Why then mention only Jesuits and Moslems? Considering the esteem in which German schools and scholarship are held by many, it would evidently have produced little effect to have said: "Moslems, the Jesuits and the Germans have prescribed courses."
Many writers on education have been misled in their estimate of the Jesuit system by blindly accepting and uncritically repeating the censures of a few authors who, deservedly or not, have acquired a reputation as pedagogical writers. Thus Quick, in numerous passages of his Educational Reformers, pays a high tribute to the Jesuit system. In a few places, especially in one paragraph, he finds fault with it. In some American works[1] we find this one paragraph quoted as Quick's judgment on the Jesuit system, and not a word is said of his hearty approbation of most points of that system. It is also most unfortunate that American teachers and writers on education place so much confidence in the productions of M. Compayré, especially his History of Pedagogy. For many reasons this work must be called a most unreliable source of
- ↑ So in the histories of education by Painter and Seeley. – I wish to state here that of all American text-books on the history of education the latest, the History of Education, by Professor Kemp, (Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1902) is the most impartial. The chapter on the Jesuits (XVIII.) is singularly free from the misrepresentations which are so numerous in other text-books. In one point, however, regarding "emulation," the author is mistaken. See below, ch. XVI, § 4.
Vol. I, pp. 32-74, especially pp. 70 foll, where it is stated that "the superiority of German public schools over those of other nations has been acknowledged repeatedly." In another place of the same Report (1891-92), Vol. I, p. 140, the words of Dr. Joynes of the University of S. C. are quoted: "Germany has now become the schoolmistress of the world."
