The History of Education / Educational Practice and Progress Considered as a Phase of the Development and Spread of Western Civilization

by Ellwood Patterson Cubberley

CHAPTER XIX

THE EIGHTEENTH A TRANSITION CENTURY

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY A TURNING-POINT. The eighteenth century, in human thinking and progress, marks for most western nations the end of mediaevalism and the ushering-in of modern forms of intellectual liberty. The indifference to the old religious problems, which was clearly manifest in all countries at the beginning of the century, steadily grew and culminated in a revolt against ecclesiastical control over human affairs. This change in attitude toward the old problems permitted the rise of new types of intellectual inquiry, a rapid development of scientific thinking and discovery, the growth of a consciousness of national problems and national welfare, and the bringing to the front of secular interests to a degree practically unknown since the days of ancient Rome. In a sense the general rise of these new interests in the eighteenth century was but a culmination of a long series of movements looking toward greater intellectual freedom and needed human progress which had been under way since the days when studia generalia and guilds first arose in western Europe. The rise of the universities in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Revival of Learning in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Protestant Revolts in the sixteenth, the rise of modern scientific inquiry in the sixteenth and seventeenth, and Puritanism in England and Pietism in Germany in the seventeenth, had all been in the nature of protests against the mediaeval tendency to confine and limit and enslave the intellect. In the eighteenth century the culmination of this rising tide of protest came in a general and determined revolt against despotism in either Church or State, which, at the close of the century, swept away ancient privileges, abuses, and barriers, and prepared the way for the marked intellectual and human and political progress which characterized the nineteenth century.

SIGNIFICANCE OF THE CHANGE IN ATTITUDE. The new spirit and interests and attitudes which came to characterize the eighteenth century in the more progressive western nations meant the ultimate overthrow of the tyranny of mediaeval supernatural theology, the evolution of a new theory as to moral action which should be independent of theology, the freeing of the new scientific spirit from the fetters of church control, the substituting of new philosophical and scientific and economic interests for the old theological problems which had for so long dominated human thinking, the substitution of natural political organization for the older ecclesiastical foundations of the State, the destruction of what remained of the old feudal political system, the freeing of the serf and the evolution of the citizen, and the rise of a modern society interested in problems of national welfare—government in the interest of the governed, commerce, industry, science, economics, education, and social welfare. The evolution of such modern-type governments inevitably meant the creation of entirely new demands for the education of the people and for far-reaching political and social reforms.

This new eighteenth-century spirit, which so characterized the mid- eighteenth century that it is often spoken of as the "Period of the Enlightenment," [1] expressed itself in many new directions, a few of the more important of which will be considered here as of fundamental concern for the student of the history of educational progress. In a very real sense the development of state educational systems, in both European and American States, has been an outgrowth of the great liberalizing forces which first made themselves felt in a really determined way during this important transition century. In this chapter we shall consider briefly five important phases of this new eighteenth-century liberalism, as follows:

1. The work of the benevolent despots of continental Europe in trying to shape their governments to harmonize them with the new spirit of the century.

2. The unsatisfied demand for reform in France.

3. The rise of democratic government and liberalism in England.

4. The institution of constitutional government and religious freedom
in America.

5. The sweeping away of mediaeval abuses in the great Revolution in
France.