III.
STURMIUS.
1507-1589.
§ 1. The curriculum bequeathed by the Renascence and stereotyped in the School Codes of Germany, in the Ratio of the Jesuits, and in the English public school system, was greatly influenced by the most famous schoolmaster of the fifteen hundreds, John Sturm, who was for over forty years Rector of the Strassburg Gymnasium.
§ 2. Sturm was a fine specimen of the successful man: he knew what his contemporaries wanted, and that was just what he wanted. “He was a blessed fellow,” as Prince Hal says of Poins, “to think as every man thought,” and he not only “kept the roadway” himself, but he also “personally conducted” great bands of pupils over it, at one time “200 noblemen, 24 counts and barons, and 3 princes.” What could schoolmaster desire more?
§ 3. But I frankly own that Sturm is no favourite of mine, and that I think that he did much harm to education. However, his influence in the schoolroom was so great that I must not leave him unnoticed; and I give some information, taken mainly from Raumer’s account of him, which is translated in Henry Barnard’s “German Teachers and Educators.” I have also looked at the exhaustive article by Dr. Bossier in K. A. Schmid’s Encyklopädie (sub v.)
§ 4. John Sturm, born at Schleiden in the Eifel, not far from Cologne, in 1507, was one of 15 children, and would not have had much teaching had not his father been steward to a nobleman, with whose sons he was brought up. He always spoke with reverence and affection of his early teachers, and from them no doubt he acquired his thirst for learning. With the nobleman’s sons and under the guidance of a tutor he was sent to Liège, and there he attended a school of the “Brethren of the Life in Common,” alias Hieronymites. Many of the arrangements of this school he afterwards reproduced in the Strassburg Gymnasium, and in this way the good Brethren gained an influence over classical education throughout the world.
§ 5. Between the age of 15 and 20 Sturm was at Lyons, and before the end of this period he was forced into teaching for a maintenance. He then, like many other learned men of the time, turned printer. We next find him at the University of Paris, where he thought of becoming a doctor of medicine, but was finally carried away from natural science by the Renascence devotion to literature, and he became a popular lecturer on the classics. From Paris he was called to Strassburg (then, as now, in Germany) in 1537. In 1538 he published his plan of a Gymnasium or Grammar School, with the title, “The right way of opening schools of literature (De Literarum Ludis recte aperiendis),” and some years afterwards (1565) he published his Letters (Classicæ Epistolæ) to the different form-masters in his school.
§ 6. The object of teaching is three-fold, says Sturm, “piety, knowledge, and the art of expression.” The student should be distinguished by reasonable and neat speech (ratione et oratione). To attain this the boys in his school had to give seven years to the acquirement of a pure Latin style; then two years more were devoted to elegance; then five years of collegiate life were to be given to the art of Latin speech. This course is for ten years carefully mapped out by Sturm in his Letters to the masters. The foundation is to be laid in the tenth class, which the child enters at seven years old, and in which he learns to read, and is turned on to the declensions and conjugations. We have for all classes the exact “pensum,” and also specimens of the questions put in examination by the top boy of the next class above, a hint which was not thrown away upon the Jesuits.
§ 7. Sturm cries over the superior advantages of the Roman children. “Cicero was but twenty when he delivered his speeches in behalf of Quintius and Roscius; but in these days where is there the man even of eighty, who could make such speeches? Yet there are books enough and intellect enough. What need we further? We need the Latin language and a correct method of teaching. Both these we must have before we can arrive at the summit of eloquence.”
§ 8. Sturm did not, like Rabelais, put Greek on a level with Latin or above it. The reading of Greek words is begun in the sixth class. Hebrew, Sturm did not himself learn till he was nearly sixty.