BASEDOW, JOHANN BERNHARD. - Pedagogue. Born in Hamburg on 11 September 1723, died in Magdeburg on 25 July 1790. He is one of the last representatives of the German Enlightenment. Having obtained a degree in philosophy and theology at Leipzig, in 1753 he was entrusted with the chair of philosophy and morals at the academy of Doroe (Denmark), living amid hardships and conflicts due to the eccentricity of his character and his lack of propriety. Removed from that chair because of certain heterodox studies of his, he moved to teach at Altona, but incurred excommunication for attacks against the orthodox.
The reading of Rousseau's Emile turned him toward pedagogy, and in 1774 he published his Elementarwerk, ein geordneter Vorrat aller nötigen Erkenntnis zum Unterricht der Jugend von Anfang leis ins akademische Alter (4 vols., Dessau), which is - at bottom - Comenius's Orbis pictus, reworked on Rousseau's plan of studies. In 1774 he went to Frankfurt to solicit aid from the great, the rich and the learned for the realization of his pedagogical reform, and here he also met Goethe, who - while he showed himself favorable to his design of developing a more vivid knowledge of the world - did not spare criticism of the « Treatise » because nature was represented in it in a state of dispersion, nor did he ever approve the manners to which he gave himself over, wounding the sentiment - especially the religious sentiment - of those from whom he solicited support. Having won many to his cause, and particularly the prince of Anhalt-Dessau, he founded in that year at Dessau the Philanthropim, a kind of institute that was to contain at one and the same time a seminary for training teachers and a boarding college for boys, and on it he published a writing dedicated to the emperor Joseph, to the king of Denmark, to the empress Catherine, and addressed to the benefactors of humanity. The Philanthropim rests, as regards politics, on the cosmopolitanism of civilized nations, as regards religion on Rousseau's deism, and as regards morals on philanthropy. Kant, in his treatise on pedagogy, judged the institute to be the only school which, given the necessity of gaining experience in the field of education, had begun to change course by giving teachers the freedom to work according to their own directions and plans: there is nothing definitive and complete in this work, but it represents a stage in the long road traveled by modern pedagogy in search of rational methods. The intuitive method, recommended by Comenius already in the 17th century, and of which Pestalozzi was to be, a few years later, the ardent apostle, was in use in the institute, which - moreover - was called by Raumer, the German historian of pedagogy, a
« pedagogical caricature » because object lessons and mechanical exercises were abused there, in an even puerile form. But more than the system that was used, it was the irascible and bizarre character of its founder that contributed to the ruin of the institute, by soon provoking internal dissensions; he then left its direction (1778); and although this remained entrusted to Wolke, who had been one of his most eminent collaborators, the institute declined rapidly, and closed in 1793. Meanwhile the feverish activity of B. did not stop: in 1795 he published another edition of his Elementarwerk and wrote: On the method of teaching Latin through the knowledge of things, and a pamphlet on the teaching of reading; in 1786 appeared his last work: New method for learning to read, for knowing God and for teaching language with the greatest exactness; 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 to the grave, after the abuse of alcoholic beverages and a disorderly life had by then reduced him to poverty.
Bibliography3 works
Rosario Guido Tentori