BASEDOW, JOHANN BERNHARD. – Pedagogue. Born in Hamburg on 11 September 1723, died in Magdeburg on 25 July 1790. He was one of the last representatives of German Enlightenment. After obtaining his doctorate in philosophy and theology at Leipzig, in 1753 he was entrusted with the chair of philosophy and moral science at the academy of Sorø (Denmark), living amid hardship and conflicts due to the eccentricity of his character and his lack of decorum. Removed from that post for some heterodox studies, he went on to teach in Altona, but incurred excommunication for his attacks on the orthodox.
The reading of Rousseau’s Émile turned him toward pedagogy, and in 1774 he published his Elementarwerk, ein gewandter Vorrat aller nötigen Erkenntnis zum Unterricht der Jugend von Anfang bis ins akademische Alter (4 vols., Dessau), which was, in essence, Comenius’s Orbis pictus, reworked according to Rousseau’s educational plan. In 1774 he went to Frankfurt to solicit aid from the great, rich, and learned for the realization of his pedagogical reform, and there he also met Goethe, who, while sympathetic to his aim of fostering a more vital knowledge of the world, spared no criticism of the “Treatise” because nature was therein depicted in a state of dispersion, nor did he ever approve of the ways in which Basedow allowed himself to indulge, wounding the sensibilities—especially the religious ones—of those from whom he sought support. Having won many to his cause, and particularly the Prince of Anhalt-Dessau, that same year he founded in Dessau the Philanthropinum, a sort of institution that was to comprise at once a teachers’ seminary and a boarding school for boys, and on this subject he published a work dedicated to Emperor Joseph, the King of Denmark, Empress Catherine, and addressed to the benefactors of humanity. The Philanthropinum was based, in terms of politics, on the cosmopolitanism of civilized nations, in terms of religion on Rousseau’s deism, and in terms of morality on philanthropy.
Kant, in his treatise on pedagogy, judged the institute the only school that, given the necessity of making headway in the field of education, had begun to change course by granting teachers the freedom to work according to their own methods and plans: nothing definitive or complete is to be found in this work, but it represents a stage along the long path taken by modern pedagogy in its search for rational methods. The intuitive method, already recommended by Comenius in the 17th century and which Pestalozzi was to become, a few years later, its ardent apostle, was in use at the institute, which, however, was described by Raumer, the German historian of pedagogy, as a “pedagogical caricature” because it abused, in an almost childish manner, object lessons and mechanical exercises. But more than the system in use, it was the irascible and eccentric character of its founder that contributed to the ruin of the institute, provoking internal dissensions; he then (1778) relinquished its direction, and although it remained entrusted to Wolke, who had been one of his most eminent collaborators, the institute rapidly declined and closed in 1793.
Meanwhile, Basedow’s feverish activity did not cease: in 1795 he published another edition of his Elementarwerk and wrote On the Method of Teaching Latin for the Knowledge of Things, and a pamphlet on the teaching of reading; in 1786 his last work appeared: New Method for Learning to Read, for Knowing God, and for Teaching Language with the Greatest Precision; and between 1785 and 1790 he went every year for a few months to teach in a school for boys in Magdeburg, where at last a sudden hemorrhage carried him off, after a life of intemperance in drink and disorder had reduced him to poverty.