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

by Ellwood Patterson Cubberley

By the middle of the seventeenth century most of the German States had followed the Würtemberg plan of organization. Even Duke Albrecht V of Bavaria, which was a Catholic State, ordered the establishment of "German schools" throughout his realm, with instruction in reading, writing, and the Catholic creed, the schools to be responsible through the Church to the State.

PROTESTANT STATE SCHOOL ORGANIZATION. We see here in German lands a new, and, for the future, a very important tendency. Throughout all the long Middle Ages the Church had absolutely controlled all education. From the suppression of the pagan schools, in 529 A.D., to the time of the Reformation there had been no one to dispute with the Church its complete monopoly of education. Even Charlemagne's attempt at the stimulation of educational activity had been clearly within the lines of church control. Until the beginnings of the modern States, following the Crusades, the Church had been the State as well, and for long humbled any ruler who dared dispute its power. In the later Middle Ages nobles and rising parliaments had at times sided with the king against the Church—warnings of a changing Europe that the Church should have heeded—but there had been no serious trouble with the rising nationalities before the sixteenth century. Now, in Protestant lands, all was changed. The authority of the Church was overthrown. By the Peace of Augsburg (1555) each German prince and town and knight were to be permitted to make choice between the Catholic and Lutheran faith, and all subjects were to accept the faith of their ruler or emigrate.

This established freedom of conscience for the rulers, but for no one else. It also gave them control of both religious and secular affairs, thus uniting in the person of the ruler, large or small, control of both Church and State. This was as much progress toward religious freedom as the world was then ready for, as Church and State had been united for so many centuries that a complete separation of the two was almost inconceivable. It was left for the United States (1787) to completely divorce Church and State, and to reduce the churches to the control of purely spiritual affairs.

The German rulers, however, were now free to develop schools as they saw fit, and, through their headship of the Church in their principality or duchy or city, to control education therein. We have here the beginnings of the transfer of educational control from the Church to the State, the ultimate fruition of which came first in German lands, and which was to be the great work of the nineteenth century. It was through the kingly or ducal headship of the Church, and through it of the educational system of the kingdom or duchy, that the great educational development in Würtemberg, Saxony, and Gotha was brought about by their rulers, and it was through the ruling princes that the German Universities were reformed [10] and the new Protestant universities established. [11] Even in Catholic States, as Bavaria, the German state-control idea took root early. Many of the important features of the modern German school systems are to be seen in their beginnings in these Lutheran state-church schools.

[Illustration: FIG. 96. EVOLUTION OF GERMAN STATE SCHOOL CONTROL]

2. Anglican foundations

THE REFORMATION AND EDUCATION IN ENGLAND. The Reformation in England took a very different direction from what it did in Germany, and its educational results in consequence were very different. In England the reform movement was much more political in character than in German lands. Henry VIII was no Protestant, in the sense that Luther or Calvin or Zwingli or Knox was. He distrusted their teachings, and was always anxious to explain objections to the old faith. The people of England as a body, too, had been much less antagonized by the exactions of the Roman Church and the immoral lives of the monks and Roman clergy; the new learning had awakened there somewhat less of a spirit of moral and religious reform; and the reformation movement of Luther, after a decade and a half, had roused no general interest. The change from the Roman Catholic faith to an independent English Church, when made, was in consequence much more nominal than had been the case in German lands. As a result the severance from Rome was largely carried out by the ruling classes, and the masses of the people were in no way deeply interested in it. The English National Church merely took over most of the functions formerly exercised by the Roman Church, in general the same priests remained in charge of the parish churches, and the church doctrines and church practices were not greatly altered by the change in allegiance. The changing of the service from Latin to English was perhaps the most important change. The English Church, in spirit and service, has in consequence retained the greatest resemblance to the Roman Catholic Church of any Protestant denomination. In particular, the Lutheran idea of personal responsibility for salvation, and hence the need of all being taught to read, made scarcely any impression in England.

By the time of Elizabeth (1558-1603) it had become a settled conviction with the English as a people that the provision of education was a matter for the Church, and was no business of the State, and this attitude continued until well into the nineteenth century. The English Church merely succeeded the Roman Church in the control of education, and now licensed the teachers (R. 168), took their oath of allegiance (R. 167), supervised prayers (R. 169) and the instruction, and became very strict as to conformity to the new faith (Rs. 164-166), while the schools, aside from the private tuition and endowed schools, continued to be maintained chiefly from religious sources, charitable funds, and tuition fees. Private tuition schools in time flourished, and the tutor in the home became the rule with families of means. The poorer people largely did without schooling, as they had done for centuries before. As a consequence, the educational results of the change in the headship of the Church relate almost entirely to grammar schools and to the universities, and not to elementary education. The development of anything approaching a system of elementary schools for England was consequently left for the educational awakening of the latter half of the nineteenth century. When this finally came the development was due to political and economic, and not to religious causes.

The English Act of Supremacy (R. 153), which severed England from Rome, had been passed by parliament in 1534. In 1536 an English Bible was issued to the churches, [12] the services were ordered conducted in English, and in 1549 the English Prayer Book, Psalter, and Catechism were put into use. In 1538 the English Bible was ordered chained in the churches, [13] that the people might read it (R. 170), and the people were ordered instructed in English in the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the Ten Commandments. The change of the service to English was perhaps the largest educational gain the masses of the people obtained as the result of the Reformation in England. [14]

[Illustration: FIG. 97. A CHAINED BIBLE
(Redrawn from an old print showing a chained Bible in a church in York,
England)]