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Studies in the History of Modern Education
Studies in the History of Modern Education Author:Charles Oliver Hoyt Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II ROUSSEAU AND INDIVIDUALISM The spirit of the eighteenth century was revolutionary in its character, and this spirit affected every phase of human ... more »life. Men from every rank revolted against the tyranny of kings and governments; they rebelled against the mandates of society and the church, and began to assert their rights as individuals. Freedom was the watchword of the hour; and the one vital question about which all others centered was the relationship that the free individual should bear to the political, the religious, and the social institutions. In the sixteenth century Luther and his contemporaries had proposed the same question concerning the church, and in the seventeenth century the same problem had been vigorously attacked from all sides. Comenius from the standpoint of education, following in the wake of the scientists, appealed to nature and introduced realism into the schools. In philosophy, Descartes, starting with doubt, founded a new school of thought; Bacon, in the same way, instituted a new method; and Hobbes, in his application of the doctrine of mechanism to the state, set at work a new influence that did much to solve the great problem. In England, the Commonwealth had demonstrated the right of the people to elect a king; and although under Louis XIV a powerful monarchy had been built up inFrance, and the American colonies were yet under the control of the English kings, the seeds had been sown and were slowly germinating in the minds of the common people. A revolution was inevitable. Thus we see that in the eighteenth century the question of the relation of the individual to the institution would give rise to other grave and important questions which must necessarily engage the attention of every thinking man, and more especially of the...« less