The condition of the schools before Luther, as described in our available sources, was very different from what Luther pictured to his readers in his works.
According to Luther’s polemical writings, learning in earlier days could not but be sacrilegious because Satan “was corrupting the young” in “his own nests, the monasteries and clerical resorts”; “he, the prince of this world, gave the young his good things and delights; the devil spread out his nets, established monasteries, schools and callings, in such a way that no boy could escape him.”[105] With this fantastic view, met with only too frequently in Luther under all sorts of shapes, goes hand in hand his wholesale reprobation and belittling of the olden methods and system of education. The professors at the close of the Middle Ages were only able, according to Luther, to “train up profligates and greedy bellies, rude donkeys and blockheads; all they could teach men was to be asses and to dishonour their wives, daughters and maids.” “People studied twenty or forty years and yet at the end of it all knew neither Latin nor German.” “Those ogres and kidnappers” set up libraries, but they were filled “with the filth and ordure of their obscene and poisonous books”; “the devil’s spawn, the monks and the spectres of the Universities” when conferring doctorates decked out “great fat loutish donkeys in red and brown hoods, like a sow pranked out with gold chains and pearls.” “The pupils and professors were as mad as the books on which they lectured. A jackdaw does not hatch out doves nor can a fool beget wise offspring.”
It is in his “An die Radherrn,” the object of which was to raise the standard of education, that we find such coarse language.
What is of more importance is that Luther seems here to be seeking to conceal the decline in learning which he had brought about, and to lay the blame solely on the olden schools. If the corruption had formerly been so great then some excuse might be found for the ruin which had followed his struggle with the Church.—Such an excuse, however, does not tally with the facts.
That, on the contrary, education, not only at the Universities, but also in the Latin schools, which Luther had more particularly in view, was in a flourishing condition and full of promise before it was so rudely checked by the religious disturbances which emptied all the schools, has been fully confirmed to-day by learned research. “The increased attendance at the Universities in the course of the 15th and the commencement of the 16th century is a very rapid one,” writes Franz Eulenburg. “Hence the decline in the ’twenties of the latter century is all the more noticeable.”[106] “At the beginning of the 16th century,” says Friedrich Paulsen, “everyone of any influence or standing, strength or courage, devoted himself to the new learning: prelates, sovereigns, the townships and, above all, the young”; but, shortly after the outbreak of the ecclesiastical revolution, “everything became changed.”[107]
What had contributed principally to a salutary revival had been the sterling work of the older Humanists. Eminent and thoroughly religious men of the schools—men like Alexander Hegius and his pupils and successors Rudolf von Langen, Ludwig Dringenberg, Johannes Murmellius and, particularly, Jakob Wimpfeling, who, on account of his epoch-making pedagogic work, was called the teacher of Germany—zealously made their own the humanistic ideal of making of the classics the centre of the education of the young, and of paving the way for a new intellectual life, by means of the instruction given in the schools.[108] An attempt was made to combine classical learning with devotion to the old religion and respect for the Church. They also strove to carry out—though not always successfully—the task which was assigned to the schools by the Lateran Council held under Leo X; the aim of the teacher was to be not merely to impart grammar, rhetoric and the other sciences, but at the same time to instil into those committed to their charge the fear of God and zeal for the faith.[109] The sovereigns and the towns placed their abundant means at the disposal of the new movement and so did the Church, which at that time was still a wealthy organisation.
The number of the schools and scholars in itself proves the interest taken by the nation in the relative prosperity of its education.
To take some instances from districts with which Luther must have been fairly well acquainted: Zwickau had a flourishing Latin school which, in 1490, numbered 900 pupils divided into four classes. In 1518 instruction was given there in Greek and Hebrew, and bequests, ecclesiastical and secular, for its maintenance continued to be made. The town of Brunswick had two Latin schools and, besides, three schools belonging to religious communities. At Nuremberg, towards the close of the 15th century, there were several Latin schools controlled by four rectors and twelve assistants; a new “School of Poetry” was added in 1515 under Johann Cochlæus. Augsburg also had five Church schools at the commencement of the 16th century, and besides this private teachers with a humanistic training were engaged in teaching Latin and the fine arts. At Frankfurt-on-the-Main there were, in 1478, three foundation schools with 318 pupils; the college at Schlettstadt in Alsace numbered 900 pupils in 1517 and Geiler of Kaysersberg and Jakob Wimpfeling were both educated there. At Görlitz in Silesia, at the close of the 15th century, the number of scholars varied between 500 and 600. Emmerich on the lower Rhine had, in 1510, approximately 450 pupils in its six classes, in 1521 about 1500. Münster in Westphalia, owing to the labours of its provost, Rudolf von Langen, became the focus and centre of humanistic effort, and, subsequent to 1512, had also its pupils divided into six classes.[110]
The “Brothers of the Common Life” established their schools over the whole of Northern Germany. Their institutions, with which Luther himself had the opportunity of becoming acquainted at Magdeburg, sent out some excellent schoolmasters. The schools of these religious at Deventer, Zwolle, Liège and Louvain were famous. The school of the brothers at Liège numbered in 1521 1600 pupils, assorted into eight classes.
In the lands of the Catholic princes many important grammar-schools withstood the storms of the religious revulsion, so that Luther’s statements concerning the total downfall of education cannot be accepted as generally correct, even subsequent to the first decades of the century.