BASEDOW, JOHANN BERNHARD. — Educationalist. Born in Hamburg on 11 September 1723, died in Magdeburg on 25 July 1790. He was one of the last representatives of the German Enlightenment. After obtaining his 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 hardship and conflicts caused by the extravagance of his character and his lack of propriety. Removed from that chair because of certain heterodox studies, he went on to teach at Altona, but incurred excommunication for attacks against the orthodox.
The reading of Rousseau’s Emile led him to turn to 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 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, the wealthy, and the learned for the realization of his pedagogical reform, and there he also met Goethe, who—although he showed himself favorable to Basedow’s plan to foster a livelier knowledge of the world—did not spare the «Treatise» criticism because nature was represented in it in a dispersed state, nor did he ever approve the ways in which Basedow behaved, wounding the feelings—especially religious feelings—of those from whom he sought support. Having won many over to his cause, particularly the prince of Anhalt-Dessau, that year he founded the Philanthropim at Dessau, a kind of institution intended at once to house a seminary for training teachers and a boarding school for children; concerning it he published a writing dedicated to Emperor Joseph, the King of Denmark, and Empress Catherine, and addressed to the benefactors of humanity. The Philanthropim
was based, politically, on the cosmopolitanism of civilized nations; religiously, on Rousseau’s deism; and morally, on philanthropy. Kant, in his treatise on pedagogy, judged the institution to be the only school which, given the need to gain experience in the field of education, had begun to change course by granting teachers the freedom to work according to their own approaches and plans: nothing definitive or complete was to be found in this undertaking, but it represented a stage along the long road traveled by modern pedagogy in its search for rational methods. The intuitive method, recommended by Comenius as early as the seventeenth century and of which Pestalozzi was to become, a few years later, its ardent apostle, was in use at the institution, which, however, was called by Raumer, the German historian of pedagogy, a
«pedagogical caricature» because lessons on objects and mechanical exercises were abused there, in a form that was even childish. Yet more than the system employed, it was the irascible and bizarre character of its founder that contributed to the institution’s ruin, by soon provoking internal disagreements; he therefore left its direction in 1778. Although it remained entrusted to Wolke, who had been one of his most eminent collaborators, the institution rapidly declined and closed in 1793. Meanwhile, B.’s feverish activity did not cease: in 1795 he published another edition of his Elementarwerk and wrote On the Method of Teaching Latin for Knowledge of Things, as well as a booklet on the teaching of reading; in 1786 his final work appeared: New Method for Learning to Read, for Knowing God, and for Teaching the Language with the Greatest Exactness; and between 1785 and 1790 he went every year, for several months, to teach at a school for children in Magdeburg, where an unexpected hemorrhage finally carried him to the grave, after the abuse of alcoholic beverages and his disorderly life had by then reduced him to poverty.