§ 17. How far did the Philanthropinum really deserve their good opinion? The conclusion to which we are driven by Fred’s narrative is, that Basedow carried to excess his principle—“Treat children as children, that they may remain the longer uncorrupted;” and that the Philanthropinum was, in fact, nothing but a good infant-school. Surely none of the thirteen children who were the subjects of Basedow’s experiments could have been more than ten years old. But if we consider Basedow’s system to have been intended for _children_, say between the ages of six and ten, we must allow that it possessed great merits. At the very beginning of a boy’s learning, it has always been too much the custom to make him hate the sight of a book, and escape at every opportunity from school-work, by giving him difficult tasks, and neglecting his acutest faculties. “Children love motion and noise,” says Basedow: “here is a hint from nature.” Yet the youngest children in most schools are expected to keep quiet and to sit at their books for as many hours as the youths of seventeen or eighteen. Their vivacity is repressed with the cane. Their delight in exercising their hands and eyes and ears is taken no notice of; and they are required to keep their attention fixed on subjects often beyond their comprehension, and almost always beyond the range of their interests. Everyone who has had experience in teaching boys knows how hard it is to get them to throw themselves heartily into any task whatever; and probably this difficulty arises in many cases, from the habits of inattention and of shirking school-work, which the boys have acquired almost necessarily from the dreariness of their earliest lessons.[150] Basedow determined to change all this; and in the Philanthropin no doubt he succeeded. We have already seen some of the expedients by which he sought to render school-work pleasurable. He appealed, wherever it was possible, to the children’s senses; and these, especially the sight, were trained with great care by exercises, such as drawing, shooting at a mark, &c. One of these exercises, intended to give quick perception, bears a curious likeness to what has since been practised in a very different educational system. A picture, with a somewhat varied subject, was exhibited for a short time and removed. The boys had then, either verbally or on paper, to give an account of it, naming the different objects in proper order. Houdin, if I rightly remember, tells us that the young thieves of Paris are required by their masters to make a mental inventory of the contents of a shop window, which they see only as they walk rapidly by. Other exercises of the Philanthropinum connected the pupils with more honourable callings. They became acquainted with both skilled and unskilled manual labour. Every boy was taught a handicraft, such as carpentering and turning, and was put to such tasks as threshing corn. Basedow’s division of the