly for the firs! step in precisely scientific method: the formulation of brilliant hypotheses, subsequently justified, and incorporated into what we now call the "new" education. Here I cannot avoid being both sketchy and selective, since the alternative would be a history of education. Plato conceived the notion of universal education, selective education, and continual education for those fitted for it. Indeed, he made education a "key" activity of the state: on which all other activities were contingent. The great Christian teachers (and not they alone brought out the central notion of virtue as the chief end of education. Nowadays we call it "character training." and attack it obliquely. The humanists of the Renaissance broke through the formalism of clerical training, and extended the appreciation of the ever-living present, to be enjoyed by the "manysided" man. Descartes and Locke opened the way to scientific knowledge about the nature of knowledge. Rousscan, perhaps the greatest of all educational visionaries, focussed attention on the child and its nature. Since his day we can no longer place what is to be learnt above the nature of the learner, we are all aware of his influence on a more obvious, political revolution, with its claim of rights for all: but I believe the influence of Rousseau on education, beginning with the "rights" of all, and going on to a recognition of individual difference and uniqueness, has been of more lasting and durable importance. From Rousseau stem the case study and child psychology: and from him, too. education through experience rather than from books alone. Perhaps even more important, we get from Rousseau the idea of stages of development, complete in themselves: a child is a child, and not merely part of a man, from Pestatozzi we gel the beginnings of practical demonstrations of learning by living and doing together: he had orphans to contend with, little equipment, but many ideas. From Frocbel (as from Wordsworth) we get the notion of wonder and tenderness: two characteristics of childhood we dare not imperil. From Herbart we get a two? pronged attack on method: working from the interest of the child, and systematising both curriculum and teaching procedure. (We can find faults with Herbart s "system" now, but he served a great needs by providing teachers in great numbers when they were needed most: in the 19th Century transition, from education for a few to education for the many.)

From [unclear: Rouscsau], and Pestalozzi Froebal, Montesori, and John Dewey, among others, we gel the concepts of and the equipment for, learning by doing; "play" as meaningful work; activity rather than passivity in "learning"; problem solving, as the way to mastery of both oneself and one's world. It remains to be said that if these thugs are still "new" [unclear: iany] people is because traditional disciplines have a stranglehold unjustified by scientific investigation. Teaching methods, and not least in the universities, are so conservative, that it could be argued (as Chesterton argued of Christianity) that the only thing wrong with the "new" education is that it has not been tried.