Physical exercises are not forgotten in Luther’s pedagogical regulations. But he attaches an especial importance to singing. “Unless a schoolmaster know how to sing, I think him of no account.” “Music,” he says again, “is a half discipline which makes men more indulgent and more mild.”
132. Progress in Methods.—At the same time that he extends the programme of studies, Luther introduces a new spirit into methods. He wishes more liberty and more joy in the school.
“Solomon,” he says, “is a truly royal schoolmaster. He does not, like the monks, forbid the young to go into the world and be happy. Even as Anselm said: ‘A young man turned aside from the world is like a young tree made to grow in a vase.’ The monks have imprisoned young men like birds in their cage. It is dangerous to isolate the young. It is necessary, on the contrary, to allow young people to hear, see, and learn all sorts of things, while all the time observing the restraints and the rules of honor. Enjoyment and recreation are as necessary for children as food and drink. The schools till now were veritable prisons and hells, and the schoolmaster a tyrant.... A child intimidated by bad treatment is irresolute in all he does. He who has trembled before his parents will tremble all his life at the sound of a leaf which rustles in the wind.”
These quotations will suffice to make appreciated the large and liberal spirit of Luther, and the range of his thought as an educator. No one has more extolled the office of the teacher, of which he said, when comparing it to preaching, it is the work of all others the noblest, the most useful, and the best; “and yet,” he added, “I do not know which of these two professions is the better.”
Do not let ourselves imagine, however, that Luther at once exercised a decisive influence on the current education of his day. A few schools were founded, called writing schools; but the Thirty Years’ War, and other events, interrupted the movement of which Luther has the honor of having been the originator.
133. The States General of Orleans (1560).—While in Germany, under the impulse of Luther, primary schools began to be established, France remained in the background. Let us note, however, the desires expressed by the States General of Orleans, in 1560:—
“May it please the king,” it was said in the memorial of the nobility, “to levy a contribution upon the church revenues for the reasonable support of teachers and men of learning in every city and village, for the instruction of the needy youth of the country; and let all parents be required, under penalty of a fine, to send their children to school, and let them be constrained to observe this law by the lords and the ordinary magistrates.”
It was demanded, in addition, that public lectures be given on the Sacred Scriptures in intelligible language, that is, in the mother tongue. But these demands, so earnest and democratic, of the Protestant nobility of sixteenth century France, were not regarded. With the fall of Protestantism, the cause of primary instruction in France was doomed to a long eclipse. The nobles of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not think of petitioning again for the education of the people, and Diderot could truthfully say of them: “The nobility complain of the farm laborers who know how to read. Perhaps the chief grievance of the nobility reduces itself to this: that a peasant who knows how to read is more difficult to oppress than another.”
134. Ratich (1571-1635).—In the first half of the seventeenth century, Ratich, a German, and Comenius, a Slave, were, with very different degrees of merit, the heirs of the educational thought of Luther.