In the “Philalethie,” one of his earlier works, he already raises the voice of protest against the ineffective, futile, and one-sided education of his day. “Are not there too many doctors?” he writes. “How many of the professors, doctors, or masters will make themselves more useful by working with their hands, by becoming turners, etc.? It is certain that parents push their children too much to the scholarly studies, when the children would do much better to learn commerce, surgery, book trade, fine arts, and especially agriculture.” Again he sneers in the vein of Montaigne at “the learned men who are praised for the dissertations on Virgil and Homer, Corneille and Racine, etc., but who neglect to be good husbands, to be good friends, and to perform well their duties,” and accuses the mistaken purpose and method of learning which “prevents one from living with the people” (9: pp. 190-191). He proclaims that the “chief purpose of education should be to prepare the child for a useful, public-spirited and happy life” (5: p. 42). To secure one’s own happy existence and to promote the general good of mankind is the end of individual life. By the happiness of an individual he understands a self-contented, cheerful existence, with a “sound mind in a sound body.” Not mere knowledge or accomplishment, but efficiency and virtue, power and character, are the essential things in a man. So, instruction, though important, occupies only a secondary place; the training, the formation of manhood, by inculcating good habits and dispositions, by guarding against the establishing of bad ones, is the first and chief task of education. In this respects Basedow is entirely Lockean. Requirement of absolute obedience for younger children, appeals to the sense of honor as the chief educative motive, are also common in both. In the initiation of children to language study through play and playthings, in the abundant use of pictures, models, globes, etc., as the handmaid of verbal teaching, in the introduction of more realistic studies and manual activities, in the encouragement of physical culture, he again follows Locke’s suggestions, but carried them into details and elaborations in the practice in his institution. The emphasis laid on the physical culture in the _Philanthropium_ especially became an incentive and model to others; Jahn, the father of German gymnastics, is numbered among those who have been inspired by Basedow.