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

[1] "The Period of the Enlightenment" had two main aims: (1) the perfection of the individual, which gave a new emphasis to education, and (2) the mastery of man over his environment, which expressed itself through the new scientific studies. In German lands elementary education, a regenerated classical education, and the Realschule were the fruits of this period.

[2] Frederick used to say that his subjects might think as they pleased so long as they behaved as he ordered.

[3] Though Prussia was primarily Lutheran, Catholics, Mennonites, Jews, and Huguenots early found a home in the kingdom. Frederick used to say that "all religions must be tolerated, for in this country every man must go to heaven in his own way."

[4] After the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (p. 301; 1685), over 20,000 French Huguenots—merchants, manufacturers, skilled workmen—found an asylum in Prussia alone. Settling in the Rhine countries, they contributed much to the future development of this region.

[5] "For the first time since Luther, the German people could call a great hero their own, whether they were the subjects of Frederick or not. Joyous pride in this prince, whose achievements in times of peace were no less than those in time of war, brought national consciousness to life again and this national feeling found expression in literature. It was the restoration of confidence in themselves that gave the Germans the courage to break with French rules and French models, and to seek independently after ideals of beauty. And this self-confidence they owed to Frederick the Great." (Priest, G. M., History of German Literature, p. 116.)

[6] Though Joseph II claimed to be a good Catholic, he felt that monasticism had outlived its usefulness as an institution, and that its continuance was inimical to the interests of organized society and the State. This view has since been taken by the rulers of every progressive modern nation.

[7] The Cortes, or National Parliament, met but three times during the century, and when it did meet possessed but few powers and exercised but little influence.

[8] The first Russian university was established at Kiev, in 1588; the second at Dorpat, in 1632; the third at Moscow, in 1755; and the fourth at Kasan, in 1804. The University of Petrograd dates from 1819.

[9] The great difference between a church and true religion must always be kept in mind. Religion is a thing of the spirit, and its principle represents the loftiest thoughts of the race; a church is a human governing institution, and clearly subject to its own ambitions and the human frailties of its age.

[10] That is, 25,000 to 30,000 families. There were also, in even numbers, 83,000 monks in 2500 monasteries (one for every ninety square miles in France), 37,000 nuns in 1500 convents, and 60,000 priests. Of the soil of France, the King and towns owned one fifth, the clergy and the monks one fifth, the nobility one fifth, the bourgeoisie one fifth, and the peasantry one fifth.

[11] In 1788 the 131 bishops and archbishops of France had an average income of 100,000 francs, and 33 abbots and 27 abbesses had incomes ranging from 80,000 to 500,000 francs. The Cardinal de Rohan, Archbishop of Strasbourg, had an income of more than 1,000,000 francs, and the 300 Benedictine monks at Cluny had an income of more than 1,800,000 francs.

[12] "The real importance of Esprit des lois is not that of a formal treatise on law, or even on polity. It is that of an assemblage of the most fertile, original, and inspiriting views on legal and political subjects, put in language of singular suggestiveness and vigour, illustrated by examples which are always apt and luminous, permeated by the spirit of temperate and tolerant desire for human improvement and happiness, and almost unique in its entire freedom at once from doctrinairism, visionary enthusiasm, egotism, and an undue spirit of system. The genius of the author for generalization is so great, his instinct in political science so sure, that even the falsity of his premises frequently fails to vitiate his conclusions." (Saintsbury, George, in Encyclopedia Britannica, vol. XVIII, p. 777.)

[13] "By the captivating prospects which he held out of future progress, and by the picture which he drew of the capacity of society to improve itself, Turgot increased the impatience which his countrymen were beginning to feel against the despotic government, in whose presence amelioration seemed to be hopeless. These, and similar speculations of the time, stimulated the activity of the intellectual classes, cheered them under the persecutions to which they were exposed, and emboldened them to attack the institutions of their native land." (Buckle, H. T., History of Civilisation in England, vol. I, p. 597.)

[14] Duruy, V., History of France, p. 523.

[15] Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed., vol. viii, p. 204.

[16] "The real king of the eighteenth century was Voltaire; but Voltaire, in his turn, was a pupil of the English. Before Voltaire became acquainted with England, through his travels and his friendships, he was not Voltaire, and the eighteenth century was still undeveloped." (Cousin, History of Philosophy.)

[17] "The first Frenchmen who in the eighteenth century turned their attention to England were amazed at the boldness with which, in that country, political and religious questions of the deepest moment were discussed—questions which no Frenchman in the preceding age had dared to broach. With wonder they discovered in England a comparative freedom of the public press, and saw with astonishment how in Parliament itself the government of the Crown was attacked with impunity, and the management of its revenues actually kept under control. To see the civilization and prosperity of England increasing, while the power of the upper classes and the King diminished, was to them a revelation…. England, said Helvetius, is a country where the people are respected, a country where each citizen has a part in the management of affairs, where men of genius are allowed to enlighten the public upon its true interests." (Dabney, R. H., Causes of the French Revolution, p. 141.)

[18] Tennyson, in his "You ask me why," well describes the growth of constitutional liberty in England when he says that England is:

"A land of settled government,
A land of just and old renown,
Where freedom broadens slowly down,
From precedent to precedent."

[19] James I, in 1604, had declared: "As it is atheism to dispute what God can do, so it is presumption and a high contempt in a subject to dispute what a king can do." For this attitude the Commons continually contested his authority, his son lost his crown and his head, and his grandson was driven from the throne and from England. By contrast, and as showing the different attitude toward self-government of the two peoples, the German Emperor William II, three centuries later, so continually boasted of his rule by divine right that "Me and God" became an international joke, and to his assumption the German people took little or no exception.

[20] The passage of the Bill of Rights (1689) ended the divine-right-of- kings idea in England for all time. This prohibited the King from keeping a standing army in times of peace, gave every subject the right to petition for a redress of grievances, gave Parliament the right of free debate, prohibited the King from interfering in any way with the proper execution of the laws, declared that members ought to be elected to Parliament without interference, and gave the Commons control of all forms of taxation.

[21] Though the English first developed regulated or constitutional government, they themselves have no single written constitution. Instead, the foundations of English constitutional government rest on Magna Charta (1215), the Petition of Rights (1628), and the Bill of Rights (1689), these three constituting "the Bible of English Liberty."

[22] At first used as a term of ridicule, from the very methodical manner in which the Wesleyans organized their campaigns.

[23] "If we except the great Puritan movement of the seventeenth century, no such appeal had been heard since the days when Augustine and his band of monks landed in Kent and set forth on their mission among the barbarous Saxons. The results answered fully to the zeal that awakened them. Better than the growing prosperity of extending commerce, better than all the conquests of the East or the West, was the new religious spirit which stirred the people of both England and America, and provoked the National Church to emulation in good works—which planted schools, checked intemperance, and brought into vigorous activity all that was best and bravest in a race that when true to itself is excelled by none." (Montgomery, D. H., English History, p. 322.)

[24] The contrast between eighteenth-century England and France, in the matter of religious liberty, is interesting. In France the Church took care, during the whole of the eighteenth century, that the persecution process should go on. "In 1717 an assembly of seventy-four Protestants having been surprised at Andure, the men were sent to the galleys and the women to prison. An edict of 1724 declared that all who took part in a Protestant meeting, or who had any direct or indirect communication with a Protestant preacher, should have their heads shaved and be imprisoned for life, and the men condemned to perpetual servitude in the galleys. In 1745 and 1746, in the province of Dauphine, 277 Protestants were condemned to the galleys and a number of women flogged. From 1744 to 1752 six hundred Protestants in the east and south of France were condemned to various punishments. In 1774 the children of a Calvinist of Rennes were taken from him. Up to the very eve of the Revolution Protestant ministers were hanged in Languedoc, and dragoons were sent against their congregations." (Dabney, R. H., Causes of the French Revolution, p. 42.)

[25] Back as early as 1695 the Commons had refused to renew the press- licensing act, enacted in 1637, to control heresy. This had confined printing to London, Oxford, and Cambridge, and to twenty master printers and four letter founders for the realm. This refusal marks the beginning of the freedom of the press in England. In 1709 the copyright law was enacted, and in 1776 the redress against publishers of libelous articles was confined to the ordinary courts of law. A century ahead of France, and more than two centuries ahead of Teutonic and Romanic lands, England provided for a free press and open discussion.

[26] George III, always consistently wrong, opposed this extension of popular rights. In 1771 he wrote the Prime Minister, Lord North: "It is highly necessary that this strange and lawless method of publishing debates in the papers should be put a stop to. But is not the House of Lords the best court to bring such miscreants before; as it can fine, as well as imprison, and has broader shoulders to support the odium of so salutary a measure."

[27] "It is evident that a nation perfectly ignorant of physical laws will refer to supernatural causes all the phenomena by which it is surrounded. But as soon as natural science begins to do its work there are introduced the elements of a great change. Each successive discovery, by ascertaining the law that governs events, deprives them of that apparent mystery in which they were formerly involved. The love of the marvelous becomes proportionally diminished; and when any science has made such progress as to enable it to fortell the events with which it deals, it is clear that the whole of those events are at once withdrawn from the jurisdiction of the supernatural, and brought under the authority of natural power? Hence it is that, supposing other things equal, the superstition of a nation must always bear an exact proportion to the extent of its physical knowledge." (Buckle, H. T., History of Civilization in England, vol. 1, p. 269.)

[28] The Charter of this Society stated the purpose to be to increase knowledge by direct experiment, and that the object of the Society was the extension of natural knowledge, as opposed to that which is supernatural. As an institution embodying the idea of intellectual progress it was most bitterly assailed by partisans of the old flunking.

[29] Birmingham, Sheffield, Leeds, and Manchester, for example, great manufacturing cities early in the nineteenth century, were insignificant villages in Cromwell's day. The steam engine made the coal and iron deposits of northern England of immense value, and the "smoky mill towns" that arose in the north began to displace southern agricultural England in population, wealth, and importance.

[30] For example, in 1774 John Howard began his great work in prison reform; in 1772 pressing to death was abolished; in 1780 the ducking-stool was used for the last time; and soon thereafter the earlier laws relating to the death penalty were modified, and the slave trade abolished. Up to the middle of the eighteenth century as many as one hundred and sixty offenses were punishable by death.

[31] The Declaration of Independence was written by Thomas Jefferson, a great admirer of French life and a propagandist for French ideas.

[32] Compare the American preamble with the following sentence from the Social Contract (Book I, chap, ix) of Rousseau:

"I shall close this chapter and this book with a remark which ought to serve as a basis for the whole social system; it is that instead of destroying natural equality, the fundamental pact, on the contrary, substitutes a moral and lawful equality for the physical inequality which nature imposed upon men, so that, although unequal in strength or intellect, they all become equal by convention and legal right."

[33] "I read attentively the cahiers drawn up by the three Orders before their union in 1789. I see that here the change of a law is demanded, and there of a custom—and I make note of them. I continue thus to the end of this immense task, and, when I come to put side by side all these particular demands, I see, with a sort of terror, that what is called for is the simultaneous and systematic abolition of all the laws and of all the customs existing in the country; whereupon I instantly perceive the approach of the vastest and most dangerous revolutions that have taken place in the world." (De Tocqueville, A. C., State of Society in France before the Revolution of 1789, p. 219.)

[34] For example, the clergy of Rodez and Saumur demanded "that there may be formed a plan of national education for the young"; the clergy of Lyons that education be restricted "to a teaching body whose members may not be removable except for negligence, misconduct, or incapacity; that it may no longer be conducted according to arbitrary principles, and that all public instructors be obliged to conform to a uniform plan adopted by the States- General"; the clergy of Blois that a system of colleges under church control be formed (R. 252); the nobility of Lyons that "a national character be impressed on the education of both sexes"; the nobility of Paris that "public education be perfected and extended to all classes of citizens"; the nobility of Blois that "better facilities for the education of children, and elementary textbooks adapted to their capacity, wherein the rights of man and the social duties shall be clearly set forth" shall be provided, and to this end that "there be established a council composed of the most enlightened scholars of the capital and of the provinces and of the citizens of the different orders, to formulate a plan of national education, for the benefit of all classes of society, and to edit elementary textbooks." The Third Estate of Blois demanded the establishment of free schools in all the rural parishes.

[35] See footnote 1, page 165. One of the great results of the French Revolution was the abolition of serfdom in central and western Europe. The last European nation to emancipate its serfs was Russia, where they were freed in 1861.

[36] "Great was the difference between France at the end of 1791 and at the end of 1793. At the former date all looked hopeful for the future; the king was the father of his people; the Constitution of 1791 was to regenerate France, and set an example to Europe; all old institutions had been renovated; everything was new, and popular on account of its novelty…. By the end of 1793 all looked threatening for the future; for the purpose of repelling her foreign foes, who included nearly the whole of Europe, France submitted to be ground down by the most despotic and arbitrary government ever known in modern history,—the Great Committee of Public Safety; the Reign of Terror was in full exercise, and it was doubtful whether the energy, audacity, and concentrated vigour of the Great Committee would enable France to be victorious over Europe, and thus secure for her the right of deciding on the character of their own government. She was to be successful, but at what a cost!" (Stephens, H. M., The French Revolution, vol. II, p. 512.)

[37] The Code Napoléon, prepared in 1804, was the first modern code of civil laws, though Frederick the Great had earlier prepared a partial code of Prussian laws. What the Justinian Code was to ancient Rome, this, organized into better form, was to modern France. This Code, prepared under Napoleon's direction, substituted one uniform code of laws worthy of a modern nation for the thousands of local laws which formerly prevailed in France.