scholastic methods are
employed. The author skillfully ridicules the methods, and shows the
utter inefficiency of the instruction by contrasting the result in
Gargantua and Eudemon, a page of the king. Gargantua, a man of
fifty-five, is introduced to Eudemon, a boy of twelve. The former is
awkward, bashful, and does not know what to say, while the latter meets
Gargantua cap in hand, with open countenance, ruddy lips, steady eyes,
and with modesty becoming a youth. In reply to the polite and
intelligent conversation of the lad, Gargantua "falls to crying like a
cow, casting down his face, and hiding it with his cap." Compayre says,
"In these two pupils, so different in manner, Rabelais has personified
two contrasted methods of education: that which, by mechanical exercises
of memory, enfeebles and dulls the intelligence; and that which, with
large grants of liberty, develops intelligences and frank and open
characters."

The deficiencies of the old education (the scholastic) being thus shown,
Rabelais places his pupil under Ponocrates, Eudemon's teacher, who has
produced such practical results. He then opens up his system of pedagogy
in the plan pursued for the redemption of Gargantua.

=Realism in Education.=--Compayre's estimate of this pedagogy is as
follows: "The pedagogy of Rabelais is the first appearance of what may
be called _realism_ in instruction, in distinction from the scholastic
_formalism_. The author of 'Gargantua' turns the mind of the young man
toward objects truly worthy of occupying his attention. He catches a
glimpse of the future reserved to scientific education, and to the study
of nature. He invites the mind, not to the labored subtleties and
complicated tricks which scholasticism had brought into fashion, but to
manly efforts, and to a wide unfolding of human nature."[78]

In comparing Rabelais with Lucretius, Walter Besant says, "Both, at an
interval of fifteen hundred years, anticipated the nineteenth century
in its restless discontent of old beliefs, its fearless questioning, its
advocacy of scientific research."[79] Compayre thinks that Rabelais is
"certainly the first, in point of time, of that grand school of
educators who place the sciences in the first rank among the studies of
human thought."[80] It would seem, then, that the author of "Gargantua"
is worthy of a most honorable place among educational writers. Rabelais
began a movement, which was destined to revolutionize educational
m