XII. THE REVOLT AGAINST AUTHORITY
THE NEW QUESTIONING ATTITUDE. The student can hardly have followed the history of educational development thus far without realizing that a serious questioning of the practices and of the dogmatic and repressive attitude of the omnipresent mediaeval Church was certain to come, sooner or later, unless the Church itself realized that the mediaeval conditions which once demanded such an attitude were rapidly passing away, and that the new life in Christendom now called for a progressive stand in religious matters as in other affairs. The new life resulting from the Crusades, the rise of commerce and industry, the organization of city governments, the rise of lawyer and merchant classes, the formation of new national States, the rise of a new "Estate" of tradesmen and workers, the new knowledge, the evolution of the university organizations, and the discovery of the art of printing--all these forces had united to develop a new attitude toward the old problems and to prepare western Europe for a rapid evolution out of the mediaeval conditions which had for so long dominated all action and thinking. This the Church should have realized, and it should have assumed toward the progressive tendencies of the time the same intelligent attitude assumed earlier toward the rise of scholastic inquiry. But it did not, and by the fifteenth century the situation had been further aggravated by a marked decline in morality on the part of both monks and clergy, which awakened deep and general criticism in all lands, but particularly among the northern peoples.
The Revival of Learning was the first clear break with mediaevalism. In the critical and constructive attitude developed by the scholars of the movement, their renunciation of the old forms of thinking, the new craving for truth for its own sake which they everywhere awakened, and their continual appeal to the original sources of knowledge for guidance, we have the definite beginnings of a modern scientific spirit which was destined ultimately to question all things, and in time to usher in modern conceptions and modern ways of thinking. The authority of the mediaeval Church would be questioned, and out of this questioning would come in time a religious freedom and a religious tolerance unknown in the mediaeval world. The great world of scientific truth would be inquired into and the facts of modern science established, regardless of what preconceived ideas, popular or religious, might be upset thereby. The divine right of kings to rule, and to dispose of the fortunes and happiness of their peoples as they saw fit, was also destined to be questioned, and another new "Estate" would in time arise and substitute, instead, in all progressive lands, the divine right of the common people. Religious freedom and toleration, scientific inquiry and scholarship, and the ultimate rise of democracy were all involved in the critical, questioning, and constructive attitude of the humanistic scholars of the Renaissance. These came historically in the order just stated, and in this order we shall consider them.
HUMANISM BECAME A RELIGIOUS REFORM MOVEMENT IN THE NORTH. In Italy the Revival of Learning was classical and scientific in its methods and results, and awakened little or no tendency toward religious and moral reform. Instead it resulted in something of a paganization of religion, with the result that the Papacy and the Italian Church probably reached their lowest religious levels at about the time the great religious agitation took place in northern lands. In the latter, on the contrary, the introduction of humanism awakened a new religious zeal, and religious reform and classical learning there came to be associated almost as one movement. In England, Germany, the Low Countries, and in large parts of northern France, the new learning was at once directed to religious and moral ends. The patriotic emotions roused in the Italians by the humanistic movement were in the northern countries superseded by religious and moral emotions, and the constant appeal to sources turned the northern leaders almost at once back to the Church Fathers and the original Greek and Hebrew Testaments for authority in religious matters.
Colet, from England, who had spent the years 1493-96 in Florence (p. 254), during the period when Savonarola (1452-98) was preaching moral reform there, returned home, not only a humanist, but a religious reformer as well, and began to lecture at Oxford on the Epistles of Saint Paul in the Greek. Linacre, Grocyn, Colet, Erasmus, and Sir Thomas More (author of Utopia), among others, formed a little group of humanists all of whom were also deeply interested in a reform of the practices of the Church. Erasmus, in particular, labored hard by his writings to remove religious abuses. His Colloquies (1519), a widely used Latin reading book, was banned from the classrooms of the University of Paris (1528), and forbidden to be used in Catholic lands by the Church Council of Trent (1564), because of the way in which it held up to ridicule the abuses in the Church, the superstitions of the age, and the immoralities in the lives of the monks and clergy. His work as Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, his numerous editions of the writings of the Church Fathers, and his Latin-Greek edition (1516), of the New Testament [1] all alike tended to turn theological scholars back to the original sources instead of to the scholastics for the foundations of their religious faith. In Germany such men as Hegius (p, 271), Reuchlin (p. 254), and Melanchthon (p. 270) began, by similar methods, to go back to Greek and Hebrew sources and to the Church Fathers for new interpretations as to religious doctrines. In so doing they discovered that many practices and demands of the Church, all of which had grown up during the long mediaeval period, were not in harmony with the earlier teachings of Christ, the Apostles, or the early Fathers. In France, Jacques Lefèvre (c. 1455-1536), a humanist and a pioneer Protestant, contended for the rule of the Scriptures and for justification by faith, and translated the Bible into the French (New Testament, 1523; complete, 1530) that the people might read it.
EVOLUTION OR REVOLUTION. The reaction against the mediaeval dogmas of the Church and the demand by the humanists of the North for a return to the simpler religion of Christ gradually grew, and in time became more and more insistent. This demand was not something which broke out all at once and with Luther, as many seem to think. Had this been so he would soon have been suppressed, and little more would have been heard of him. Instead, the literature of the time clearly reveals that there had been, for two centuries, an increasing criticism of the Church, and a number of local and unsuccessful efforts at reform had been attempted. The demand for reform was general, and of long standing, outside of Italy and southern France. Had it been heeded probably much subsequent history might have been different. A few of the more important attempts at reform may be mentioned here, as a background for our study.
The first organized revolt against the Church occurred in southern France, in the early thirteenth century, and the revolters (Albigenses) were so fearfully punished by fire and sword that it was not attempted there again.
In 1378 there was a disputed papal election, and for nearly forty years there were two Popes, one at Rome, and one at Avignon in southern France, each attempting to control the Church and each denouncing the other as Antichrist. The discussions which accompanied this "Great Schism" did much to weaken the authority of the Church in all Christian lands. In England a popular preacher and Oxford divinity graduate by the name of John Wycliffe was led, by the sad condition of the Church there, to a careful study of the Bible. He came to the conclusion that many of the claims of the Popes and many practices of the Church were wrong (R. 147) and he refused to accept teachings of the Church for which he could not find sanction in the Bible. His revolt was as direct and vigorous as that of Luther, in German lands, a century and a half later (R. 148). So great was his zeal for reform that he and his scholars attempted a translation of the Bible [2] into English (see Figure 93), that the people might read it, and he and his followers (called Lollards) went about the country teaching what they believed to be the true Christianity. What had before in England been a widespread but undefined feeling of disaffection for the rich and careless clergy and monks, the work of Wycliffe organized into a political and social force.
Due to the then close connection of the English and Bohemian courts, through royal marriages, Wycliffe's teachings were carried to Bohemia, where a popular preacher and university theologian by the name of John Huss (1373-1415) expounded them. He denounced the evil conduct of the clergy, and he and his followers tried to introduce several new customs into the Church. For this Huss was first excommunicated, and then burned at the stake as a dangerous heretic. [3] After a series of terrible massacres his followers were forced, in large part, to accept once more the old system.
In 1414 a Council of the Church was called at Constance, in Switzerland, to heal the papal schism, and this Council made a serious attempt at church reform. After reuniting the Church under one Pope, it drew up a list of abuses which it ordered remedied (R. 149). It also attempted to establish a democratic form of organization for the government of the Church, with Church Councils meeting from time to time to advise with the Pope and formulate church policy, much like the government of a modern parliament and king. Had this succeeded, much future history might have been different [4] and the civilization of the world to-day much advanced. But the attempt failed, and the absolutism of the reunited Papacy became stronger than ever before. Protests of princes, actions of legislative assemblies, [5] protests sometimes of bishops, [6] the failing allegiance of men of affairs, the increasing condemnation and ridicule from laymen and scholars--all signs of a strong undercurrent of public opinion--seemed to have no effect on those responsible for the policy of the Church.
That the different rebellions and refusals of reform helped directly to the ultimate break of Luther is not probable, as Luther seems to have worked out his position by himself. Each of these earlier defiances of authority and the later defiance of Luther were alike, though, in two respects. Each demanded a return to the usages and beliefs and practices of the earlier Christian Church, as derived from a study of the Bible and of the writings of the early Christian Fathers; and each insisted that Christians should be permitted to study the Bible for themselves, and reach their own conclusions as to Christian duty. In this demand to be allowed to go back to the original sources for authority, and the assertion of the right to personal investigation and conclusions, we see the new intellectual standards established by the Revival of Learning in full force. After 1500 the rising demands for moral reform and the recognition of individual judgment could not be put aside much longer. Unless there could be evolution there would be revolution. Evolution was refused, [7] and revolution was the result.
DISCONTENT IN GERMAN LANDS. It happened that the first revolt to be successful in a large way broke out in Germany, and about the person of an Augustinian monk and Professor of Theology in the University of Wittenberg by the name of Martin Luther (1483-1546). Had it not centered about Luther the revolt would have come about some one else; had it not come in Germany it would have come in some other land. It was the modern scientific spirit of inquiry and reason in conflict with the mediaeval spirit of dogmatic authority, and two such forces are sooner or later destined to clash. Whether we be Catholic or Protestant, and whether we approve or disapprove of what Luther did or of his methods, makes little difference in this study. Over a question involving so much religious partisanship we do not need to take sides. All that we need concern ourselves with is that a certain Martin Luther lived, did certain things, made certain stands for what he believed to be right, and what he did, whether right or wrong, whether beneficial to progress and civilization or not, stands as a great historical fact with which the student of the history of education must take account. That the same or even better results might have been arrived at in time by other methods may be true, but what we are concerned with is the course which history actually took. [8]
There were special reasons why the trouble, when once it broke, made such rapid entry in German lands. The Germans had a long-standing grudge against the Italian papal court, chiefly because it had for long been draining Germany of money to support the Italian Church. Germany's greatest minnesinger, Walther von der Vogelweide (1170-1228), three centuries before Luther had sung to the German people how the Pope made merry over the stupid Germans.
"All their goods will be mine, Their silver is flowing into my far-away chest; Their priests are living on poultry and wine, And leaving the silly layman to fast."
Many positions in the German Church had been filled by the Pope with Italians, who not infrequently drew the perquisites, but did not reside in Germany. The princely and feudal Archbishops of Mayence, Treves, Cologne, and Salzburg, with their fortified castles and lands and troops and large governmental powers, frequently proved to be serious sources of irritation. The most widespread discontent, though, arose over the heavy church taxation, which drained the money of the people to Italy. The whole German people, from the princes down to the peasants, felt themselves unjustly treated, that the German money which flowed to Rome should be kept at home, and that the immoral and inefficient clergy should be replaced by upright, earnest men who would attend better to their religious duties (R. 150). It was these conditions which prepared the Germans for revolt, and enabled Luther to rally so many of the princes and people to his side when once he had defied authority.
THE GERMAN REVOLT. The crisis came over the sale of indulgences for sins by the papal agent, Tetzel, who began the practice in the neighborhood of Wittenberg, where Luther was a Professor of Theology, in 1516. There is little doubt but that Tetzel, in his zeal to raise money for the rebuilding of the church of Saint Peter's at Rome, a great undertaking then under way, exceeded his instructions and made claims as to the nature and efficacy of indulgences which were not warranted by church doctrines. Such would be only human. The sale, however, irritated Luther, and he appealed to the Archbishop of Magdeburg to prohibit it. Failing to obtain any satisfaction, he followed the old university custom, made out ninety- five theses, or reasons, why he did not believe the practice justifiable, detailed the abuses, set forth what he conceived to be the true Christian doctrine in the matter, and challenged all comers to a debate on the theses (R. 151). Following true university custom, also, these theses were made out in Latin, and in October, 1517, Luther followed still another university custom and nailed them to the church door in Wittenberg. Luther was probably as much surprised as any one to find that these were at once translated into German, printed, and in two weeks had been scattered all over Germany. Within a month they were known in all the important centers of the Western Christian world. They had been carried everywhere on the currents of discontent. Luther at first intended no revolt from the Church, but only a protest against its practices. From one step to another, though, he was gradually led into open rebellion, and finally, in 1520, was excommunicated from the Church. He then expressed his defiance by publicly burning the bull of excommunication, together with a volume of the canon law. This was open rebellion, and such heresy (R. 152) must needs be stamped out. Luther took his stand on the authority of the Scriptures, and the battle was now joined between the forces representing the authority of the Church versus the authority of the Bible, and salvation through the Church versus salvation through personal faith and works. [9] Luther also forced the issue for freedom of thought in religious matters. It was, to be sure, some three centuries before freedom in religious thinking and worship became clearly recognized, but what the early university masters and scholars had stood for in intellectual matters, Luther now asserted in religious affairs as well.
We do not need to follow the details of the conflict. Suffice it to know that great portions of northern and western Germany followed Luther, as is shown in Figure 88, and that the Western Church, which had remained one for so many centuries and been the one great unifying force in western Europe, was permanently split by the Protestant Revolt. The large success of Luther is easily explained by the new life which now permeated western Europe. The world was rapidly becoming modern, while the Church, with a perversity almost unexplainable, insisted upon remaining mediaeval and tried to force others to remain mediaeval with it. Adams expresses the situation well when he says: [10]
A revolution had been wrought in the intellectual world in the century between Huss and Luther. At the death of Huss the world had only just begun the study of Greek. Since that date, the great body of classical literature had been recovered, and the sciences of philology and historical criticism thoroughly established. As a result Luther had at his command a well-developed method ... impossible to any earlier reformer.... The world also had become familiar with independent investigation, and with the proclamation of new views and the upsetting of old ones. By no means the least of the great services of Erasmus to civilization had been to hold up before all the world so conspicuous an example of the scholar following, as his inalienable right, the truth as he found it and wherever it appeared to lead him, and honest in his public utterances as to the results of his studies.... His was the crowning work of a century which had produced in the general public a greatly changed attitude of mind toward intellectual independence since the days of Huss. The printing press was of itself almost enough to account for Luther's success as compared with his predecessors. Wycliffe made almost as direct and vigorous an appeal to the public at large, and with "an amazing industry he issued tract after tract in the tongue of the people," but Luther had the advantage in the rapid multiplication of copies and in their cheapness, and he covered Europe with the issues of his press.... Luther spoke to a very different public from that which Wycliffe or Huss had addressed,--a public European in extent, and one not merely familiar with the assertion of new ideas, but tolerant, in a certain way, of the innovator, and expectant of great things in the future.
A revolution it undoubtedly was, but a revolution in thinking much more than a political revolution. It was but a further manifestation of the inquiring and questioning tendency awakened by the Revival of Learning. It might in a sense be dated from Wycliffe and Huss, as well as from Erasmus and Luther. Luther did not create the Reformation. He rather popularized the work of preceding protesters, giving the impress of his powerful personality to the movement, and directing and moulding its form.
REVOLTS IN OTHER LANDS. The outbreak in Germany soon spread to other lands. Lutheranism made rapid headway in Denmark, where the German grievances against Italian rule were equally familiar, and in 1537 the Danish Diet severed all connection with Rome and established Lutheranism as the religion of the country. Norway, being then a part of Denmark, was carried for Lutheranism also. In Sweden the Church was shorn of some of its powers and property in 1527, and in 1592 Lutheranism was definitely adopted as the religion for the nation. This included Finland, then a part of Sweden. An independent reform movement, closely akin to Lutheranism in its aims, made considerable headway in German Switzerland contemporaneously with the reform work of Luther in Germany. This was under the leadership of a popular humanist preacher in Zurich by the name of Huldreich Zwingli. In 1519 he began a series of sermons on real religion, as he had learned it from a study of the New Testament writings. Zwingli, being supported by the people, made many changes in church practices and worship, eventually even abolishing the mass. Many other towns took up this reform movement, and civil war was the result. Zwingli was killed in battle between Swiss partisans of the old regime and reformers, in 1531, but his work though checked persisted, and German Switzerland became mixed Catholic and Protestant. [11]
In England the struggle came nominally over the divorce (1533) of Henry VIII from Catherine of Aragon, though the independence of the English Church had been asserted from time to time for two centuries, and a free National Church had for long been a growing ideal with English statesmen. In 1534 Parliament passed the Act of Supremacy (R. 153) which severed England from Rome. By it the King was made head of the English National Church. The change was in no sense a profound one, such as had taken place in Lutheran Germany. The priests who took the new oath of allegiance to the King instead of the Pope as the head of the Church, as most of them did, continued in the churches, the service was changed to English, some reforms were instituted, but the people did not experience any great change in religious feeling or ideas. This new National Church became known as the English or Anglican Church.
So far as the early history of America is concerned, the most important reform movement was neither Lutheranism nor Anglicanism, but Calvinism. In 1537 John Calvin, a French Protestant who had fled to Switzerland, [12] was invited to submit a plan for the educational and religious reorganization of the city of Geneva, and in 1541 he was entrusted with the task of organizing there a little religious City-Republic. For this he established a combined church and city government, in which religious affairs and the civil government were as closely connected as they had ever been in any Catholic country. During the twenty-three years that Calvin dominated Geneva it became the Rome of Protestantism. Calvin's The Institutes of Christianity, published in Latin in 1536, and in French in 1541, was the first orderly presentation of the principles of Christian faith from the Protestant standpoint, [13] while his French Catechism (1537) was extensively used [14] in Calvinistic lands as a basis for elementary religious instruction.
From Geneva a reformed Calvinistic religion spread over northern France, [15] where its followers became known as Huguenots; to Scotland (1560), where they were known as Scotch Presbyterians; to the Netherlands (1572), where originated the Dutch Reformed Church; and to portions of central England, where those who embraced it became known as Puritans. Through the Puritans who settled New England, and later through the Huguenots in the Carolinas, the Scotch Presbyterians in the central colonies, and the Dutch in New York, Calvinism was carried to America, was for long the dominant religious belief, and profoundly colored all early American education. Lutheranism also came in through the Swedes along the Delaware and the Germans in Pennsylvania, while the Anglican Church, known in America as the Episcopalian, came in through the landed aristocracy in Virginia and the later settlers in New York. The early settlement of America was thus a Protestant settlement, while the migration to America of large numbers of peoples from Catholic lands is a relatively recent movement.
RELIGIOUS FREEDOM AND RELIGIOUS WARFARE. Of course the revolt against the authority of the Church, once inaugurated, could not be stopped. The same right to freedom in religious belief which Luther claimed for himself and his followers had of course to be extended to others. This the Protestants were not much more willing to grant than had been the Catholics before them. The world was not as yet ready for such rapid advances, and religious toleration, [16] though established in principle by the revolt, was an idea to which the world has required a long time to become accustomed. It took two centuries of intermittent religious warfare, during which Catholic and Protestant waged war on one another, plundered and pillaged lands, and murdered one another for the salvation of their respective souls, before the people of western Europe were willing to stop fighting and begin to recognize for others that which they were fighting for for themselves. When religious tolerance finally became established by law, civilization had made a tremendous advance.
The religious wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were waged with greatest intensity in Spain, France, and the German States, though no land wholly escaped. The result of this religious strife was to check the progress of the higher civilization of the people for nearly three centuries, and to delay greatly the coming of the great blessing of freedom in matters of religious belief, while the poverty and misery resulting from the devastation of these religious wars left neither the energy for nor the interest in educational or political progress.
The struggle to suppress Lutheranism in Germany was postponed for twenty- five years--due to outside pressure, chiefly that of the Turks in southeastern Europe--from the time that the Diet of Worms decided against Luther (1521). Finally, in 1546, the German-Spanish Emperor Charles V felt at last free to proceed against the Lutheran heresy, and from the breaking-out in that year of the struggle between Charles and the German princes who sided with Luther, to the Peace of Westphalia, in 1648, represents a century of almost continual religious warfare in the German States. The worst of the period was the last thirty years, when religious ferocity and hatred reached its climax in the period known as the Thirty Years' War (1618-48). Though fought on German soil, France, Spain, and Sweden were deeply involved in the struggle. It left Germany a ruin. From the most prosperous State in Europe, in 1550, Germany was so reduced that it was not until the second third of the nineteenth century that central and southern Germany had fully recovered. More than half the population and two thirds of the movable property were swept away. The people were so reduced by starvation that cannibalism was openly practiced. But one tenth of the inhabitants of the Duchy of Würtemberg were left alive. Land tilled for centuries became a wilderness, thousands of towns were destroyed, whole trades were swept away, and the generation which survived the war came to manhood without knowing education, religion, law and order, or organized industry. Not until the end of the eighteenth century was Germany again able to make any significant contribution to education or civilization, and not until the middle of the nineteenth century did parts of Germany come to have as many people or cattle as before this devastating religious war broke out.
From 1560 to 1629 in France, also, a period of carnage and devastation prevailed, due to an attempt to exterminate the Calvinistic Huguenots. In the massacre of Saint Bartholomew's eve, in 1572, ten thousand Protestants are said to have perished in Paris alone, and forty-five thousand additional outside the city. Though the Edict of Nantes (1598) had granted religious toleration, this never was fully accomplished, and in 1685 the Edict was revoked. The Huguenots were now given fifteen days to become Catholics or leave France. The demands were enforced with great severity, and the sect, which embraced one tenth of the population of France, was stamped out and France became once more a Catholic country. In a short time four hundred thousand thrifty and highly intelligent Huguenots had left France for other lands. In Southern German lands, Holland, England, and America many found a new home.
CHANGED ATTITUDE TOWARD THE OLD PROBLEMS. The Peace of Westphalia (1648), which ended the bloody Thirty Years' War, itself the culmination of a century of bitter and vindictive religious strife, has often been regarded as both an end and a beginning. Though the persecution of minorities for a time continued, especially in France, this treaty marked the end of the attempt of the Church and the Catholic States to stamp out Protestantism on the continent of Europe. The religious independence of the Protestant States was now acknowledged, and the beginnings of religious freedom were established by treaty. This new freedom of conscience, once definitely begun for the ruling princes, was certain in time to be extended further. Ultimately the day must come, though it might be centuries away, when individual as well as national freedom in religious matters must be granted as a right, and one of the greatest blessings of mankind finally be firmly established by law. [17]
The end of the period of bitter religious warfare, too, was followed by a reaction against religious intolerance which contained within itself the germs of much future liberty and human progress. Paulsen has well expressed the change, in the following words: [18]
The long and terrible wars to which the ecclesiastical schism had everywhere given rise--the wars of the Huguenots in France, the Thirty Years War, and the Civil War in England--had, in the end, created a feeling of indifference toward religious and theological problems. Did it really pay, people asked themselves, to kill each other and devastate each other's countries for the sake of such questions? Could these problems ever be decided at all? If not, was it not much more reasonable to let everyone believe what he could, and, instead of wasting breath and arguments, convincing to nobody, on transubstantiation, predestination, and real presence, to cultivate sciences which really placed lasting and verifiable truths within the reach of the understanding, such as mathematics and natural philosophy, geography and astronomy? Here were sciences which offered knowledge to the mind that could be turned to account in this earthly life, whereas those transcendental speculations were of no use at all.... Toward the end of the seventeenth century this spirit of indifference and scepticism toward theology, and sometimes even toward religion in general and the future world, formed a most important factor in the changing intellectual attitude of the times. [19]
Physically exhausted, and recognizing at last the futility of fire and sword as means for stamping out opposing religious convictions, but still thoroughly convinced as to the correctness of their respective points of view, both sides now settled down to another century and more of religious hatred, suspicion, and intolerance, and to a close supervision of both preaching and teaching as safeguards to orthodoxy. During the century following the Peace of Westphalia greater reliance than ever before was placed on the school as a means for protecting the faith, and the pulpit and the school now took the place of the sword and the torch as converting and holding agents.
RELIGIOUS REFORM. The effect of the Protestant Revolts on the Church was good. For the first time in history Catholic churchmen learned that they could not rely on the general acceptance of any teachings they promulgated, or any practices they saw fit to approve. The spirit of inquiry which had been aroused by the methods of the humanists would in the future force them to explain and to defend. If they were to make headway against this great rebellion they must reform abuses, purify church practices, and see that monks and clergy led upright Christian lives. Unless the mass of the people could be made loyal to the Church by reverence for it, further revolts and the ultimate break-up of the institution were in prospect. The Council of Trent (1545-63) at last undertook the reform which should have come at least a century before. Better men were selected for the church offices, and bishops and clergy were ordered to reside in their proper places and to preach regularly. New religious orders arose, whose purpose was to prepare priests better for the service of the Church and for ministry to the needs of the people. Irritating practices were abandoned. The laws and doctrines of the Church were restated, in new and better form. Moral reforms were instituted. In most particulars the reforms forced by the work of Luther were thorough and complete, and since the middle of the sixteenth century the Catholic Church, in morals and government, has been a reformed Church. Above all, attention was turned to education rather than force as a means of winning and holding territory. A rigid quarantine was, however, established in Catholic lands against the further spread of heretical text books and literature. Especially was the reading of the Bible, which had been the cause of all the trouble, for a time rigidly prohibited. [20]
Such, in brief, are the historical facts connected with the various revolts against authority which split the Roman Catholic Church in the sixteenth century. These have been stated, as briefly and as impartially as possible, because so much of future educational history arose out of the conditions resulting from these revolts. The early educational history of America is hardly understandable without some knowledge of the religious forces awakened by the work of the Protestants. To the educational significance and consequences of these revolts we next turn.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. How do you explain the difference in the effect, on the scholars of the time, of the Revival of Learning in Italy and in northern lands?
2. How do you explain the serious church opposition to the different attempts of northern scholars to try to turn the Church back to the simpler religious ideals and practices of early Christianity?
3. Explain how opposition to the practices of the Church could be organized into a political force.
4. Explain the analogy of a heretic in the fifteenth century and an anarchist of to-day.
5. Assuming that the Church had encouraged progressive evolution as a policy, and thus warded off revolution and disruption, in what ways might history have been different?
6. How can the bitter opposition to the reading and study of the Bible be explained?
7. Show the analogy between the freedom of thinking demanded by Luther, and that obtained three centuries earlier by the scholars in the rising universities. Why were the universities not opposed?
8. Enumerate the changes which had taken place in western Europe between the days of Wycliffe and Huss and the time of Luther, which enabled him to succeed where they had failed.
9. Explain in what ways the Protestant Revolt was essentially a revolution in thinking, and that, once started, certain other consequences must inevitably follow in time.
10. Was it perfectly natural that the reformers should refuse to their followers the same right to revolt, and separate off into smaller and still different sects, which they had contended for for themselves? Why?
11. On what basis could Catholic and Protestant wage war on one another to try to enforce their own particular belief?
12. Compare the individualism of the Greek Sophists with that of the Protestant reformers. Did Greece attempt to deal with them in the same way?
SELECTED READINGS
In the accompanying Book of Readings the following selections are reproduced:
147. Wycliffe: On the Enemies of Christ. 148. Wycliffites: Attack the Pope and the Practice of Indulgences. 149. Council of Constance: List of Church Abuses demanding Reform. 150. Geiler: A German Priest's View as to Coming Reform. 151. Luther: Illustrations from his Ninety-Five Theses. 152. Saint Thomas Aquinas: On the Treatment of Heresy. 153. Henry VIII: The English Act of Supremacy.
QUESTIONS ON THE READINGS
1. Was Wycliffe's attack (147) as direct and fierce as Luther's (151)?
2. Explain the difference in the results attained by the two attacks?
3. Was the challenge of Wycliffe's followers on indulgences (148) any less direct than that of Luther (151)?
4. Does the list of items drawn up by the Church Council of Constance (149) indicate a general recognition of the need for extensive Church reform?
5. Try to state the possible change in the progress of human history and civilization, had the demands of the Council of Constance (149) been carried out in good faith.
6. Considering the nature of heresy at the time, does the extract from Thomas Aquinas (152) indicate a narrow or a liberal attitude?
SUPPLEMENTARY REFERENCES
* Adams, G. B. Civilization during the Middle Ages. Beard, Charles. Martin Luther and the Reformation. Beard, Charles. _The Reformation of the Sixteenth Century in its Relation to Modern Thought and Knowledge_. (Hibbert Lectures, 1883.) Fisher, George P. History of the Reformation. Gasquet, F. A. Eve of the Reformation. Johnson, A. H. Europe in the Sixteenth Century. Perry, George G. History of the Reformation in England.
XIII. EDUCATIONAL RESULTS OF THE PROTESTANT REVOLTS
I. AMONG LUTHERANS AND ANGLICANS
ULTIMATE CONSEQUENCES OF THE BREAK WITH AUTHORITY. That the Protestant Revolts in the different lands produced large immediate and permanent changes in the character of the education provided in the revolting States is no longer accepted as being the case. In every phase of educational history growth has proceeded by evolution rather than by revolution, and this applies to the Protestant Revolts as well as to other revolutions. Many changes naturally resulted at once, some of which were good and some of which were not, while others which were enthusiastically attempted failed of results because they involved too great advances for the time. Much, too, of the progress that was inaugurated was lost in the more than a century of religious strife which followed, and the additional century and more of suspicion, hatred, religious formalism, and strict religious conformity which followed the period of religious strife. The educational significance of the reformation movement, though, lies in the far-reaching nature of its larger results and ultimate consequences rather than in its immediate accomplishments, and because of this the importance of the immediate changes effected have been overestimated by Protestants and underestimated by Catholics.
The dominant idea underlying Luther's break with authority, and for that matter the revolts of Wycliffe, Huss, Zwingli, and Calvin as well, was that of substituting the authority of the Bible in religious matters for the authority of the Church; of substituting individual judgment in the interpretation of the Scriptures and in formulating decisions as to Christian duty for the collective judgment of the Church; and of substituting individual responsibility for salvation, in Luther's conception of justification through personal faith and prayer, for the collective responsibility for salvation of the Church. [1] Whether one believes that the Protestant position was sound or not depends almost entirely upon one's religious training and beliefs, and need not concern us here, as it makes no difference with the course of history. We can believe either way, and the course that history took remains the same. The educational consequences of the position taken by the Protestants, though, are important.
Under the older theory of collective judgment and collective responsibility for salvation--that is, the judgment of the Church rather than that of individuals--it was not important that more than a few be educated. Under the new theory of individual judgment and individual responsibility promulgated by the Protestants it became very important, in theory at least, that every one should be able to read the word of God, participate intelligently in the church services, and shape his life as he understood was in accordance with the commandments of the Heavenly Father. This undoubtedly called for the education of all. Still more, from individual participation in the services of the Church, with freedom of judgment and personal responsibility in religious matters, to individual participation in and responsibility for the conduct of government was not a long step, and the rise of democratic governments and the provision of universal education were the natural and ultimate corollaries, though not immediately attained of the Protestant position regarding the interpretation of the Scriptures and the place and authority of the Church. This was soon seen and acted upon. The great struggle of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in consequence, became one for religious freedom and toleration; the great struggle of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has been for political freedom and political rights; to supply universal education has been left to the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries.
SCHOOLS AND LEARNING BEFORE THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. After the rise of the universities, as we have seen, many Latin secondary schools were founded in western Europe, and a more extensive development of the cathedral and other larger church schools took place. Rashdall (R. 154) thinks that by 1400 the opportunity to attend a Latin grammar school was rather common, an opinion in which Leach and Nohle concur. After the humanistic learning had spread to northern lands these opportunities were increased and improved. In England, for example, some two hundred and fifty Latin grammar schools are known to have been in existence by 1500. In Germany, as we have seen (chapter xi), many such schools were founded before the time of Luther. These offered a form of advanced education, in the language of the educated classes of the time, for those intending to go to the universities to prepare for service in either Church or State, and for teaching. The Church had also for long maintained or exercised control over a number of types of more elementary schools--parish, song, chantry, hospital (chapter VII)--the chief purpose of which was to prepare for certain phases of the church service, or to enter the secondary schools. These schools, too, were taught partly or wholly in Latin. In consequence, while Latin schools came to be rather widely diffused, schools in the vernacular hardly existed outside of a few of the larger commercial cities of the north. Even the burgh and guild schools (p. 205), established in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, were essentially Latin schools.
In the commercial cities of the North, however, though often only after quite a struggle with the local church authorities, which throughout the Middle Ages had maintained a monopoly of all instruction as a protection to orthodoxy, different types of elementary vernacular schools had been developed to meet local commercial needs, such as writing-schools to train writers, [2] and reckoning-schools to train young men to handle accounts. [3] Reading, manners, and religion were also taught in these schools. Other city schools, largely Latin in type, but containing some vernacular instruction to meet local business needs not met by the cathedral or parish schools of the city, were also developed. Up to the time of the Protestant Revolts, however, there was almost no instruction in the vernacular outside of the commercial cities, nor was there any particular demand for such instruction elsewhere. If one wished to be a scholar, a statesman, a diplomat, a teacher, a churchman, or to join a religious brotherhood, he needed to study the learned language of the time,--Latin. With this he could be at home with people of his kind anywhere in western Europe. The vernacular he could leave to tradesmen, craftsmen, soldiers, laborers, and the servant classes.
These people, on the other hand, had practically no need for a written language, aside from a very small amount for business needs. Even here the sign of the cross would do. There were but few books written in the vernacular tongues, and these had to be copied by hand and, in consequence, were scarce and expensive. There were no newspapers (first newspaper, Venice, 1563) or magazines. Spectacles for reading were not known until the end of the thirteenth century, and were not common for two centuries after that. There was little knowledge that could not pass from mouth to mouth. Such little vernacular literature as did exist was transmitted orally, and no great issue which appealed to the imagination of the masses had as yet come to the front to create any strong desire for the ability to read. As a result, the education of the masses was in hand labor, the trades, and religion, and not in books, and the need for book education was scarcely felt.
A NEW DEMAND FOR VERNACULAR SCHOOLS. The invention of printing and the Protestant Revolts were in a sense two revolutionary forces, which in combination soon produced vast and far-reaching changes. The discovery of the process of making paper and the invention of the printing press changed the whole situation as to books. These could now be reproduced rapidly and in large numbers, and could be sold at but a small fraction of their former cost. The printing of the Bible in the common tongue did far more to stimulate a desire to be able to read than did the Revival of Learning (Rs. 155, 170). Then came the religious discussions of the Reformation period, which stirred intellectually the masses of the people in northern lands as nothing before in history had ever done. In an effort to reach the people the reformers originated small and cheap pamphlets, written in the vernacular, and these, sold for a penny or two, were peddled in the market-places and from house to house. While there had been imperfect translations of the Bible in German before Luther's, his translation (New Testament, 1522) was direct from the original Greek and so carefully done that it virtually fixed the character of the German language. [4] Calvin's Institutes of Christianity (French edition, 1541) in a similar manner fixed the character of the French language, [5] and Tyndale's translation of the New Testament (1526) was into such simple and homely language [6] that it fixed the character of the English tongue, and was made the basis for the later Authorized translation.
The leaders of the Protestant Revolts, too, in asserting that each person should be able to read and study the Scriptures as a means to personal salvation, created an entirely new demand, in Protestant lands, for elementary schools in the vernacular. Heretofore the demand had been for schools only for those who expected to become scholars or leaders in Church or State, while the masses of the people had little or no interest in learning. Now a new class became desirous of learning to read, not Latin, but the language which they had already learned to speak. Wycliffe, Huss, Zwingli, Luther, Calvin, and Knox alike insisted on the importance of the study of the Bible as a primary necessity in the religious life. In an effort to bring the Bible within reach of the people Wycliffe's followers had attempted the laborious and impossible task of multiplying by hand (p. 290) copies of his translation. Zwingli had written a pamphlet on The Manner of Instruction and Bringing up Boys in a Christian Way (1524), in which he urged the importance of religious education. Luther, besides translating the Bible, had prepared two general Catechisms, one for adults and one for children, had written hymns [7] and issued numerous letters and sermons in behalf of religious education. All these were printed in the vernacular and scattered broadcast. Luther thought that "every human being, by the time he has reached his tenth year, should be familiar with the Holy Gospels, in which the very core and marrow of his life is bound." In his sermons and addresses he urged a study of the Bible and the duty of sending children to school. Calvin's Catechism similarly was extensively used in Protestant lands.
1. Lutheran School Organization
EDUCATIONAL IDEAS OF LUTHER. Luther enunciated the most progressive ideas on education of all the German Protestant reformers. In his Letter to the Mayors and Aldermen of all the Cities of Germany in behalf of Christian Schools (1524) (R. 156), and in his Sermon on the Duty of Sending Children to School (1530), we find these set forth. That his ideas could be but partially carried out is not surprising. There were but few among his followers who could understand such progressive proposals, they were entirely too advanced for the time, there was no body of vernacular teachers [8] or means to prepare them, the importance of such training was not understood, and the religious wars which followed made such educational advantages impossible, for a long time to come. The sad condition of the schools, which he said were "deteriorating throughout Germany," awakened his deep regret, and he begged of those in authority "not to think of the subject lightly, for the instruction of youth is a matter in which Christ and all the world are concerned." All towns had to spend money for roads, defense, bridges, and the like, and why not some for schools? This they now could easily afford, "since Divine Grace has released them from the exaction and robbery of the Roman Church." Parents continually neglected their educational duty, yet there must be civil government. "Were there neither soul, heaven, nor hell," he declared, "it would still be necessary to have schools for the sake of affairs here below.... The world has need of educated men and women to the end that men may govern the country properly and women may properly bring up their children, care for their domestics, and direct the affairs of their households." "The welfare of the State depends upon the intelligence and virtue of its citizens," he said, "and it is therefore the duty of mayors and aldermen in all cities to see that Christian schools are founded and maintained" (R. 156).
The parents of children he held responsible for their Christian and civic education. This must be free, and equally open to all--boys and girls, high and low, rich and poor. It was the inherent right of each child to be educated, and the State must not only see that the means are provided, but also require attendance at the schools (R. 158). At the basis of all education lay Christian education. The importance of the services of the teacher was beyond ordinary comprehension (R. 157). Teachers should be trained for their work, and clergymen should have had experience as teachers. A school system for German people should be a state system, divided into:
1. Vernacular Primary Schools. Schools for the common people, to be taught in the vernacular, to be open to both sexes, to include reading, writing, physical training, singing, and religion, and to give practical instruction in a trade or in household duties. Upon this attendance should be compulsory. "It is my opinion," he said, "that we should send boys to school for one or two hours a day, and have them learn a trade at home the rest of the time. It is desirable that these two occupations march side by side."
2. Latin Secondary Schools. Upon these he placed great emphasis (R. 156) as preparatory schools by means of which a learned clergy was to be perpetuated for the instruction of the people. In these he would teach Latin, Greek, Hebrew, rhetoric, dialectic, history, science, mathematics, music, and gymnastics.
3. The Universities. For training for the higher service in Church and State.
THE ORGANIZING WORK OF BUGENHAGEN. Luther assisted in reorganizing the churches at Wittenberg (1523), Leipzig (1523), and Magdeburg (1524), in connection with all of which he provided for Lutheran-type schools. [9] Luther, though, was not essentially an organizer. The organizing genius of the Reformation, in central and southern Germany, was Luther's colleague, Philipp Melanchthon (1497-1560), Professor of Greek at the University of Wittenberg. In northern Germany it was Johannes Bugenhagen (1485-1558), another of Luther's colleagues at Wittenberg. More than any other Germans these two directed the necessary reorganization of religion and education in those parts of Germany which changed from Roman Catholicism to German Lutheranism. The churches, of course, had to be reorganized as Lutheran churches, and the schools connected with them refounded as Lutheran schools. For the reorganization of each of these a more or less detailed Ordnung had to be written out (Rs. 159, 160). In this change cathedral and other large church schools became Latin secondary schools, while the song, chantry, and other types of parish elementary schools were transformed into Lutheran vernacular parish schools.
Bugenhagen was sent to reorganize the churches of northern Germany. Being in close sympathy with Luther's ideas, he made good provision for Lutheran parish schools in connection with each of the churches he reorganized. At Brunswick (1528), Hamburg (1529) (R. 159), Lübeck (1530), for his native State of Pomerania (1534), for Schleswig-Holstein (1537), and elsewhere in northern Germany, he drew up church and school plans (Kirchen und Schule- Ordnungen) which formed models (Rs. 159, 160) for many northern German cities and towns. Besides providing for a Latin school for the city, he organized elementary vernacular schools in each parish, for both boys and girls, in which instruction in reading, writing, and religion was to be given in the German tongue. He has been called the father of the German Volksschule, though probably much of what he did was merely the redirection of existing schools. In 1537 he was called to Denmark, by the Danish King, to reorganize the University of Copenhagen and the Danish Church and schools as Lutheran institutions.
Efforts were also made to create Protestant schools in the Scandinavian countries. In Denmark writing-schools for both boys and girls were organized, and the sexton of each parish was ordered to gather the children together once a week for instruction in the Catechism. In Sweden little was done before 1686, when Charles XI ordained that the sacristan of each parish should instruct the children in reading, while the religious instruction should be conducted by the clergy, and carried on by means of sermons, the Catechism, and a yearly public examination. The ability to read and a knowledge of the Catechism was made necessary for communion. A Swedish law of this same time also ordered that, "No one should enter the married state without knowing the lesser Catechism of Luther by heart and having received the sacrament." This latter regulation drove the peasants to request the erection of children's schools in the parishes, to be supported by the State, though it was not for more than a century that this was generally brought about. The general result of this legislation was that the Scandinavian countries, then including Finland, early became literate nations.
THE REORGANIZING WORK OF MELANCHTHON. Melanchthon, unlike Bugenhagen, was essentially a humanistic scholar, and his interest lay chiefly In the Latin secondary schools. He prepared plans for schools in many cities and smaller States of central and southern Germany, among which were Luther's native town, Eisleben (1525), and for Nuremberg (1526), Herzeberg (1538), Cologne (1543), and Wittenberg (1545) among cities; and Saxony (1528), Mecklenberg (1552), and the Palatinate (1556) among States. The schools he provided for Saxony may be described as typical of his work.
In 1527 he was asked by the Elector of Saxony to head a commission of three to travel over the kingdom and report on its needs as to schools. In his Report, or Book of Visitation, which was probably the first school survey report in history, he outlined in detail plans for school organization for the State (R. 161), of which the following is an abstract:
Each school was to consist of three classes. In the first class there was to be taught the beginnings of reading and writing, in both the vernacular and in Latin, Latin grammar (Donatus), the Creed, the Lord's prayer, and the prayers and hymns of the church service. In the second class Latin became the language of instruction, and Latin grammar was thoroughly learned. Latin authors were read, and religious instruction was continued. In the third class more advanced work in reading Latin (Livy, Sallust, Vergil, Horace, and Cicero) was given, and rhetoric and dialectic were studied.
These were essentially humanistic schools with but a little preparatory work in the vernacular, and their purpose was to prepare those likely to become the future leaders of the State for entrance to the universities. How different was Melanchthon's conception as to the needs for education from the conceptions of Luther and Bugenhagen may easily be seen. Yet, so great were his services in organizing and advising, and so well did such schools meet the great demand of the time for educational leaders that he has, very properly, been called "the Preceptor of Germany." His work was copied by other leaders, and the result was the organization of a large number of humanistic gymnasia throughout northern Germany, in which the new learning and the Protestant faith were combined. Sturm's school at Strassburg (p. 272) was one of the more important and better organized of this type, many of which have had a continuous existence up to the present. By 1540 the process was begun of endowing such schools from the proceeds of old monasteries, confiscated by the State, and many German gymnasia of to-day trace their origin back to some old monastic foundation, altered by state authority to meet modern needs and purposes.
EARLY GERMAN STATE SCHOOL SYSTEMS. Melanchthon's Saxony plan was put into partial operation as a Lutheran Church school system, but the first German State to organize a complete system of schools was Würtemberg (R. 162), in southwestern Germany, in 1559. This marks the real beginning of the German state school systems. Three classes of schools were provided for:
(1) Elementary schools, for both sexes, in which were to be taught reading, writing, reckoning, singing, and religion, all in the vernacular. These were to be provided in every village in the Duchy.
(2) Latin schools (Particularschulen), with five or six classes, in which the ability to read, write, and speak Latin, together with the elements of mathematics and Greek in the last year, were to be taught.
(3) The universities or colleges of the State, of which the University of Tübingen (f. 1476) and the higher school at Stuttgart were declared to be constituent parts.
Acting through the church authorities, these schools were to be under the supervision of the State.
The example of Würtemberg was followed by a number of the smaller German States. Ten years later Brunswick followed the same plan, and in 1580 Saxony revised its school organization after the state-system plan thus established. In 1619 the Duchy of Weimar added compulsory education in the vernacular for all children from six to twelve years of age. In 1642, the same date as the first Massachusetts school law (chapter XV), Duke Ernest the Pious of little Saxe-Gotha and Altenburg established the first school system of a modern type in German lands. An intelligent and ardent Protestant, he attempted to elevate his miserable peasants, after the ravages of the Thirty Years' War, by a wise economic administration and universal education. With the help of a disciple of the greatest educational thinker of the period, John Amos Comenius (chapter XVII), he worked out a School Code (Schulmethode, 1642) which was the pedagogic masterpiece of the seventeenth century (R. 163). In it he provided for compulsory school attendance, and regulated the details of method, grading, and courses of study. Teachers were paid salaries which for the time were large, pensions for their widows and children were provided, and textbooks were prepared and supplied free. So successful were his efforts that Gotha became one of the most prosperous little spots in Europe, and it was said that "Duke Ernest's peasants were better educated than noblemen anywhere else."
By the middle of the seventeenth century most of the German States had followed the Würtemberg plan of organization. Even Duke Albrecht V of Bavaria, which was a Catholic State, ordered the establishment of "German schools" throughout his realm, with instruction in reading, writing, and the Catholic creed, the schools to be responsible through the Church to the State.
PROTESTANT STATE SCHOOL ORGANIZATION. We see here in German lands a new, and, for the future, a very important tendency. Throughout all the long Middle Ages the Church had absolutely controlled all education. From the suppression of the pagan schools, in 529 A.D., to the time of the Reformation there had been no one to dispute with the Church its complete monopoly of education. Even Charlemagne's attempt at the stimulation of educational activity had been clearly within the lines of church control. Until the beginnings of the modern States, following the Crusades, the Church had been the State as well, and for long humbled any ruler who dared dispute its power. In the later Middle Ages nobles and rising parliaments had at times sided with the king against the Church--warnings of a changing Europe that the Church should have heeded--but there had been no serious trouble with the rising nationalities before the sixteenth century. Now, in Protestant lands, all was changed. The authority of the Church was overthrown. By the Peace of Augsburg (1555) each German prince and town and knight were to be permitted to make choice between the Catholic and Lutheran faith, and all subjects were to accept the faith of their ruler or emigrate.
This established freedom of conscience for the rulers, but for no one else. It also gave them control of both religious and secular affairs, thus uniting in the person of the ruler, large or small, control of both Church and State. This was as much progress toward religious freedom as the world was then ready for, as Church and State had been united for so many centuries that a complete separation of the two was almost inconceivable. It was left for the United States (1787) to completely divorce Church and State, and to reduce the churches to the control of purely spiritual affairs.
The German rulers, however, were now free to develop schools as they saw fit, and, through their headship of the Church in their principality or duchy or city, to control education therein. We have here the beginnings of the transfer of educational control from the Church to the State, the ultimate fruition of which came first in German lands, and which was to be the great work of the nineteenth century. It was through the kingly or ducal headship of the Church, and through it of the educational system of the kingdom or duchy, that the great educational development in Würtemberg, Saxony, and Gotha was brought about by their rulers, and it was through the ruling princes that the German Universities were reformed [10] and the new Protestant universities established. [11] Even in Catholic States, as Bavaria, the German state-control idea took root early. Many of the important features of the modern German school systems are to be seen in their beginnings in these Lutheran state-church schools.
2. Anglican foundations
THE REFORMATION AND EDUCATION IN ENGLAND. The Reformation in England took a very different direction from what it did in Germany, and its educational results in consequence were very different. In England the reform movement was much more political in character than in German lands. Henry VIII was no Protestant, in the sense that Luther or Calvin or Zwingli or Knox was. He distrusted their teachings, and was always anxious to explain objections to the old faith. The people of England as a body, too, had been much less antagonized by the exactions of the Roman Church and the immoral lives of the monks and Roman clergy; the new learning had awakened there somewhat less of a spirit of moral and religious reform; and the reformation movement of Luther, after a decade and a half, had roused no general interest. The change from the Roman Catholic faith to an independent English Church, when made, was in consequence much more nominal than had been the case in German lands. As a result the severance from Rome was largely carried out by the ruling classes, and the masses of the people were in no way deeply interested in it. The English National Church merely took over most of the functions formerly exercised by the Roman Church, in general the same priests remained in charge of the parish churches, and the church doctrines and church practices were not greatly altered by the change in allegiance. The changing of the service from Latin to English was perhaps the most important change. The English Church, in spirit and service, has in consequence retained the greatest resemblance to the Roman Catholic Church of any Protestant denomination. In particular, the Lutheran idea of personal responsibility for salvation, and hence the need of all being taught to read, made scarcely any impression in England.
By the time of Elizabeth (1558-1603) it had become a settled conviction with the English as a people that the provision of education was a matter for the Church, and was no business of the State, and this attitude continued until well into the nineteenth century. The English Church merely succeeded the Roman Church in the control of education, and now licensed the teachers (R. 168), took their oath of allegiance (R. 167), supervised prayers (R. 169) and the instruction, and became very strict as to conformity to the new faith (Rs. 164-166), while the schools, aside from the private tuition and endowed schools, continued to be maintained chiefly from religious sources, charitable funds, and tuition fees. Private tuition schools in time flourished, and the tutor in the home became the rule with families of means. The poorer people largely did without schooling, as they had done for centuries before. As a consequence, the educational results of the change in the headship of the Church relate almost entirely to grammar schools and to the universities, and not to elementary education. The development of anything approaching a system of elementary schools for England was consequently left for the educational awakening of the latter half of the nineteenth century. When this finally came the development was due to political and economic, and not to religious causes.
The English Act of Supremacy (R. 153), which severed England from Rome, had been passed by parliament in 1534. In 1536 an English Bible was issued to the churches, [12] the services were ordered conducted in English, and in 1549 the English Prayer Book, Psalter, and Catechism were put into use. In 1538 the English Bible was ordered chained in the churches, [13] that the people might read it (R. 170), and the people were ordered instructed in English in the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the Ten Commandments. The change of the service to English was perhaps the largest educational gain the masses of the people obtained as the result of the Reformation in England. [14]
SUPPRESSION OF THE MONASTERIES AND THE FOUNDING OF GRAMMAR SCHOOLS. Between 1536 and 1539 the most striking result of the Reformation in England took place,--the dissolution of the monasteries. Their doubtful reputation enabled Henry and Parliament to confiscate their property, and "the dead hand of monasticism was removed from a third of the lands of England." There were precedents for this in pre-Reformation times, the church authorities themselves having converted several monastic foundations into grammar schools. At one blow Parliament now suppressed the monasteries of all England, some eight thousand monks and nuns were driven out, many of the monasteries, nunneries, and abbey churches were destroyed, and the monastic lands were forfeited to the Crown. It was a ruthless proceeding, though in the long course of history beneficial to the nation. Much of the land was given to influential followers of the king in return for their support, and a large part of the proceeds from sales was spent on coast defenses and a navy, though more than was formerly thought to be the case was used in refounding grammar schools. A number of the monasteries were converted into collegiate churches, with schools attached. Some of the alms-houses and hospitals confiscated at the same time were similarly used, and the cathedral churches in nine English cities were taken from the monks (R. 171), who had driven out the regular clergy during the tenth to the twelfth centuries, and were refounded as cathedral church schools. The cathedral church school at Canterbury, which Henry refounded in 1541 as a humanistic grammar school, with a song school attached, and for the government of which he made detailed provisions (R. 172), is typical of a school which had fallen into bad repute (R. 171), and was later refounded as a result of the confiscation of the monastic property. The College of Christ Church at Oxford, and Trinity College at Cambridge, were also richly endowed from the monastic proceeds.
In 1546 another Act of Parliament vested the title of all chantry foundations, some two hundred in number, in the Crown that they might be "altered, changed, and amended to convert them to good and godly uses as in the erecting of grammar schools," but so pressing became the royal need for money that, after their sale, the intended endowments were never made. As the song schools had been established originally to train a few boys "to help a priest sing mass," and as the service was now to be read rather than sung, the need for choristers largely disappeared. Being regarded as nurseries of superstition, they were abandoned without regret.
RESULT OF THE REFORMATION IN ENGLAND. The result of the change in religious allegiance in England was a material decrease in the number of places offering grammar-school advantages, though with a material improvement in the quality of the instruction provided, and a consequent decrease in the number of boys given free education in the refounded grammar schools. As for elementary education, the abolition of the song, chantry, and hospital schools took away most of the elementary schools which had once existed. The clerk of the parish usually replaced them by teaching a certain number of boys "to read English intelligently instead of Latin unintelligently," many new parish elementary schools were created, especially during the reign of Elizabeth, and in time the dame school, the charity school, the writing school, and apprenticeship training arose (chapter XVIII) and became regular English institutions. These types of schooling constituted almost all the elementary-school advantages provided in England until well into the eighteenth century.
The post-Reformation educational energy of England was given to the founding of grammar schools, and during the century and a half before the outbreak of the struggle with James II (1688) to put an end in England for all time to the late-mediaeval theory of the divine right of kings, a total of 558 grammar schools were founded or refounded. [15]
The grammar schools thus founded were, one and all, grammar schools of the reformed humanistic type. What was to be taught in them was seldom mentioned in the foundation articles, as it was assumed that every one knew what a grammar school was, so well by this time had the humanistic type become established. They were one and all modeled after the instruction first provided in Saint Paul's School (p. 275) in London, and such modifications as had been sanctioned with time, and this continued to be the type of English secondary school instruction until well into the nineteenth century.
THE DOMINATING RELIGIOUS PURPOSE. The religious conflicts following the reformation movement everywhere intensified religious prejudices and stimulated religious bigotry. This was soon reflected in the schools of all lands. In England, after the restoration under Catholic Mary (1553-58) and the final reëstablishment of the English Church under Elizabeth (1558), all school instruction became narrowly religious and English Protestant in type. By the middle of the seventeenth century the grammar schools had become nurseries of the faith, as well as very formal and disciplinary in character. In England, perhaps more than in any other Protestant country, Christianity came to be identified with a strict conformity to the teachings and practices of the Established Church, and to teach that particular faith became one of the particular missions of all types of schools. Bishops were instructed to hunt out schoolmasters who were unsound in the faith (R. 164 a), and teachers were deprived of their positions for nonconformity (R. 164 b). More effectively to handle the problem a series of laws were enacted, the result of which was to institute such an inquisitorial policy that the position of schoolmaster became almost intolerable. In 1580 a law (R. 165) imposed a fine of £10 on any one employing a schoolmaster of unsound faith, with disability and imprisonment for the schoolmaster so offending; in 1603 another law required a license from the bishop on the part of all schoolmasters as a condition precedent to teaching; in 1662 the obnoxious Act of Uniformity (R. 166) required every schoolmaster in any type of school, and all private tutors, to subscribe to a declaration that they would conform to the liturgy of the Church, as established by law, with fine and imprisonment for breaking the law; in 1665 the so-called "Five-Mile Act" forbade Dissenters to teach in any school, under penalty of a fine of £40; and in that same year bishops were instructed to see that
the said schoolmasters, ushers, schoolmistresses, and instructors, or teachers of youth, publicly or privately, do themselves frequent the public prayers of the Church, and cause their scholars to do the same; and whether they appear well affected to the Government of his Majesty, and the doctrine and discipline of the Church of England.
This attitude also extended upward to the universities as well, where nonconformists were prohibited by law (1558) from receiving degrees, a condition not remedied until 1871 (R. 305). The great purpose of instruction came to be to support the authority and the rule of the Established Church, and the almost complete purpose of elementary instruction came to be to train pupils to read the Catechism, the Prayer Book, and the Bible. This intense religious attitude in England was reflected in early colonial America, as we shall see in a following chapter.
THE POOR-LAW LEGISLATION, AND ITS EDUCATIONAL SIGNIFICANCE. After the thirteenth century, due in part to the rise of the wool industry in Flanders, England began to change from a farming to a sheep-raising country. Accompanying this decline in the importance of farming there had been a slow but gradual growth of trade and manufacturing in the cities, and to the cities the surplus of rural peasantry began to drift. The cost of living also increased rapidly after the fifteenth century. As a result there was a marked shifting of occupations, much unemployment, and a constantly increasing number of persons in need of poor-relief. In the time of Elizabeth (1558-1603) it has been estimated that one half the population of England did not have an income sufficient for sustenance, and great numbers of children were running about without proper food or care, and growing up in idleness and vice.
The situation, which had been growing worse for two centuries, culminated at the time of the Reformation when the religious houses, which had previously provided alms, were confiscated as a result of the reformation activities. The groundwork of the old system of religious charity was thus swept away, and the relation which had for so long existed between prayer and penance and almsgiving and charity was altered. The nation was thus forced to deal with the problem of poor-relief, and with the care of the children of the poor. In the place of the old system the people were forced, by circumstances, to develop a new conception of the State as a community of peoples bound together by community interest, good feeling, charity, and service.
As this new conception dawned on the English people, a series of laws were enacted which attempted to provide for the situation which had been created. These were progressive in character, and ranged over much of the sixteenth century. First the poor were restricted from begging, outside of certain specified limits. Next church collections and parish support for the poor were ordered (1553), and the people were to be urged to give. Then workhouses for the poor and their children, and materials with which to work, were ordered provided, and those persons of means who would not give freely were to be cited before the bishop first (R. 173), and the justices later, and if necessary forcibly assessed (1563). The next step was to permit the local authorities to raise needed funds by strictly local taxation (1572). In 1601 the last step was taken, when the compulsory taxation of all persons of property was ordered to provide the necessary poor-relief, and the excessive burdens of one parish were to be shared by neighboring parishes. Thus, after a long period of slowly evolving legislation (R. 173), the English Poor-Law of 1601 (R. 174) finally gave expression to the following principles:
1. The compulsory care of the poor, as an obligation of the State.
2. The compulsory apprenticeship of the children of the poor, male and female, to learn a useful trade.
3. The obligation of the master to train his apprentices in a trade.
4. The obligation of the overseers of the poor to supply, where necessary, the opportunity and the materials for such training of the children of the poor.
5. The compulsory taxation of all persons of property to provide the necessary funds for such a purpose, and without reference to any benefits derived from the taxation.
6. The excessive burdens of any one parish to be pooled throughout the hundred or county.
In this compulsory apprenticeship of the children of the poor, with the obligation imposed that such children must be trained in a trade and in proper living, with general taxation of those of property to provide workhouses and materials for such a purpose, we have the germ, among English-speaking peoples, of the idea of the general taxation of all persons by the State to provide schools for the children of the State. The apprenticing of the children of the poor to labor and the requirement that they be taught the elements of religion soon became a fixed English practice (R. 217), and in the seventeenth century this idea was carried to the American colonies and firmly established there. It was on the foundations of the English Poor-Law of 1601, above stated, that the first Massachusetts law relating to the schooling of all children (1642) was framed (R. 190), but with the significant Calvinistic addition that:
7. "In euery towne ye chosen men" shall see that parents and masters not only train their children in learning and labor, but also "to read & understand the principles of religion & the capitall lawes of this country," with power to impose fines on such as refuse to render accounts concerning their children.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Why is progress that is substantial nearly always a product of slow rather than rapid evolution?
2. Show why the evolution of many Protestant sects was a natural consequence of the position assumed by Luther. What is the ultimate outcome of the process?
3. Why was it not important that more than a few be educated under the older theory of salvation?
4. Show how modern democratic government was a natural consequence of the Protestant position.
5. Why was universal education involved as a later but ultimate consequence of the position taken by the Protestants?
6. Explain why the local Church authorities, before 1520, tried so hard to prevent the establishment of vernacular schools.
7. Explain why the religious discussions of the Reformation should have so strongly stimulated a desire to read.
8. Explain the fixing in character of the German, French, and English languages by a single book. What had fixed the Italian?
9. Was Luther probably right when he wrote, in 1524, that the schools "were deteriorating throughout Germany"? Why?
10. Give reasons why Luther's appeals for schools were not more fruitful.
11. What was the significance of the position of Luther for the future education of girls?
12. Was Luther's idea that a clergyman should have had some experience as a teacher a good one, or not? Why?
13. How do you explain Luther's ideas as to coupling up elementary and trade education in his primary schools?
14. Point out the similarity of Luther's scheme for a school system with the German school system as finally evolved (Figure 96).
15. Show how Melanchthon's Saxony Plan differed from Luther's ideas. For the times was it a more practical plan? Why?
16. Explain why the Lutheran idea of personal responsibility for salvation made so little headway in England, and show that the natural educational consequences of this resulted.
17. Show what different conditions were likely to follow, in later centuries, from the different stands taken as to the relation of the State and Church to education by the German people by the middle of the sixteenth century, and by the English at the time of Elizabeth.
18. Compare the origin of the vernacular elementary-school teacher in Germany and England.
19. Leach estimates that, in 1546, there were approximately three hundred grammar schools in England for a total population of approximately two and one half millions. About what opportunities for grammar-school education did this afford?
SELECTED READINGS
In the accompanying Book of Readings the following selections are reproduced:
154. Rashdall: Diffusion of Education in Mediaeval Times. 155. Times: The Vernacular Style of the Translation of the Bible. 156. Luther: To the Mayors and Magistrates of Germany. 157. Luther: Dignity and Importance of the Teacher's Work. 158. Luther: On the Duty of Compelling School Attendance. 159. Hamburg: An Example of a Lutheran Kirchenordnung. 160. Brieg: An Example of a Lutheran Schuleordnung. 161. Melanchthon: The Saxony School Plan. 162. Raumer: The School System Established in Würtemberg. 163. Duke Ernest: The Schulemethodus for Gotha. 164. Strype: The Supervision of a Teacher's Acts and Religious Beliefs in England. (a) Letter of Queen's Council on. (b) Dismissal of a Teacher for non-conformity. 165. Elizabeth: Penalties on Non-conforming Schoolmasters. 166. Statutes: English Act of Uniformity of 1662. 167. Carlisle: Oath of a Grammar School Master. 168. Strype: An English Elementary-School Teacher's License. 169. Cowper: Grammar School Statutes regarding Prayers. 170. Green: Effect of the Translation of the Bible into English. 171. Old MS.: Ignorance of the Monks at Canterbury and Messenden. 172. Parker: Refounding of the Cathedral School at Canterbury. 173. Nicholls: Origin of the English Poor-Law of 1601. 174. Statutes: The English Poor Law of 1601.
QUESTIONS ON THE READINGS
1. From the selection from Rashdall (154), what do you infer as to the effect of the Reformation on the schools? What kind of schools does Rashdall describe as existing?
2. Contrast the vernacular style of the Bible (155) with the Ciceronian.
3. Characterize the three extracts (156-58) from Luther.
4. How advanced was the ground taken by Luther (158)? Would we accept the logic of his argument to-day?
5. Just what do the Hamburg (159) and Brieg (160) Ordnungen indicate?
6. Compare Melanchthon's Saxony Plan (161) with Sturm's (137) and the French Collège de Guyenne (136), and grade the three in order of importance.
7. Show the close similarity of the Würtemberg plan of 1559-65 (162) and a modern German state school system.
8. How advanced for the time was the work of Duke Ernest of Gotha (163)?
9. What kind of a school attitude is indicated by the close supervision of English teachers, as described in 164 and 165?
10. What would be the natural effect on the teaching occupation of such legislation as the Act of Uniformity (166)?
11. Compare the form of license of an elementary teacher (168) with a modern form. What have we added and omitted?
12. What do the statutes regarding prayers (169) indicate as to the nature of the grammar schools of the time?
13. Characterize the educational importance of the translations of the Bible into the native tongues (170).
14. What are the marked features of the refounding act (172) for Canterbury cathedral school? What improvements are indicated?
15. State the steps in the development (173) of the English Poor-Law of 1601, just what the law provided for (174), and just what elements necessary to the creation of a state school system were incorporated into it.
SUPPLEMENTARY REFERENCES
* Adams, G. B. Civilization during the Middle Ages Barnard, Henry. German Teachers and Educators. Francke, Kuno. Social Forces in German Literature. * Good, Harry E. "The Position of Luther upon Education," in _School and Society_, vol. 6, pp. 511-18 (Nov. 3, 1917). * Montmorency, J. E. G. de. _State Intervention in English Education_. * Montmorency, J. E. G. de. The Progress of Education in England. Painter, F. V. N. Luther on Education. Paulsen, Fr. German Education. Richard, J. W. _Philipp Melanchthon, the Protestant Preceptor of Germany_. Woodward, W. H. Education during the Renaissance.
XIV. EDUCATIONAL RESULTS OF THE PROTESTANT REVOLTS
II. AMONG CALVINISTS AND CATHOLICS
3. Educational work of the Calvinisms
THE ORGANIZING WORK OF CALVIN. From the point of view of American educational history the most important developments in connection with the Reformation were those arising from Calvinism. While the Calvinistic faith was rather grim and forbidding, viewed from the modern standpoint, the Calvinists everywhere had a program for political, economic, and social progress which has left a deep impress on the history of mankind. This program demanded the education of all, and in the countries where Calvinism became dominant the leaders included general education in their scheme of religious, political, and social reform. [1] In the governmental program which Calvin drew up (1537) for the religious republic at Geneva (p. 298), he held that learning was "a public necessity to secure good political administration, sustain the Church unharmed, and maintain humanity among men."
In his plan for the schools of Geneva, published in 1538, he outlined a system of elementary education in the vernacular for all, which involved instruction in reading, writing, arithmetic, religion, careful grammatical drill, and training for civil as well as for ecclesiastical leadership. In his plan of 1541 he upholds the principle, as had Luther, that "the liberal arts and good training are aids to a full knowledge of the Word." This involved the organization of secondary schools, or colleges as he called them, following the French nomenclature, to prepare leaders for the ministry and the civil government through "instruction in the languages and humane science." In the colleges (secondary schools) which he organized at Geneva and in neighboring places to give such training, and which became models of their kind which were widely copied, the usual humanistic curriculum was combined with intensive religious instruction. These colleges became famous as institutions from which learned men came forth. The course of study in the seven classes of one of the Geneva colleges, which has been preserved for us, reveals the nature of the instruction (R. 175). The lowest class began with the letters, reading was taught from a French-Latin Catechism, and the usual Latin authors were read. Greek was begun in the fourth class, and, in addition to the usual Greek authors, the New Testament was read in Greek. In the higher classes, as was common also in German gymnasia, logic and rhetoric were taught to prepare pupils to analyze, argue, and defend the faith. Elocution was also given much importance in the upper classes as preparation for the ministry, two original orations being required each month. Psalms were sung, prayers offered, sermons preached and questioned on, and the Bible carefully studied. The men who went forth from the colleges of Geneva to teach and to preach the Calvinistic gospel were numbered by the hundreds. [2]
Calvin's great educational work at Geneva has been well summarized by a recent writer, [3] as follows:
The strenuous moral training of the Genevese was an essential part of Calvin's work as an educator. All were trained to respect and obey laws, based upon Scripture, but enacted and enforced by representatives of the people, and without respect of persons. How fully the training of children, not merely in sound learning and doctrine, but also in manners, "good morals," and common sense was carried out is pictured in the delightful human Colloquies of Calvin's old teacher, Corderius (once a teacher at the College of Guyenne, p. 269), whom he twice established at Geneva....
Calvin's memorials to the Genevan magistrates, his drafts for civil law and municipal administration, his correspondence with reformers and statesmen, his epoch-making defense of interest taking, his growing tendency toward civil, religious, and economic liberty, his development of primary and university education, his intimate knowledge of the dialect and ways of thought of the common people of Geneva, and his broad understanding of European princes, diplomats, and politics mark him out as a great political, economic, and educational as well as a religious reformer, a constructive social genius capable of reorganizing and moulding the whole life of a people.
The world owes much to the constructive, statesman-like genius of Calvin and those who followed him, and we in America probably most of all. Geneva became a refuge for the persecuted Protestants from other lands, and through such influences the ideas of Calvin spread to the Huguenots in France, the Walloons of the Dutch and Belgian Netherlands, the Germans in the Palatinate, the Presbyterians of Scotland, the Puritans in England, and later to the American colonies.
CALVINISM IN THE OTHER LANDS. The great educational work done by the Calvinists in France, in the face of heavy persecution, deserves to be ranked with that of the Lutherans in Germany in its importance. Had the Calvinists had the same opportunity for free development the Lutherans had, and especially their state support, there can be little doubt that their work would have greatly exceeded the Lutherans in importance and influence on the future history of mankind. Beginning with one church in 1538, they had 2150 churches by 1561, when the severe persecutions and religious wars began.
True to the Calvinistic teaching of putting principles into practice, they organized an extensive system of schools, extending from elementary education for all, through secondary schools or colleges, up to eight Huguenot universities. As a people they were thrifty and capable of making great sacrifices to carry out their educational ideals. The education they provided was not only religious but civil; not only intellectual but moral, social, and economic. Education was for all, rich and poor alike. Their synods made liberal appropriations for the universities, while municipalities provided for colleges and elementary education. They emphasized, in the lower schools, the study of the vernacular and arithmetic, and in the colleges Greek and the New Testament. The long list of famous teachers found in their universities reveals the character of their instruction. Foster has well summarized the distinguishing characteristics of Huguenot education in France, before they were driven from the land, as follows: [4]
The significant characteristics of Huguenot education were: an emphasis on the education of the laity; training for "the republic" and "society" as well as for the Church; insistence upon virtue as well as knowledge; the wide-spread demand for education, and a view of it as essential to liberty of conscience; a comprehensive working system of elementary, collegiate, and university training for all, poor as well as rich; an astonishing familiarity with Scripture, even among the lowest classes; utilization of representative church organization for founding, supporting, and unifying education; readiness to sacrifice for education, a spirit of carrying a thing through at any cost; business-like supervision of money, and systematic supervision of both professors and students; a notable emphasis on vernacular, arithmetic, Greek, use of full texts, and libraries; and finally a progressive spirit of inquiry and investigation.
In the Palatinate (see map, Figure 88) some progress in founding churches and schools was made, especially about Strassburg, and the universities of Heidelberg and Marburg became the centers of Huguenot teaching. In the Dutch Netherlands, and in that part of the Belgian Netherlands inhabited by the Walloons, Calvinist ideas as to education dominated. The universities of Leyden (f. 1575), Groningen (f. 1614), Amsterdam (f. 1630), and Utrecht (f. 1636) were Calvinistic, and closely in touch with the Calvinists and Huguenots of German lands and France. Popular education was looked after among these people as it was in Calvinistic France and Geneva. The Church Synod of The Hague (1586) ordered the establishment of schools in the cities, and in 1618 the Great Synod held at Dort (R. 176) ordered that:
Schools in which the young shall be properly instructed in piety and fundamentals of Christian doctrine shall be instituted not only in cities, but also in towns and country places where heretofore none have existed. The Christian magistracy shall be requested that honorable stipends be provided for teachers, and that well-qualified persons may be employed and enabled to devote themselves to that function; and especially that the children of the poor may be gratuitously instructed by them and not be excluded from the benefits of schools.
Further provisions were made as to the certificating of schoolmasters, and the pastors were made superintendents of the schools, to visit, examine, encourage, advise, and report (R. 176). Provision for the free education of the poor became common, and elementary education was made accessible to all. The careful provision for education made by the province of Utrecht (1590, 1612) (R. 178) was typical of Dutch activity. The province of Drenthe ordered (1630) a school tax paid for all children over seven, whether attending school or not. The province of Overyssel levied (1666) a school tax for all children from eight to twelve years of age. The province of Groningen constituted the pastors the attendance officers to see that the children got to school. Amsterdam and many other Dutch cities demanded an examination of all teachers before being licensed to teach. By the middle of the seventeenth century a good system of schools seems to have been provided generally [5] by the Dutch and the Belgian Walloons (R. 178). That the teaching of religion was the main function of the Dutch elementary schools, as of all other vernacular schools of the time, is seen from the official lists of the textbooks used (R. 178).
John Knox, the leader of the Scottish Reformation (1560), who had spent some time at Geneva and who was deeply impressed by the Calvinistic religious-state found there, introduced the Calvinistic religious and educational ideas into Scotland. His Book of Discipline for the Scottish Church (1560), framed closely on the Genevan model, contained a chapter devoted to education in which he proposed:
That everie severall churche have a school-maister appointed, such a one as is able at least to teach Grammar and the Latin tung, yf the Town be of any reputation. Yf it be upaland ... then must either the Reider or the Minister take cayre over the children ... to instruct them in their first rudementie and especially in the catechisme.
The educational plan proposed by Knox would have called for a large expenditure of money, and this the thrifty Scotch were not ready for. Knox and his followers then proposed to endow the new schools from the old church and monastic foundations, but the Scottish nobles hoped to share in these, as had the English nobility under Henry VIII, and Knox's plan was not approved. This delayed the establishment of a real national system of education for Scotland until the nineteenth century. The new Church, however, took over the superintendence of education in Scotland, and when parish schools were finally established by decree of the Privy Council, in 1616, and by the legislation of 1633 and 1646 (R. 179), the Church was given an important share in their organization and management. These schools, while not always sufficient in number to meet the educational needs, were well taught, and have deeply influenced the national character.
4. The Counter-Reformation of the Catholics
THE JESUIT ORDER. The Protestant Revolt made but little headway in Italy, Spain, Portugal, much of France, or southern Belgium (see map, p. 296). Italy was scarcely disturbed at all, while in France, where of all these countries the reform ideas had made greatest progress, nine tenths of the people remained loyal to Rome. In a general way it may be stated that those parts of western Europe which had once formed an integral part of the old Roman Empire remained loyal to the Roman Church, while those which had been the homes of the Germanic tribes revolted. Now it naturally happened that the countries which remained loyal to the old Church experienced none of the feelings of the necessity for education as a means to personal salvation which the Lutherans and Calvinists felt. There, too, the church system of education which had developed during the long Middle Ages remained undisturbed and largely unchanged. The Church as an institution, though, learned from the Protestants the value of education as a means to larger ends, and soon set about using it. [6]
After the Church Council of Trent (1545-63), where definite church reform measures were carried through (p. 303), the Catholics inaugurated what has since been called a counter-reformation, in an effort to hold lands which were still loyal and to win back lands which had been lost. Besides reforming the practices and outward lives of the churchmen, and reforming some church practices and methods, the Church inaugurated a campaign of educational propaganda. In this last the chief reliance was upon a new and a very useful organization officially known as the "Society of Jesus," but more commonly called the "Jesuit Order." This had been founded, in 1534, by a Spanish knight, pilgrim, man of large ideas, and scholar by the name of Ignatius Loyola, and had been sanctioned as an Order of the Church by Pope Paul III, in 1540. It was organized along strictly military lines, all members being responsible to its General, and he in turn alone to the Pope. The quiet life of the cloister was abandoned for a life of open warfare under a military discipline. The Jesuit was to live in the world, and all peculiarities of dress or rule which might prove an obstacle to worldly success were suppressed. The purposes of the Order were to combat heresy, to advance the interests of the Church, and to strengthen the authority of the Papacy. Its motto was Omnia ad Majorem Dei Gloriam (that is, All for the greater glory of God), and the means to be employed by it to accomplish these ends were the pulpit, the confessional, the mission, and the school. Of these the school was given the place of first importance. Realizing clearly that the real cause of the Reformation had been the ignorance, neglect, and vicious lives of so many monks and priests and the extortion and neglect practiced by the Church, and that the chief difficulty was in the higher places of authority, it became the prime principle of the Order to live upright and industrious lives themselves, and to try to reach and train those likely to be the future leaders in Church and State. With the education of the masses of the people the Order was not concerned. [7] Our interest lies only with the educational work of this Order, a work in which it was remarkably successful and through which it exercised a very large influence.
GREAT SUCCESS OF THE ORDER. The service of the Order to the Church in combating Protestant heresies was very marked. Beginning in a small way, the Order, by 1600, had established two hundred colleges (Latin secondary schools), universities, and training seminaries; by 1640, 372; by 1706 (150 years after the death of its founder), 769; and by 1756, 728. In 1773, when the Order was for a time abolished, [8] after it had been driven out of a number of European countries because of the unscrupulous methods it adopted and the continual application of its doctrine that the end justifies the means, the Order had 22,589 members, about half of whom were teachers. Its colleges (secondary schools) and universities were most numerous and its work most energetically carried on in northern France, Belgium, Holland, the German States, Austria, Poland, and Hungary. Here was the great battle line, and here the Jesuits deeply entrenched themselves. In these portions of Europe alone there were, in 1750, 217 colleges, 55 seminaries, 24 houses for novitiates, and 160 missions. In France alone there were 92 colleges. They did much, single-handed, to roll back the tide of Protestantism which had advanced over half of western Europe, and to hold other countries true to the ancient faith.
The colleges were usually large and well-supported institutions, with dormitories, classrooms, dining-halls; and play-grounds. The usual number of scholars in each was about 300, though some had an attendance of 600 to 800, and a few as high as 2000. At their period of maximum influence the colleges and universities of the Order probably enrolled a total of 200,000 students. Their graduates were prominent in every scholarly and governmental activity of the time. As far as possible the pupils were a selected class to whom the Order offered free instruction. The children of the nobility and gentry, and the brightest and most promising youths of the different lands were drawn into their schools. The children of many Protestants, also, were attracted by the high quality of the instruction offered. There they were given the best secondary-school education of the time, and received, at an impressionable age, the peculiar Jesuit stamp. [9] Bacon gave his opinion as to the success of their instruction in the following sentence: "As for the pedagogical part, the shortest rule would be, Consult the schools of the Jesuits; for nothing better has been put in practice." (De Augmentis, VI, 4.) [10]
SUCCESS OF THE JESUIT SCHOOLS. Displaying a genius for organization worthy of Rome, Loyola and his followers absorbed the best educational ideas of the time as to school organization and management and curriculum, and incorporated these into their educational plan. Too practical to make many changes, but with a keen eye for what was best, they accepted the best and used it much as others had worked it out. From the municipal college of Guyenne, the colleges of Calvin, and Sturm's organization at Strassburg, they adopted the plan of class organization, with a teacher for each class. From the Calvinists they obtained the idea of the careful supervision of instruction, which was worked out in the Prefect of Studies for their colleges. In their course of study they incorporated the Ciceronian ideal of the humanistic learning, and as careful religious instruction as was provided by any of the reformers. From the Italian court schools they took the idea of physical training. The method of instruction and classroom management which they worked out was detailed, practical, and for their purposes excellent. The reasons for their educational work gave them a clearly defined aim and purpose. The military brotherhood type of organization, the lifetime of celibate service, and the opportunity to sort the carefully selected members according to their ability for service in the different lines of the Order gave them the best-selected teaching force in Europe, and these men they trained for the teaching service with a thoroughness unknown before and seldom equaled since. Knowing why they were at work and what ends they should achieve, intolerant of opposition, intensely practical in all their work, and possessed of an indefatigable zeal in the accomplishment of their purpose, they gave Europe in general and northern continental Europe in particular a system of secondary schools and universities possessed of a high degree of effectiveness, which, combined with religious warfare and persecution, in time drove out or dwarfed all competing institutions in the countries they were able to control.
That their educational system, viewed from a modern liberal-education standpoint, equaled in effectiveness for liberal-education ends such institutions as the court schools of Vittorino da Feltre, Battista da Guarino, or other Italian humanistic educators of the Renaissance (p. 267); the French and Swiss colleges of Calvin (p. 331); Colet's school at Saint Paul's (p. 275), and the better English grammar schools; or the schools of the Brethren of the Common Life in the Netherlands (p. 271); would hardly be contended for to-day. Such, though, was not their purpose. To proselyte for the Church rather than to liberalize--from their point of view there had been too much liberalizing already--was their ultimate aim, and their educational work was organized to suppress rather than to awaken more Protestant heresy. The work of this Order was so successful, and for two centuries so dominated secondary and higher education in Europe, that it will pay us to examine a little more closely their educational organization to see more fully the reasons for their large success. In so doing we will examine three points--their school organization, their methods of instruction, and the training of their teachers.
JESUIT SCHOOL ORGANIZATION. Each college was presided over by a Rector, who was in effect the president of the institution, and a Prefect of Studies, who was the superintendent of instruction. Below these were the Professors or teachers, the House Prefect, the official disciplinarian of the institution, known as the Corrector, the monitors, and the students. There were two classes of students, interns and externs. Their schools were divided into two courses. The studia inferiora, or lower school, which covered the six years from ten to twelve years of age up to sixteen to eighteen; and the studia superiora, which followed, and included the higher college and university courses, with philosophy and theology as the important subjects. For the whole, there was a very carefully worked-out manual of instruction (R. 180) known as the Ratio Studiorum. [11]
The boy entering a Jesuit college was supposed to have previously learned how to read Latin. The first three years were given to learning Latin grammar and a little Greek. In the fourth year Latin and Greek authors were begun, and in the fifth and sixth years a rhetorical study of the Latin authors was made. Latin was the language of the classroom and the playground as well, the mother tongue being used only by permission. Greek was studied through the medium of the Latin. The retention of Latin as the language of all scholarly and political intercourse, and the cultivation of the style and speech of Cicero as the standard of purity and elegance, were the ends aimed at. Careful attention was given to the health and sports of the pupils, and special regard was paid to moral and religious training.
Following this lower school of six years came the so-called philosophical course of three years (sometimes two). The study of the Latin classics and rhetoric was continued, and dialectics (logic) and some metaphysics were added. The nine years together covered about the same scope as Sturm's school (R. 137) at Strassburg (p. 273), but was more formal in character and partook more of the nature of the later formalized humanistic schools. Slight variations were allowed in places, to meet particular local needs, but this course of study remained practically unchanged until 1832, when some history, geography, and elementary mathematics and science were added to the lower schools, and advanced mathematics and science to the philosophical course. In 1906 each Province of the Order was permitted to change the Ratio further, if necessary to adjust it better to local needs. Above the philosophical course a course of four or six years in philosophy and theology prepared for the higher work of the Order, the four-year course for preaching and the six-year course for teaching.
JESUIT SCHOOL METHODS. The characteristic method of the schools was oral, with a consequent closeness of contact of teacher and pupils. This closeness of contact and sympathy was further retained by the system whereby all punishment was given by the official Corrector of the institution. Their method, like that of the modern German Volkschule, was distinctly a teaching and not a questioning method. The teacher planned and gave the instruction; the pupils received it. In the upper classes the teacher explained the general meaning of the entire passage; then the construction of each part; then gave the historical, geographical, and archaeological information needed further to explain the passage; then called attention to the rhetorical and poetical forms and rules; then compared the style with that of other writers; and finally drew the moral lesson. The memory was drilled; but little training of the judgment or understanding was given. Thoroughness, memory drills, and the disciplinary value of studies were foundation stones in the Jesuit's educational theory. Repetition, they said, was the mother of memory. Each day the work of the previous day was reviewed, and there were further reviews at the end of each week, month, and year.
To retain the interest of the pupils amid such a load of memorizing various school devices were resorted to, chief among which were prizes, ranks, emulations, rivals, and public disputations. The system of rivals, whereby each boy had an opponent constantly after him, as shown in Figure 102, was one of the peculiar features of their schools. While the schools were said to have been made pleasant and attractive, the idea of the absolute authority of the Church which they represented pervaded them and repressed the development of that individuality which the court schools of the Italian Renaissance, the schools of the northern humanists, and the Calvinistic colleges had tried particularly to foster. This, however, is a criticism made from a modern point of view. That the school represented well the spirit of the times is indicated by their marked success as teaching institutions.
TRAINING OF THE JESUIT TEACHER. The newest and the most distinguishing feature of the Jesuit educational scheme, as well as the most important, was the care with which they selected and the thoroughness with which they trained their teachers. To begin with, every Jesuit was a picked man, and of those who entered the Order only the best were selected for teaching. Each entered the Order for life, was vowed to celibacy, poverty, chastity, uprightness of life, and absolute obedience to the commands of the Order. The six-year inferior course had to be completed, which required that the boy be sixteen to eighteen years of age before he could take the preliminary steps toward joining the Order. Then a two-year novitiate, away from the world, followed. This was a trial of his real character, his weak points were noted, and his will and determination tested. Many were dismissed before the end of the novitiate. If retained and accepted, he took the preliminary vows and entered the philosophical course of study. On completing this he was from twenty-one to twenty-three years of age. He was now assigned to teach boys in the inferior classes of some college, and might remain there. If destined for higher work he taught in the inferior classes for two or three years, and then entered the theological course at some Jesuit university. This required four years for those headed for the ministry, and six for those who were being trained for professorships in the colleges. On completing this course the final vows were taken, at an age of from twenty-nine to thirty-two. The training to- day is still longer. To become a teacher in the inferior classes required training until twenty-one at least, and for college (secondary) classes training until at least twenty-nine. The training was in scholarship, religion, theology, and an apprenticeship in teaching, and was superior to that required for a teaching license in any Protestant country of Europe, or in the Catholic Church itself outside of the Jesuit Order.
With such carefully selected and well-educated teachers, themselves models of upright life in an age when priests and monks had been careless, it is not surprising that they wielded an influence wholly out of proportion to their numbers, and supplied Europe with its best secondary schools during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In the loyal Catholic countries they were virtually the first secondary schools outside of the monasteries and churches, and the real introduction of humanism into Spain, Portugal, and parts of France came with the establishment of the Jesuit humanistic colleges. For their schools they wrote new school books --the Protestant books, the most celebrated of which were those of Erasmus, Melanchthon, Sturm, and Lily, were not possible of use--and for a time they put new life into the humanistic type of education. Before the eighteenth century, however, their secondary schools had become as formal as had those in Protestant lands (R. 146), and their universities far more narrow and intolerant.
The elements of strength and weakness in the Jesuit system of education has been well summarized by Dabney, [12] in the following words:
The order of the Jesuits was anti-democratic, and was founded to uphold authority, and to antagonize the right of private judgment. With masterly skill they ruled the Catholic world for about two centuries; and, in the beginning of their activity, performed services of great value to mankind. For, although they aimed, in their system of education, to fit pupils merely for so-called practical avocations, and to avoid all subjects likely to stimulate them to independent thought, it was nevertheless the best system which had then appeared. In dropping the old scholastic methods, and teaching new and fresher subjects, although with the intention of perverting them to their own ends, they sowed, in fact, the germs of their own decay. In spite of their wonderful organization, and their indefatigable industry as courtiers in royal palaces, as professors in the universities, as teachers in the schools, as preachers, as confessors, and as missionaries, they were utterly unable to crush the spirit of doubt and inquiry. During the first half century of their existence they were intellectually in advance of their age; but after that they gradually dropped behind it, and, instead of diffusing knowledge, saw that the only hope of retaining their dominion was to oppose it with all their might.
THE CHURCH AND ELEMENTARY EDUCATION. As was stated on a preceding page, the countries which remained loyal to the Church experienced none of the Protestant feeling as to the necessity for universal education for individual salvation. In such lands the church system of education which had grown up during the Middle Ages remained undisturbed, and was expanded but slowly with the passage of time. The Church, never having made general provision for education, was not prepared for such work. Teachers were scarce, there was no theory of education except the religious theory, and few knew what to do or how to do it. Many churchmen, too, did not see the need for doing anything. Nevertheless the Church, spurred on by the new demands of a world fast becoming modern, and by the exhortations of the official representatives of the people, [13] now began to make extra efforts, in the large cathedral cities, to remedy the deficiency of more than a thousand years. In Paris, for example, which was typical of other French cities, the Church organized a regular system of elementary schools, with teachers licensed by the Precentor of the cathedral of Notre Dame and nominally under his supervision, in which instruction was offered to children of the artisan and laboring classes, of both sexes, "in reading, writing, reckoning, the rudiments of Latin Grammar, Catechism, and singing." By 1675 these "Little Schools" in Paris came to contain "upwards of 5000 pupils, taught by some 330 masters and mistresses." All such schools, of course, remained under the immediate control of the Church, and modern state systems of education in the Catholic States are late nineteenth-century productions. In Spain, Portugal, Poland, and the Balkan States, general state systems of education have not even as yet been evolved.
The general effect of the Reformation, though, was to stimulate the Church to greater activity in elementary, as well as in secondary and higher education. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries we find a large number of decrees by church councils and exhortations by bishops urging the extension of the existing church system of education, so as to supply at least religious training to all the children of the faithful. As a result a number of teaching orders were organized, the aim of which was to assist the Church in providing elementary and religious education for the children of the laboring and artisan classes in the cities.
TEACHING ORDERS ESTABLISHED. The teaching orders for elementary education, founded before the eighteenth century, with the dates of their foundation, were:
* 1535-The Order of Ursulines. (U.S., 1729.) 1592--The Congregation of Christian Doctrine. * 1598--The Sisters of Notre Dame. (U.S., 1847.) * 1610--The Visitation Nuns. (U.S., 1799.) 1621--Patres piarum scholarum (Piarists). First school opened in 1597; authorized by the Pope, 1662. 1627--The Daughters of the Presentation. * 1633--The Sisters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul. (U.S., 1809.) 1637--The Port Royalists (Jansenists). (Suppressed in 1661.) 1643--The Sisters of Providence. * 1650--The Sisters of Saint Joseph. Rule based on Jesuits. (U.S., 19th C.) 1652--The Sisters of Mary of Saint Charles Borromeo. 1684--The Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin. * 1684--The Brothers of the Christian Schools. (U.S., 1845.)
* Have communities in the United States, the date being that of the first one established. See Cyclopedia of Education, vol. v, p. 528.
All of these, except the Ursulines and the Piarists, were founded in France, many of them originating in Paris. The first has long been prominent in Italy, and is now found in all lands. The second was founded by Father César de Bus, at Cavaillon, Avignon, in southern France, and its purpose was to teach the Catechism to the young. The catechetical schools of this Order were prominent in southern France up to the time of the French Revolution. The third was founded by the Blessed Peter Fourier (1565-1640), in 1598, and played an important part in the education of girls in France, particularly in Lorraine, where Calvinism had made much headway. This noted Order offered free instruction to tradesmen's daughters, not only in religion but in "that which concerns this present life and its maintenance" as well. The girls were taught "reading, writing, arithmetic, sewing, and divers manual arts, honorable and peculiarly suitable for girls" of their station of life. At a time when handwork had not been thought of for boys, the beginnings of such work were here introduced for girls. In 1640 Fourier gave the sisterhood a constitution and a rule, which were revised and perfected in 1694. In this he laid down rules for the organization and management of schools, methods of teaching the different branches, and provided for a rudimentary form of class organization. The following extract from the Rule illustrates the approach to class organization which he devised:
The inspectress, or mistress of the class, shall endeavor, as far as it possibly can be carried out, that all the pupils of the same mistress have each the same book, in order to learn and read therein the same lesson; so that, whilst one is reading hers in an audible and intelligible voice before the mistress, all the others, following her and following this lesson, in their books at the same time, may learn it sooner, more readily, and more perfectly. [14] The Piarists were established in Italy, the first school being opened in Rome, in 1597, by a Spanish priest who had studied at Lerida, Valencia, and Alcalá. Being struck by the lack of educational opportunities for the poor, he opened a free school for their instruction. By 1606 he had 900 pupils in his schools, and by 1613 he had 1200. In 1621 Pope Gregory XV gave his work definite recognition by establishing it a teaching Order for elementary (reading, writing, counting, religion) education, modeled on that of the Jesuits. The Order did some work in Italy and Spain, but its chief services were in border Catholic lands. In 1631 it began work in Moravia, in 1640 in Bohemia, in 1642 in Poland, and after 1648 in Austria and Hungary. The members wore a habit much like that of the Jesuits, had a scheme of studies similar to their Ratio, and were organized by provinces and were under discipline as were the members of the older Order.
The Jansenists, founded by Saint Cyran, at Port Royal, conducted a very interesting and progressive educational experiment, and their schools have become known to history as the "Little Schools of Port Royal." The congregation was a reaction against the work and methods of the Jesuits. It included both elementary and secondary education, but never extended itself, and probably never had more than sixty pupils and teachers. After seventeen years of work it was suppressed through the opposition of the Jesuits, and its members fled to the Netherlands. There they wrote those books which have explained to succeeding generations what they attempted, [15] and which have revealed what a modern type of educational experiment they conducted. The progressive and modern nature of their teaching, in an age of suspicion and intolerance, condemned them to extinction. Yet despite the progressive nature of their instruction, the intense religious atmosphere which they threw about all their work (R. 181) reveals the dominant characteristic of most education for church ends at the time.
THE BROTHERS OF THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS. The largest and most influential of the teaching orders established for elementary education was the "Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools," founded by Father La Salle at Rouen, in 1684, and sanctioned by the King and Pope in 1724. As early as 1679 La Salle had begun a school at Rheims, and in 1684 he organized his disciples, prescribed a costume to be worn, and outlined the work of the brotherhood (R. 182). The object was to provide free elementary and religious instruction in the vernacular for the children of the working classes, and to do for elementary education what the Jesuits had done for secondary education La Salle's Conduct of Schools, first published in 1720, was the ratio studiorum of his order. His work marks the real beginning of free primary instruction in the vernacular in France. In addition to elementary schools, a few of what we should call part-time continuation schools were organized for children engaged in commerce and industry. Realizing better than the Jesuits the need for well-trained rather than highly educated teachers for little children, and unable to supply members to meet the outside calls for schools, La Salle organized at Rheims, in 1685, what was probably the second normal school for training teachers in the world. [16] Another was organized later at Paris. In addition to a good education of the type of the time and thorough grounding in religion, the student teachers learned to teach in practice schools, under the direction of experienced teachers.
The pupils in La Salle's schools were graded into classes, and the class method of instruction was introduced. [17] The curriculum was unusually rich for a time when teaching methods and textbooks were but poorly developed, the needs for literary education small, and when children could not as yet be spared from work longer than the age of nine or ten. Children learned first to read, write, and spell French, and to do simple composition work in the vernacular. Those who mastered this easily were taught the Latin Psalter in addition. Much prominence was given to writing, the instruction being applied to the writing of bills, notes, receipts, and the like. Much free questioning was allowed in arithmetic and the Catechism, to insure perfect understanding of what was taught. Religious training was made the most prominent feature of the school, as was natural. A half-hour daily was given to the Catechism, mass was said daily, the crucifix was always on the wall, and two or three pupils were always to be found kneeling, telling their beads. The discipline, in contradistinction to the customary practice of the time, was mild, though all punishments were carefully prescribed by rule. [18] The rule of silence in the school was rigidly enjoined, all speech was to be in a low tone of voice, and a code of signals replaced speech for many things.
Though the Order met with much opposition from both church and civil authorities, it made slow but steady headway. At the time of the death of La Salle, in 1719, thirty-five years after its foundation, the Order had one general normal school, four normal schools for training teachers, three practice schools, thirty-three primary schools, and one continuation school. The Order remained largely French, and at the time of its suppression, in 1792, had schools in 121 communities in France and 6 elsewhere, about 1000 brothers, and approximately 30,000 children in its schools. This was approximately 1 child in every 175 of school age of the population of France at that time. While relatively small in numbers, their schools represented the best attempt to provide elementary education in any Catholic country before well into the nineteenth century. The distribution of their schools throughout France, by 1792, is shown on the map above. In 1803 the Order was reëstablished, by 1838 it had schools in 282 communities, and in 1887, when La Salle was declared a Saint of the Church, it had 1898 communities on four continents, 109 of which were in the United States, and was teaching a total of approximately 300,000 primary children.
5. General Results of the Reformation on Education
DESTRUCTION AND CREATION OF SCHOOLS. Any such general overturning of the established institutions and traditions of a thousand years as occurred at the time of the Protestant Revolts, with the accompanying bitter hatreds and religious strife, could not help but result in extensive destruction of established institutions. Monasteries, churches, and schools alike suffered, and it required time to replace them. Even though they had been neglectful of their functions, inadequate in number, and unsuited to the needs of a world fast becoming modern, they had nevertheless answered partially the need of the times. In all the countries where revolts took place these institutions suffered more or less, but in England probably most of all. The old schools which were not destroyed were transformed into Protestant schools, the grammar schools to train scholars and leaders, and the parish schools into Protestant elementary schools to teach reading and the Catechism, but the number of the latter, in all Protestant lands, was very far short of the number needed to carry out the Protestant religious theory. This, as we have seen, proposed to extend the elements of an education to large and entirely new classes of people who never before in the history of the world had had such advantages. Out of the Protestant religious conception that all should be educated the popular elementary school of modern times has been evolved. The evolution, though, was slow, and long periods of time have been required for its accomplishment.
In place of the schools destroyed, or the teachers driven out if no destruction took place, the reformers made an earnest effort to create new schools and supply teachers. This, though, required time, especially as there was as yet in the world no body of vernacular teachers, no institutions in which such could be trained, no theory as to education except the religious, no supply of educated men or women from which to draw, no theory of state support and control, and no source of taxation from which to derive a steady flow of funds. Throughout the long Middle Ages the Church had supplied gratuitous or nearly gratuitous instruction. This it could do, to the limited number whom it taught, from the proceeds of its age-old endowments and educational foundations. In the process of transformation from a Catholic to a Protestant State, and especially during the more than a century of turmoil and religious strife which followed the rupture of the old relations, many of the old endowments were lost or were diverted from their original purposes. As the Protestant reformers were supported generally by the ruling princes, many of these tried to remedy the deficiency by ordering schools established. The landed nobility though, unused to providing education for their villein tenants and serfs, were averse to supplying the deficiency by any form of general taxation. Nor were the rising merchant classes in the cities any more anxious to pay taxes to provide for artisans and servants what had for ages been a gratuity or not furnished at all.
NO REAL DEMAND OF ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS. The creation of a largely new type of schools, and in sufficient numbers to meet the needs of large classes of people who before had never shared in the advantages of education, in consequence proved to be a work of centuries. The century of warfare which followed the reformation movement more or less exhausted all Europe, while the Thirty Years' War which formed its culmination left the German States, where the largest early educational progress had been made, a ruin. In consequence there was for long little money for school support, and religious interest and church tithes had to be depended on almost entirely for the establishment and support of schools. Out of the parish sextons or clerks a supply of vernacular teachers had to be evolved, a system of school organization and supervision worked out and added to the duties of the minister, and the feeling of need for education awakened sufficiently to make people willing to support schools. In consequence what Luther and Calvin declared at the beginning of the sixteenth century to be a necessity for the State and the common right of all, it took until well into the nineteenth century actually to create and make a reality.
The great demand of the time, too, was not so much for the education of the masses, however desirable or even necessary this might be from the standpoint of Protestant religious theory, but for the training of leaders for the new religious and social order which the Revival of Learning, the rise of modern nationalities, and the Reformation movements had brought into being. For this secondary schools for boys, largely Latin in type, were demanded rather than elementary vernacular schools for both sexes. We accordingly find the great creations of the period were secondary schools.
LINES OF FUTURE DEVELOPMENT ESTABLISHED. Still more, certain lines of future development now became clearly established. The drawing given here will help to make this evident. It will be seen from this that not only was the secondary school still the dominant type, though elementary schools began for the first time to be considered as important also, but that the secondary schools were wholly independent of the elementary schools which now began to be created. The elementary schools were in the vernacular and for the masses; the secondary schools were in the Latin tongue and for the training of the scholarly leaders. Between these two schools, so different in type and in clientèle, there was little in common. This difference was further emphasized with time. The elementary schools later on added subjects of use to the common people, while the secondary schools added subjects of use for scholarly preparation or for university entrance. The secondary schools also frequently provided preparatory schools for their particular classes of children. As a result, all through Europe two school systems--an elementary-school system for the masses, and a secondary-school system for the classes--exist to-day side by side. We in America did not develop such a class school system, though we started that way. This was because the conception of education we finally developed was a product of a new democratic spirit, as will be explained later on.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Compare the attention to careful religious instruction in the secondary schools provided by the Lutherans, Calvinists, and English. What analogous instruction do we provide in the American high schools? Is it as thorough or as well done?
2. Compare the scope and ideals of the educational system provided by the Calvinists with the same for the Lutherans and Anglicans.
3. Compare the characteristics of Calvinistic (Huguenot) education, as summarized by Foster, with present-day state educational purposes.
4. Just what kind of a school system did Knox propose (1560) for Scotland?
5. Show how the educational program of the Jesuits reveals Ignatius Loyola as a man of vision.
6. Viewed from the purposes the Order had in mind, was it warranted in neglecting the education of the masses?
7. Does the success of the Order show the importance to society of finding and educating the future leader? Can all men be trained for leadership?
8. What does the statement that the Jesuits were "too practical to make many changes," but had "a keen eye for what was best" in the work of others, indicate as to the nature of school administration and educational progress?
9. Indicate the advantages which the Jesuits had in their teachers and teaching-aim over us of to-day. How could we develop an aim as clearly defined and potent as theirs? Could we select teachers with such care? How?
10. Compare the religious and educational propaganda of the Jesuits with the recent political propaganda of the Germans.
11. What is meant by the statement that the Jesuit teaching method, like that of the modern German Volksschule, was a teaching and not a questioning method?
12. Compare present American standards for teacher-training for elementary and secondary teaching with those required by the Jesuits:--(a) as to length of preparation; (b) as to nature and scope of preparation.
13. How do you explain the introduction of sewing into the elementary vernacular Catholic schools for girls, so long before handiwork for boys was thought of?
14. In schools so formally organized as those of La Salle, how do you explain the great freedom allowed in questioning on arithmetic and the Catechism?
15. Why should La Salle's work have been so opposed by both Church and civil authorities? Do you consider that his Order ever made what would be called rapid progress?
16. Why must the education of leaders always precede the education of the masses?
17. Explain how European countries came naturally to have two largely independent school systems--a secondary school for leaders and an elementary school for the masses--whereas we have only one continuous system.
18. Explain why modern state systems of education developed first in the German States, and why England and the Catholic nations of Europe were so long in developing state school systems.
SELECTED READINGS
In the accompanying Book of Readings the following selections are reproduced:
175. Woodward: Course of Study at the College of Geneva. 176. Synod of Dort: Scheme of Christian Education adopted. 177. Kilpatrick: Work of the Dutch in developing Schools. 178. Kilpatrick: Character of the Dutch Schools of 1650. 179. Statutes: The Scotch School Law of 1646. 180. Pachtler: The Ratio Studiorum of the Jesuits. 181. Gérard: The Dominant Religious Purpose in the Education of French Girls. 182. La Salle: Rules for the "Brothers of the Christian Schools."
QUESTIONS ON THE READINGS
1. Was the College at Geneva (175) a true humanistic-revival school?
2. Just what did the Synod of Dort provide for (176) in the matter of schools, school supervision, and ministerial duties?
3. Compare the work of the Dutch (177) and the Lutherans (159-163) in creating schools.
4. Just what type of school is indicated by selection 178?
5. Just what did the Scotch law of 1646 provide for (179)?
6. Characterize the schools provided for by La Salle (182).
7. Compare the religious care at Port Royal (181) with that suggested by Saint Jerome (R. 45).
SUPPLEMENTARY REFERENCES
Baird, C. W. History of the Rise of the Huguenots of France. Baird, C. W. Huguenot Emigration to America. Grant, Jas. History of the Burgh Schools of Scotland. Hughes, Thos. Loyola, and the Educational System of the Jesuits. Kilpatrick, Wm. H. _The Dutch Schools of New Netherlands and Colonial New York_. Laurie, S. S. _History of Educational Opinion since the Renaissance_. Ravelet, A. Blessed J. B. de la Salle. Schwickerath, R. _Jesuit Education; its History and Principles in the Light of Modern Educational Problems_. Woodward, W. H. Education during the Renaissance.
XV. EDUCATIONAL RESULTS OF THE PROTESTANT REVOLTS
III. THE REFORMATION AND AMERICAN EDUCATION
THE PROTESTANT SETTLEMENT OF AMERICA. Columbus had discovered the new world just twenty-five years before Luther nailed his theses to the church door at Wittenberg, and by the time the northern continent had been roughly explored and was ready for settlement, Europe was in the midst of a century of warfare in a vain attempt to extirpate the Protestant heresy. By the time that the futility of fire and sword as means for religious conversion had finally dawned upon Christian Europe and found expression in the Peace of Westphalia (1648), which closed the terrible Thirty Years' War (p. 301), the first permanent settlements in a number of the American colonies had been made. These settlements, and the beginnings of education in America, are so closely tied up with the Protestant Revolts in Europe that a chapter on the beginnings of American education belongs here as still another phase of the educational results of the Protestant Revolts.
Practically all the early settlers in America came from among the peoples and from those lands which had embraced some form of the Protestant faith, and many of them came to America to found new homes and establish their churches in the wilderness, because here they could enjoy a religious freedom impossible in their old home-lands. This was especially true of the French Huguenots, many of whom, after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes [1] (1685), fled to America and settled along the coast of the Carolinas; the Calvinistic Dutch and Walloons, who settled in and about New Amsterdam; the Scotch and Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, who settled in New Jersey, and later extended along the Allegheny Mountain ridges into all the southern colonies; the English Quakers about Philadelphia, who came under the leadership of William Penn, and a few English Baptists and Methodists in eastern Pennsylvania; the Swedish Lutherans, along the Delaware; the German Lutherans, Moravians, Mennonites, Dunkers, and Reformed-Church Germans, who settled in large numbers in the mountain valleys of Pennsylvania; and the Calvinistic dissenters from the English National Church, known as Puritans, who settled the New England colonies, and who, more than any others, gave direction to the future development of education in the American States. Very many of these early religious groups came to America in little congregations, bringing their ministers with them. Each set up, in the colony in which it settled, what were virtually little religious republics, that through them they might the better perpetuate the religious principles for which they had left the land of their birth. Education of the young for membership in the Church, and the perpetuation of a learned ministry for the congregations, from the first elicited the serious attention of these pioneer settlers.
Englishmen who were adherents of the English national faith (Anglicans) also settled in Virginia and the other southern colonies, and later in New York and New Jersey, while Maryland was founded as the only Catholic colony, in what is now the United States, by a group of persecuted English Catholics who obtained a charter from Charles I, in 1632. These settlements are shown on the map on the following page. As a result of these settlements there was laid, during the early colonial period of American history, the foundation of those type attitudes toward education which subsequently so materially shaped the educational development of the different American States during the early part of our national history.
THE PURITANS IN NEW ENGLAND. Of all those who came to America during this early period, the Calvinistic Puritans who settled the New England colonies contributed most that was valuable to the future educational development of America, and because of this will be considered first.
The original reformation in England, as was stated in chapters XII and XIII, had been much more nominal than real. The English Bible and the English Prayer-Book had been issued to the churches (R. 170), and the King instead of the Pope had been declared by the Act of Supremacy (R. 153) to be the head of the English National Church. The same priests, though, had continued in the churches under the new régime, and the church service had not greatly changed aside from its transformation from Latin into English. Neither the Church as an organization nor its members experienced any great religious reformation. Not all Englishmen, though, took the change in allegiance so lightly (R. 183), and in consequence there came to be a gradually increasing number who desired a more fundamental reform of the English Church. By 1600 the demand for Church reform had become very insistent, and the question of Church purification (whence the name "Puritans") had become a burning question in England.
The English Puritans, moreover, were of two classes. One was a moderate but influential "low-church" group within the "high" State Church, possessed of no desire to separate Church and State, but earnestly insistent on a simplification of the Church ceremonial, the elimination of a number of the vestiges of the old Romish-Church ritual, and particularly the introduction of more preaching into the service. The other class constituted a much more radical group, and had become deeply imbued with Calvinistic thinking. This group gradually came into open opposition to any State Church, stood for the local independence of the different churches or congregations, and desired the complete elimination of all vestiges of the Romish faith from the church services. [2] They became known as Independents, or Separatists, and formed the germs of the later Congregational groups of early New England. Both Elizabeth (1558-1603) and James I (1603-25) savagely persecuted this more radical group, and many of their congregations were forced to flee from England to obtain personal safety and to enjoy religious liberty (R. 184). One of these fugitive congregations, from Scrooby, in north-central England, after living for several years at Leyden, in Holland, finally set sail for America, landed on Plymouth Rock, in 1620, and began the settlement of that "bleak and stormy coast." Other congregations soon followed, it having been estimated that twenty thousand English Puritans migrated [3] to the New England wilderness before 1640. These represented a fairly well-to-do type of middle-class Englishmen, practically all of whom had had good educational advantages at home.
Settling along the coast in little groups or congregations, they at once set up a combined civil and religious form of government, modeled in a way after Calvin's City-State at Geneva, and which became known as a New England town. [4] In time the southern portion of the coast of New England was dotted with little self-governing settlements of those who had come to America to obtain for themselves that religious freedom which had been denied them at home. These settlements were loosely bound together in a colony federation, in which each town was represented in a General Court, or legislature. The extent of these settlements by 1660 is shown on the map on the opposite page.
BEGINNINGS OF SCHOOLS IN NEW ENGLAND. Having come to America to secure religious freedom, it was but natural that the perpetuation of their particular faith by means of education should have been one of the first matters to engage their attention, after the building of their homes and the setting up of the civil government (R. 185). Being deeply imbued with Calvinistic ideas as to government and religion, they desired to found here a religious commonwealth, somewhat after the model of Geneva (p. 298), or Scotland (p. 335), or the Dutch provinces (p. 334), the corner- stones of which should be religion and education.
At first, English precedents were followed. Home instruction, which was quite common in England among the Puritans, was naturally much employed to teach the children to read the Bible and to train them to participate in both the family and the congregational worship. After 1647, town elementary schools under a master, and later the English "dame schools" (chapter XVIII), were established to provide this rudimentary instruction. The English apprentice system was also established (R. 201), and the masters of apprentices gave similar instruction to boys entrusted to their care. The town religious governments, under which all the little congregations organized themselves, much as the little religious parishes had been organized in old England, also began the voluntary establishment of town grammar schools, as a few towns in England had done (R. 143) before the Puritans migrated. The "Latin School" at Boston dates from 1635, and has had a continuous existence since that time. The grammar school at Charlestown dates from 1636, that at Ipswich from the same year, and the school at Salem from 1637. In 1639 Dorchester voted:
that there shall be a rent of 20 lb a year for ever imposed upon Tomsons Island ... toward the mayntenance of a schoole in Dorchester. This rent of 20 lb yearly to bee payd to such a schoole-master as shall vndertake to teach english, latine, and other tongues, and also writing. The said schoole-master to bee chosen from tyme to tyme p'r the freemen.
Newbury, in 1639, voted "foure akers of upland" and "sixe akers of salt marsh" to Anthony Somerby "for his encouragement to keepe schoole for one yeare," and later levied a town rate of £24 for a "schoole to be kepte at the meeting house." Cambridge also early established a Latin grammar school "for the training up of Young Schollars, and fitting them [5] for Academicall Learning" (R. 185).
The support for the town schools thus founded was derived from various sources, such as the levying of tuition fees, the income from town lands or fisheries set aside for the purpose, [6] voluntary contributions from the people of the town, [7] a town tax, or a combination of two or more of these methods. The founding of the "free (grammar) school" at Roxburie, in 1645, is representative (R. 188) of the early methods. There was no uniform plan as yet, in either old or New England.
FOUNDING OF HARVARD COLLEGE. In addition to establishing Latin grammar schools, a college was founded, in 1636, by the General Court (legislature) of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, to perpetuate learning and insure an educated ministry (R. 185) to the churches after "our present ministers shall lie in the dust." This new college, located at Newtowne, was modeled after Emmanuel College at Cambridge, an English Puritan college in which many of the early New England colonists had studied, [8] and in loving memory of which they rechristened Newtowne as Cambridge. In 1639 the college was christened Harvard College, after a graduate of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, by the name of John Harvard, who died in Charlestown, a year after his arrival in the colony, and who left the college his library of two hundred and sixty volumes and half his property, about £850.
The instruction in the new college was a combination of the arts and theological instruction given in a mediaeval university, though at Harvard the President, Master Dunster (R. 185), did all the teaching. For the first fifty years at Harvard this continued to be true, the attendance during that time seldom exceeding twenty. The entrance requirements for the college (R. 186 a) call for the completion of a typical English Latin grammar-school education; the rules and precepts for the government of the college (R. 186 b) reveal the deep religious motive; and the schedule of studies (R. 186 c) and the requirements for degrees (R. 186 d) both show that the instruction was true to the European type. In the charter for the college, granted by the colonial legislature in 1650 (R. 187 a), we find exemptions and conditions which remind one strongly of the older European foundations. A century later Brown College, in Rhode Island, was granted even more extensive exemptions (R. 187 b).
THE FIRST COLONIAL LEGISLATION: THE LAW OF 1642. We thus see manifested early in New England the deep Puritan-Calvinistic zeal for learning as a bulwark of Church and State. We also see the establishment in the wilderness of New England of a typical English educational system--that is, private instruction in reading and religion by the parents in the home and by the masters of apprentices, and later by a town schoolmaster; the Latin grammar school in the larger towns, to prepare boys for the college of the colony; and an English-type college to prepare them for the ministry. As in England, too, all was clearly subordinate to the Church. Still further, as in England also, the system was voluntary, the deep religious interest which had brought the congregations to America being depended upon to insure for all the necessary education and religious training.
It early became evident, though, that these voluntary efforts on the part of the people and the towns would not be sufficient to insure that general education which was required by the Puritan religious theory. Under the hard pioneer conditions, and the suffering which ensued, many parents and masters of apprentices evidently proved neglectful of their educational duties. Accordingly the Church appealed to its servant, the State, as represented in the colonial legislature (General Court) to assist it in compelling parents and masters to observe their religious obligations. The result was the famous Massachusetts Law of 1642 (R. 190), which directed "the chosen men" (Selectmen; Councilmen) of each town to ascertain, from time to time, if the parents and masters were attending to their educational duties; if the children were being trained "in learning and labor and other employments ... profitable to the Commonwealth"; and if children were being taught "to read and understand the principles of religion and the capital laws of the country," and empowered them to impose fines on "those who refuse to render such accounts to them when required." In 1645 the General Court further ordered that all youth between ten and sixteen years of age should also receive instruction "in ye exercise of arms, as small guns, halfe pikes, bowes & arrows, &c."
The Law of 1642 is remarkable in that, for the first time in the English- speaking world, a legislative body representing the State ordered that all children should be taught to read. The law shows clearly not only the influence of the Reformation theory as to personal salvation and the Calvinistic conception of the connection between learning and religion, but also the influence of the English Poor-Law legislation which had developed rapidly during the half-century immediately preceding the coming of the Puritans to America (R. 173). On the foundations of the English Poor Law of 1601 (R. 174) our New England settlers moulded the first American law relating to education, adding to the principles there established (p. 326) a distinct Calvinistic contribution to our new-world life that, the authorities of the civil town should see that all children were taught "to read and understand the principles of religion and the capital laws of the country." This law the Selectmen, or the courts if they failed to do so, were ordered to enforce, and the courts usually looked after their duties in the matter (R. 192).
The Law of 1647. The Law of 1642, while ordering "the chosen men" of each town to see that the education and training of children was not neglected, and providing for fines on parents and masters who failed to render accounts when required, did not, however, establish schools, or direct the employment of schoolmasters. The provision of education, after the English fashion, was still left with the homes. After a trial of five years, the results of which were not satisfactory, the General Court enacted another law by means of which it has been asserted that "the Puritan government of Massachusetts rendered probably its greatest service to the future."
After recounting in a preamble (R. 191) that it had in the past been "one cheife proiect of y't ould deluder, Satan, to keepe men from the knowledge of y'e Scriptures, ... by keeping y'm in an unknowne tongue," so now "by pswading from y'e use of tongues," and "obscuring y'e true sence & meaning of y'e originall" by "false glosses of saint-seeming deceivers," learning was in danger of being "buried in y'e grave of o'r fath'rs in y'e church and comonwealth"; the Court ordered:
1. That every town having fifty householders should at once appoint a teacher of reading and writing, and provide for his wages in such manner as the town might determine; and
2. That every town having one hundred householders must provide a grammar school to fit youths for the university, under a penalty of £5 (afterwards increased to £20) for failure to do so.
This law represents a distinct step in advance over the Law of 1642, and for this there are no English precedents. It was not until the latter part of the nineteenth century that England took such a step. The precedents for the compulsory establishment of schools lie rather in the practices of the different German States (p. 318), the actions of the Dutch synods (R. 176) and provinces (p. 335), the Acts of the Scottish parliament of 1633 and 1646 (p. 334; R. 179), and the general Calvinistic principle that education was an important function of a religious State.
PRINCIPLES ESTABLISHED. The State here, acting again as the servant of the Church, enacted a law and fixed a tradition which prevailed and grew in strength and effectiveness after State and Church had parted company. Not only was a school system ordered established--elementary for all towns and children, and secondary for youths in the larger towns--but, for the first time among English-speaking people, there was an assertion of the right of the State to require communities to establish and maintain schools, under penalty if they refused to do so. It can be safely asserted, in the light of later developments, that the two laws of 1642 and 1647 represent the foundations upon which our American state public-school systems have been built. Mr. Martin, the historian of the Massachusetts public-school system, states the fundamental principles which underlay this legislation, as follows: [9]
1. The universal education of youth is essential to the well-being of the State.
2. The obligation to furnish this education rests primarily upon the parent.
3. The State has a right to enforce this obligation.
4. The State may fix a standard which shall determine the kind of education, and the minimum amount.
5. Public money, raised by general tax, may be used to provide such education as the State requires. The tax may be general, though the school attendance is not.
6. Education higher than the rudiments may be supplied by the State. Opportunity must be provided, at public expense, for youths who wish to be fitted for the university.
"It is important to note here," adds Mr. Martin, "that the idea underlying all this legislation is neither paternalistic nor socialistic. The child is to be educated, not to advance his personal interests, but because the State will suffer if he is not educated. The State does not provide schools to relieve the parent, nor because it can educate better than the parent can, but because it can thereby better enforce the obligation which it imposes." To prevent a return to the former state of religious ignorance it was important that education be provided. To assure this the colonial legislature enacted a law requiring the maintenance and support of schools by the towns. This law became the corner-stone of our American state school systems.
Influence on other New England colonies. Connecticut Colony, in its Law of 1650 establishing a school system, combined the spirit of the Massachusetts Law of 1642, though stated in different words (R. 193), and the Law of 1647, stated word for word. New Haven Colony, in 1655, ordered that children and apprentices should be taught to read, as had been done in Massachusetts, in 1642, but on the union of New Haven and Connecticut Colonies, in 1665, the Connecticut Code became the law for the united colonies. In 1702 a college was founded (Yale) and finally located at New Haven, to offer preparation for the ministry in the Connecticut colony, as had been done earlier in Massachusetts, and Latin grammar schools were founded in the Connecticut towns to prepare for the new college, as also had been done earlier in Massachusetts. The rules and regulations for the grammar school at New Haven (R. 189) reveal the purpose and describe the instruction provided in one of the earliest and best of these.
Plymouth Colony, in 1658 and again in 1663, proposed to the towns that they "sett vp" a schoolmaster "to traine vp children to reading and writing" (R. 194 a). In 1672 the towns were asked to aid Harvard College by gifts (R. 194 b). In 1673-74 the income from the Cape Cod fisheries was set aside for the support of a (grammar) school (R. 194 c). Finally, in 1677, all towns having over fifty families and maintaining a grammar school were ordered aided from the fishery proceeds (R. 194 d).
The Massachusetts laws also applied to Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, as these were then a part of Massachusetts Colony. After New Hampshire separated, in 1680, the Massachusetts Law of 1647 was virtually readopted in 1719-21. In Maine and Vermont there were so few settlers, until near the beginning of our national life, that the influence of the Massachusetts legislation on these States was negligible until a later period.
Only in Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, of all the New England colonies, did the Massachusetts legislation fail to exert a deep influence. Settled as these two had been by refugees from New England, and organized on a basis of hospitality to all who suffered from religious oppression elsewhere, the religious stimulus to the founding of schools naturally was lacking. As the religious basis for education was as yet the only basis, the first development of schools in Rhode Island awaited the humanitarian and economic influences which did not become operative until early in the nineteenth century.
Outside of the New England colonies, the appeal to the State as the servant of the Church was seldom made during the early colonial period, the churches handling the educational problem in their own way. As a result the beginnings of State oversight and control were left to New England. In the central colonies a series of parochial-school systems came to prevail, while in Episcopalian Virginia and the other colonies to the south the no-business-of-the-State attitude assumed toward education by the mother country was copied.
THE CHURCH SCHOOLS OF NEW YORK. New Netherland, as New York Colony was called before the English occupation, was settled by the Dutch West India Company, and some dozen villages about New York and up the Hudson had been founded by the time it passed to the control of the English, in 1664. In these the Dutch established typical home-land public parochial schools, under the control of the Reformed Dutch Church. The schoolmaster was usually the reader and precentor in the church as well (R. 195), and often acted, as in Holland, as sexton besides. Girls attended on equal terms with boys, but sat apart and recited in separate classes. The instruction consisted of reading and writing Dutch, sometimes a little arithmetic, the Dutch Catechism, the reading of a few religious books, and certain prayers. The rules (1661) for a schoolmaster in New Amsterdam (R. 196), and the contract with a Dutch schoolmaster in Flatbush (R. 195), dating from 1682, reveal the type of schools and school conditions provided. All except the children of the poor paid fees to the schoolmaster. [10] He was licensed by the Dutch church authorities. As the Dutch had not come to America because of persecution, and were in no way out of sympathy with religious conditions in the home-land, the schools they developed here were typical of the Dutch European parochial schools of the time (R. 178). A trivial (Latin) school was also established in New York, in 1652.
After the English occupation the English principle of private and church control of education, with schooling on a tuition or a charitable basis, came to prevail, and this continued up to the beginning of our national period. [11] Of the English colonial schools of New York Draper has written: [12]
All the English schools in the province from 1700 down to the time of the Declaration of Independence were maintained by a great religious society organized under the auspices of the Church of England--and, of course, with the favor of the government--called "The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts." The law governing this Society provided that no teacher should be employed until he had proved "his affection for the present government" and his "conformity to the doctrine and discipline of the Church of England." Schools maintained under such auspices were in no sense free schools. Indeed, humiliating as it is, no student of history can fail to discern the fact that the government of Great Britain, during its supremacy in this territory, did nothing to facilitate the extension or promote the efficiency of free elementary schools among the people.
THE PAROCHIAL SCHOOLS OF PENNSYLVANIA. Pennsylvania was settled by Quakers, Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, German Lutherans, Moravians, Mennonites, and members of the German Reformed Church, all of whom came to America to secure greater religious liberty and had been attracted to this colony by the freedom of religious worship which Penn had provided for there. All these were Protestant sects, all believed in the necessity of learning to read the Bible as a means to personal salvation, and all made efforts looking toward the establishment of schools as a part of their church organization. Unlike New England, though, no sect was in a majority; church control for each denomination was considered as most satisfactory; and no appeal was made to the State to have it assist the churches in the enforcement of their religious purposes. The clergymen were usually the teachers in the parochial schools established, [13] while private pay schools were opened in the villages and towns. These were taught in English, German, or the Moravian tongue (Czech), according to the original language of the different immigrants. The Quakers seem to have taken particular interest in schools (R. 199), a Quaker school in Philadelphia (R. 198) having been established the year the city was founded. Girls were educated as well as boys, and the emphasis was placed on reading, writing, counting, and religion, rather than upon any higher form of training.
The result was the development in this colony of a policy of depending on church and private effort, and the provision of education, aside from certain rudimentary and religious instruction, was left largely for those who could afford to pay for the privilege. Charitable education was extended to but a few, for a short time, while, under the freedom allowed, many communities made but indifferent provisions or suffered their schools to lapse. Under the primitive conditions of the time the interest even in religious education often declined almost to the vanishing point. So lax in the matter of providing schooling had many communities become that the second Provincial Assembly, sitting in Philadelphia, in 1683, passed an ordinance requiring (R. 197) that all persons having children must cause them to be taught to read and write, so that they might be able to read the Scriptures by the time they were twelve years old, and also that all children be taught some useful trade. A fine of £5 was to be assessed for failure to comply with the law. So much in advance of English ideas as to what was fitting and proper was this compulsory law that it was vetoed by William and Mary, when submitted to their majesties for approval. Ten years later it was reënacted by the Governor and Assembly of the colony, but proved so difficult of enforcement that it was soon dropped, and the chance of starting education in Pennsylvania somewhat after the New England model was lost. The colony now settled down to a policy of non state action, and this in time became so firmly established that the do- as-you-please idea persisted in this State up to the establishment of the first free state school system, in 1834.
MIXED CONDITIONS IN NEW JERSEY. In New Jersey, situated as it was near the center of the different colonies, the early development of education there was the product of a number of different influences. The Dutch crossed from New Amsterdam, the English came from Connecticut and later from New York, Scotch and Scotch-Irish Presbyterians came from the mother country, Swedish Lutherans settled along the Delaware, and Quakers and German Lutherans came over from Pennsylvania. The educational practice of the colony or land from which each group of settlers came was reproduced in the colony. After the English succeeded the Dutch in New Amsterdam (1664), English methods and practice in education gradually came into control throughout most of New Jersey, and as a result here, as in New York, but little was accomplished in providing schools for other than a select few until well after the beginning of the nineteenth century. Neither New Jersey, New York, nor Pennsylvania may be said to have developed any colonial educational policy aside from that of allowing private and parochial effort to provide such schools as seemed desirable.
VIRGINIA AND THE SOUTHERN TYPE. Almost all the conditions attending the settlement of Virginia were in contrast to those of the New England colonies. The early settlers were from the same class of English yeomen and country squires, but with the important difference that whereas the New England settlers were Dissenters from the Church of England and had come to America to obtain freedom in religious worship, the settlers in Virginia were adherents of the National Church and had come to America for gain. The marked differences in climate and possible crops led to the large plantation type of settlement, instead of the compact little New England town; the introduction of large numbers of "indentured white servants," and later negro slaves, led to the development of classes in society instead of to the New England type of democracy; and the lack of a strong religious motive for education naturally led to the adoption of the customary English practices instead of to the development of colonial schools. The tutor in the home, education in small private pay schools, or education in the mother country were the prevailing methods adopted among the well-to-do planters, while the poorer classes were left with only such advantages as apprenticeship training or charity schools might provide. Throughout the entire colonial period Virginia remained most like the mother country in spirit and practice, and stands among the colonies as the clearest example of the English attitude toward school support and control. As in the mother country, education was considered to be no business of the State. Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and the Carolinas followed the English attitude, much after the fashion of Virginia.
Practically all the Virginia colonial legislation relating to education refers either to William and Mary College (founded in 1693), or to the education of orphans and the children of the poor. Both these interests, as we have previously seen, were typically English. All the seventeenth- century legislation relating to education is based on the English Poor-Law legislation, [14] previously described (p. 325), and included the compulsory apprenticeship of the children of the poor, training in a trade, the requirement that the public authorities must provide opportunities for this type of education, and the use of both local and colony funds for the purpose (R. 200 a), all, as the Statutes state, "according to the aforesaid laudable custom in the Kingdom of England." It was not until 1705 that Virginia reached the point, reached by Massachusetts in 1642, of requiring that "the master of the [apprenticed] orphan shall be obliged to teach him to read and write." In all the Anglican colonies the apprenticing of the children of the poor (see R. 200 b for some interesting North Carolina records) was a characteristic feature. During the entire colonial period the indifference of the mother country to general education was steadily reflected in Virginia and in the colonies which were essentially Anglican in religion, and followed the English example.
TYPE PLANS REPRESENTED BY 1750. The seventeenth century thus witnessed the transplanting of European ideas as to government, religion, and education to the new American colonies, and by the eighteenth century we find three clearly marked types of educational practice or conception as to educational responsibility established on American soil.
The first was the strong Calvinistic conception of a religious State, supporting a system of common vernacular schools, higher Latin schools, and a college, for both religious and civic ends. This type dominated New England, and is best represented by Massachusetts. From New England this attitude was carried westward by the migrations of New England people, and deeply influenced the educational development of all States to which the New Englander went in any large numbers. This was the educational contribution of Calvinism to America. [15] Out of it our state school systems of to-day, by the separation of Church and State, have been evolved.
The second was the parochial-school conception of the Dutch, Moravians, Mennonites, German Lutherans, German Reformed Church, Quakers, Presbyterians, Baptists, and Catholics. This type is best represented by Protestant Pennsylvania and Catholic Maryland. It stood for church control of all educational efforts, resented state interference, was dominated only by church purposes, and in time came to be a serious obstacle in the way of rational state school organization and control.
The third type, into which the second type tended to fuse, conceived of public education, aside from collegiate education, as intended chiefly for orphans and the children of the poor, and as a charity which the State was under little or no obligation to assist in supporting. All children of the upper and middle classes in society attended private or church schools, or were taught by tutors in their homes, and for such instruction paid a proper tuition fee. Paupers and orphans, in limited numbers and for a limited time, might be provided with some form of useful education at the expense of either Church or State. This type is best represented by Anglican Virginia, which typified well the laissez-faire policy which dominated England from the time of the Protestant Reformation until the latter half of the nineteenth century.
These three types of attitude toward the provision of education became fixed American types, and each deeply influenced subsequent American educational development, as we shall point out in a later chapter.
DOMINANCE OF THE RELIGIOUS MOTIVE. The seventeenth century was essentially a period of the transplanting, almost unchanged in form, of the characteristic European institutions, manners, religious attitudes, and forms of government to American shores. Each sect or nationality on arriving set up in the new land the characteristic forms of church and school and social observances known in the old home-land. Dutch, Germans, English, Scotch, Calvinists, Lutherans, Anglicans, Presbyterians-- reproduced in the American colonies the main type of schools existing at the time of their migration in the mother land from which they came. They were also dominated by the same deep religious purpose.
The dominance of this religious purpose in all instruction is well illustrated by the great beginning-school book of the time, The New England Primer. A digest of the contents of this, with a few pages reproduced, is given in R. 202. This book, from which all children learned to read, was used by Dissenters and Lutherans alike in the American colonies. This book Ford well characterizes in the following words:
As one glances over what may truly be called "The Little Bible of New England," and reads its stern lessons, the Puritan mood is caught with absolute faithfulness. Here was no easy road to knowledge and salvation; but with prose as bare of beauty as the whitewash of their churches, with poetry as rough and stern as their storm-torn coast, with pictures as crude and unfinished as their own glacial-smoothed boulders, between stiff oak covers which symbolized the contents, the children were tutored, until, from being unregenerate, and as Jonathan Edwards said, "young vipers, and infinitely more hateful than vipers" to God, they attained that happy state when, as expressed by Judge Sewell's child, they were afraid that they "should goe to hell," and were "stirred up dreadfully to seek God." God was made sterner and more cruel than any living judge, that all might be brought to realize how slight a chance even the least erring had of escaping eternal damnation.
One learned to read chiefly that one might be able to read the Catechism and the Bible, and to know the will of the Heavenly Father. There was scarcely any other purpose in the maintenance of elementary schools. In the grammar schools and the colleges students were "instructed to consider well the main end of life and studies." These institutions existed mainly to insure a supply of learned ministers for service in Church and State. Such studies as history, geography, science, music, drawing, secular literature, and organized play were unknown. Children were constantly surrounded, week days and Sundays, by the somber Calvinistic religious atmosphere in New England, [16] and by the careful religious oversight of the pastors and elders in the colonies where the parochial-school system was the ruling plan for education. Schoolmasters were required to "catechise their scholars in the principles of the Christian religion," and it was made "a chief part of the schoolmaster's religious care to commend his scholars and his labors amongst them unto God by prayer morning and evening, taking care that his scholars do reverently attend during the same." Religious matter constituted the only reading matter, outside the instruction in Latin in the grammar schools. The Catechism was taught, and the Bible was read and expounded. Church attendance was required, and grammar-school pupils were obliged to report each week on the Sunday sermon. This insistence on the religious element was more prominent in Calvinistic New England than in the colonies to the south, but everywhere the religious purpose was dominant. The church parochial and charity schools were essentially schools for instilling the church practices and beliefs of the church maintaining them. This state of affairs continued until well toward the beginning of the nineteenth century.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Compare the conservative and radical groups in the English purification movement with the conservative and radical groups, as typified by Erasmus and Luther, at the time of the Reformation.
2. Show how, for each group, the schools established were merely homeland foreign-type religious schools, with nothing distinctively American about them.
3. Show why such copying of home-land types, even to the Latin grammar school, was perfectly natural.
4. The provision of the Law of 1642 requiring instruction in "the capital laws of the country" was new. How do you explain this addition to mother- land practices?
5. Show why the Law of 1642 was Calvinistic rather than Anglican in its origin.
6. Explain the meaning of the preamble to the Law of 1647.
7. Show how the Law of 1647 must go back for precedents to German, Dutch, and Scotch sources.
8. Apply the six principles stated by Mr. Martin, as embodied in the legislation of 1647, to modern state school practice, and show how we have adopted each in our laws.
9. Show also that the Law of 1647, as well as modern state school laws, is neither paternalistic nor socialistic in essential purpose.
10. Show that, though the mixture of religious sects in Pennsylvania made colonial legislation difficult, still it would have been possible to have enforced the Massachusetts Law of 1642, or the Pennsylvania laws of 1683 or 1693, in the colony. How do you explain the opposition and failure to do so?
11. Show how the charity schools for the poor, and church missionary- society schools, were the natural outcome of the English attitude toward elementary education.
12. Which of the three type plans in the American colonies by 1750 most influenced educational development in your State?
13. State the important contribution of Calvinism to our new-world life.
14. Explain the indifference of the Anglican Church to general education during the whole of our colonial period.
15. Explain what is meant by "The Puritan Church applied to its servant, the State," etc.
SELECTED READINGS
In the accompanying Book of Readings the following selections are reproduced:
183. Nichols: The Puritan Attitude. 184. Gov. Bradford: The Puritans leave England. 185. First Fruits: The Founding of Harvard College. 186. First Fruits: The First Rules for Harvard College. (a) Entrance Requirements. (b) Rules and Precepts. (c) Time and Order of Studies. (d) Requirements for Degrees. 187. College Charters: Extracts from, showing Privileges. (a) Harvard College, 1650. (b) Brown College, 1764. 188. Dillaway: Founding of the Free School at Roxburie. 189. Baird: Rules and Regulations for Hopkins Grammar School. 190. Statutes: The Massachusetts Law of 1642. 191. Statutes: The Massachusetts Law of 1647. 192. Court Records: Presentment of Topsfield for Violating the Law of 1642. 193. Statutes: The Connecticut Law of 1650. 194. Statutes: Plymouth Colony Legislation. 195. Flatbush: Contract with a Dutch Schoolmaster. 196. New Amsterdam: Rules for a Schoolmaster in. 197. Statutes: The Pennsylvania. Law of 1683. 198. Minutes of Council: The First School in Philadelphia. 199. Murray: Early Quaker Injunctions regarding Schools. 200. Statutes: Apprenticeship Laws in the Southern Colonies. (a) Virginia Statutes. (b) North Carolina Court Records. 201. Stiles: A New England Indenture of Apprenticeship. 202. The New England Primer: Description and Digest.
QUESTIONS ON THE READINGS
1. What does the selection on The Puritan Attitude (183) reveal as to the extent and depth of the Reformation in England?
2. Characterize the feelings and emotions and desires of the Puritans, as expressed in the extract (184) from Governor Bradford's narrative.
3. Characterize the spirit behind the founding of Harvard College, as expressed in the extract from New England's First Fruits (185).
4. What was the nature and purpose of the Harvard College instruction as shown by the selection 186 a-d?
5. Point out the similarity between the exemptions granted to Harvard College by the Legislature of the colony (187 a) and those granted to mediaeval universities (103-105). Compare the privileges granted Brown (187 b) and those contained in 104.
6. Compare the founding of the Free School at Roxbury (188) with the founding of an English Grammar School (141-43).
7. What does the distribution of scholars at Roxbury (188) show as to the character of the school?
8. State the essentials of the Massachusetts Law of 1642 (190).
9. Compare the Massachusetts Law of 1642 and the English Poor-Law of 1601 (190 with 174) as to fundamental principles involved in each.
10. What does the court citation of Topsfield (192) show?
11. What new principle is added (191) by the Law of 1647, and what does this new law indicate as to needs in the colony for classical learning?
12. Show how the Connecticut Law of 1650 (193) was based on the Massachusetts Law (190) of 1642.
13. What does the Plymouth Colony appeal for Harvard College (194 b) indicate as to community of ideas in early New England?
14. What type of school was it intended to endow from the Cape Cod fisheries (194 c)?
15. What is the difference between the Plymouth requirement as to grammar schools (194 d) and the Massachusetts requirement (191)?
16. Compare the rules for the New Haven Grammar School (189) with those for Colet's London School (138 a-c).
17. Characterize the early Dutch schools as shown by the rules for the schoolmaster (196) and the Flatbush contract (195).
18. Just what type of education did the Quakers mean to provide for, as shown in the extract from their Rules of Discipline (199)?
19. What kind of a school was the first one established in Philadelphia (198)?
20. Compare the proposed Pennsylvania Law of 1683 (197) and the Massachusetts Law of 1642 (190).
21. What conception of education is revealed by the Virginia apprenticeship laws (200 a, 1-3) and the North Carolina court records (200 b, 1-3)?
22. Characterize the New England Indenture of Apprenticeship given in 201.
SUPPLEMENTARY REFERENCES
Boone, R. G. Education in the United States. Brown, S. W. The Secularization of American Education. Cheyney, Edw. P. European Background of American Education. Dexter, E.G. A History of Education in the United States. * Eggleston, Edw. The Transit of Civilization. Fisk, C. R. "The English Parish and Education at the Beginning of American Civilization"; in School Review, vol. 23, pp. 433-49. (September, 1915.) * Ford, P. L. The New England Primer. * Heatwole, C. J. A History of Education in Virginia. Jackson, G. L. _The Development of School Support in Colonial Massachusetts_. * Kilpatrick, Wm. H. _The Dutch Schools of New Netherlands and Colonial New York_. * Knight, E. W. Public School Education in North Carolina. * Martin, Geo. H. _Evolution of the Massachusetts Public School System_. Seybolt, R. F. _Apprenticeship and Apprentice Education in Colonial New York and New England_. * Small, W. H. "The New England Grammar School"; in School Review, vol. 10, pp. 513-31. (September, 1902.) Small, W. H. Early New England Schools.
XVI. THE RISE OF SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY
NEW ATTITUDES AFTER THE ELEVENTH CENTURY. From the beginning of the twelfth century onward, as we have already noted, there had been a slow but gradual change in the character of human thinking, and a slow but certain disintegration of the Mediaeval System, with its repressive attitude toward all independent thinking. Many different influences and movements had contributed to this change--the Moslem learning and civilization in Spain, the recovery of the old legal and medical knowledge, the revival of city life, the beginnings anew of commerce and industry, the evolution of the universities, the rise of a small scholarly class, the new consciousness of nationality, the evolution of the modern languages, the beginnings of a small but important vernacular literature, and the beginnings of travel and exploration following the Crusades--all of which had tended to transform the mediaeval man and change his ways of thinking. New objects of interest slowly came to the front, and new standards of judgment gradually were applied. In consequence the mediaeval man, with his feeling of personal insignificance and lack of self- confidence, came to be replaced by a small but increasing number of men who were conscious of their powers, possessed a new self-confidence, and realized new possibilities of intellectual accomplishment.
The Revival of Learning, first in Italy and then elsewhere in western Europe, was the natural consequence of this awakening of the modern spirit, and in the careful work done by the humanistic scholars of the Italian Renaissance in collecting, comparing, questioning, inferring, criticizing, and editing the texts, and in reconstructing the ancient life and history, we see the beginnings of the modern scientific spirit. It was this same critical, questioning spirit which, when applied later to geographical knowledge, led to the discovery of America and the circumnavigation of the globe; which, when applied to matters of Christian faith, brought on the Protestant Revolts; which, when applied to the problems of the universe, revealed the many wonderful fields of modern science; and which, when applied to government, led to a questioning of the divine right of kings and the rise of constitutional government. The awakening of scientific inquiry and the scientific spirit, and the attempt of a few thinkers to apply the new method to education, to which we now turn, may be regarded as only another phase of the awakening of the modern inquisitive spirit which found expression earlier in the rise of the universities, the recovery and reconstruction of the ancient learning, the awakening of geographical discovery and exploration, and the questioning of the doctrines and practices of the Mediaeval Church.
INSUFFICIENCY OF ANCIENT SCIENCE. From the point of view of scientific inquiry, all ancient learning possessed certain marked fundamental defects. The Greeks had--their time and age in world-civilization considered--made many notable scientific observations and speculations, and had prepared the way for future advances. Thales (636?-546? B.C.), Xenophanes (628?-520? B.C.), Anaximenes (557-504 B.C.), Pythagoras (570- 500 B.C.), Heraclitus (c. 500 B.C.), Empedocles (460?-361? B.C.), and Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) had all made interesting speculations as to the nature of matter, [1] Aristotle finally settling the question by naming the world-elements as earth, water, air, fire, and ether. Hippocrates (460-367? B.C.), as we have seen (p. 197), had observed the sick and had recorded and organized his observations in such a manner [2] as to form the foundations upon which the science of medicine could be established. The Greek physician, Galen (130-200 A.D.) added to these observations, and their combined work formed the basis upon which modern medical science has slowly been built up.
On the other hand, some of what each wrote was mere speculation and error, [3] and modern physicians were compelled to begin all over and along new lines before any real progress in medicine could be made. Aristotle had done a notable work in organizing and codifying Greek scientific knowledge, as the list of his many scientific treatises in use in Europe by 1300 (R. 87) will show, but his writings were the result of a mixture of keen observation and brilliant speculation, contained many inaccuracies, and in time, due to the reverence accorded him as an authority by the mediaeval scholars and the church authorities, proved serious obstacles to real scientific progress.
At Alexandria the most notable Greek scientific work had been done. Euclid (323-283 B.C.) in geometry; Aristarchus (third century B.C.), who explained the motion of the earth; Eratosthenes (270-196 B.C.), who measured the size of the earth; Archimedes (270?-212 B.C.), a pupil of Euclid's, who applied science in many ways and laid the foundations of dynamics; Hipparchus (160-125 B.C.), the father of astronomy, who studied the heavens and catalogued the stars, were among the more famous Greeks who studied and taught there in the days when Alexandria had succeeded Athens as the intellectual capital of the Greek world. Some remarkable advances also were made in the study of human anatomy and medicine by two Greeks, Herophilus (335-280 B.C.) and Erasistratus (d. 280 B.C.), who apparently did much dissecting.
But even at Alexandria the promise of Greek science was unfulfilled. Despite many notable speculations and scientific advances, the hopeful beginnings did not come to any large fruitage, and the great contribution made by the Greeks to world civilization was less along scientific lines than along the lines of literature and philosophy. Their great strength lay in the direction of philosophic speculation, and this tendency to speculate, rather than to observe and test and measure and record, was the fundamental weakness of all Greek science. The Greeks never advanced in scientific work to the invention and perfection of instruments for the standardization of their observations. As a result they passed on to the mediaeval world an extensive "book science" and not a little keen observation, of which the works of Aristotle and the Alexandrian mathematicians and astronomers form the most conspicuous examples, but little scientific knowledge of which the modern world has been able to make much use. The "book science" of the Greeks, and especially that of Aristotle, was highly prized for centuries, but in time, due to the many inaccuracies, had to be discarded and done anew by modern scholars.
The Romans, as we have seen (chapter III), were essentially a practical people, good at getting the work of the world done, but not much given to theoretical discussion or scientific speculation. They were organizers, governors, engineers, executives, and literary workers rather than scientists. They executed many important undertakings of a practical character, such as the building of roads, bridges, aqueducts, and public buildings; organized government and commerce on a large scale; and have left us a literature and a legal system of importance, but they contributed little to the realm of pure science. The three great names in science in all their history are Strabo the geographer (63 B.C.-24 A.D.); Pliny the Elder (23-79 A.D.), who did notable work as an observer in natural history; and Galen (a Roman-Greek), in medicine. They, like the Greeks, were pervaded by the same fear that their science might prove useful, whereas they cultivated it largely as a mental exercise (R. 203).
THE CHRISTIAN REACTION AGAINST INQUIRY. The Christian attitude toward inquiry was from the first inhospitable, and in time became exceedingly intolerant. The tendency of the Western Church, it will be remembered (p. 94), was from the first to reject all Hellenic learning, and to depend upon emotional faith and the enforcement of a moral life. By the close of the third century the hostility to pagan schools and Hellenic learning had become so pronounced that the Apostolic Constitutions (R. 41) ordered Christians to abstain from all heathen books, which could contain nothing of value and only served "to subvert the faith of the unstable." In 401 A.D. the Council of Carthage forbade the clergy to read any heathen author, and Greek learning now rapidly died out in the West. For a time it was almost entirely lost. In consequence Greek science, then best represented by Alexandrian learning, and which contained much that was of great importance, was rejected along with other pagan learning. The, very meager scientific knowledge that persisted into the Middle Ages in the great mediaeval textbooks (p. 162), as we have seen in the study of the Seven Liberal Arts (chapter VII), came to be regarded as useful only in explaining passages of Scripture or in illustrating the ways of God toward man. The one and only science worthy of study was Theology, to which all other learning tended (see Figure 44, p. 154).
The history of Christianity throughout all the Dark Ages is a history of the distrust of inquiry and reason, and the emphasis of blind emotional faith. Mysticism, good and evil spirits, and the interpretation of natural phenomena as manifestations of the Divine will from the first received large emphasis. The worship of saints and relics, and the great development of the sensuous and symbolic, changed the earlier religion into a crude polytheism. During the long period of the Middle Ages the miraculous flourished. The most extreme superstition pervaded all ranks of society. Magic and prayers were employed to heal the sick, restore the crippled, foretell the future, and punish the wicked. Sacred pools, the royal touch, wonder-working images, and miracles through prayer stood in the way of the development of medicine (R. 204). Disease was attributed to satanic influence, and a regular schedule of prayers for cures was in use. Sanitation was unknown. Plagues and pestilences were manifestations of Divine wrath, and hysteria and insanity were possession by the devil to be cast out by whipping and torture. One's future was determined by the position of the heavenly bodies at the time of birth. Eclipses, meteors, and comets were fearful portents of Divine displeasure:
Eight things there be a Comet brings, When it on high doth horrid rage; Wind, Famine, Plague, and Death to Kings, War, Earthquakes, Floods, and Direful Change. [4]
The literature on magic was extensive. The most miraculous happenings were recorded and believed. Trial by ordeal, following careful religious formulae, was common before 1200, though prohibited shortly afterward by papal decrees (1215, 1222). The insistence of the Church on "the willful, devilish character of heresy," and the extension of heresy to cover almost any form of honest doubt or independent inquiry, caused an intellectual stagnation along lines of scientific investigation which was not relieved for more than a thousand years. The many notable advances in physics, chemistry, astronomy, and medicine made by Moslem scholars (chapter VIII) were lost on Christian Europe, and had to be worked out again centuries later by the scholars of the western world. Out of the astronomy of the Arabs the Christians got only astrology; out of their chemistry they got only alchemy. Both in time stood seriously in the way of real scientific thinking and discovery.
GROWING TOLERANCE CHANGED BY THE PROTESTANT REVOLTS. After the rise of the universities, the expansion of the minds of men which followed the Crusades and the revival of trade and industry, the awakening which came with the revival of the old learning and the rise of geographical discovery, the church authorities assumed a broader and a more tolerant attitude toward inquiry and reason than had been the case for hundreds of years. It would have been surprising, with the large number of university- trained men entering the service of the Church, had this not been the case. By the middle of the fifteenth century it looked as though the Renaissance spirit might extend into many new directions, and by 1500 the world seemed on the eve of important progress in almost every line of endeavor. As was pointed out earlier (p. 259), the Church was more tolerant than it had been for centuries, and about the year 1500 was the most stimulating time in the history of our civilization since the days of Alexandria and ancient Rome.
In 1517 Luther nailed his theses to the church door in Wittenberg. The Church took alarm and attempted to crush him, and soon the greatest contest since the conflict between paganism and Christianity was on. Within half a century all northern lands had been lost to the ancient Church (see map, p. 296); the first successful challenge of its authority during its long history.
The effect of these religious revolts on the attitude of the Church toward intellectual liberty was natural and marked. The tolerance of inquiry recently extended was withdrawn, and an era of steadily increasing intolerance set in which was not broken for more than a century. In an effort to stop the further spread of the heresy, the Church Council of Trent (1545-63) adopted stringent regulations against heretical teachings (p. 303), while the sword and torch and imprisonment were resorted to to stamp out opposition and win back the revolting lands. A century of merciless warfare ensued, and the hatreds engendered by the long and bitter struggle over religious differences put both Catholic and Protestant Europe in no tolerant frame of mind toward inquiry or new ideas. The Inquisition, a sort of universal mediaeval grand jury for the detection and punishment of heretics, was revived, and the Jesuits, founded in 1534-40, were vigorous in defense of the Church and bitter in their opposition to all forms of independent inquiry and Protestant heresy.
It was into this post-Reformation atmosphere of suspicion and distrust and hatred that the new critical, inquiring, questioning spirit of science, as applied to the forces of the universe, was born. A century earlier the first scientists might have obtained a respectful hearing, and might have been permitted to press their claims; after the Protestant Revolts had torn Christian Europe asunder this could hardly be. As a result the early scientists found themselves in no enviable position. Their theories were bitterly assailed as savoring of heresy; their methods and purposes were alike suspected; and any challenge of an old long-accepted idea was likely to bring a punishment that was swift and sure. From the middle of the sixteenth to the middle of the seventeenth century was not a time when new ideas were at a premium anywhere in western Europe. It was essentially a period of reaction, and periods of reaction are not favorable to intellectual progress. It was into this century of reaction that modern scientific inquiry and reasoning, itself another form of expression of the intellectual attitudes awakened by the work of the humanistic scholars of the Italian Renaissance, made its first claim for a hearing.
THE BEGINNINGS OF MODERN SCIENTIFIC METHOD. One of the great problems which has always deeply interested thinking men in all lands is the nature and constitution of the material universe, and to this problem people in all stages of civilization have worked out for themselves some kind of an answer. It was one of the great speculations of the Greeks, and it was at Alexandria, in the period of its decadence, that the Egyptian geographer Ptolemy (138 A.D.) had offered an explanation which was accepted by Christian Europe and which dominated all thinking on the subject during the Middle Ages. He had concluded that the earth was located at the center of the visible universe, immovable, and that the heavenly bodies moved around the earth, in circular motion, fixed in crystalline spheres. [5] This explanation accorded perfectly with Christian ideas as to creation, as well as with Christian conceptions as to the position and place of man and his relation to the heavens above and to a hell beneath. This theory was obviously simple and satisfactory, and became sanctified with time. As we see it now the wonder is that such an explanation could have been accepted for so long. Only among an uninquisitive people could so imperfect a theory have endured for over fourteen centuries.
In 1543 a Bohemian church canon and physician by the name of Nicholas Copernicus published his De Revolutionibus Orbium Celestium, in which he set forth the explanation of the universe which we now know. He piously dedicated the work to Pope Paul III, and wisely refrained from publishing it until the year of his death. [6] Anything so completely upsetting the Christian conception as to the place and position of man in the universe could hardly be expected to be accepted, particularly at the time of its publication, without long and bitter opposition.
In the dedicatory letter (R. 205), Copernicus explains how, after feeling that the Ptolemaic explanation was wrong, he came to arrive at the conclusions he did. The steps he set forth form an excellent example of a method of thinking now common, but then almost unknown. They were:
1. Dissatisfaction with the old Ptolemaic explanation.
2. A study of all known literature, to see if any better explanation had been offered.
3. Careful thought on the subject, until his thinking took form in a definite theory.
4. Long observation and testing out, to see if the observed facts would support his theory.
5. The theory held to be correct, because it reduced all known facts to a systematic order and harmony.
This is as clear a case of inductive reasoning as was L. Valla's exposure of the forgery of the so-called "Donation of Constantine," an example of deductive reasoning. Both used a new method--the method of modern scholarship. In both cases the results were revolutionary. As Petrarch stands forth in history as the first modern classical scholar, so Copernicus stands forth as the first modern scientific thinker. The beginnings of all modern scientific investigation date from 1543. Of his work a recent writer (E. C. J. Morton) has said:
Copernicus cannot be said to have flooded with light the dark places of nature--in the way that one stupendous mind subsequently did-- but still, as we look back through the long vista of the history of science, the dim Titanic figure of the old monk seems to rear itself out of the dull flats around it, pierces with its head the mists that overshadow them, and catches the first gleam of the rising sun,...
Like some iron peak, by the Creator Fired with the red glow of the rushing morn.
THE NEW METHOD OF INQUIRY APPLIED BY OTHERS. At first Copernicus' work attracted but little attention. An Italian Dominican by the name of Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), deeply impressed by the new theory, set forth in Latin and Italian the far-reaching and majestic implications of such a theory of creation, and was burned at the stake at Rome for his pains. A Dane, Tycho Brahe, after twenty-one years of careful observation of the heavens, during which time he collected "a magnificent series of observations, far transcending in accuracy [7] and extent anything that had been accomplished by his predecessors," showed Aristotle to be wrong in many particulars. His observations of the comet of 1577 led him to conclude that the theory of crystalline spheres was impossible, and that the common view of the time as to their nature [8] was absurd. In 1609 a German by the name of Johann Kepler (1571-1630), using the records of observations which Tycho Brahe had accumulated and applying them to the planet Mars, proved the truth of the Copernican theory and framed his famous three laws for planetary motion.
Finally an Italian, Galileo Galilei, a professor at the University of Pisa, developing a telescope that would magnify to eight diameters, discovered Jupiter's satellites and Saturn's rings. The story of his discovery of the satellites of Jupiter is another interesting illustration of the careful scientific reasoning of these early workers (R. 206). Galileo also made a number of discoveries in physics, through the use of new scientific methods, which completely upset the teachings of the Aristotelians, and made the most notable advances in mechanics since the days of Archimedes. For his pronounced advocacy of the Copernican theory he was called to Rome (1615) by the Cardinals of the Inquisition, the Copernican theory was condemned as "absurd in philosophy" and as "expressly contrary to Holy Scripture," and Galileo was compelled to recant (1616) his error. [9] For daring later (1632) to assume that he might, under a new Pope, defend the Copernican theory, even in an indirect manner, he was again called before the inquisitorial body, compelled to recant and abjure his errors (R. 207) to escape the stake, and was then virtually made a prisoner of the Inquisition for the remainder of his life. So strongly had the forces of medievalism reasserted themselves after the Protestant Revolts!
Finally the English scholar Newton (1642-1728), in his Principia (1687), settled permanently all discussions as to the Copernican theory by his wonderful mathematical studies. He demonstrated mathematically the motions of the planets and comets, proved Kepler's laws to be true, explained gravitation and the tides, made clear the nature of light, and reduced dynamics to a science. Of his work a recent writer, Karl Pearson, has said:
The Newtonian laws of motion form the starting point of most modern treatises on dynamics, and it seems to me that physical science, thus started, resembles the mighty genius of an Arabian tale emerging amid metaphysical exhalations from the bottle in which for long centuries it had been corked down.
So far-reaching in its importance was the scientific work of Newton that Pope's couplet seems exceedingly applicable:
Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night; God said, "Let Newton be," and all was light.
THE NEW METHOD APPLIED IN OTHER FIELDS. The new method of study was soon applied to other fields by scholars of the new type, here and there, and always with fruitful results. The Englishman, William Gilbert (1540-1603) published, in 1600, his De Arte Magnetica, and laid the foundations of the modern study of electricity and magnetism. A German-Swiss by the name of Hohenheim, but who Latinized his name to Paracelsus (1493-1541), and who became a professor in the medical faculty at the University of Basle, in 1526 broke with mediaeval traditions by being one of the first university scholars to refuse to lecture in Latin. He ridiculed the medical theories of Hippocrates (p. 197) and Galen (p. 198), and, regarding the human body as a chemical compound, began to treat diseases by the administration of chemicals. A Saxon by the name of Landmann, who also Latinized his name to Agricola (1494-1555), applied chemistry to mining and metallurgy, and a French potter named Bernard Palissy (c. 1500- 88) applied chemistry to pottery and the arts. To Paracelsus, Agricola, and Palissy we are indebted for having laid, in the sixteenth century, the foundations of the study of modern chemistry.
A Belgian by the name of Vesalius (1514-64) was the first modern to dissect the human body, and for so doing was sentenced by the Inquisition to perform a penitential journey to Jerusalem. One of his disciples discovered the valves in the veins and was the teacher of the Englishman, William Harvey, who discovered the circulation of the blood and later (1628) dared to publish the fact to the world. These men established the modern studies of anatomy and physiology. Another early worker was a Swiss by the name of Conrad Gessner (1516-65), who observed and wrote extensively on plants and animals, and who stands as the first naturalist of modern times.
The sixteenth century thus marks the rise of modern scientific inquiry, and the beginnings of the study of modern science. The number of scholars engaged in the study was still painfully small, and the religious prejudice against which they worked was strong and powerful, but in the work of these few men we have not only the beginnings of the study of modern astronomy, physics, chemistry, metallurgy, medicine, anatomy, physiology, and natural history, but also the beginnings of a group of men, destined in time to increase greatly in number, who could see straight, and who sought facts regardless of where they might lead and what preconceived ideas they might upset. How deeply the future of civilization is indebted to such men, men who braved social ostracism and often the wrath of the Church as well, for the, to them, precious privilege of seeing things as they are, we are not likely to over- estimate. In time their work was destined to reach the schools, and to materially modify the character of all education.
HUMAN REASON IN THE INVESTIGATION OF NATURE. To the English statesman and philosopher, Francis Bacon, more than to any one else, are we indebted for the proper formulation and statement of this new scientific method. Though not a scientist himself, he has often been termed "the father of modern science." Seeing clearly the importance of the new knowledge, he broke entirely with the old scholastic deductive logic as expressed in the Organon, of Aristotle, and formulated and expressed the methods of inductive reasoning in his Novum Organum, published in 1620. In this he showed the insufficiency of the method of argumentation; analyzed and formulated the inductive method of reasoning, of which his study as to the nature of heat [10] is a good example; and pointed out that knowledge is a process, and not an end in itself; and indicated the immense and fruitful field of science to which the method might be applied. By showing how to learn from nature herself he turned the Renaissance energy into a new direction, and made a revolutionary break with the disputations and deductive logic of the Aristotelian scholastics which had for so long dominated university instruction.
In formulating the new method he first pointed out the defects of the learning of his time, which he classified under the head of "distempers," three in number, and as follows:
1. Fantastic learning: Alchemy, magic, miracles, old-wives, tales, credulities, superstitions, pseudo-science, and impostures of all sorts inherited from an ignorant past, and now conserved as treasures of knowledge.
2. Contentious learning: The endless disputations of the Scholastics about questions which had lost their significance, deductive in character, not based on any observation, not aimed primarily to arrive at truth, "fruitful of controversy, and barren of effect."
3. Delicate learning: The new learning of the humanistic Renaissance, verbal and not real, stylish and polished but not socially important, and leading to nothing except a mastery of itself.
As an escape from these three types of distempers, which well characterized the three great stages in human progress from the sixth to the fifteenth centuries, Bacon offered the inductive method, by means of which men would be able to distinguish true from false, learn to see straight, create useful knowledge, and fill in the great gaps in the learning of the time by actually working out new knowledge from the unknown. The collecting, organizing, comparing, questioning, and inferring spirit of the humanistic revival he now turned in a new direction by organizing and formulating for the work a new Organum to take the place of the old Organon of Aristotle. In Book 1 he sets forth some of the difficulties (R. 208) with which those who try new experiments or work out new methods of study have to contend from partisans of old ideas.
The Novum Organum showed the means of escape from the errors of two thousand years by means of a new method of thinking and work. Bacon did not invent the new method--it had been used since man first began to reason about phenomena, and was the method by means of which Wycliffe, Luther, Magellan, Copernicus, Brahe, and Gilbert had worked--but he was the first to formulate it clearly and to point out the vast field of new and useful knowledge that might be opened up by applying human reason, along inductive lines, to the investigation of the phenomena of nature. His true service to science lay in the completeness of his analysis of the inductive process, and his declaration that those who wish to arrive at useful discoveries must travel by that road. As Macaulay well says, in his essay on Bacon:
He was not the maker of that road; he was not the discoverer of that road; he was not the person who first surveyed and mapped that road. But he was the person who first called the public attention to an inexhaustible mine of wealth which had been utterly neglected, and which was accessible by that road alone.
To stimulate men to the discovery of useful truth, to turn the energies of mankind--even slowly--from assumption and disputation to patient experimentation, [11.] and to give an impress to human thinking which it has retained for centuries, is, as Macaulay well says, "the rare prerogative of a few imperial spirits." Macaulay's excellent summary of the importance of Bacon's work (R. 209) is well worth reading at this point.
THE NEW METHOD IN THE HANDS OF SUBSEQUENT WORKERS. By the middle of the seventeenth century many important advances had been made in many different lines of scientific work. In the two centuries between 1450 and 1650, the foundations of modern mathematics and mechanics had been laid. At the beginning of the period Arabic notation and the early books of Euclid were about all that were taught; at its end the western world had worked out decimals, symbolic algebra, much of plane and spherical trigonometry, mechanics, logarithms (1614) and conic sections (1637), and was soon to add the calculus (1667-87). Mercator had published the map of the world (1569) which has ever since born his name, and the Gregorian calendar had been introduced (1572). The barometer, thermometer, air-pump, pendulum clock, and the telescope had come into use in the period. Alchemy had passed over into modern chemistry; and the astrologer was finding less and less to do as the astronomer took his place. The English Hippocrates, Thomas Sydenham (1624-89), during this period laid the foundations of modern medical study, and the microscope was applied to the study of organic forms. Modern ideas as to light and optics and gases, and the theory of gravitation, were about to be set forth. All these advances had been made during the century following the epoch-making labors of Copernicus, the first modern scientific man to make an impression on the thinking of mankind.
Accompanying this new scientific work there arose, among a few men in each of the western European countries, an interest in scientific studies such as the world had not witnessed since the days of the Alexandrian Greek. This interest found expression in the organization of scientific societies, wholly outside the universities of the time, for the reporting of methods and results, and for the mingling together in sympathetic companionship of these seekers after new truth. The most important dates connected with the rise of these societies are:
1603. The Lyncean Society at Rome. 1619. Jungius founded the Natural Science Association at Rostock. 1645. The Royal Society of London began to meet; constituted in 1660; chartered in 1662. 1657. The Academia del Cimento at Florence. 1662. The Imperial Academy of Germany. 1666. The Academy of Sciences in France. 1675. The National Observatory at Greenwich established.
After 1650 the advance of science was rapid. The spirit of modern inquiry, which in the sixteenth century had animated but a few minds, by the middle of the seventeenth had extended to all the principal countries of Europe. The striking results obtained during the seventeenth century revealed the vast field waiting to be explored, and filled many independent modern-type scholars with an enthusiasm for research in the new domain of science. By the close of the eighteenth century the main outlines of most of the modern sciences had been established.
LEADING THINKERS OUTSIDE THE UNIVERSITIES. During the seventeenth century, and largely during the eighteenth as well, the extreme conservatism of the universities, their continued control by their theological faculties, and their continued devotion to theological controversy and the teachings of state orthodoxy rather than the advancement of knowledge, served to make of them such inhospitable places for the new scientific method that practically all the leading workers with it were found outside the universities. This was less true of England than other lands, but was in part true of English universities as well. As civil servants, court attachés, pensioners of royalty, or as private citizens of means they found, as independent scholars reporting to the recently formed scientific societies, a freedom for investigation and a tolerance of ideas then scarcely possible anywhere in the university world.
Tycho Brahe and Kepler were pensioners of the Emperor at Prague. Lord Bacon was a lawyer and political leader, and became a peer of England. Descartes, the mathematician and founder of modern philosophy, to whom we are indebted for conic sections; Napier, inventor of logarithms; and Ray and Willoughby, who did the first important work in botany and zoology in England, were all independent scholars. The air-pump was invented by the Burgomaster of Madgeburg. Huygens, the astronomer and inventor of the clock was a pensioner of the King of France. Cassini, who explained the motion of Jupiter's satellites, was Astronomer Royal at Paris. Halley, who demonstrated the motions of the moon and who first predicted the return of a comet, held a similar position at Greenwich. Van Helmont and Boyle, who together laid the foundations of our chemical knowledge, were both men of noble lineage who preferred the study of the new sciences to a life of ease at court. Harvey was a physician and demonstrator of anatomy in London. Sydenham, the English Hippocrates, was a pensioner of Cromwell and a physician in Westminster. The German mathematical scholar, Leibnitz, who jointly with Newton discovered the calculus, scorned a university professorship and remained an attaché of a German court. Newton, though for a time a professor at Cambridge, during most of his mature life held the royal office of Warden of the Mint. These are a few notable illustrations of scientific scholars of the first rank who remained outside the universities to obtain advantages and freedom not then to be found within their walls. Much these same conditions continued throughout most of the eighteenth century, during which many remarkable advances in all lines of pure science were made. By the close of this century the universities had been sufficiently modernized that scientific workers began to find in them an atmosphere conducive to scientific teaching and research; during the nineteenth century they became the homes of scientific progress and instruction; to-day they are deeply interested in the promotion of scientific research.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Show that the rise of scientific inquiry was but another manifestation of the same inquiring spirit which had led to the recovery of the ancient literatures and history.
2. What do you understand to be meant by the failure of the Greeks to standardize their observations by instruments?
3. Show that it would be possible largely to determine the character of a civilization, if one knew only the prevailing ideas and conceptions as to scientific and religious matters.
4. Show the two different types of reasoning involved in the deduction of L. Valla (p. 246) and the induction of Copernicus.
5. Of which type was the reasoning of Galileo as to Jupiter's satellites?
6. Show that the three "distempers" described by Bacon characterize the three great stages in human progress from the sixth to the fifteenth centuries.
7. How do you explain the long rejection of the new sciences by the universities?
SELECTED READINGS
In the accompanying Book of Readings the following selections are reproduced:
203. Macaulay: Attitude of the Ancients toward Scientific Inquiry. 204. Franck: The Credulity of Mediaeval People. 205. Copernicus: How he arrived at the theory he set forth. 206. Brewster: Galileo's Discovery of the Satellites of Jupiter. 207. Inquisition: The Abjuration of Galileo. 208. Bacon: On Scientific Progress. 209. Macaulay: The Importance of Bacon's Work.
QUESTIONS ON THE READINGS
1. How do you explain the attitude of the ancients toward scientific inquiry?
2. State the ancient purpose in pursuing scientific studies.
3. Contrast Bacon and Plato as to aims.
4. Show that the thinking of Copernicus as to the motions of the heavenly bodies was an excellent example of deductive thinking.
5. Show that the discovery and reasoning of Galileo was an example of the common method of reasoning of to-day.
6. Were the difficulties that surrounded scientific inquiry and progress, as described by Bacon, easily removed?
7. Explain the readiness with which the clergy have so commonly opposed scientific inquiry for fear that the results might upset preconceived theological ideas.
SUPPLEMENTARY REFERENCES
Ball, W. R. R. History of Mathematics at Cambridge. * Libby, Walter. An Introduction to the History of Science. Ornstein, Martha. _Role of the Scientific Societies in the Seventeenth Century_. * Routledge, Robert. A Popular History of Science. * Sedgwick, W. T. and Tyler, H. W. A Short History of Science. * White, A. D. History of the Warfare of Science with Theology, 2 vols. Wordsworth Christopher. _Scholae Academicae; Studies at the English Universities in the Eighteenth Century_.