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

by Ellwood Patterson Cubberley

THE BROTHERS OF THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS. The largest and most influential of the teaching orders established for elementary education was the "Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools," founded by Father La Salle at Rouen, in 1684, and sanctioned by the King and Pope in 1724. As early as 1679 La Salle had begun a school at Rheims, and in 1684 he organized his disciples, prescribed a costume to be worn, and outlined the work of the brotherhood (R. 182). The object was to provide free elementary and religious instruction in the vernacular for the children of the working classes, and to do for elementary education what the Jesuits had done for secondary education La Salle's Conduct of Schools, first published in 1720, was the ratio studiorum of his order. His work marks the real beginning of free primary instruction in the vernacular in France. In addition to elementary schools, a few of what we should call part-time continuation schools were organized for children engaged in commerce and industry. Realizing better than the Jesuits the need for well-trained rather than highly educated teachers for little children, and unable to supply members to meet the outside calls for schools, La Salle organized at Rheims, in 1685, what was probably the second normal school for training teachers in the world. [16] Another was organized later at Paris. In addition to a good education of the type of the time and thorough grounding in religion, the student teachers learned to teach in practice schools, under the direction of experienced teachers.

The pupils in La Salle's schools were graded into classes, and the class method of instruction was introduced. [17] The curriculum was unusually rich for a time when teaching methods and textbooks were but poorly developed, the needs for literary education small, and when children could not as yet be spared from work longer than the age of nine or ten. Children learned first to read, write, and spell French, and to do simple composition work in the vernacular. Those who mastered this easily were taught the Latin Psalter in addition. Much prominence was given to writing, the instruction being applied to the writing of bills, notes, receipts, and the like. Much free questioning was allowed in arithmetic and the Catechism, to insure perfect understanding of what was taught. Religious training was made the most prominent feature of the school, as was natural. A half-hour daily was given to the Catechism, mass was said daily, the crucifix was always on the wall, and two or three pupils were always to be found kneeling, telling their beads. The discipline, in contradistinction to the customary practice of the time, was mild, though all punishments were carefully prescribed by rule. [18] The rule of silence in the school was rigidly enjoined, all speech was to be in a low tone of voice, and a code of signals replaced speech for many things.

[Illustration: FIG. 104. A SCHOOL OF LA SALLE AT PARIS, 1688 A visit of James II and the Archbishop of Paris to the School (From a bas- relief on the statue of La Salle, at Rouen)]

Though the Order met with much opposition from both church and civil authorities, it made slow but steady headway. At the time of the death of La Salle, in 1719, thirty-five years after its foundation, the Order had one general normal school, four normal schools for training teachers, three practice schools, thirty-three primary schools, and one continuation school. The Order remained largely French, and at the time of its suppression, in 1792, had schools in 121 communities in France and 6 elsewhere, about 1000 brothers, and approximately 30,000 children in its schools. This was approximately 1 child in every 175 of school age of the population of France at that time. While relatively small in numbers, their schools represented the best attempt to provide elementary education in any Catholic country before well into the nineteenth century. The distribution of their schools throughout France, by 1792, is shown on the map above. In 1803 the Order was reëstablished, by 1838 it had schools in 282 communities, and in 1887, when La Salle was declared a Saint of the Church, it had 1898 communities on four continents, 109 of which were in the United States, and was teaching a total of approximately 300,000 primary children.

[Illustration: FIG. 105. THE BROTHERS OF THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS BY 1792
Map, showing the locations of their communities]

5. General Results of the Reformation on Education

DESTRUCTION AND CREATION OF SCHOOLS. Any such general overturning of the established institutions and traditions of a thousand years as occurred at the time of the Protestant Revolts, with the accompanying bitter hatreds and religious strife, could not help but result in extensive destruction of established institutions. Monasteries, churches, and schools alike suffered, and it required time to replace them. Even though they had been neglectful of their functions, inadequate in number, and unsuited to the needs of a world fast becoming modern, they had nevertheless answered partially the need of the times. In all the countries where revolts took place these institutions suffered more or less, but in England probably most of all. The old schools which were not destroyed were transformed into Protestant schools, the grammar schools to train scholars and leaders, and the parish schools into Protestant elementary schools to teach reading and the Catechism, but the number of the latter, in all Protestant lands, was very far short of the number needed to carry out the Protestant religious theory. This, as we have seen, proposed to extend the elements of an education to large and entirely new classes of people who never before in the history of the world had had such advantages. Out of the Protestant religious conception that all should be educated the popular elementary school of modern times has been evolved. The evolution, though, was slow, and long periods of time have been required for its accomplishment.

In place of the schools destroyed, or the teachers driven out if no destruction took place, the reformers made an earnest effort to create new schools and supply teachers. This, though, required time, especially as there was as yet in the world no body of vernacular teachers, no institutions in which such could be trained, no theory as to education except the religious, no supply of educated men or women from which to draw, no theory of state support and control, and no source of taxation from which to derive a steady flow of funds. Throughout the long Middle Ages the Church had supplied gratuitous or nearly gratuitous instruction. This it could do, to the limited number whom it taught, from the proceeds of its age-old endowments and educational foundations. In the process of transformation from a Catholic to a Protestant State, and especially during the more than a century of turmoil and religious strife which followed the rupture of the old relations, many of the old endowments were lost or were diverted from their original purposes. As the Protestant reformers were supported generally by the ruling princes, many of these tried to remedy the deficiency by ordering schools established. The landed nobility though, unused to providing education for their villein tenants and serfs, were averse to supplying the deficiency by any form of general taxation. Nor were the rising merchant classes in the cities any more anxious to pay taxes to provide for artisans and servants what had for ages been a gratuity or not furnished at all.

NO REAL DEMAND OF ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS. The creation of a largely new type of schools, and in sufficient numbers to meet the needs of large classes of people who before had never shared in the advantages of education, in consequence proved to be a work of centuries. The century of warfare which followed the reformation movement more or less exhausted all Europe, while the Thirty Years' War which formed its culmination left the German States, where the largest early educational progress had been made, a ruin. In consequence there was for long little money for school support, and religious interest and church tithes had to be depended on almost entirely for the establishment and support of schools. Out of the parish sextons or clerks a supply of vernacular teachers had to be evolved, a system of school organization and supervision worked out and added to the duties of the minister, and the feeling of need for education awakened sufficiently to make people willing to support schools. In consequence what Luther and Calvin declared at the beginning of the sixteenth century to be a necessity for the State and the common right of all, it took until well into the nineteenth century actually to create and make a reality.

The great demand of the time, too, was not so much for the education of the masses, however desirable or even necessary this might be from the standpoint of Protestant religious theory, but for the training of leaders for the new religious and social order which the Revival of Learning, the rise of modern nationalities, and the Reformation movements had brought into being. For this secondary schools for boys, largely Latin in type, were demanded rather than elementary vernacular schools for both sexes. We accordingly find the great creations of the period were secondary schools.