Pedagogy

PEDAGOGY. - From παῖς = child and ἄγωγὴ = the action of leading by the hand (Latin manuductio), it is the science and art of education.

I. PEDAGOGY AS A SCIENCE

Now education is first of all a fact; better: a complex of facts and procedures, which imply a becoming, a continuous actualizing, a moving toward a goal, which is the development in man of all that perfection which his rational nature, his powers and faculties entail; and therefore it concerns all the activities by means of which this development can be actualized, and above all the action of the educating individual upon the individual being educated. This note of becoming, of process or development, is proper to every form of the educational moment: for the intellect there will be the unfolding of the mind, that is, of knowledge, of culture and instruction; for the will there will be the acquisition of self-mastery, of good habits, of inner energies; for the aesthetic sense the forming of artistic and poetic sense and taste; for the body the harmonious development of the organism.

But to abandon this whole series of activities to themselves and to the spontaneity of instincts or inclinations would be equivalent to sowing confusion where there ought to be harmony, to heaping up facts of every sort without connecting them in such a way as to deduce from them consequences and laws that would guide in the choice of the means, so very many, that can be offered for actualization; indeed it would be equivalent to disowning the very innate tendency of reason, which is to establish an end and then to study the means and methods best suited to attaining it. Therefore a theory is also necessary in the field of education, one that gathers and scientifically specifies, compares in their aspects, and links together, in a continuous series, the historical and psychological data of fact and the other elements concerning education; that derives the laws intrinsic to the facts or the higher requirements to which the facts are subject, in order to direct the educational effort toward the goal that is to be reached, that is, the complete perfection of man as man. Thus there will be a well-organized theory, that is, a science.

Furthermore, the human individual is a rational being; therefore his activity, whatever it may be, can always be reduced to rational principles; the same may be said of intellectual and practical habits; hence the educational fact, in all its extent and its value, can be studied in a rational and systematic manner and therefore constitute a science of education.

This science, in the explanation and application of its theories and norms, will have to take into account the various factors that contribute to exercising an influence on the development and formation of the child and the young person, factors reducible to five, constituting as many parts or subdivisions of pedagogy: 1) the educator, with his qualities, his rights and duties, his formation and maturity; 2) the educand, with his natural physical, intellectual and moral dispositions, with the particular laws according to which the individual faculties unfold in the different periods of his life, with the more or less active voluntariness of his cooperation, with his physical and moral deficiencies and defects; 3) the end, which moves the educator to his work and is constituted by a fixed, moral element (bringing it about that the educand succeeds in being good, cultured and happy; the καλοκαγαθία of the Greeks) and by a variable element according to the different types and studies of culture (ideal of physical strength, of personal valor, of political art, etc.). Where it is also to be noted that in the present order of Providence the end or ideal cannot be restricted to the natural order, but transcends it and rises to the supernatural order; it is no longer enough, therefore, merely to adorn and refine the soul with culture, but one must also save it for eternal life and the beatific vision of God; 4) the environment: geographical and domestic (heredity, example, abnormality, etc.), social (degree of civilization, legislation, etc.); scholastic (day school, boarding school, university, etc.); companions and relationships (mixed schools or coeducation, etc.); 5) educational activity: in general (body, sensitive, intellectual, volitional life); in particular (reading, composition, calculation); special means and expedients (rewards, punishments, emulation, incentives, etc.).

The question is raised as to what kind of science pedagogy belongs. There are, in fact, theoretical or speculative sciences that subject their object only to intellectual study (e.g., mathematics) and practical and operative sciences, which in subjecting their object to study also aim to produce in it determinate effects (e.g., engineering, medicine, in which the speculative process aims to build a bridge, a house, or to cure a sick person). Now pedagogy is precisely a practical or poetic science because it seeks to produce in the educand determinate intellectual and practical habits, which are externalized in determinate attitudes.

II. PEDAGOGY AS ART

P. is not only a science, but also essentially an art. Indeed, it has the elements of art: 1) the formation in the artist's mind of an idea; in the specific case: the formation in the educator's mind of the idea of morality or of science, to which he wishes to lead the pupil; 2) the realization of this idea, translating it into definite habits and acts. And in this there can play a part, beyond long study, wide experience and perhaps a more or less large harvest of errors, the educator's brilliant intuition (the clinical eye), quick and sure in grasping a factual situation and in judging its value; expedients and means that variously shape his personality and variously adapt themselves to the ever-varying personality of the pupil, more or less receptive, more or less active in exploiting what he receives. As happens in the artist, architect, painter, poet, faced with a villa to be built, a scene to be portrayed, an event or a feeling to be sung; so it is in the educator, who must cooperate in shaping a character, in forming a man, a father of a family, a citizen. Moreover, anyone who reflects on the value and importance of the final term of the whole educational process and on how knowledge can become useless and harmful when it fails to produce good and to make one progress in perfection, cannot fail to admit that p. is essentially an art. It will be said, therefore, that, as a science, p. studies and codifies the educational processes; while, as an art, it translates them into act with a view to its end.

III. RELATIONS BETWEEN PEDAGOGY AND PHILOSOPHY

From what has been touched upon, it follows that pedagogy cannot at all ignore or neglect philosophy. The pupil, in fact, is not merely the object upon which to work, but also and above all the subject upon whom the educative activity is to be exercised, insofar as the spiritual activism of the intellect and the will, of self-awareness and self-mastery, must be aroused in him; the world in which he lives, his social and religious relations, the moral level of his conscience, the end to be attained, touch upon and call forth a multiplicity of problems that are proper to philosophy: the problem of being and of knowing, of God, of the world, of living beings, of the soul, of conduct, of sociality. Pedagogy must therefore borrow from metaphysics, from gnoseology, from aesthetics, from deontology and from ethics, and above all from rational and experimental psychology, all those notions and explanations that enable it to apply the means necessary to carry out its particular educative processes.

Indeed, it must be affirmed that pedagogy is a fruit that sprouts on the branch of a philosophical system; and that it is therefore absurd to undertake the critical examination of the different pedagogical orientations while prescinding from the different philosophical systems from which they take their start; nor can the pedagogical thought of a thinker be understood, except in function of his philosophy. Depending, in fact, on the answers we give to these questions: is life entirely enclosed within the ambit of matter and of the earth? Do higher values exist, the values of the spirit? Is the soul immortal? Is there, above the creatures, which are contingent beings, an absolute Being, a Transcendent One, from whom all things proceed and to whom all things converge?, the substratum of the educative work will be different, and so will its orientations and its applications; one speaks, in fact, of a positivist, idealist, actualist, pragmatist pedagogy, etc.

All this, however, cannot at all lead, as the actualist theory would have it, to the identity of philosophy and pedagogy, which instead have a formal object of their own and clearly distinct. Philosophy abstracts from every particular object or fact and considers only what is proper to reality as such, being insofar as it is being; it considers the transcendental properties of being (the true, the beautiful, the good) or the objects that constitute the real (nature, spirit, God). Pedagogy, on the other hand, considers the concrete individual; it studies how he may conquer knowledge, form his own personality, developing the demands of his universal and at the same time individual human nature, overcoming the difficulties and obstacles connected with his particular psychophysical structure, with his different age, the various historical forms of culture and the demands of the different social communities to which he belongs (family, State, Church). To confuse and identify education with the dialectical process of the becoming (which one does not even know to be development, much less progress) of the absolute Spirit, swallows up and causes to vanish the rich and manifold content of the educative work in a mystical and perpetually identical act of identification, I do not say of the educator with the pupil, but of the Spirit with itself (cf. G. Vidari, Elementi di p., II, Milan 1924, p. 4 ff.).

Pedagogy also has relations with the other sciences (for example, with the physical and natural ones); but always and in all circumstances it will take possession of their contributions, infusing into them, whenever it applies them, a new breath of life, in relation to the individual demands of the subject and of the particular problems to be solved; its work in this will always be like gathering wood to put on the fire, without ever confusing the wood with the spark of its own fire, which will transform it into flame.

IV. RELATIONS OF PEDAGOGY WITH THEOLOGY

Pedagogy must have a quite particular relation with theology. Since the human soul is naturally religious and reason is sufficient to demonstrate the dependence of every creature on God and therefore the duty to direct every effort toward him, pedagogy cannot ignore the religious element without ceasing to be the science of a total education of man. And since there is only one true religion, the Catholic one, which, besides truths of the natural order, contains others that are suprarational and revealed (the elevation of man to adopted son of God, original sin with all its humiliating and painful consequences, the Sacraments and their efficacy), it follows that the true, perfect and complete pedagogy can be grafted only onto the truths and the morality taught by the Catholic religion.

V. OUTLINES OF THE HISTORY OF PEDAGOGY

P., like all the other arts, has historically had a development which, for greater clarity, can be distinguished into three phases: 1) empirical, when for the education of the human individual those means are adopted, without much reflection, which good sense, true or supposed, habit and tradition suggest; 2) preceptive, when the progress and complication of individual and social life and the consequent division of labour lead to the formation of specialized individuals (teachers) who practise the educative art with the formulation of maxims and precepts suited to guiding the educator; 3) scientific, when p. constructs and organizes into a true scientific system the rational directive principles of the art of educating. These phases, however, are not always to be understood in a sense of historical succession.

1. Primitive, traditional epoch

Among primitive peoples education takes very simple and utilitarian forms, circumscribed as it is to the elements whose object is to satisfy material necessities: food, clothing, lodging and shelter. Hence: the making of tools, weaving, the handling of weapons, the tending and exploitation of flocks, agricultural work. All this, however, while it prepares for life, develops through the necessity of defence and of overcoming adversities and dangers an extraordinary sensory keenness (eye, hearing, smell), a great tenacity of memory.

(parental lists, legends, traditions to be handed down), a vivid imagination (mythological explanations of natural forces, appeals to mysterious forces), a great capacity for reflection. There are no schools properly so called; but very often special buildings where the children can gather. Although the moral sense may sometimes be found blunted, their conscience still feels the value of certain obligations and certain norms of good conduct (worship of the divinity, of the ancestors, a sense of honour, fidelity to the given word, obedience to authority). Very often children are educated to courage, to contempt for pain and death, by bloody and cruel ordeals. In particular the passage from childhood to adolescence is marked by special practices and rites (segregation from the rest of the tribe, abstinences from particular foods, various ordeals, initiation into life, circumcision), which aim at moral formation for future life and future family and social relations (v. FAMIGLIA; INIZIAZIONE; PRIMITIVI).

To an epoch no longer primitive, but still traditional, the ancient Oriental peoples may be referred, who seek to hand down a sum of cognitions constituting as it were a kind of scientific treasure, generally regarded as received by revelation from the divinity, in which are seen wisdom and the foundation of individual and social happiness. Within this common framework profound divergences are noted: among the Hebrew people there prevails a religious traditionalism, which regards the sacred books of the Bible as the treasure of all science and moral virtue; in Brahminical India there is a traditionalism, so to speak, philological, in possession of a religious nucleus of cognitions which is elaborated literarily; in Egypt there prevails a scientific traditionalism, which, around the hermetic books that form its religious tradition, builds a scientific encyclopedia; China, which does not admit the character of revelation in the complex of its traditions, founds on them its teaching and its political organization. From this epoch we have inherited the sacred books of the Hebrews, which with the New Testament form the fundamental matter of our religious teaching; the grammatical elements of India, inspirers of modern grammars; numeration, the origin of that later called Arabic; the writing of the Phoenicians, the mathematics of the Egyptians, the astronomy of the Babylonians.

2. Greco-Roman humanistic epoch

P., however, appears as a science only in the Greco-Roman world. Characteristic of Greek παῖδεία was the harmonious intellectual, moral and physical culture of the individual with a view to continuous progress for the good of the city-State, and it aimed at forming a perfect body (harmony of forms, agility, strength) and a mind cultivated in all the subjects concerning the Muses (whence the name of "music"). For physical education there were the palaestras and the public games (Olympic, Isthmian, Pythian and Nemean), to which the flower of Greece hastened to award prizes and celebrate with songs what was considered an exquisite fruit of παῖδεία; for intellectual and moral education there were poetry (especially Homer and Hesiod), drama, dance, eloquence, music properly so called. At Sparta, education more marked by rigid discipline, strength and boldness, was a function of the State, which exercised it by means of a "pedonomos", assisted by correctors or mastigophoroi (= armed with the whip); at Athens, on the other hand, the freer, more aristocratic, ample and serene education was left to private initiative. There indeed arose scientific p.; at first treated in the philosophical schools as part of political science (πολιτεία); then in the gymnasia, governed by a gymnasiarch, which from palaestras for gymnastics, singing, declamation of poems and lectures passed into true academies and centres of every kind of culture. Among famous pedagogists may be remembered: Pythagoras with his exoteric and esoteric teaching and his table of operations; Socrates who gave his name to the heuristic (or Socratic) method apt to keep attention awake and sharpen the activity of the intelligence, and which he compared to a spiritual "maieutic" (art of the midwife), because it stimulated the pupil to discover the treasures hidden in the depths of the mind; Plato, disciple of Socrates, who, starting from the unitary concept of political society, wants education to be in the hands of the public power and outlines a program of studies, followed thereafter until the Middle Ages, and, as to substance, down to our own days; Xenophon, another disciple of Socrates, who in his Oeconomicus left the first treatise on the education of women; Aristotle, educator of Alexander the Great and supreme philosopher, who in his Politics limits the intervention of the State in education and wants a program embracing literature, music, grammar, gymnastics, and drawing. There also arose in Greece the "encyclopedia" (= the circle of general culture), which in its complete development comprised the philosophical sciences (grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic), the mathematical sciences (arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy), and the philosophical sciences (metaphysics, psychology, and theology). The ancient Romans always held family education in great esteem; Cato the Censor considered it a more important thing to attend at home to the education of his son than to take part in the sessions of the Senate (Plutarch, Cato maior, ch. 20), and of the Roman matron the finest eulogy was: "casta fuit, domum servavit, Ianam fecit". The ideal was dominated by the mos maiorum, the aim was Roman virtus; instruction carried less weight, and as an object of study the laws of the Twelve Tables sufficed. Nevertheless, from the earliest times the principle of education in common was practiced; but the school was held in some room or shop, or even in the open air, under some little-frequented portico or at the street crossings (in trivia, whence the name of scholae triviales), and instruction was entrusted to teachers (Indimagistri or litteratores), generally slaves or freedmen. Their low status did not in the least prevent some of them from becoming worthy of remembrance (cf. Suetonius, De claris grammaticis) and from receiving notable remuneration. However, during the period of the Republic, Roman p. did not emerge from the empirical phase; indeed the Senate and the censors opposed the introduction of Greek schools (cf. Suetonius, De claris rethoribus, ch. 1), and one must go down to Quintilian to greet the first official professor. Nevertheless, even before him there are figures of distinguished pedagogists: Cato wrote a kind of encyclopedia, Origines, for his son; Cicero, also for his son, the three books De officiis; Varro left a scholastic encyclopedia, Disciplinae; Seneca many opuscules of moral and practical philosophy: De ira, De clementia, De vita beata, and the Letters to Lucilius. The true text of p. is that of Quintilian, De institutione oratoria, where with the celebrated definition of the orator: Vir bonus dicendi peritus, he shows that he wishes to place moral education at the basis of professional education. One may still cite: Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Plutarch who, although Greek, exercised a very great influence on the Romans with his treatise On Education and the Parallel Lives, and Martianus Capella, who in the De nuptiis philologiae et Mercurii outlined the program of studies, followed throughout the Middle Ages, of the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, dialectic) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, music, geometry, astronomy).

3. Patristic and monastic era. The coming of Jesus Christ brought salutary and effective innovations in the field of p. The idea of God as father, the dignity of man elevated by Grace to the state of adopted son of God, the meaning of life which is no longer merely human but becomes divine, the interiority that gives true value to human actions, whatever they may appear outwardly and be judged by others, the universal brotherhood that destroys the unnatural barriers of distinctions and privileges, the family one and indissoluble, and the supernatural means lavished, renewed education in its deepest spirit (v. Gesù Cristo, V. Il pedagogo divino). The Fathers, especially the Greek ones, aimed to incorporate into the treasures of Christianity those inherited from Hellenic culture. At Alexandria, the school was transformed into a true scientific and Christian university (Didacaleion), where Clement of Alexandria, successor in the direction of the founder St. Pantenus, wrote the first work of Christian p.: The Pedagogue. For Clement, p. is like a medicine of the soul, a θεοσέβεια or religiosity, which teaches the service of God through the acquisition and practice of the virtues and of intellectual culture, even if founded on the pagan classics.

Mention should be made of St. Basil, for his Homily XXII on the usefulness that can be derived from reading profane authors; of St. Jerome for the two pedagogical letters, one to Laeta for the education of little Paula and the other to Gaudentius for the child Pacatula. The pedagogical works of St. Augustine have a quite particular value: in the De magistro he expounds his theory of the interiority of knowledge: it might seem that without the word of the teacher there is no instruction; instead the word is nothing but a sound, an exterior sign and a stimulus for the pupil to seek within himself the truth, by the divine light of the Word, which speaks within. Every instruction is therefore essentially self-instruction. In the De catechizandis rudibus the educational work of the teacher acquires a function of no negligible importance, because on his didactic gifts depends the progress of the pupil. In the De ordine he justifies the teaching of the liberal arts, useful for the search for truth and the defense of Christianity; in the De musica he expounds the importance and educational efficacy of art, insofar as it is beauty and an ascent to supreme beauty.

Monasticism (v.), with the luxuriant flowering of monasteries scattered throughout the East and the West, revealed itself as the heir and vigilant guardian of the cultural treasures of antiquity, preserving them amid the ruins scattered by the barbarian invasions and setting itself up, in the midst of that general dissolution of ancient civilization, as centers—if not always the only ones, certainly always principal and sought-after—of culture. And monks were those who took upon themselves the task of instructing and civilizing the uncultivated invaders, who were to be the founders of the new European nationalities. In the monasteries, besides the hours consecrated to prayer and to the manual labor necessary to provide for the needs of the monks and of the guests, there were also hours consecrated to study, to the transcription of codices, to the translation of authors; and furthermore internal schools for future monks and external schools for laymen, both with the entire program of the liberal arts and of the exact sciences; and furthermore the abbatial schools, in which the best, after the common courses, specialized in determined subjects. Parallel to the monastic schools arose, or rather continued, the presbyteral, parochial, and episcopal schools; and also those municipal or corporative, maintained by the Communes or by determined guilds.

The Carolingian era marked a true reform and a better and broader and more complete organization of studies, and from it derived the "Palatine Academy", to which were attracted the most learned and renowned monks of Italy, France, and England: Alcuin, Rabanus Maurus, Paul Warnefrid (surnamed "the Deacon"), Theodulf, Peter of Pisa. And after the likeness of the Palatine, others arose at Osnabrück for Greek and Latin, at Metz and at Soissons for music and chant. At the same time the disorganized parochial schools were called back to life, instruction was extended to freemen and serfs, without distinction, and attendance at school was made obligatory.

Naturally all this led to the composition of numerous textbooks, commentaries, and extracts, and not only that, but also of pedagogy properly so called, as the art of teaching and educating. Among the pedagogues of this period the following should be noted: St. Patrick, founder of the school of Armagh; Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus, founder of the "Vivarium" near Squillace and author of a treatise for the study of Sacred Scripture and of the seven liberal arts: Institutiones divinarum et saecularium litterarum; St. Benedict, founder of the Benedictines and of the schools attached to the monasteries; St. Gregory the Great for the school of chant and sacred music; St. Columbanus, founder, among others, of the monastery of Bobbio; St. Isidore of Seville, promoter of schools for the formation of the invading Vandals and author of an encyclopedic summary of all knowledge: Origines and Etymologiae; St. Bede the Venerable, with more than 80 writings on the arts and sciences; Alcuin, the principal animator of the Carolingian renaissance and author of school texts; St. Boniface, apostle of Germany and founder of the monastery of Fulda; Rabanus Maurus with his encyclopedia De universo.

Nor was the education of women neglected, for alongside the male cloister schools there arose female schools for girls not destined for the cloister, in which there were taught, besides the subjects of the elementary schools, chant, embroidery, instrumental music, and painting; for noble girls there were added notions of astronomy, falconry, dice and chess, and practical medicine. In some monasteries there were also higher studies: all the nuns knew Latin, and the girls learned the seven liberal arts. The nun Bertila (6th century), of the monastery of Chelles, taught Sacred Scripture with acclaim; St. Lioba was an authority in the subjects of the trivium; Hrotsvitha composed comedies in the manner of Terence; St. Hildegard left writings on all subjects from mysticism to physics and astronomy.

Also from this epoch is chivalric education, a school of devotion to one's duty; its principal virtues: moderation and self-mastery; love toward God and the Church; delicate and respectful love toward woman, daring in arms, defense of the weak, fidelity, a high sentiment of love. Externally: decorum, nobility of manner, dignity, summed up in the term "courtesy."

s. The period of the Communes and the Universities. — With the 12th and 13th centuries the center of life and culture shifts quite noticeably from the monasteries to the city, which is moving toward becoming a commune. In city circles one notes a greater rational curiosity, a greater freedom of inquiry and opinion among masters and pupils; the Crusades, the broader exchanges between East and West, the more complete knowledge of the Greek philosophers through the commentaries of the Arabs, increasingly heightened the thirst for knowledge, which the monastic and episcopal schools were no longer sufficient to satisfy; and so the universities arose. Their origin is varied; for some it is the earlier schools themselves, which broaden the field and method of studies and take on an independent character; for others they are new institutions. These higher institutes of culture were called Studium or Studium generale, and they had their corporations of teachers and pupils (universitas magistrorum and universitas scholarium) and "colleges" for foreign students, at first in the form of hospices and then of true boarding schools under strict discipline. In Italy the most illustrious universities were those of Bologna, Padua, Naples, and Pavia; abroad: the Sorbonne of Paris and the two English ones of Oxford and Cambridge. And their number, through the interest of princes and of the Church, grew rapidly; by the end of the 14th century there were more than one hundred and twenty. The degrees that could be obtained there were three: baccalaureate, licentiate, doctorate; the method of teaching was twofold: the lectio or exposition of doctrine and the disputatio or defense and attack around a question.

In this period pedagogy turns in a particular way either to the education of princes, as in Vincent of Beauvais, educator of the sons of Louis IX (De educatione regalium), and Giles of Rome (De regimine principum), or to the education of pupils, as in Alexander de Villa Dei (Doctrinale), Eberhard of Béthune (De Graecismis), John of Garland (Morale scholarium, Dictionarium), the pseudo-Boethius (De disciplina scholarium), Denis the Carthusian (De vita, moribus et eruditione scholasticorum), John Gerson (De pueris ad Christum trahendis). The only one who truly confronted a pedagogical-didactic problem with full awareness is St. Thomas Aquinas in his De magistro (Quaestiones disputatae: quaestio 11) and in his article: Utrum unus homo possit alium docere (Sum. theol., 1a, q. 117, a. 1). In the first work, recalling the Augustinian theory of the "divine light," which is the interior teacher, he explains it by identifying it with the "light of reason," given by God to man, so that in a certain way one can say that it is God who interiorly and principally acts as teacher; but while St. Augustine focused essentially on the moment of self-education, St. Thomas introduces and also requires hetero-education, which is the modern theory of the bipolarity of the educational fact. In the second writing, St. Thomas answers the question whether to teach a science well it is enough to know it well; and he answers that it is not enough, but that there is also required in the teacher a special technical ability to hold attention and above all to make the truth intelligible.

5. The Humanist Period

With the advent of Humanism and the Renaissance, the detachment from the medieval mentality became deeper. A veritable wind of revolt sought to sweep away, on the field of reason, the "scientific" value of Sacred Scripture, of Scholasticism, of Aristotle; there was a repugnance for the staticism of the ipse dixit, which was maintained in the schools; a culture was wanted that was not only Christian but also, indeed, predominantly human, one that would cause all the values contained in man's own natural and spiritual reality to flourish anew; the authors of antiquity were to be traversed entirely, and all exploited, beyond the scholastic disputes, so that contact might be felt with those great men who to the beauty of style had known how to join and sing the beauties of life, the art of government and of conquest; in short, it was a matter of giving predominance to the "I," of conquering greater autonomy; and it ended with the prevalence in pedagogy of the concept of an education understood as an aesthetic norm of beautiful harmony and eurhythmic order, rather than as a norm of discipline of duty; man is therefore educated more for the realization of an ideal of beauty and artistic composure than for the formation of character. If these ideas led some astray, there was no lack of Christian pedagogists who, while welcoming the best and most profound and free classical culture, which had risen into great vogue, did not neglect moral values and above all religious ones, so necessary for education. Among these: Giovanni Dominici (Regola del governo di cura famigliare), Pier Paolo Vergerio (De ingenuis moribus ac liberalibus studiis adolescentiae), Maffeo Vegio (De educatione liberorum clarisque eorum moribus), Guarino Guarini with his boarding school at Ferrara, Vittorino da Feltre with his "joyous house," Enea Silvio Piccolomini, later Pope Pius II (De educatione liberorum), Cardinal Jacopo Sadoleto (De liberis recte instituendis), Matteo Palmieri (Della vita civile), Leon Battista Alberti (De iciarchia, Della famiglia), Baldassarre Castiglione (Il Cortigiano), Thomas More (Utopia), Ludovico Vives (De disciplinis). Here it should be noted how, between the two extreme tendencies that were then observable — the naturalistic sense of Lorenzo Valla, the hedonistic Epicureanism of Pietro Pomponazzi, and the rigidity of De Dominici and of Savonarola — the intermediate position prevailed, wittily affirmed by St. Bernardino of Siena: young people do well to study "el Ciccarone" in order to learn the language, but they must also have as their master "santo Girolamo barba canuta." Against the excessive bookish flavor and the phenomenon of Ciceromania, derived from Humanism, Erasmus of Rotterdam, François Rabelais and Michel Montaigne rose up.

6. Period of the Catholic Reformation and of the Protestant "Reformation." — With the Protestant "Reformation," by necessity of propaganda and counter-propaganda, a rather theological humanism came to prevail: on the Protestant side with Philip Melanchthon and Johann Sturm, on the Catholic side with the great teaching religious Orders and their principles and theories, followed with enthusiasm and discernment; consider, for example, the "ratio studiorum" of the Jesuits, with its commentators: Sacchini, Perpignan, Possevino, Jouvancy, etc.; the restorative work of St. Charles Borromeo and the Della educazione cristiana e politica dei figliuoli, of Silvio Antoniano; the foundations of St. Philip Neri with the Oratory; of St. Joseph Calasanz with the Piarists; of St. Jerome Emiliani with the Somaschi; of St. Anthony Mary Zaccaria with the Barnabites; of St. Peter Fourier, St. Francis de Sales, Mary Ward with the English Ladies.

The current of realism (established by a more ardent and profound study of nature, by the experimental and inductive method proclaimed by Francis Bacon and Galileo Galilei, by the still lively reaction against the last remnants of decadent Scholasticism), besides the social realism, made of reality and utopia, of Tommaso Campanella's Città del Sole, produced among the Protestants: Wolfgang Ratke and especially John Amos Comenius with Didactica magna, Janua linguarum reserata, Orbis pictus rerum sensualium. His program, set out in the subtitle of the Didactica magna, is to provide to all (cities, villages, communes, youth of both sexes) all knowable things, including the method by which teachers may teach less and students learn more. Alongside theories of undeniable novelty and practicality (law of the gradation of subjects, cyclic method, alphabetic method in place of the intuitive method), Comenius has however the fault of easily leading to an encyclopedic scientism, against which August Hermann Francke reacted with his Pietism, in part exaggerated, and John Locke with his disciplinary realism (Conduct of the Understanding): the task of education is not to make young people perfect in one science or another, but to open and dispose the minds so as to render them capable of any science to which they may wish to apply themselves. Among the Jansenists, realism provoked the reaction of Port-Royal and their "little schools"; among Catholics it gave St. John Baptist de la Salle with his Brothers of the Christian Schools, Bossuet and Fénelon.

7. Modern Period

From this point on, the dependence of pedagogical theories on the philosophical theories that came one by one into vogue becomes ever more evident. Thus we have, as a fruit of the Enlightenment: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Emile) and Joh. Bernhard Basedow with his philanthropinism, A. Genovesi, G. Filangieri, Gian Rinaldo Carli, etc.; in a reactive sense: Cardinal Sigismondo Gerdil. In dependence, more or less felt and veiled, on Kantian criticism and on idealist philosophy, especially after the Hegelian period: J. G. Fichte (Discourses to the German Nation), F. W. Schelling (Lectures on the Method of Academic Study), Jean Paul Richter (Levana), Heinrich Pestalozzi with his schools, Friedrich Fröbel (The Education of Man); in a reactive sense: Father Grégoire Girard (Plan for the Education of All Switzerland) and Albertine Necker de la Saussure (Progressive Education). With the return to realism and the prevalence of the study of psychology, we have Johann Friedrich Herbart (General Pedagogy Deduced from the Aim of Education).

In the period of the "Risorgimento," pedagogical currents tended to form a new conscience, making education adhere to national life and emphasizing the intimate correspondence between educational renewal and political and civil renewal. One may cite: V. Cuoco and Gian Domenico Romagnosi; the mutual-teaching schools of Andrew Bell and Joseph Lancaster; Ferrante Aporti with his Asylums and the provincial Method Schools; Antonio Rosmini (Saggio sull'unità della educazione, Catechismo disposto secondo l'ordine delle idee); Vincenzo Gioberti, Raffaele Lambruschini (La Guida dell'educazione, Della educazione, etc.); Gino Capponi (Frammenti sull'educazione), Niccolò Tommaseo (Dell'educazione); Giovanni Antonio Rayneri, Domenico Berti, Giuseppe Allievo. An eminent and separate place is deserved by St. John Bosco, with his institutions, his perfect knowledge of the pupil, the completeness of his education and the preventive method.

The positivist current, which sought to introduce into pedagogy the positive method of investigation proper to the natural sciences and claimed that pedagogy, in order to construct its theories, should make use of natural investigations alone, setting aside everything that smacked of tradition, dogma, or truth not verifiable through experience, denied or neglected or combated spiritual problems, religious beliefs, metaphysical doctrines, and remade everything according to the process of physical and natural formation. Among its authors: Auguste Comte (Discorso sull'insieme del positivismo), Herbert Spencer with evolutionism, Jeremy Bentham with utilitarianism; in Italy: Roberto Ardigò, Aristide Gabelli, Cesare Lombroso and his criminalist school; in a materialist sense there are Karl Marx and his successors, who emphasized class struggle and irreligion.

Positivism provoked a strong intellectualist reaction with a neo-Hegelian background, with Bertrando Spaventa, Benedetto Croce, Giovanni Gentile, Giuseppe Lombardo Radice. And furthermore the various currents that stem from the pragmatism of William James, the psychologism of Wilhelm Wundt, the intuitionism of Henri Bergson.

8. The new school

The contemporary movement in pedagogy has developed in a marvelous flowering, so much so that it is spoken of as a "Copernican revolution" in the field of education. The central point of this revolution consists in the fact that the child has moved to the center of pedagogical activity and the teacher instead to the periphery, in the sense that the teacher will know the child, will place himself at his service, but will not substitute himself for him; he will awaken life without substituting himself for it.

The new school is also customarily called the "active school," insofar as it seeks to encompass all those pedagogical experiences that start from the consideration of spontaneity, interest, collaboration, functionality, and sociability, and that discern and awaken in the child a spontaneous effort of self-formation, an immanent vital impulse which, well assisted and directed, yields a greater strengthening of the spirit. Not all of the philosophical presuppositions from which it starts are acceptable, however (e.g., the biogenetic law, the original goodness of the child), nor are all of its didactic implementations to be approved (e.g., coeducation, religious neutrality, the appeal, for the ethical part, solely to the pupil's moral conscience, to civic, national, and humanitarian sentiment).

The new school is realized under various forms, of which the principal ones are: a) in Italy: the "Asilo modello" of the sisters Rosa and Carolina Agazzi; the "Casa del bambino" of Maria Montessori; the "Scuola serena di Agno" of Maria Boschetti-Alberti; b) in England: the "School of Abbotsholme" of Cecil Reddie; the "School of Bedales" of J. Haden Badley; the "School of Klearsley" of E. F. O'Neil; c) in Germany, the "School of Ilsenburg" of E. Lietz and the creation of the "focolari"; the "School of Odenwald" of P. Ghebeb; the "School of Wichendorf" of G. Winken; d) in France: the "Ecole des Roches" of E. Demolins and G. Bertier; the "Lavoro a squadre" of R. Cousinet; e) in Belgium: the O. Decroly method or "school-laboratory"; f) in Switzerland: the methods of A. Ferrière and E. Devaud with the centers of interest; g) in America: the method of "projects" of G. Dewey and A. Kilpatrick; the Dalton method of E. Parkhurst; the Winnetka system of C. Washburne, etc.; to which must be added the Scuole-città of E. Codignola and the "Villaggi dei ragazzi" of E. J. Flanagan (v. ATTIVISMO). Now another movement is taking shape: having overcome the school centered on the teacher and on the program, there is a tendency to overcome also the school centered on the pupil, arriving at the school which, taking into account the merits and undeniable contributions of the two systems, goes beyond them, placing its center in love (cf. A. Agazzi, Oltre la scuola attiva, in Paedagogium, 10 [1948-49], pp. 28-35).

Celestino Testore