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

by Ellwood Patterson Cubberley

I. NEW CONCEPTIONS OF THE EDUCATIONAL PURPOSE

THE STATE AS SERVANT OF THE CHURCH. With the rise of the Protestant sects we noted, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and for the first time since Christianity became supreme in the western world, the beginnings of a state connection with the education of the young. The Protestant reformers, obtaining the support of the Protestant princes and kings, had successfully used this support to assist them in the organization of church schools as an aid to the reformed faith. Luther, it will be recalled (p. 312), had made a strong appeal to the mayors and magistrates of all German lands to establish schools as a part of their civic duties (R. 156), and had contended that a solemn obligation rested upon them to do so. The Dutch Provinces had worked closely with the Dutch Protestant synods (p. 334) in ordering schools established and in providing for their financing; Calvin had organized a religious City-State at Geneva (p. 330), of which religion and learning had been the corner-stones; the Scottish Parliament, by the laws of 1633 and 1646 (p. 335), had ordered schools for Scottish children in connection with the churches; and in the Scandinavian countries and in Finland the beginnings of a connection with the State had also been made (p. 315). Finally, in the new Massachusetts Colony the laws of 1642 and 1647 (p. 366) had, for the first time in the English-speaking world, ordered that children be taught "to read and understand the principles of religion and the capital laws of the country" (p. 364), and that schools be established by the towns, under penalty if they refused to do so. In all Protestant lands we saw that the reformers appealed, from time to time, to what were then the servants of the churches—the rising civil governments and principalities and States—to use their civil authority to force the people to meet their new religious obligations in the matter of schooling.

The purpose of the schooling ordered established, however, was almost wholly religious. Massachusetts, in ordering instruction in the "capital laws of the country," as well as reading and religion, had formed a marked exception. In nearly all lands the rising state governments merely helped the Protestant churches to create the elementary vernacular religious school, and to make of it an auxiliary for the protection of orthodoxy and the advancement of the faith. Even in the new state school systems of the German States—Saxony, Würtemberg (p. 317), Brunswick, Weimar, Gotha—the elementary schools established were for religious rather than for state ends. This condition continued until well toward the middle of the eighteenth century.

THE NEW STATE THEORY OF EDUCATION. After about the middle of the eighteenth century a new theory as to the purpose of education, and one destined to make rapid headway, began to be advanced. This theory had already made marked progress, as we shall see, in the New England Colonies, and had also found expression, as we shall also see in a later chapter, in the organizing work of Frederick the Great in Prussia. It was from the French political philosophers of the eighteenth century, though, that its clearest definition came. They now advanced the idea that schools were essentially civil affairs, the purpose of which should be to promote the everyday interests of society and the welfare of the State, rather than the welfare of the Church, and to prepare for a life here rather than a life hereafter.

After about 1750 a critical and reformatory pedagogy rapidly began to take shape in France, and the second half of the eighteenth century became a period of criticism and discontent and reconstruction in education, as well as in politics and religion.

This criticism and discontent in France was greatly stimulated by the decline in character and influence of the Jesuit schools. Unwilling to change their instruction to meet the needs of a changing society, their schools had become formal in character (R. 146), and were now engaged chiefly in stilling thinking rather than in promoting it. In consequence the schools had fallen into disrepute throughout all France. The Society, too, in the eighteenth century, came to be a powerful political organization which strove to dominate the State. So bad had the situation become by 1762, that the different parliaments in the provinces and in Paris had formulated complaints against the Jesuits and their schools, [1] and, in 1764, the king was induced to suppress the Order. [2] This decline in influence and final suppression of the Society gave rise to some rather remarkable pedagogical literature, which looked to the creation of a system of state secondary schools in France to replace those of the Jesuits.

The outcome was the rise of a new national and individual conception of the educational purpose. This was destined in time to spread to other lands and to lead to the rise of complete state school systems, financed and managed by the State and conducted for state ends, and to the ultimate divorce of Church and State, in all progressive lands, in the matter of the education of the young. Teachers trained and certificated by the State were in time to supplant the nuns and brothers of the religious congregations in Catholic lands, as well as teachers who served as assistants to the pastors in Protestant lands and whose chief purpose was to uphold the teachings and advance the interests of the sect; citizens were to supplant the ecclesiastic in the supervision of instruction; and the courses of instruction were to be changed in direction and vastly broadened in scope to make them minister to the needs of the State rather than the Church, and to prepare pupils for useful life here rather than for life in another world.