Effect of the Reformation upon the Secondary Schools.—While the development of elementary instruction and state systems of education was the most important educational outcome of the Reformation, the movement had a somewhat similar effect upon the humanistic secondary education of the time. In Protestant Germany the Civic control among Protestants, Latin schools and gymnasia came under the control of the princes and the State rather than the Church, and gradually became the backbone of the state school systems. But they stressed the religious element in their though direct management through the Church. curriculum, and the direct management of education was simply transferred to Protestant ministers or leaders. The schools were still taught and inspected by representatives of the Church, but the form of the organization and administration of education was radically changed. In England there was a similar transfer of management to the Protestant clergy. The existence of the schools had to be authorized and their teachers licensed by the bishop, and they were at all times liable to visitation from ecclesiastical authority. The grammar schools, however, were never organized like the gymnasia, but each school remained independent of the rest and of any national combination. Nor were the Calvinistic colleges united into a national system, except where they came into Germany, when they were absorbed into the system of the gymnasia. The state system of education established by the Scotch parliament in the parishes, often gave secondary training, as well as elementary. And in America the establishment and control of the ‘grammar’ schools, inherited from the mother country, were vested in the authorities of the state and the several Catholic education largely in hands of Jesuits. towns. On the other hand, the Catholic education in all countries found its secondary schools largely in the colleges of the Jesuits, and the subordination of the individual to authority and the Church was insisted upon.
Influence of the Reformation upon the Universities.—In Many universities adhered to Catholic authority. the case of the universities, many remained loyal to Catholicism and a few new Catholic foundations grew out of the Reformation. All these adhered to the principle of submission to ecclesiastical authority. But the majority of the universities in the Protestant states of Germany followed their princes when they changed from Others changed to Protestantism with their princes. the old creed to the new. Wittenberg, through its connection with Luther and Melanchthon, was the first German university to become Protestant, but others, like Marburg, Königsberg, Jena, Helmstadt, and Dorpat followed rapidly. Altdorf and Strassburg were developed out of gymnasia. The English universities, Oxford and Cambridge, went over to Protestantism with the national Church. In America, too, Harvard and other early colleges were closely connected with the various commonwealths and with the Calvinistic or the Anglican communion, according to the colony.
The Lapse into Formalism.—There came to be both in Catholic and Protestant institutions a tendency to regard the subjects taught as materials for discipline rather than as valuable for their content. The studies largely became an end in themselves and were deprived of almost all their vitality. The curriculum of the institutions became fixed and stereotyped in nature, and education lapsed into a formalism but little superior to that of the mediæval scholastics. The methods of teaching Memory stressed, rather than reason; authority emphasized; and individuality repressed. came to stress memory more than reason. The Protestants had claimed to depend less upon uncritical and obedient acceptance of dogma than upon the constant application of reason to the Scriptures, but they soon tended to emphasize the importance of authority and the repression of the individual quite as clearly as the Catholics, who definitely held that reason is out of place and unreliable as a final guide in education and life. Hence, except for launching the great conception of state support and control of education, the Reformation accomplished but little directly making for individualism and progress, either through the Catholic awakening or the Protestant revolts. Education fell back before long into the grooves of formalism, repression, and distrust of reason. There resulted a tendency to test life and the educational preparation for living by a formulation of belief almost as much as in the days of scholasticism.
SUPPLEMENTARY READING
Graves, During the Transition (Macmillan, 1910), chap. XV-XVI; Monroe, Text-book (Macmillan, 1905), chap. VII. An excellent interpretative account of the Reformation is that in Adams, G. B., Civilization during the Middle Ages (Scribner, 1894), chaps. XVI and XVII. Painter, F. V. N., furnishes a good translation of Luther on Education (Lutheran Publication Society, Philadelphia). Richard, J. W., gives a good account of Melanchthon, the Protestant Preceptor of Germany (Putnam, 1898), especially chaps. II-IV and VII; Watson, F., of Maturinus Corderius, the Schoolmaster of Calvin (School Review, vol. XII, nos. 4, 7, and 9); Graves, F. P., Ramus and the Educational Reformation of the Sixteenth Century (Macmillan, 1912) of conditions in France; and Leach, A. F., of the dissolution acts of Henry VIII and Edward VI in English Schools at the Reformation (Constable, London, 1896), pp. 58-122. On the side of Catholic education, one should read Schwickerath, R., Jesuit Education (Herder, St. Louis), chaps. III-VIII and XV-XVIII; Cadet, F., Port Royal Education (Bardeen, Syracuse, 1899; George Allen and Co., London) pp. 9-119; and Wilson, Mrs. R. F., Christian Brothers (London, 1883), which gives an epitome of Ravelet, A., Life of La Salle. The influence of the Reformation upon the German schools and universities, both Protestant and Catholic, is shown in Nohle E., History of the German School System (Report of the United States Commissioner of Education, 1897-98, vol. I), pp. 30-40; and Paulsen, F., German Education (Scribner, 1908), pp. 79-85.
CHAPTER XIV
EARLY REALISM AND THE INNOVATORS
OUTLINE
The intellectual awakening that appeared in the Renaissance and the Reformation found another avenue for expression in early realism.
This movement had two phases: (1) humanistic realism, which emphasized the content of classical literature; and (2) social realism, which strove to adapt education to actual life. But the two phases generally occurred together, and the classification of a treatise under one head or the other is largely a matter of emphasis.
The influence of the two phases was mostly indirect, but through social realism a special training arose in the Ritterakademien in Germany, while Milton’s humanistic realism was embodied in the ‘academies’ of England, and afterward of America.
The Rise and Nature of Realism.—By the seventeenth century it is obvious that humanism was everywhere losing its vitality and declining into a narrow ‘Ciceronianism,’ and that the Reformation was hardening once more into fixed concepts and a dogmatic formalism. A new channel for the emancipation of the individual. The awakened intellect of Europe, however, was tending to find still another mode of expression in the educational movement that is usually known as ‘realism.’ The process of emancipating the individual from tradition and repressive authority had not altogether ceased, but it was manifesting itself mainly through a rather different channel. The movement of A method by which ‘real things’ may be known. realism implied a search for a method by which ‘real things’ may be known. In its most distinct and latest form,—‘sense realism,’ it held that real knowledge comes ‘Sense realism’ through the senses and reason rather than through memory and reliance on tradition, and in this way it interpreted the ‘real things’ as being individual objects. Educational realism, therefore, concerned itself ultimately with investigation in the natural sciences; and it might well be denominated ‘the beginnings of the scientific movement,’ were it not that such a description and the earlier realism. neglects the earlier phases of the realistic development.