Nationalism and education since 1789; a social and political history of modern education

Front matter

Glass.

Book-

COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT

Preface

In the large view, education is public policy, related inseparably to economic conditions, social organization, and political administration. The educator who would wisely plan the activities and the management of the schools, must pay attention to the major conditions of life outside the schools, and must be able to evaluate educational procedure in terms of far-reaching and broadly inclusive social purpose. No less must the statesman who would build a just, efficient, prosperous, and patriotic nation, enlist the schools in his efforts and utilize them to effect his aims.

Up to the outbreak of the World War, the pre-eminent importance of education as a phase of public policy had not been so clearly recognized in the United States as in some other great nations of the world. We had believed in the schools and had been generous in supporting them, but as a nation we had not concerned ourselves very actively with educational policies. The war has considerably changed this attitude, and we suddenly find citizens and legislatures making all kinds of demands upon the school system. Since many of the proposals that are being made among us have been exemplified in the school systems of other nations, it might be well for us, before undertaking any radical reorganization of the spirit and method of American public education, to find out what has resulted from the application of similar policies in other countries. Furthermore, a study of the administrative systems which those other nations have built up will aid in guiding our heightened desire for greater educational efficiency.

It is with these considerations in mind that the writer has tried to describe the major facts of the social, economic, and political life of France. Prussia, England, and the United viii PREFACE

States since about 1789, in close relationship wtih educational policy and practice. As the period covered is short and the historical record is brought down to date, the matters treated of are of current concern in education, since the major conditioning factors of the period, namely, nationalism, democracy, and the factory system of industrial production, are with us today in more insistent form than ever before. The account given is necessarily brief and elementary, particularly with reference to the general social factors that surround and condition education. It is hoped, however, that it is accurate as far as it goes, and, above all, that it is unprejudiced and candid.

The book is an elaboration of a syllabus for a course in the history of education published in 19 19 by Teachers College, Columbia University, entitled Democracy and Nationalism in Education. In the preparation of the present work, the writer has made large use of source materials, particularly in the case of France, Prussia, and England. He has borrowed quite shamelessly his accounts of general social, economic, and political background from the works of acknowledged authorities in those fields and his indebtedness is fairly represented in the list of readings named at the end of chapters. Standard secondary accounts of education have also been studied carefully, but in this field running acknowledgment has more often been made. For the first three chapters on the United States, free use has been made of Cubberley's Public Education in the United States and of the articles which Professor Cubberley has contributed to the Cyclopedia of Education, edited by Monroe.

To Professor Paul Monroe of Teachers College is due the writer's sincere appreciation for encouragement in developing the field of education which is the special subject of this study. To many of his colleagues in Teachers College he is under obligation for advice and criticism lying within their special fields of mastery. Professor William H. Kilpatrick has the writer's lively gratitude for his valuable suggestions of changes or additions made after reading the

PREFACE

IX entire book in manuscript form. The writer's greatest indebtedness is to his colleague, Dr. I. L. Kandel, whose extensive and accurate scholarship and first-hand knowledge of European school conditions have made his criticisms and suggestions invaluable. Dr. Kandel, to the decided improvement of the book, read it in manuscript form, and throughout the course of its preparation he has been most generously subject to call for suggestions and information.

E. H. R.

New York City, June, 1922.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. The Social Factors that Have Conditioned Western

Education Since the French Revolution .... i

Part I France

II. The French Revolution: Its Educational Promise

and Achievement 7

The Old Regime. The National Assembly and Talleyrand's Education Bill. The Legislative Assembly and Condorcet's Report. The Convention and the Directory and Daunou's Law.

III. Napoleon and the Imperial French University . . 33

IV. The Restoration Monarchy and Educational Con-

servatism 43

V. The Upper-middle-class Monarchy and the Establishment of a State System of Primary Schools . 46 The State of Primary Education. The Primary Education Law of 1833. Improvements in Education under the July Monarchy.

VI. The Second Republic and the Second Empire and the

Revival of Church Influence in Education ... 63 The Second Republic. The Education Law of 1850. Government and Education after December 2, 1851.

VII. The Third Republic and Further Developments of

The Ferry Laws. Moral and Civic Instruction. Centralization of Educational Administration. Vocational Education and the Higher Primary School. Democracy in Education under the Third Republic.

Part II Prussia

VIII. The Regeneration of Prussia and the Organization of

AN Efficient National System of Education . . . 121 No Efficient National System of Education before the Nineteenth Century. The Reforms Following xii CONTENTS

CHAPTER PACE

the Treaty of Tilsit. The Organization of a National System of Education. The Conflict between Liberal and Conservative Political Opinion.

IX. MlDCENTURY POLITICAL DEVELOPMENTS AND ThEIR Ef-

TECTs ON Public Education 151

The Advent of a New Political and Intellectual Period. Official Reorganization of the Teachers Seminaries. The Regulations of 1854. Prussia under William I and Bismarck,

X. Prussia and the German Empire 176

Prussia in the Empire. Economic Expansion of the Empire. Vocational Education. The Kulturkampf. The General Regulations of 1872. The Fight against Social Democracy. Militant Nationalism after 1890. The Modern Prussian System of Education. Nationalistic Propaganda by Means of the Schools. The Lack of Democracy in German Education. The GermanRepublic.

Part III England

XI. The Old Order and the Industrial Revolution . . 221

England in the Late Eighteenth Century. The Industrial Revolution. Philanthropy in English Education. Early Parliamentary Interest in Education.

XII. Benevolent Aristocracy and Early State Intervention IN Education 243

The New Spirit of Political Reform. The First Parliamentary Grants for Education. The Report of the Newcastle Commission. Secondary Education the Object of Parliamentary Inquiry.

XIII. Political Democracy and the Achievement of a Na-

tional System or Education 273

Political and Social Reform. The Elementary Education Act of 1870. The Third Reform Act. The Cross Commission on Elementary Education. Secondary Education as .Effected by New Social and Economic Conditions. Report of the Bryce Commission on Secondary Education. The Education Act of 1902.

XIV. The New Liberalism and the Fisher Act .... 300

New Political Alignments. Social Legislation. The Education Act of 1918, Commonly Called the Fisher Act. The Present English System of Schools.

CONTENTS

Xlll

Part IV The United States XV

XVI.

XVII.

XVIII.

The New Federal State and the Passing of an Old

Political Order 323

The Degree of Political Union among the Original States. The Constitution of the United States. The Federal Constitution and Democracy. The Frontier and Its Influence on the Suffrage. The Nature of American Democracy. The Federal Government and Education. State Governments and Education. Local Education Authorities. The Elementary School. Secondary Education. Higher Education. Philanthropic School Societies.

The Triumph of Sectionalism. The Common People Take the Helm. Progress in the Development of State .Administrative Systems. The Common School Revival. State Educational Administration. Local Education .Authorities. The Public Schools Made Free. The Extension of the Elementary School Upward. Educational Influences of the New Immigration. The American School System by 1861.

Material Growth and Cultural Unification

Economic Development of the North and West. Increase in Centralization in Government. Reconstruction and Education. State and Local School Administration. City School Administration. The High School. Industrial Education. The Preparation of Teachers. Compulsory .Attendance. Rural Schools. The Changes of Twenty-live Years.

The Development of a National Consciousness in

Education 468

Economic and Social Conditions after i8go. Extension of the Prerogatives of the National Government. The Practical Disappearance of Sectionalism. The Federal Government and Public Education. State Educational Administration. Local Education Authorities. Local School Supervision. City School Administration. Public Secondary Education. Vocational Education. Continuation Schools. Compulsory .Attendance. The Professional Education of Teachers and Supervisors. Private and Parochial Schools. Civic and Patriotic Instruction.

Index S6i

Chapter I

THE SOCIAL FACTORS THAT HAVE CON- DITIONED WESTERN EDUCATION SINCE THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

Three great social movements have conditioned the educational developments of the last century and a half of Western history. They are: (a) the increasing importance of nationalism as a form of political organization; (6) the gradual enlargement of the electorate in control of government, and (c) the transformation of economic and social life which has been brought about by the application of a series of important mechanical inventions to the arts of communication and to the processes of the manufacture and distribution of goods. For convenience we may refer to these major conditioning factors of education as nationalism, democracy, and the industrial revolution. They have been closely interrelated in their development and each has had a host of ramifications. In son)e respects they have supplemented one another, while in other respects they have been antagonistic. At all events, each has had important influence in the creation of the present social situation and each has entered with power into the conditions of public education.

Contrast between American and European Conditions. — While nationalism, democracy, and the industrial revolution have influenced the entire Western world, their manifestation in Europe has been different from that in the United States.

In Europe, in the latter part of the eighteenth century and the early part of the nineteenth, a new and extremely vital type of nationalism sprang into existence as a result of the French Revolutionary and the Napoleonic wars. In its beginnings, this new nationalism was apparently closely allied to liberal conceptions of political rights; but nationalism continued to govern the policies of European governments, while the promise of democracy was engulfed in a flood of political reactionism. After the Congress of Vienna (181 5), it was the industrial revolution that brought about in Europe gradual extensions of the suffrage and ultimately manhood suffrage. In the United States, on the other hand, the full development of a democracy based on manhood suffrage had taken place before 1830; that is to say, before any large degree of national unity had been achieved and before the industrialization of American life had made much headway. If democracy in the countries of Western Europe has been the result of the efforts of the factory workers to secure the ballot for the improvement of the conditions of labor, in the United States democracy has come as a result of the abundance of free land on the everextending frontier and from the simplicity and the naturalness of pioneer life. The effects of the industrial revolution on American institutions have been appreciably felt only since the Civil War. And so it is seen that, while the three factors of nationalism, democracy, and the industrial revolution have operated both in Western Europe and in the United States, they have done so in different order, with different emphasis, and with quite different effect.

Major Social Movements of the Period All Favor Public Education. — It may be said that each of these factors of nationalism, democracy, and the industrial revolution might alone have accounted in considerable measure for the present status of public education. Each implies the necessity for an educated people. Nationalism calls for universal education in order that there may be a general development of individual power — physical, mental, and moral — so that the nation composed of individuals may realize its full military and economic

SOCIAL FACTORS CONDITIONING EDUCATION 3

strength. Democracy calls for assiduous devotion to education in order that the great mass of the voters may be equipped for the responsible duties and privileges of citizenship. The economic revolution, with its extensive application of science, art, and superior forms of management to the business of everyday life, calls in its turn for the education of all the people in order that they may be efficient economic units, productive and prosperous for their individual satisfaction as well as for national strength.

In the pages which follow, the materials introduced have been selected from the point of view of their bearing upon the major social influences named above. The necessity of conserving space has led to laying the emphasis, in the treatment of each of the four nations considered, upon the particular development which that nation's history has especially exemplified. Thus, Prussia has been seen as representative of the extreme development of nationalism in education; France as showing a type of accommodation between the demands of nationalism and those of democracy; while in the parts of the book devoted to those countries, the influence of the industrial revolution has been given slight attention. In the story of England, the dominant theme throughout has been the response of a conservative society in terms of education to the conditions brought about by the revolution in industrial life. America has been accepted as showing an extreme type of democracy responding gradually to the necessity of self-discipline and self-cultivation through public education and only in recent years feeling in marked degree the influence either of the industrial revolution or of nationalism.

The writer has tried to describe the educational evolution of each of these four countries as it has taken place in response to changing social, economic, and political conditions. The narrative does not attempt to solve problems or teach lessons, but rather to bring concrete educational situations before the reader for his own observation and judgment. It is to be hoped and expected that the serial presentation of the educational problems and practices of four important modern nations may reveal to us in a new light and with greater clearness the complex educational problems of our own day, and that it may give us an enlarged conception of the responsibility and the promise of public education in a democratic state.

Chapter II The French Revolution: Its Edu- Cational Promise And Achievement

The Old Regime

The Absolute Monarchy and the Privileged Classes. — In order to appreciate fully the tremendous significance of the political and educational changes that were accomplished through the French Revolution, it is necessary to understand the nature of the system which it brought to an end. The government under Louis XVT was an absolute monarchy — the government of France was simply the extension of the will of the king. The king's power over his subjects was practically absolute wherever he cared to set aside the operation of ordinary law, and no one was secure against distortions of justice or even against imprisonment without warrant or means of redress. There was no representative assembly for the making of laws or the determination of public policy. The administration of government in the provinces into which the country was divided was accomplished through intendants, who were the appointees and the personal representatives of the king.

The nobility, which under mediaeval conditions had performed real social and political functions, had been deprived of all political significance. They served mainly as the personnel of the king's brilliant court. Maintained partly by the income from their estates and largely by sinecure pensions and salaries provided by the king, they spent their time in the diversions of society.

The higher officials of the church were often worldly men who had been appointed from strictly personal or political motives. They absented themselves from their legitimate fields of religious activity and frequented the court, where commonly they entered with abandon into all its worldliness and excess. In such instances the cure of souls was left to the lowly parish priest who toiled among the poor while the bishops and abbots and other high Church dignitaries flirted and gamed and intrigued at Versailles.

The Bourgeoisie. — If the first and second estates — or, in other words, the nobility and the clergy — had degenerated from positions of large social importance and had become mere supernumeraries in the real administration of French government, the third estate, otherwise known as the bourgeoisie or the middle class, had risen to a position of great power and influence. They furnished the members of the bureaucracy through which the civil administration was carried on. They were in complete possession of the courts of justice and could delay or defeat the operation of the law to meet their personal ends. They were the bankers, the manufacturers, the professional class. Through their wealth or the political favor which they were able to win, the members of the middle class frequently acquired titles of nobility. In general, their interests were much more closely assimilated to those of the upper classes than to those of the submerged masses of the peasantry and the artisans. The bourgeoisie were the backbone of the civil administration; they were the foundation of France's financial credit; they furnished the great majority of France's intellectual elite. Of actual political representation or power on their own initiative, they had none, because there were no political institutions through which they could make their will effective.

Peasants and Workingmen. — The condition of the peasants was altogether unfavorable. Serfdom, to be sure, had largely disappeared; but even where the peasants enjoyed freedom of person a great number of mediaeval dues and restrictions continued to plague and hamper them. The great burden of taxation which was necessary to maintain the military and civil establishments and to support the wasteful extravagance of the royal court rested almost exclusively upon their backs. Toil as they might, the tax collector would make away with all the returns of their labor above the barest minima of a miserable existence.

^ Education under the Old Regime. — Corresponding to the political and social aspects of the old regime, there was a system of education which served as a means of its perpetuation. Largely through the Church, to which he had tacitly delegated this function, the king controlled education in the interest of maintaining the existing order. Instruction in the universities had about it none of the spirit of research, being mainly the lifeless reproduction of the formulas of an earlier time. Everything taught therein was in the spirit and the letter of orthodox religion and to the glory of "His Most Christian Majesty." The secondary schools were in the hands of religious orders and gave traditional and devitalized instruction to the sons of the middle and upper classes. As for the children of the common people, such facilities of instruction as they enjoyed were provided by religious associations of men and women. The schools maintained by these teaching congregations were by no means universally supplied and their main purpose was moral and religious instruction. The great mass of the French poorer classes were altogether illiterate.

The National Assembly (May 5, 1789, to September 14, 1 791) AND Talleyrand's Education Bill

Political Reforms of the National Assembly. — The French Revolution began by being no revolution at all, but rather a council of representatives of the three estates of France elected to propose means for bolstering up a tottering financial system. The government stood prepared to trade off as advantageously as possible social reforms for money grants, and the estates of France had prepared cahiers (notebooks) of grievances which their representatives were to have remedied as far as possible. But even before the three estates had been organized for the work which they had been called together to perform, a contest over the matter of balance of power in the council arose between the Third Estate and the two privileged estates, with the result that the representatives of the Third Estate, hitherto without political recognition or social privilege, declared themselves a National Assembly of the French people and invited the representatives of the other estates to join them. Upon royal order this invitation was accepted. The king's later effort to suppress the Assembly by armed force led to an uprising of the Paris Commune in support of the Assembly. The success of the uprising of the people of Paris was immediate and complete, and the National Assembly was saved. It promptly set to work to abolish the old regime and its numerous relics of feudalism and to draft a constitution.

The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, prefixed to the Constitution of 1791, stated in a positive way the principles of security from those abuses which had been abolished. This declaration asserted in part that the aim of all political association was the preservation of the natural and inalienable rights of man, which were liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression, and that the principle of all sovereignty resided essentially in the nation. Law, it declared, was the expression of the common will, and every citizen had the right to participate personally or through his representatives in its formation. It called for protection against the subversion of justice by arbitrary power and guaranteed freedom of conscience, freedom of the press, and equity and universality of taxation.

The Constitution set up by the National, or Constituent, Assembly provided for a limited monarchy with the king in possession of a limited veto power. The French nation was divided for administrative purposes into departments, which in turn were divided and subdivided into districts, cantons and communes. All officials, including judges, of these various political divisions, were to be elected. The franchise was limited, in apparent inconsistency with the provisions of the Declaration of Rights, to those who paid taxes equal to three

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND EDUCATION ii

days' wages, and there was established a property qualification for all office holders. Trial by jury was guaranteed for all criminal cases and a system of local and appellate courts was organized. The legislative function of the government was to be in the hands of a single chamber, the members of which were to be elected by the departments.

The Constitution of 1791 is thus seen to represent a complete overturn of the old system of absolutism and privilege and to be democratic in a very true sense of the word. But it is equally plain that the writers of the Constitution intended to have a democracy which was limited by the possession of property. If the new order of things had changed radically in contrast with the old, it nevertheless realized only the aspirations for political power of the bourgeoisie, or middle class, and withheld from the great mass of artisans and agricultural laborers the right of active participation in political affairs.

The National Assembly and the Church. — A phase of the work of the National Assembly that is of great significance in the history of French education is its treatment of the Church. The state confiscated the lands of the Church and sold a large part of them, applying the proceeds to governmental purposes. Monasteries and nunneries were dissolved and the monks and nuns were pensioned by the state, while the salaries of the clergy were carried on the civil service list. The opposition which was aroused within the Church to this policy of confiscation and interference rallied that venerable institution against the new radical political policies and the new nationalism. As a result, there has been from that time to the present in France an alliance, more or less influential at various periods, between conservative or reactionary politics and the Catholic Church.

The Enlarged Importance of Education in the New Political Order. — When the Old Regime was overthrown and a system of representative political institutions was established, participation in the national life was extended at least as widely as the suffrage. In addition to the voters, every peasant who had had his hunger for independent landownership satisfied by the agrarian reforms of the National Assembly and the sale of Church and forfeited lands, might be expected to feel identified with the fortunes of the nation. Immediately the complex problem arose of preparing the citizens for their new privileges and responsibilities and of welding them into social unity. It was seen to be necessary that all the people should be able to read the official French language; that they should be informed respecting the political institutions under which they were to live; that enthusiasm for those institutions should be engendered in them; that they should be assimilated to the historical tradition of France and made to feel a pride in their heritage; and that their bodies be strengthened and trained, their minds be stimulated and expanded, and their moral purposes be formed and set in the mold of the new social and political order. To accomplish this work of human creation and regeneration it was seen to be essential that there be a system of education that was dependent in its purposes and its administration upon the civil state.

The Constitution of 1791 contained the following provision regarding education: "There shall be created and organized a system of public instruction common to all the citizens and gratuitous in respect to those subjects of instruction that are indispensable to all men. Schools of various grades shall be supplied according to need over the entire kingdom. Commemorative days shall be designated for the purpose of preserving the memory of the French Revolution, of developing the spirit of fraternity among all citizens and of attaching them to the constitution, the country and its laws." Consistently with the constitutional provision for education, the National Assembly appointed a Committee on Public Instruction, in behalf of which a report was made and a bill presented for the consideration of the Assembly by M. Talleyrand- Perigord on September 10 and 11, 1791.

Talleyrand's Education Bill. — Talleyrand's Bill is an indication of a new attitude toward education which had been induced by the establishment of a new political order. It recognized education as a state function and not a church function. It proposed to employ the schools as an agency for the promotion of a national culture. It planned an organization of schools consistent with the increased participation of the people in government.

A division in principle was made in the Bill between those subjects of instruction which were "indispensable to the individual as a man and a citizen" and those which were needed only in preparation for professional life. The former were to be free of cost and open to the children of all citizens without distinction, while the latter were to be paid for. Such a distinction was essentially that which has existed in Europe between primary and secondary education down to the present time and only reflected the half-way democracy which France had achieved by the Constitution of 179 1.

Primary Education. — Truly a high and difficult objective was set up in the Bill for the primary schools, for their purpose was declared to be "to teach all children their first and indispensable duties, to instil in them the principles which ought to direct their actions; and to make them happier men and more useful citizens through preserving them from the dangers of ignorance." These results were to be achieved through reading, writing, the simple elements of the French language, the rules of elementary arithmetic, the elements of mensuration, place geography of limited scope, and some wellconceived moral and religious material. The children were to be taught the principles of religion and the first elements of morals in such a way as to show the interdependence of the members of society. They were to be instructed in the duties common to all citizens and in the laws which it was necessary for all to know.

The Bill did not specify any administrative unit for the establishment of primary schools, but left this to the judgment of the departmental governments acting upon the demands of local initiative. No compulsion was laid upon the communes to establish schools nor upon parents to send their children to the schools after they had been established. The Committee on Public Instruction relied upon popular enthusiasm for education to establish schools and to send the children to them for instruction. The teacher of the primary school was to receive from the state a fixed salary and to be provided with a schoolroom. His professional fitness was to be insured through official examinations; his loyalty to the state was to be guaranteed by a civil oath.

Secondary Education. — The Bill provided for secondary education through a system of "district" schools, the number of which was to be decided upon by the government of each department. The double purpose of these schools was to give general cultural development and to furnish special preparation for entrance to professional life. The curriculum as described in the Bill was a decided innovation in its emphasis upon scientific and social subjects and the verriacular. The principles of religion, ethics, languages, logic, rhetoric, geography, history, mathematics, and physics were to be distributed over a period of seven years, while special attention was to be paid to physical training and military exercises. In the Grammar Course, comprising the first two years, republican morality was to be made the central theme, and the pupils were to learn by heart the Declaration of the Rights of Man. The motive of creating a national culture is shown in the relatively great emphasis which was to be laid upon the French language and literature and upon comparative and French history. The secondary school teacher was to be made a member of the national civil administration through uniform examinations to determine his eligibility, through civil appointment and legally safeguarded tenure of office, through a state contribution to his salary, and through his subscribing to a civil oath.

Scholarships in the District Schools. — Even though the instruction in the district schools was not to be free, a system of scholarships was provided for in the Bill which was intended to keep such schools at least partly accessible to poor, but gifted youths. At least ten scholarships were to be provided in the principal school of each department in their behalf. Existing educational foundations were to be applied to this object, but where such funds were insufficient, the expense of the scholarships was to be borne by the state.