and in his discussion of educational questions he combined the enthusiasm of the visionary with the sanity of the scientist. This is the distinguishing feature of the Memoirs he wrote on public instruction in the first years of the Revolution, and again of the Report he was instructed to prepare for the Assembly in 1792. He has a clear-cut plan for a system of national education, not unlike that of Rolland, but before he broaches his specific proposals he sets forth the essential principles on which his plan is based. It was impossible for him to take for granted, as La Chalotais and his disciples had done, that national education is necessarily good. The Revolution had revived the sense of antagonism between State and individual which Rousseau had brought to clear consciousness; and at the very outset he has to justify national education by showing that it is not really incompatible with liberty and equality. His task is all the harder because he has to admit not only that men are unequal in original capacity, but that education greatly accentuates the inequality. Yet he does not hesitate to maintain that the right kind of education really promotes liberty and equality. Why must society educate its members ? For three reasons, he says. In the first place, there is a certain minimum of knowledge which every citizen must possess if he is to be able to discharge his duties to himself and his fellows, and not to be slavishly dependent on those who happen to know more than himself. Equality of opportunity in this respect is the true equality. In the second place, education is needed to develop the diverse gifts of the citizens, and to ensure that each of them is making his fullest contribution to the well-being which all equally share. In the third place, the perfectibility of mankind depends on education. The advance due to revolutionary changes can only be maintained and extended if no section of the people is allowed to fall behind the rest for lack of the requisite instruction. Admitting all this, everything turns on the State giving the right education; and here Condorcet has an important distinction to make. "Education, if taken in its whole extent, is not limited to positive instruction, to the teaching of truths of fact and number, but includes all opinions, political, moral or religious."* The State has no concern with education in this

*P. 47.

wide sense. It is only positive instruction that it can be allowed to give: any intrusion into the sphere of opinion would be a negation of liberty. In matters of politics, morals, or religion, no public authority has any right to interfere with the parent in the upbringing of his children, or with the thinker in the search for truth.

The restriction of the State to the imparting of positive knowledge affects his whole scheme. He proposes that there should be five distinct institutions concerned with learning:

Concordel) Primary schools-of which he calculates that 31,000 will

be required to be spread over the whole country, where children from six to ten will learn reading, writing, spelling, morality, and elementary notions of agriculture or commerce, as the case may be. (b) Secondary schools in all towns with 4,000 inhabitants and upwards, where the older children will learn the grammar needed for correct speech and writing, the history and geography of France, the elements of mathematics, physics, and natural history relative to the arts, agriculture and commerce, and the foreign language most useful for the district. (c) Institutes to the number of 110, with courses in mathematics and physics, the moral and political sciences, applied sciences, literature and the fine arts, two or more of which will be taken by more advanced pupils. (d) Nine Lycées in different parts of France, with similar courses to the Institutes, but more highly specialized and differentiated, to meet the needs of older students. (e) The National Society of the Sciences and Arts, with its headquarters in Paris and drawing its members from all over the country-an institution for research and not for teaching, but having supervision of the whole educational system. In the mere framework of the scheme there is, of course, little that is novel except in the grant of supervisory powers to a non-teaching National Society. Condorcet's originality showed itself rather in the proposals he made for the working of it. Science and its practical applications put in the forefront of the curricula of schools and colleges, education at all stages made gratuitous and brought within the reach of everyone with the necessary capacity, the same education for the two sexes, special provision for the instruction of adults of every degree of intelligence: these

ideas were all in his plan. But even more striking-and still as Utopian as his other ideas seemed at the time he propounded them-was the idea of making teaching virtually a selfgoverning profession, by allowing each grade to appoint the members, and direct the work, of the grade below it. His object was to ensure freedom of thought and the unhampered progress of science by keeping education independent of any political authority save in the last resort the authority of the State itself. It was an ingenious attempt at the solution of one of the most difficult problems of democratic education.

7. KANT AND PESTALOZZI

On a superficial view of the facts it might appear that, in spite of the great influence of the Emile in the latter part of the Eighteenth Century, the idea of education as a national function, with its chief end the making of loyal citizens, had altogether eclipsed the complementary idea of education as a process of individual development. But nothing could be farther from the truth. The latter view was slower in passing out of theory into practice; and it could scarcely have been otherwise. The adaptation of the educational system to the nature of the child which it required involved a reversal of all the ordinary prejudices and practices which even its most enthusiastic adherents found difficult to make; and, in any case, time was required for the elimination of the crudities which obscured the essential truth in it, and prevented its application under the actual conditions of educational work. But with all this the individual conception of education steadily gained ground as a directing ideal, more especially in Germanspeaking countries. Most notably, we see it beginning to come to clearness in the theorizing of Kant, and, later, attaining practical definiteness through the empirical gropings after right methods by which Pestalozzi succeeded in establishing schools more or less in accord with child nature.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) has been called Rousseau's greatest disciple. It may be doubtful whether the statement does not exaggerate Kant's general obligation to Rousseau, but it certainly applies to his views on education. The Emile

Mart

came to him as a revelation. With Rousseau's other writings, it gave him a new conception of the dignity and worth of man as man, and helped to set him on the train of thought that led to the critical philosophy. When he had to lecture on pedagogy in the course of his professorial duties at Königsberg in 1776, he was still under the spell of Rousseau. (His first textbook, it is interesting to note, was Basedow's Method Book. He was a warm admirer of the Philanthropinum, and wrote an article in unqualified commendation of it in 1777.) But while he borrowed freely from the Emile in certain sections of his lectures as is shown by the somewhat fragmentary notes published under the title On Pedagogy, the year before his death-there are some significant differences between his point of view and that of Rousseau. He accepts the idea of education according to nature, even thinks of the initial dispositions of the child as directed towards goodness, and counsels freedom for physical and mental growth in the first years of life. But he distinguishes more sharply than his master between the first animal nature and the human nature that requires education for its making. In consequence of this, he insists on the necessity for constraint being put on the child's impulses, and even for the moralizing of him by teaching him definite maxims of conduct. He justifies this departure from Rousseau by arguing that there need be no antagonism between liberty and constraint. The aim of education, according to him, is to make the child capable of finding the law that rules his life within himself, and he maintains that, in so far as the external restrictions are capable of passing into this inner law, they make for true liberty. But the proviso must be noted. It is not constraint as such that is good: only the constraint that ultimately approves itself to a self-determining being. Kant is quite in agreement with Rousseau about the badness of contemporary society, and of the education that prepares for it. The education that reconciles freedom and law must be very different from the ordinary education. It must be one directed by the ideal of a perfect humanity. "Children should be educated, not with reference to the present conditions of things, but rather with regard to a possibly improved state of the human race—that is, according to the ideal of humanity

and its entire destiny."* In his discussion of the actual work of education, he holds strangely aloof from all the usual questions of curriculum and method. His main concern is with what goes on in the experience of the individual pupil in the different stages of educational advancement. One of the few definite opinions he expresses on practical matters is that public education is to be preferred to private, because of the moral effects of the restraints imposed on the pupil by his contact with his fellows. At the same time, he is no believer in national education under the direction of kings and princes. Experience teaches us that the ultimate aim of princes is not the promotion of the good of mankind, but the well-being of their own state and the attainment of their own ends. When they provide money for educational enterprises, they reserve to themselves the right to control the plans." Therefore," he adds, "the management of the schools should be left entirely to the judgment of the most intelligent experts."†

In matters educational, Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746-1827) was a better Kantian than Kant himself. It is true that he was not a philosopher in any academic sense of the term, and that he had probably read none of Kant's works. But, like Kant, he had been profoundly moved by the Emile, and he had talked much with people more scholarly than himself who had come under the influence of Kant, with the result that his social ideals and his general conception of mental process (so far as it went) were very much like those of the great philosopher. At any rate, his principles and methods were just such as Kant might have evolved if, like Pestalozzi, he had been an "intelligent expert" in educational work. It must not be inferred from this, however, that Pestalozzi set out with certain borrowed ideas, and worked out an educational system to correspond. Kant might have done that, but Pestalozzi's genius was essentially practical. More than) with most educators, his educational theory grew out of his educational practice, and even at the best it was never more than a very imperfect expression of what underlay the practice To understand Pestalozzi, therefore, we must begin with the man and his work.

*On Pedagogy, p. 15.

† Ibid., p. 17.