Further return to papal methods
Painter further says: “The schools, which stand in close relation to religion, were naturally influenced in a large measure by the theological tendencies of the age. Theological interests imposed upon the schools a narrow range of subjects, a mechanical method of instruction, and a cruel discipline. The principle of authority, exacting a blind submission of the pupil, prevailed in the schools of every grade. The young were regarded not as tender plants to be carefully nurtured and developed, but as untamed animals to be repressed or broken.”[133]
Notice the creeping in of those very characteristics of papal education so often referred to heretofore: 1, narrow range of subjects; 2, mechanical instruction,—memory work devoid of understanding; 3, arbitrary government, as seen in the matter of discipline. To this we must add that which is the natural accompaniment in papal instruction—the teaching of Latin. Says Painter, quoting Dittes: “‘In the higher institutions, and even in the wretched town schools, Latin was the Moloch to which countless minds fell an offering in return for the blessing granted to a few. A dead knowledge of words took the place of a living knowledge of things. Latin schoolbooks supplanted the book of nature, the book of life, the book of mankind. And in the popular schools youthful minds were tortured over the spelling book and catechism. The method of teaching was almost everywhere, in the primary as well as in the higher schools, a mechanical and compulsory drill in unintelligible formulas. The pupils were obliged to learn, but they were not educated to see and hear, to think and prove, and were not led to a true independence and personal perfection. The teachers found their function in teaching the prescribed text, not in harmoniously developing the young human being according to the laws of nature—a process, moreover, that lay under the ban of ecclesiastical orthodoxy.’”[134]
Cramming system and memory work
That there was a cramming process followed equal to any twentieth-century school, is evident. “The discipline answered to the content and spirit of the instruction.... The principle was to tame the pupils, not to educate them. They were to hold themselves motionless, that the school exercises might not be disturbed. What took place in their minds, and how their several characters were constituted, the school pedants did not understand and appreciate.”
Sturm’s school a compromise
In order to appreciate the rapidity with which the relapse took place from the educational system introduced by Luther to the medieval principles and methods, our attention is directed to the school of John Sturm. This man, “regarded as the greatest educator that the Reformed Church produced during this period,” died in 1589, less than seventy years after the Diet of Worms; hence his work fell within the half century following those forty years of unusual prosperity for Protestantism which has already been noticed. His work is contemporary with the first Jesuit school of Germany. The decline is visible in every feature of his work.
John Sturm presided for forty years over the gymnasium of Strasburg, and his boast was that his institution “reproduced the best periods of Athens and Rome; and, in fact, he succeeded in giving to his adopted city the name of New Athens.” Sturm’s school stood as a halfway mark between the Christian schools and the purely papal schools of the Jesuits, but since compromise always places a person or institution on the side of wrong, in weighing the worth of his school the balances necessarily tip in favor of the papacy.
Course of study in Sturm’s school