Essays on Educational ReformersQuick, Robert Hebert
History
Essays on Educational Reformers
Quick, Robert Hebert
Education -- History; Educators
realism was to be joined with verbal realism, for Gargantua was to carry
home with him great handfuls for herborising. Rabelais even recommends
studying the face of the heavens at night, and then observing the change
that has taken place at 4 in the morning. So he seems to have been the
first writer on education (and the first by a long interval), who would
teach about things by observing the things themselves. It was this
_Anschauungs-prinzip_—use of sense-impressions—that Pestalozzi extended
and claimed as his invention two centuries and a half later. Rabelais
also gives a hint of the use of hand-work as well as head-work. Gargantua
and his fellows “did recreate themselves in bottling hay, in cleaving
and sawing wood, and in threshing sheaves of corn in the barn. They also
studied the art of painting or carving.” The course was further connected
with life by visits to the various handicraftsmen, in whose workshops
“they did learn and consider the industry and invention of the trader.”
Thus, even in the time of the Renascence, Rabelais saw that the life of
the intellect might be nourished by many things besides books. But books
were still kept in the highest place. Even on a holiday, which occurred
on some fine and clear day once a month, “though spent without books or
lecture, yet was the day not without profit; for in the meadows they
repeated certain pleasant verses of Virgil’s _Agriculture_, of Hesiod,
of Politian’s _Husbandry_.” They also turned Latin epigrams into French
_rondeaux_.
This course of study, “although at first it seemed difficult, yet soon
became so sweet, so easy, and so delightful, that it seemed rather the
recreation of a king than the study of a scholar.”
In preferring the Quadrivial studies to the Trivial, and still more
in his use of actual things, Rabelais separates himself from all the
teachers of his time.
§ 6. Very remarkable too is the attention he pays to physical education.
A day does not pass on which Gargantua does not gallantly exercise his
body as he has already exercised his mind. The exercises prescribed are
very various, and include running, jumping, swimming, with practice on
the horizontal bar and with dumb-bells, &c. But in one respect Rabelais
seems behind our own writer, Richard Mulcaster. Mulcaster trained the
body simply with a view to health. Rabelais is thinking of the gentleman,
and all his physical exercises are to prepare him for the gentleman’s
occupation, war. The constant preparation for war had a strong and in
some respects a very beneficial influence on the education of gentlemen
in the fifteen and sixteen hundreds, as it has had on that of the Germans
in the eighteen hundreds. But to be ready to slaughter one’s fellow
creatures is not an ideal aim in education; and besides this, one half of
the human race can never (as far as we can judge at present) be affected
by it. We therefore prefer the physical training recommended by the
Englishman.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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