Sometimes I read a blog called JF Ptak Science Books. That's a pretty dry title for a blog, but the author runs some kind of bookstore of rare and unusual used books and publications, and I find it endlessly fascinating.
Today, after coming home and having my increasingly customary but seemingly insalubrious Saturday post-work nap, I was browsing that blog and ran across a posting of this article excerpted from a publication called The Emporium of Arts, and Sciences (1814). I will not reproduce the entirety of it here, because I'm not sure of Ptak's policy on republication of materials, but here is the first facsimile, as a live link back to the blogpost.
Much of the advice could apply just as aptly to the treatment of our fellow adults as to children. But over all it's remarkable, in that it gets at the core of something it is far too easy to forget, with children especially – they learn as much (or more) by our example as by our "instruction" – whatever that is.
When I followed up on Ptak's reference to the supposed author of this 1814 article, Christian Gotthilf Salzmann, I found the wikithing's entry far too tantalizingly brief – what, exactly, might a school founded on Rousseauian principles be like? He was translated by Mary Wollstonecraft? – A bunch of late 18th century hippies, I expect.
[daily log: walking, 5 km]
The German wiki says he was a Protestant pastor, who get involved in education from age 37 (1781) in what would’ve then been the orbit of a rising Prussia in the late 1700s (the places he lived and worked were not technically within Prussia’s domains until well after his death, as far as I can tell — but this panoply of minor statelets on the Prussian fringes in those years must’ve been defacto cultural satellites of Prussia in some sense). After a few years working at another guy’s school, he founded his own school in 1784 and began to publish lots of books on education. Somebody called him “the German Rousseau”. He was a freemason.
“How to make children stupid—Give them a good box on the ear, every time they forget anything.”