Frank Pierrepont Graves

Evolution in education may be interpreted from the standpoint of the development of individualism. Individualism was first fully recognized in the teachings of Christ, but was repressed during the Middle Ages. While it reappeared during the Renaissance, Reformation, and other movements, it soon lapsed, but a complete break from tradition occurred with Rousseau in the eighteenth century.

For a time individualism dominated, but education since then has endeavored to afford latitude to the individual without losing sight of the welfare of society.

The Development of Individualism.—The discussion of present day tendencies that has just been given, together with the account of educational evolution in the preceding chapters, serves to show how far modern times have progressed in the ideals and practice of education. This may perhaps be best appreciated from the standpoint of the development of individualism. To follow such an interpretation back to the beginning of the history of education, it may be stated that during the day Progress of individualistic tendencies during the days of primitive man, of primitive man no real distinction was made between society and the individual, and practically all advancement was impossible, for no one looked much beyond the present. With the appearance of the transitional Oriental nations, period in the Oriental countries, the individual had begun to emerge, but was kept in constant subjection to the social whole, for man was quite enslaved to the past. Jewish, Athenian, and Roman civilizations, As the Jewish, Athenian, and Roman civilizations developed, the beginnings of individualism were for the first time clearly revealed, and some regard was had for the future. Then, through the teachings of Christ, Christian development, there came to be a larger recognition of the principle of individualism and the brotherhood of man. Owing to a necessity for spreading these enlarged ideals among a barbarous horde of peoples, individualism was repressed, and the Middle Ages; and throughout the Middle Ages the keynote was submission to authority and preparation for the life to come. The cultural products of Greece and Rome largely disappeared, and all civilization became restricted, fixed, and formal.

But the human spirit could not be forever held in bondage, and, after almost a millennium of repression and uniformity, various factors that had accumulated within the Middle Ages produced an intellectual awakening the Renaissance, that we know as the ‘Renaissance.’ Its vitality lasted during the fifteenth century in Italy and to the close of the sixteenth in the Northern countries, but by the dawn of the seventeenth century it had everywhere degenerated into a dry and mechanical study of the classics. This constituted a formalism almost as dense as that it had superseded, except that linguistic and literary studies had replaced dialectic and theology. A little later than the spread of the Renaissance, though overlapping the Reformation, it somewhat, came the allied movement of the ‘Reformation.’ This grew in part out of the disposition of the Northern Renaissance to turn to social and moral account the revived intelligence and learning. Yet here also the revival failed in its mission, and the tendency to rely upon reason rather than dogma hardened into formalism and a distrust of individualism. Again, in the seventeenth century, apparently as an outgrowth of the same forces, intellectual activity took the form of a search for ‘real things.’ The movement that culminated and realism; in ‘sense realism’ appeared, but this small and crude beginning of the modern scientific tendency was for some decades yet held within limits. Associated with this realistic tendency, on the religious and political sides also appeared a quickening in such forms as ‘Puritanism’ Puritanism and Pietism; and ‘Pietism,’ which likewise degenerated eventually into a fanaticism and hypocrisy.

The Harmonization of the Individual and Society.—Thus and Rousseau and the destructive tendency. the way was opened for the complete break with tradition and authority that occurred in the eighteenth century. This tendency, while in France at least most destructive and costly, was the inevitable result of the unwillingness to reshape society and education in accordance with changing ideals and conditions. Hence Rousseau undertook to shatter all educational traditions. But his recommendation of isolated education, so palpable in its fallacies, prepared the ground for the numerous social, scientific, and psychological tendencies (see pp. 218-222) that were destined to spring up in modern education and for the consequent improvement in the aim, organization, content, and method of education. Of course modern education has advanced infinitely beyond anything implied by Rousseau or even the later reformers of the past century, but it is out of his attempts at destruction that has grown this nobler structure. For a time individualism triumphed and ground authority under its heel, but when this extremity had been passed, the problem became how to harmonize the individual with society, and to develop personality progressively in keeping with its environment. Thus the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have put forth conscious efforts to justify the eighteenth and to bring The present tendencies in education seem to harmonize the individual interest with those of society. out and develop the positions barely hinted at in its negations. It is not alone the individual as such that has been of interest in the modern period, but more and more the individual in relation to the social whole to which he belongs, as only in this way can the value of his activities be estimated.

This is revealed in the works of those who followed Rousseau, and especially in the attempts of recent Recent definitions of education show this. educational philosophers to frame a definition of education that shall recognize the importance of affording latitude to the individual without losing sight of the welfare of the social environment in connection with which his efforts are to function. Thus Butler, though recognizing the individual factor, especially stresses the social by declaring education to be “the gradual adjustment of the individual to the spiritual possessions of the race.” Then he further declares: “When we hear it sometimes said, ‘All education must start from the child,’ we must add, ‘Yes, and lead into human civilization;’ and when it is said on the other hand that ‘all education must start from a traditional past,’ we must add, ‘Yes, and be adapted to the child.’” And the balance between the two factors of the individual and society is even more explicitly preserved in Dewey’s statement “that the psychological and social sides are organically related, and that education cannot be regarded as a compromise between the two, or a superimposition of one upon the other.” In the same way Bagley has made ‘social efficiency’ the main aim in educating the individual to-day, and both elements are carefully considered by all modern writers in discussing educational values. Thus the central problem in education of the twentieth and succeeding centuries is to be The educational problem of the future. a constant reorganization of the curriculum and methods of teaching, and this reconstruction must be such as to harmonize a due regard for the progressive variations of the individual with the welfare of the conservative institutions of society. It must include a continual effort to hand on the intellectual possessions of the race, but also to stimulate all individuals to add some modification or new element to the product. In this way there may develop unending possibilities for both the individual and society.

SUPPLEMENTARY READING

Graves, F. P., History of Education before the Middle Ages (Macmillan, 1909), chap. XII; History of Education during the Transition (Macmillan, 1910), chap. XXIII; History of Education in Modern Times (Macmillan, 1913), chap. XII; Monroe, P., Textbook in the History of Education (Macmillan, 1905), chap. X.