The History of Pedagogy — Background and Themes

CATION AMONG THE HINDOOS; POLITICAL CASTE AND RELIGIOUS PANTHEISM; EFFECTS ON EDUCATION; BUDDHISTIC REFORM; CONVERSATION OF BUDDHA AND PURNA; EDUCATIONAL USAGES; EDUCATION AMONG THE ISRAELITES; PRIMITIVE PERIOD; RELIGIOUS AND NATIONAL EDUCATION; PROGRESS OF POPULAR INSTRUCTION; ORGANIZATION OF SCHOOLS; RESPECT FOR TEACHERS; METHODS AND DISCIPLINE; EXCLUSIVE AND JEALOUS SPIRIT; EDUCATION AMONG THE CHINESE; FORMALISM; LÂO-TSZE AND KHUNG-TSZE (CONFUCIUS); EDUCATION AMONG OTHER PEOPLE OF THE EAST; THE EGYPTIANS AND THE PERSIANS; ANALYTICAL SUMMARY.

1. PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS.--A German historian of philosophy begins his work by asking this question: “Was Adam a philosopher?” In the same way certain historians of pedagogy begin by learned researches upon the education of savages. We shall not carry our investigations so far back. Doubtless from the day when a human family began its existence, from the day when a father and a mother began to love their children, education had an existence. But there is very little practical interest in studying these obscure beginnings of pedagogy. It is a matter of erudition and curiosity.[6] Besides the difficulty of gathering up the faint traces of primitive education, there would be but little profit in painfully following the slow gropings of primeval man. In truth, the history of pedagogy dates but from the period relatively recent, when human thought, in the matter of education, substituted reflection for instinct, art for blind nature. So we shall hasten to begin the study of pedagogy among the classical peoples, the Greeks and the Romans, after having thrown a rapid glance over some Eastern nations considered either in their birthplace and remote origin, or in their more recent development.

2. THE PEDAGOGY OF THE HINDOOS.--It would not be worth our while to enter into details respecting a civilization so different from our own as that of the Hindoos. But we should not forget that we are in part the descendants of that people, and that we belong to the same ethnic group, and that the European languages are derived from theirs.

3. POLITICAL CASTE AND RELIGIOUS PANTHEISM.--The spirit of caste, from the social point of view, and pantheism, from the religious point of view, are the characteristics of Hindoo society. The Indian castes constituted hereditary classes where social rank and special vocation were determined, not by free choice, but by the accident of birth. The consequence of this was an endless routine, with no care either for the individuality, or the personal talents, or the inclination of children, and without the possibility of rising by personal effort above one’s rank in life.[7] On the other hand, religious ideas came to restrict, within the limits where it was already imprisoned, the activity of the young Hindoo. God is everywhere present; he manifests himself in all the phenomena of heaven and earth, in the sun and in the stars, in the Himalayas and in the Ganges; he penetrates and animates everything; the things of sense are but the changing and ephemeral vestments of the unchangeable being. “With this pantheistic conception of the world and of life, the thought and the will of the Hindoo perished in the mystic contemplation of the soul. To become master of one’s inclinations; to abandon every terrestrial thought; after this life to lose one’s identity, and to be annihilated by absorption in the divine nature; to prepare one’s self by macerations and expiations for complete submersion in the original principle of all being,--this is the highest wisdom, the true happiness of the Hindoo, the ideal of all serious education.”[8]

4. EFFECTS ON EDUCATION.--It is easy to predict what education would become under the weight of these double chains, social and religious. While the ideal in our modern societies is more and more to enfranchise the individual, and to create for him personal freedom and self-consciousness, the effort of the Hindoo Brahmins consisted above all in crushing out all spontaneity, in abolishing individual predilections, by preaching the doctrine of absolute self-renunciation, of voluntary abasement, and of contempt for life. Man was thus born doubly a slave,--by his social condition, which predestinated him to the routine apprenticeship of his ancestral caste, and by his mysterious dependence on the divine being who absorbed in himself all real activity, and left to human beings only the deceptive and frail appearance of it.

5. BUDDHIST REFORM.--The Buddhist reform, which so profoundly affected Brahmanism at about the sixth century B.C., did not sensibly modify, from the educational point of view, the ideas of the Hindoos. Buddha also taught that the cause of evil resides in the passions of men, and that in order to attain moral peace, there is no other means to be employed than that of self-abnegation and of the renouncement of everything selfish and personal.