Johann Bernhard Basedow

German educator

• Born: September 11, 1723
• Birthplace: Hamburg (now in Germany)
• Died: July 25, 1790
• Place of death: Magdeburg, Brandenburg (now in Germany)

Basedow, believing that children should be permitted their childhood, taught them accordingly, encouraging them to learn through observation and experience more than through books. He insisted on a secular approach to an education that included nature study, physical education, and manual training.

Early Life

Johann Bernhard Basedow (yoh-HAHN BURN-hahrt BAHZ-uh-doh) was born in the northeastern German seaport of Hamburg, the son of an unhappy, alcoholic wig maker, a man of dark moods, whose wife lapsed into madness and died shortly after the birth of her son. As a youth, Basedow exhibited erratic behavior. He was given to practical jokes, which annoyed his father. The boy, who learned Latin from his father by the time he was eight, ran away from home but soon returned and applied himself to his studies.

By the time he was twenty, Basedow had entered the University of Leipzig as a student in theology. His unconventional, though brilliant, thinking and his extreme egotism soon put him at odds with important faculty members, and he decided not to prepare for the priesthood. Rather, in 1749, he became a tutor in Holstein, and during his three years of tutoring he discovered that teaching was his real vocation. His views were unique for his time in that he eschewed book learning and was convinced that people learn best from observation and experience. Basedow taught Latin as though he were a Roman citizen, chatting informally in Latin with his students, who began to learn by what modern theorists have termed the audiolingual approach. By 1752, Basedow had taken a doctorate in foreign languages at the University of Kiel, where his dissertation explored some of the new methods of teaching he had developed as a tutor.

Soon afterward, Basedow accepted his first regular teaching job, in a Danish academy attended by the children of affluent, influential Danes. A gifted teacher, Basedow drew attention to himself by his unorthodox religious views and by his heterodox teaching methods. He advocated nonsectarian teaching, a shocking idea in his day. By 1761, he was no longer welcome among the Danes and moved to a classical Gymnasium (a German secondary school) in Altona, near his birthplace. Long a philosophical rationalist, Basedow issued broadsides so shocking to the people of Altona that the Church barred him and his family from taking Holy Communion and they were placed under an ecclesiastical ban. Anyone who read his work was threatened with exile, but these restraints did not stifle Basedow, who issued vituperation after vituperation.

Life’s Work

Basedow was forty-five and had lost several teaching jobs when he published his Vorstellung an Menschenfreunde und vermögende Männer über Schulen, Studien, und ihren Enfluss in die öffentliche Wohlfahrt (1768). His tract, in part a direct appeal for funds from the affluent readers at whom the book was directed, called for nonsectarian schools, noninvolvement of the clergy in schools, the establishment of a state school board, and educational reform based on the philosophies and methodologies expounded by John Amos Comenius in Orbis sensualium pictus (1658; The Visible World in Pictures, 1659), by John Locke in Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), and by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Émile: Ou, De l’éducation (1762; Emilius and Sophia: Or, A New System of Education, 1762-1763). Basedow’s book received wide attention and, remarkably, brought to its author a flood of contributions sufficient to ensure his family’s future for some years and to allow him the leisure to work on two other books he had promised his supporters. Contributions came to him from every sector—from Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and, quite particularly, Freemasons, to whom the secularization of education was especially appealing.

Two years afterward, Basedow published the books he had promised, Des Methodenbuchs für Väter und Mütter der Familien und Völker (1770; Book of Methods for Fathers and Mothers of Families and Nations, 1913) and Des Elementarbuchs für die Jugend und für ihre Lehrer und Freunde in gesitteten Ständen (1770), both of which were reissued later as the multivolume Elementarwerke (1774), as richly illustrated for pedagogical purposes as Comenius’s The Visible World in Pictures had been. The aim of Elementarwerke was to entice children to read while keeping them completely captivated by what they were doing. The volumes covered much of what was then known about the world, including commerce, manners, virtue, science, and how to adapt to situations.

The work was received enthusiastically, and its publication encouraged Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Dessau to subsidize a school in which Basedow could practice his unique teaching methods. The prince offered Basedow a considerable yearly sum for his efforts. In December, 1774, Basedow, aided by three assistants, opened his quite expensive boarding school, the Philanthropinum (later named the Institute), to which the affluent, many of them daunted by the novelty of the operation, sent their children only in small numbers and often reluctantly, attracted usually because Basedow was eager to work with children who experienced difficulties in more conventional schools. At no time did the school’s total enrollment exceed fifty students, including Basedow’s two children.

Basedow expected to enroll three kinds of students: those who planned to attend a university, those preparing to become teachers themselves, and those who would enter service occupations after they left school. He encouraged impoverished students to enroll by offering them subventions, but attracting students to a school of this kind was a continuing problem, as were the financial struggles that continued to plague Basedow.

The school, which distributed a twenty-item list of rules and regulations, forbade its students to powder their hair and to rouge their cheeks, as was then the custom among many upper-class children. The school day was divided into segments for studying (five hours), for manual work and play (six hours), and for physical activities such as fencing, dancing, or singing (three hours). Although a religious attitude was encouraged among students, no time was devoted to the discussion of minor points of theological disagreement, as was the custom in many religiously oriented schools of that period.

Among its other departures from conventional educational practices, Basedow’s school was coeducational. It emphasized play over study, consistent with the theory that real learning takes place from informal activities. Even the foreign languages the school offered, Latin and French, were approached by emphasizing the spoken languages rather than by the rote learning of vocabulary and of paradigms for the conjugation of verbs or the declension of nouns. Perhaps the most controversial element in Basedow’s education new pedagogy, however, was its insistence that students receive sex education and that this education be provided in a straightforward and honest manner. Simple anatomical terms were to be used, along with charts and drawings that would amplify the instruction.

Basedow aimed to prepare students for the real world. So far did his means of achieving this end depart from expected norms that the public became indignant. Basedow, a tall person, unprepossessing in appearance, had a monumental ego that stood in the way of his communicating meaningfully with those who questioned his educational procedures. When challenged, he became defensive, so that his opponents usually wanted to defeat him rather than understand him.

Perhaps the greatest influence upon Basedow’s educational philosophy, greater even than his reading of Rousseau’s Emilius and Sophia, was John Locke’s concept of the tabula rasa, the blank slate that Locke considered constituted the mind of every newborn infant, and his strident calls in Some Thoughts Concerning Education for an emphasis on physical education. Locke’s conception of the human mind joined with his recognition of the need to develop a sound body justified Basedow’s notion that observation, experience, and play are quintessential ingredients of any effective education.

Not surprisingly, Basedow lasted for only two years as director of his school before he turned to regular teaching. He continued teaching for eight more years, and in 1784 he resigned from the school altogether. The institution continued until 1793, when, burdened by debt and low enrollments, it was forced to close. The closing of the school did not mark the end of Basedow’s educational influence. Joachim Heinrich Campe, who succeeded Basedow as director, opened a school of his own, based on Basedow’s principles, in Hamburg and ran it for several years until he became director of education for the state of Brunswick. In his later years, in collaboration with others who admired Basedow’s ideas, Campe published a sixteen-volume work that called for school reform of the kind Basedow had earlier promulgated.

Another educator who taught under Basedow’s influence, Christian Saltzmann, founded his own school in Schnepfenthal in Coxe-Saxony in 1784 and ran it until his death, following Basedow’s general pedagogical theories but adapting them wisely to his immediate situation. Saltzmann’s school, on falling into the hands of his assistants, prospered and continued to flourish for more than one hundred years after its founding.

Significance

Johann Bernhard Basedow is a striking example of a man far ahead of his time. Educational ideas that sounded extreme at the beginning of the eighteenth century are taken quite for granted by twentieth century Western society. Basedow, flourishing in a time of educational reform marked by such eminent thinkers as Rousseau, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, Johann Friedrich Herbart, and Friedrich Froebel, has not received the celebrity they commanded. Nevertheless, his educational writings and practices directly affected the history of Western education.

His idea of secularizing schools is widely accepted in most Western countries today. Basedow’s support of coeducation, at a time when such an idea was virtually unthinkable and when the education of women was severely limited, was courageous. That notion not only came of age in the twentieth century but also has finally been generally accepted, as has the establishment of central governing bodies for education as suggested by Basedow.

As Western society has grown more open, frank, and honest, sex education has pervaded the schools. As society has grown increasingly diverse and as the age for leaving school has increased in most countries, manual training, now extended to include sophisticated levels of vocational education, has become a significant element of education, having exceeded by far anything Basedow could have envisioned. Even though such an eminent figure as Immanuel Kant lauded Basedow’s Philanthropinum publicly, most people were not yet ready for Basedow’s proposals during his lifetime. His cause was undoubtedly damaged by his unattractive demeanor and by his enormous ego, both of which stood in the way of many who could not separate the man from his farsighted pedagogy.

Bibliography

Good, Harry, and James D. Teller. A History of American Education. 3d ed. New York: Macmillan, 1973. This brief profile of Basedow relates his pedagogical theories to the development of education in the United States and comments on Kant’s admiration of the Philanthropinum. The section sometimes tends to be irritatingly didactic.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. A History of Western Education. 3d ed. New York: Macmillan, 1969. This treatment, although brief, is fuller than that in the authors’ A History of American Education. Offers good commentary on Basedow’s most important books and considers contemporary criticism of those books.

Graves, Frank Pierrepont. Great Educators of Three Centuries: Their Work and Its Influence on Modern Education. New York: AMS Press, 1971. Reprint of a collection of lectures on education originally published in 1912. Includes a lecture on Basedow and the Philanthropinum.

Lucas, Christopher J. Our Western Educational Heritage. New York: Macmillan, 1971. Although brief, Lucas’s treatment relates Basedow well to those who influenced him most substantially—Comenius, Locke, Rousseau—and presents a clear exposition on the establishment of the Philanthropinum.

Meyer, Adolphe E. An Educational History of the Western World. 2d ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972. Meyer’s presentation of Basedow, although limited, is in many ways the most complete one available. Overwritten but well researched and accurate, it gives valuable insights into the early influences that shaped Basedow’s personality.

Randall, John Herman. The Making of the Modern Mind. 50th anniversary ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1976. A brilliant overall cultural history that relates Basedow to the philosophical movement of rationalism. Badly dated, but the book’s shrewd observations make it worthwhile for modern readers.