The Great Educators Doctrines of the Great Educators

Doctrines of the Great Educators Doctrines of the Great Educators Robert R. Rusk and J ames Scotland FIFTH EDITION St. Martin's Press New York © R.R. Rusk 1965, 1969 © New material, James Scotland 1979 All rights reserved. For information, write: St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Printed in Great Britain Fifth edition first published in the United States of America in 1979 Reprinted 1987 ISBN 978-0-333-23221-7 ISBN 978-1-349-16075-4 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-16075-4 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Rusk, Robert Robertson, 1879-1972. Doctrines of the great educators. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Education-History 2. Educators I. Scotland, James, joint author. II. Title LA13.R85 1979 370.1 78-12874 ISBN 978-0-312-21491-3 ISBN 978-0-312-21492-0 pbk. Contents Preface vii 1 'The Great Educators' 1 2 Plato 7 3 Quintilian 35 4 Loyola 46 5 Comenius 62 6 Locke 80 7 Rousseau 100 8 Pestalozzi 136 9 Herbart 155 10 Froebel 178 11 Montessori 193 12 Dewey 215 13 The Twentieth Century 233 Notes and References 247 Bibliography 293 Index 303 Preface to the Fifth Edition Dr Robert Rusk died in 1972, at the age of ninety-three, his energy undimmed. This book went through four editions and seventeen impressions during his lifetime, and it has been reprinted three times since his death. It is a classic of educational exposition. For this new edition I have made some alterations, omissions and additions. I have dropped three of Rusk's chapters, those on Elyot, Milton and Whitehead. The first two were included as representative of English educators in the period of the Renaissance and Reformation, but they do not seem to me to satisfy all the criteria Rusk adopted for a 'Great Educator': few students, even specialists, would claim much currency for their educational doctrines today. Some of these doctrines, especially Elyot's, I have added to the beginning of the chapter on Loyola. Whitehead did not make his appearance in the book until its fourth edition, and in the event his philosophy has proved to be less influential than it promised. Nevertheless his ideas still have power, and they have been given their place in the last chapter. That chapter is itself an addition. The outstanding educators of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries virtually select themselves; but after Dewey, who?* There have been many writers of stature in the last half-century, perhaps too many. Piaget would have his supporters, and detractors; so would Neill, Bruner and Illich. There is a good case for suggesting that the ideas of Marx and Freud (and for that matter Nietzsche) have had more influence in our education than those of any educational specialist. But fashions change: today's Peter the Apostle looks tomorrow * Dewey himself did not make his appearance until the second edition. Vlll Doctrines of the Great Educators like Peter the Hermit. The last chapter is my attempt to discern patterns in the spate of recent ideas. To smooth continuity I have introduced a little extra material into each chapter - at the beginning a short biographical sketch, with some suggestions concerning influences at work on the educator concerned; at the end a few remarks on his impact in schools, colleges and educational systems. For students I have rectified an omission Rusk himself intended to repair, by adding short bibliographies. And, as is fitting in a new edition, I have amended the text in places to take account of a decade of recent scholarship. This last task has not been onerous. Generally it has amounted to providing alternative readings and fresh emphases, seldom to introducing corrections. This is because Rusk worked habitually from the original texts or the best translations; what we have is his interpretation of the author's own statements, not his summary of another critic's commentary. In consequence many pages of the last edition he revised appear unchanged in this. One would expect no less of a book going into a new edition after sixty years. It is a measure of Robert Rusk, who was my own master, over thirty years ago, in the University of Glasgow. J ames Scotland September 1977 1 'The Great Educators' MOST people concerned in education will tell you that there is no such creature as a 'Great Educator' nowadays; some will contend there never was. The concept is seen as part of the hero myth, now widely and enthusiastically discredited, the fantasy that an individual with a message is capable of changing the course of human affairs. In a world of 'superpowers' and international combines, it has become increasingly difficult to imagine an individual exercising any significant influence at all. The hero has been converted into an abstraction, an image required by ordinary men and women to see them through the confused, messy business of daily living. In war he is Douglas Haig, Foch, 'Monty', Rommel; in politics Churchill, Stalin, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara; in education the 'Great Educators'. The image exists because we want it to exist. We live in chaos, but continue to believe that somewhere someone holds the key to order. We are all educational alchemists, in quest of the Educator's Stone. The evidence to support this is that the anti-hero men are as enthusiastic in their quest as everyone else; only their Educator's Stone is to be found in committees, working parties, soviets, the Democratic Process, the Good of the Nation or the People's Will. We have travelled from the age of the prophet into the age of the expert, and although many, probably the majority, still hanker after their prophets, the experts will see that they do not have them. There are famous and fashionable names today as there were in previous ages, Piaget and A. S. Neill, Whitehead and Skinner and Illich, but fashions change, and few observers would risk forecasting which of them will be a Great Educator tomorrow. Nevertheless, as Whitehead pointed out,l 'education never reverts to its old position after the shock of a great philosopher'. 2 Doctrines of the Great Educators There have been some deeply influential thinkers in educational history; faced with our present problems, we may still profit by reading and reflecting on their ideas. That seems reason enough to call them Great Educators. That is certainly what they were thought to be, some in their lifetime, all by succeeding educators. There are five common features in those whose ideas are considered in this book. First, each contributed theories or new emphases to the process of education. These may relate to the psychology of the pupil or his teacher, as when Rousseau and Froebel chart the stages through which a child matures, and Locke or Pestalozzi describes the properties of an 'ideal educator'. They may be concerned with general or specific methods of teaching and learning. This is the field of Comenius, with his 'one sure way', of Loyola and the Jesuits, constructing a carefully articulated system, of Dewey, the main begetter (whatever he himself said) of the 'Project Method', and Herbart, whose 'Steps' were developed into the lesson plans of countless courses in pedagogy. The new directions pointed by these pioneers may be in the content or locale of the educational experience. We find Rousseau and Locke agreeing that the best place for teaching is the home, but disagreeing violently on what ought to be taught. On the other hand Pestalozzi accepts much of Rousseau's curriculum, but transfers it to a classroom. Both Froebel and Montessori concentrated their attention on the learning processes of very young children, but the divergencies of the elaborate systems they produced have led their followers into bitter feuds. Most commonly, the men we shall study have novel ideas on the proper relationship of education and society. Here above all we turn to Plato, who formulated with total clarity the problems which still beset us in the competing claims of individual fulfilment and community satisfaction. Here we see the contrast of Rousseau, for whom the task is to protect his pupil from social corruption, and Locke, whose aim is to educate men capable of making a rich contribution to the society in which they live: 'Here and here did England help me: how can I help England? - say.' Out of this conflict of individual and social demands rises the perennially troublesome question of discipline. It is one on which most of the Great Educators have something to say. Quintilian 'The Great Educators' 3 regards the whipping of children as 'mean and servile'; Rousseau puts his trust in the controlling effect of natural consequences; others as unlike as Plato, Pestalozzi and Montessori are all prepared to compel their charges to concentrate. The problem, as any student in training will witness, is as pressing today as ever it was. The second feature distinguishing our Great Educators is that they were all, in greater or less degree, philosophers. Their ideas are invariably rooted firmly in a definite philosophical position, a conception of the nature of human beings and their place within their world. This is why it is never difficult to identify their educational aims. Plato is concerned, he tells us, with enquiring into the true meaning of 'justice'; this leads him to examine the kind of state in which justice may be expected to flourish, and so the kind of education necessary to produce and preserve that state. Comenius, Loyola and Froebel see the perfection of man only in a world beyond ours; their educational systems are therefore de signed to bring him as near as possible to a full understanding of God's will on earth, and to prepare him for a better life hereafter.

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