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 essentials of this Greek training were later embodied in the private- adventure school system that arose in Rome, which was adapted to conditions and needs there, and which was used for the training of a few Roman youths of the wealthier families for a political career. Schooling at Rome, though, never attained the importance or rendered the service that characterized education at Athens, and never became an instrument of the State used consciously for State ends. One Roman writer, Quintilian, as we have seen (R. 25), worked out a careful statement of the whole process of educating a youth for a public career, and this, the first practical treatise on education, was for long highly prized as the best- written statement of the educational art.

THE FUTURE-LIFE CONCEPTION OF THE CHRISTIANS. With the decline of Roman power and influence, and the victory of Christianity throughout the Roman world, the State conception of education was entirely lost to western Europe, and more than a thousand years elapsed before it again arose in the western world. The Church now became the State, and the need for any education for secular life almost entirely passed away. For centuries the aim was almost entirely a preparation for life in the world to come. Throughout all the early Middle Ages this attitude continued, supplemented only by the meager education of a few to carry on the work of the Church here below.

After the tenth century we noted the rise of some more or less independent study in some of the monastery and cathedral schools, and after the twelfth century the rise of studia generalia marked the congregation into groups of the few interested in a studious life. These in turn gave rise to the university foundations, and to the beginning of independent and secular study once more in the western world. The Revival of Learning, the recovery of the ancient manuscripts, the revival of the study of Greek in the West, the founding of libraries, the invention of paper and printing, and the revival of trade and commerce—all were new forces tending to give a new direction to scholarly study, and as a result a new race of scholars, more or less independent of the Church, now arose in western Europe. They were, however, a class, and a very small class at that, and though the result of their work was the creation of a new humanistic secondary school, this still ministered to the needs of but a few. This few was intended either for the service of the Church, for the governmental service of the towns which had by this time attained their independence, or for the governments of the rising principalities or states.

For the great mass of the people, whose purpose in life was to work and believe and obey, agriculture, warfare, the rising trades with their guilds (p. 209), and the services of the Church constituted almost all in the way of education which they ever received. To be useful to his overlord and master here and to be saved hereafter were the chief life- purposes of the common man. The former he must himself undertake in order to be able to live at all; the latter the Church undertook to supply to those who followed her teachings.

THE RISE OF THE VERNACULAR RELIGIOUS SCHOOL. For the first time in history, if we except the schools of the early Christian period, the Protestant Revolts created a demand for some form of an elementary religious school for all. The Protestant theory as to personal versus collective salvation involved as a consequence the idea of the education of all in the essentials of the Christian faith and doctrine. The aim was the same as before—personal salvation—but the method was now changed from that of the Church as intermediary to personal knowledge and faith and effort. To be saved, one must know something of the Word of God, and this necessitated instruction. To this end, in theory at least, schools had to be established to educate the young for membership in the new type of Church relationship. Reading the vernacular, a little counting and writing, in Teutonic countries a little music, and careful instruction in a religious Primer (R. 202), the Catechism, and the Bible, now came to constitute the subject matter of a new vernacular school for the children of Protestants, and to a certain extent in time for the children of Catholics as well. As we pointed out earlier (p. 353), between this new type of school for religious ends and the older Latin grammar school for scholarly purposes there was almost no relationship, and the two developed wholly independently of one another. In the Latin grammar schools one studied to become a scholar and a leader in the political or ecclesiastical world; in the vernacular religious school one learned to read that he might be able to read the Catechism and the Bible, and to know the will of the Heavenly Father. There was scarcely any other purpose to the maintenance of the elementary vernacular schools. This condition continued until well into the eighteenth century.

[Illustration: FIG. 129. A FRENCH SCHOOL BEFORE THE REVOLUTION
(After an etching by Boisseau, 1730-1809)]

EARLY UNSUCCESSFUL EDUCATIONAL REFORMERS. Back in the seventeenth century, as we have pointed out in the preceding chapter, a very earnest effort was made by Ratke and Comenius to introduce a larger conception of the educational process into the elementary vernacular school, to eliminate the gloomy religious material from the textbooks, to substitute a human- welfare purpose for the exclusively life-beyond view, and to transform the school into an institution for imparting both learning and religion. Comenius in particular hoped to make of the new elementary religious school a potent instrument for human progress by introducing new subject- matter, and by formulating laws and developing methods for its work which would be in harmony with the new scientific procedure so well stated by Francis Bacon. Comenius stands as the commanding figure in seventeenth- century pedagogical thought. He reasoned out and introduced us to the whole modern conception of the educational process and purpose, and gave to the school of the people a solid theoretical and practical basis. Living, though, at an unfortunate period in human history, he was able to awaken little interest either in rational teaching-method or in reforms looking to the advancement of the welfare of mankind. Instead he roused suspicion and distrust by the innovations and progressive reforms he proposed; his now-celebrated book on teaching method (Rs. 218, 219) was not at the time understood and was for long forgotten, while the fundamentally sound ideas and pedagogical reforms which he proposed and introduced were lost amid the hatreds of his time, and had to be worked out again and reëstablished in a later and a more tolerant age.

Another unsuccessful reformer of some importance, and one whose work antedated that of both Ratke and Comenius, was the London schoolmaster, Richard Mulcaster (1531-1611), for twenty-five years headmaster of the famous Merchant Taylors' School, and later Master of Saint Paul's School. In 1581 he issued his Positions, a pedagogical work so far in advance of his time, and written in such a heavy and affected style, that it passed almost unnoticed in England, and did not become known at all in other lands. Yet the things he stood for became the fundamental ideas of nineteenth-century educational thought. These were:

1. That the end and aim of education is to develop the body and the faculties of the mind, and to help nature to perfection.

2. That all teaching processes should be adapted to the pupil taught.