30 THE NEW METHOD 



less than it had been a hundred years earlier. Before 

 the middle of the eighteenth century many people be- 

 came out-spoken in their criticisms of the schools. 

 They claimed that the method must be radically 

 wrong, for in two centuries the public school had 

 done but little toward raising the people out of their 

 ignorance and degradation. 



The first of the noted writers on this subject was 

 Rousseau in France. In 1749 he wrote that the 

 children learn nothing but words and no real knowl- 

 edge, that books rob a boy of his mother wit and he 

 becomes a machine and a dunce. He said that what 

 real knowledge a child receives comes through the 

 senses, which are the basis of the intellectual, and that 

 books are useless until the child is ten years old. 



The next distinguished advocate of better methods 

 in education was Henry Pestalozzi of Switzerland. 

 He opened his first school at Neuhof in 1775. Pes- 

 talozzi rejected as worse than useless the book learn- 

 ing which prevailed in all public schools at that time. 

 He said that a man who has only book learning is 

 less susceptible to truth than a savage. 



For nearly a hundred years Germany has been the 

 educational centre of the world. She is exerting a 

 great and increasing influence in all the progressive 

 and most highly civilized nations, by illustrating the 

 true or at least the best known methods of educating 

 a child. It becomes us, then, to inquire how Germany 



