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In his Essays, in his Letters to the Countess of Gurson, are found all of the elements for the education of the future. About the great German and Swiss specialists in pedagogy and psychology, Comenius, Basedow, Pestalozzi, Salzmann, Froebel, Herbart, I do not need to speak.
Basedow tied boys who fell into temptation to a strong pillar to brace them up; if stupid and careless, put on a fool's cap and bells; if they were proud, they were suspended near the ceiling in a basket, as Aristophanes represented Socrates.
Then, too, there was that "nerve-strengthening" patriotism which pervaded everything, filling the place of the superficial philanthropy of the Basedow system of education.
In spite of the failure of such men as Comenius, Ratich, Basedow, and Rousseau to secure the introduction of these studies in a liberal degree, in spite of the enormous influence of custom and prejudice in favor of Latin and other traditional studies, the natural sciences have made recently such surprising advances and have so penetrated and transformed our modern life that we are simply compelled, even in the common school, to take heed of these great, living educational forces already at work.
The old superstition that children have innate faculties of such a finished sort that they flash up and grasp the principle of things by a rapid sort of first "intellection," an error that made all departments of education so trivial, assumptive and dogmatic for centuries before Comenius, Basedow and Pestalozzi, has been banished everywhere save from moral and religious training, where it still persists in full force.
The great though capricious educator, Basedow, to some extent a pupil of Rousseau, was an early pioneer in both the theory and the practice of giving school children instruction in the facts of the sexual life, from the age of ten onwards.
And when he got upon his hobby and told her how grand a vocation the teacher's profession was, and recited stories of the self-denial of Pestalozzi and Froebel, and the great schemes of Basedow, and told how he meant here in this new country to build a great Institute on rational principles, Helen Minorkey found him more interesting than ever.
Basedow , that strange, restless, and most ill-regulated person, was seized with an almost phrenetic enthusiasm for Rousseau's educational theories, translated them into German, and repeated them in his works over and over again with an incessant iteration.
These were Basedow, Pestalozzi, and Froebel. Basedow, a German theologian, had devoted himself entirely to dogmatic controversy, until the reading of "Émile" had the effect of enlarging his mental horizon, and of revealing to him his true vocation.
Then, too, there was that "nerve-strengthening" patriotism which pervaded everything, filling the place of the superficial philanthropy of the Basedow system of education.
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