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7. Everything by experiment and analysis." Per inductionem et experimentum omnia. Nothing was to be received on authority. Indeed, Ratich even adopted the motto "Vetustas cessit, ratio vicit," as if the opposite to ratio was vetustas. 8. "Everything without coercion." The human understanding, he says, is so formed that it best retains what it finds pleasure in receiving." The rod should be used to correct offenses against morals only. Ratich laid great stress on the maintenance of a good feeling between the teacher and the taught, and, lest this should be endangered by necessary discipline, he would hand over the care of discipline to a separate officer, called the Scholarch.

*

When we examine Ratich's method of teaching, we shall find that here, too, he deserves to be considered the Coryphæus of the Innovators. The teacher

of which the names and symbols are the accidents. "But," objects the teacher, "these sounds can not be pronounced alone." Certainly not, and they should therefore be first brought to the child's notice as they really exist, and as the child is already familiar with them, i. e., in connection. The child knows words. Teach him the symbols of those words. By analyzing these, he may learn the symbols of the component syllables, and finally of the component sounds. He will then have no difficulty in learning the names of the letters, as he knows the letters themselves. This was Jacotot's method.

*The reader will find that the unanimity of the writers on education in advocating this principle is almost as great as that of the schoolmasters in neglecting it. The oldest and perhaps the most striking testimony I have met with on this point is the passage from 7th book of Plato's Republic, quoted by Ascham: ovdèv μálnμa μetà δουλείας τὸν ἐλεύθερον χρὴ μανθάνεινι· οἱ μὲν γὰρ τοῦ σώματος πόνοι βίᾳ πονούμενοι χεῖρον οὐδὲν τὸ σῶμα ἀπεργάζονται· ψυχῇ δὲ βίαιον οὐδὲν ἔμμονον μάθημα μὴ τοίνυν βίᾳ, ὦ ἄριστε, τοὺς παῖδας ἐν τοῖς μαθήμασιν, ἀλλὰ παίζοντας τρέφε.

...

of the lowest class at Köthen had to talk with the children, and to take pains with their pronunciation. When they knew their letters, the teacher read the book of Genesis through to them, each chapter twice over, requiring the children to follow with eye and finger. Then the teacher began the chapter again, and read about four lines only, which the children read after him. When the book had been worked over in this way, the children were required to read it through without assistance. Reading once secured, the master proceeded to grammar. He explained, say, what a substantive was, and then showed instances in Genesis, and next required the children to point out others. In this way grammar was verified throughout from Genesis, and the pupils were exercised in declining and conjugating words taken from the book.

When they advanced to the study of Latin, they were given a translation of a play of Terence, and worked over it several times before they were shown the Latin. The master then translated the play to them, each half-hour's work twice over. At the next reading, the master translated the first half hour, and the boys translated the same piece the second. Having thus got through the play, they began again, and only the boys translated. After this there was a course of grammar, which was applied to the Terence, as the grammar of the mother-tongue had been to Genesis. Finally, the pupils were put through a course of exercises, in which they had to turn into Latin sentences imitated from the Terence, and differing from the original only in the number or person used.

RATICH'S METHOD AND ASCHAM S.

39

Raumer gives other particulars, and quotes largely from the almost unreadable account of Kromayer, one of Ratich's followers, in order that we may have, as he says, a notion of the tediousness of the method. No doubt any one who has followed me hitherto, will consider that this point has been brought out al ready with sufficient distinctness.

So

When we compare Ratich's method with that of Ascham, we find that they have much in common. Ratich began the study of a language with one book, which he worked over with the pupil a great many times. Ascham did the same. Each lecture, he says, would, according to his plan, be gone over a dozen times at the least. Both construed to the pupil, instead of requiring him to make out the sense for himself. Both taught grammar, not independently, but in connection with the model book. far as the two methods differed, I have no hesitation in pronouncing Ascham's the better. It gave the pupil more to do, and contained the very important element, writing. By this means there was a chance of the interest of the pupil surviving the constant repetition; but Ratich's pupils must have been bored to death. His plan of making them familiar with the translation first, was subsequently advocated by Comenius, and may have advantages, but in effect the pupil would be tired of the play before he began to translate it. Then Ratich's plan of going through and through seems very inferior to that of thoroughly mastering one lesson before going on to the next. I should say that whatever merit there was in Ratich's plan, lay in its insisting on complete knowledge of a single book, and that this knowledge would be

much better attained by Ascham's practice of double translation.

MILTON.

In the middle of the seventeenth century there was in England a schoolmaster, and author of a Latin "Accidence," who was perhaps the most notable man who ever kept a school or published a schoolbook. This was John Milton. His notions of education have been very briefly recorded by him in his Tract to Hartlib, and have been read by many of us, not, I fancy, without a feeling of disappointment. His proposals, indeed, like everything connected with him, are of heroic mold. The reader (especially if he be a schoolmaster) gasps for breath at the mere enumeration of the subjects to be learned and the books to be read. In natural philosophy "they (the scholars) may proceed leisurely from the history of meteors, minerals, plants, and living creatures, as far as anatomy." In law, "they are to dive into the grounds of law and legal justice, delivered first, and with best warrant, by Moses, and, as far as human prudence can be trusted, in those extolled remains of Grecian lawgivers, Lycurgus, Solon, Zaleucus, Charondas, and thence to all the Roman edicts and tables with their Justinian, and so down to Saxon and common laws of England and the Statutes." "To set them right and firm in the knowledge of virtue and hatred of vice, their young and pliant affections are to be led through all the moral works of Plato,

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Xenophon, Cicero, Plutarch, and those Locrian remnants." "At some set hour they are to learn Hebrew," with the Chaldee and Syrian dialects, and they may have easily learned at any odd hour the Italian tongue!" "This," says Milton (and here at least he carries the reader with him), " is not a bow for every man to shoot in, that calls himself a teacher."

But though Milton flew so high, we shall find, if we examine his proposals, that he took the same direction as the other Innovators. (1) He denounced, as they did, "the asinine feast of sow-thistles and brambles, to which we now haul and drag our choicest and hopefullest wits, as all the food and entertainment of their tenderest and most docilable age." In the schools he complains that nothing but grammar was taught, at the universities nothing hut logic and metaphysics. He would turn from these verbal toils to the study of things. Language was not to be studied for itself, but merely as an instrument conveying to us things useful to be known. Latin and Greek must therefore be acquired by a method that I will take little time. This method he does not describe at length, but his words seem to refer 10 some such plan as that of Ascham or Ratich. "Whereas," he says, "if after some preparatory grounds of speech by their certain forms got into memory, they were led to the praxis thereof in some chosen short book lessoned thoroughly to them, they might then forthwith proceed to learn the substance of good things and arts in due order, which would bring the whole language quickly into their power." (2) The young were to be led on “ by the infinite desire of a