the leaders in education, under his direct inspiration, have been slowly and painfully transforming the false pedagogy of the cloister into the true pedagogy of out-of-doors. Writers and teachers, schools and universities, have been engaged in a halting and irregular struggle to transfer education from a metaphysical to a physical basis, to lead it away from the habit of deductive speculation into one of inductive research. This transfer Rabelais made boldly and at once. He did not, of course, elaborate the educational ideal of to-day, but he plainly marked out the lines upon which that ideal is framed. He taught truth and simplicity, be ridiculed hypocrisy and formalismn, he denounced the worship of words, he demanded the study of things, he showed the beauty of intellectual health, of moral discipline, of real piety. Best of all, he enunciated the supreme principle of Nature, which is ordered freedom.”
Montaigne,[1] also, in France, was equally severe in his criticisms on the humanists. He denounced in no uncertain terms the methods of introducing Latin to beginners and the harsh and severe discipline so common in the schools of Europe during the sixteenth century. “Education ought to be carried on with a severe sweetness,” he wrote, “quite contrary to the practice of our pedants, who, instead of tempting and alluring children to a study of language by apt and gentle ways, do, in truth, present nothing before them but rods and ferules, horror and eruelty. Away with this violence Away with this compulsion! There is nothing which more completely dulls and degenerates
- ↑ Montaigne’s Education of children. Translated by L. E. Rector. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1899. pp. xxiii+191.
