VOLUME II, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 16, SECTION 1
Comenius, Rousseau, Dewey, Three Who Walked Half the Way
The last three chapters stood on the ancestors. This chapter turns to the West, which sent up, over the last four hundred years, some of the loudest minds it had on how a person is taught, and the schools of the whole world today still stand on the roads they laid. Across three sections. The first calls out three of them, Comenius, Rousseau, Dewey. See where each walked to, and where each stopped.
The first is Comenius, a Czech, who in 1632 wrote a book called The Great Didactic. Most people today have never heard the name. And yet the classroom you sit in every day, he built it. Set down what came before him. Before him, teaching was one teacher and a handful of students, uneven in age, uneven in level, taught as far as they got, whoever kept up kept up. The rich hired a tutor and shut the door on one child. The poor child never touched a letter. Comenius said, this will not do. He meant to teach knowledge to everyone, rich or poor, boy or girl, quick or slow. And how do you teach that many? He worked out a method. Group the children of about one age into a class. Give the class a curriculum. Set one textbook, one pace. Put one teacher at the front, facing dozens at once. Test after each lesson, and the ones who pass move up a grade together. Read those lines and look up at the room you are in. It is the same room. A drawing one man made on paper four hundred years ago, and billions of children still sit inside it. This is a vast achievement, because it let education out of the few's courtyard. Confucius pushed the door open, teach all without distinction. Comenius built that door into a road that billions could walk through at once.
And where did he stop? At the very root of his method. Uniformity. Uniform age, uniform textbook, uniform pace, uniform testing. Uniformity is the whole reason the thing could spread, for without it you cannot teach billions. But recall the second section of the fourteenth chapter. Confucius gave Zilu and Ranyou opposite answers because one needed spurring and one needed reining. The old book on learning nurtured the strength and remedied the failing. Both say the same thing. Each person is different. And Comenius's method says, from end to end, everyone the same. This is not a matter of who is right. It is the two ends of one thing. To give education to all, you must make it uniform, and the moment you make it uniform, teaching each by his material has no place left to stand. Comenius bought the half that is teach all, at the cost of the half that is teach each by his material. Four hundred years on, the whole world still stands on that trade, and most who stand on it never know they made it.
The second is Rousseau, a Frenchman, who in 1762 wrote Emile. His line, in that day, split the sky. A child is not a small adult. The Europe of his time dressed children as shrunken grown-ups, made them carry grown-up books, boxed them in with grown-up rules. Rousseau said, no. A child has a child's nature, a child's rhythm, a child's way of growing, and education should follow that nature and let him grow. This was a great thing, and every voice today that says respect the child, follow his nature, do not force the sprout, roots here. And plainly it was aimed at Comenius, one saying everyone the same, the other saying every child different. And where did Rousseau stop? At his next line. The child's nature is good, and society made it dirty. See what that line does. It sets up a stance. The child is the good side, society the dirty side, and education is the wall standing between, keeping the child from being fouled. Three positions, fixed in one stroke. And that stroke is a verdict. This book, from its first chapter to now, lays out positions and passes no verdict, and Rousseau's stroke passes one. And once the verdict is passed, the road narrows. If you have decided society is dirty, how do you teach a child to walk into it well, to deal with a difficult person, to hold himself in an unfair seat? Rousseau cannot teach these, because from the start he put society on the far side. A student may ask, but does our own Mencius not also teach that nature is good? A fair question, and here is the line to draw. Mencius's good nature is the heart's flicker of not being able to bear another's suffering, the root position of a person, and he never once concluded from it that society is dirty and the child must be walled off. The line that follows Mencius's good nature is to extend it and fill it out, to push that good outward, into the human world. One walls the child in, the other pushes the person out. One word apart, and two roads.
The third is Dewey, an American, who in 1916 wrote Democracy and Education. His line you have surely heard. Education is life. School, he said, should not be a wall shutting the child off from the real world. Education is not preparation for a life to come. Education is the life. The child should learn in the doing, in the working of his hands, in solving a real problem alongside others. This too was great, and every path today that speaks of learning by doing roots here. And where did Dewey stop? At folding the two operations into one. The last chapter set it out plainly. Teaching is one operation, steeping is another. Teaching is deliberate, focused, spoken. Steeping is unintended, all-around, wordless. Two operations, each with its own work, and together they hand a culture down. Dewey's education is life smeared the two into one. And the result is this. Teaching gets watered down. A lesson that should have been driven home becomes a lively activity. The child has a fine time, makes many things, and no one drives the principle home for him. The three fires of the old book on learning, lead him but do not drag him, brace him but do not press him down, open the way but do not walk it for him, have nowhere left to work, because no one is teaching at all. And steeping does not truly grow either. Because the moment you move life into the school and make it curriculum, make it a project, make it a thing to be graded, it stops being life. The last chapter said steeping's first mark is that it is unintended, and anything staged on purpose for the child is performance. A life scheduled onto the timetable, with reflections to write and homework to hand in, is not steeping. It is teaching in the clothes of life. So both fall through. Not that Dewey lacked brilliance. He took two operations for one.
So here is where this section leaves us. Three men called out. Comenius built today's classroom and freed education from the few's courtyard, a vast merit, but his method's root is uniformity, and where uniformity stands, teaching each by his material cannot, so he bought teach all and gave up teach each. Rousseau saw that a child is not a small adult and should be followed, a great thing, but his next line passed a verdict, child good and society dirty, and the road narrowed, where Mencius, from the same good nature, concluded to push the good outward, not to wall the child in. Dewey saw that education should not be walled from real life, also great, but he folded teaching and steeping into one, and teaching thinned into activity while a graded, scheduled steeping stopped being steeping, and both fell through. Three walked half. And the reason is the same in all three. Each took a stance, and passed a verdict. The ancestors' eight-step road, and teach each by his material, and teach all without distinction, pass no verdict, and so they have lasted twenty five centuries. That is the start of the sixteenth stake. In teaching on education, pass a verdict and the road narrows. Only lay out positions, and it goes far. And two more went further, and fiercer. One means to abolish the school outright. The other sets school and prison and barracks and factory on one table. The next section brings in Illich and Foucault. See you there.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.