Education in Europe- 3

From the Protestant Reformation

to the Nineteenth Century

Despite their many differences, both Protestants and Catholics taught the new Renaissance humanistic curriculum in their Latin schools at the pre-university level. Each simply added religious instruction to the classical curriculum. Indeed, from about 1550 until the beginning of the French Revolution in 1789, the most important pre-university schools in Europe were schools with strong connections to religious institutions. In Catholic Europe the Jesuits and other religious orders founded in the sixteenth century and devoted to teaching dominated Latin education, the schooling that prepared boys for university study, the professions, and leadership roles. Latin schools organized by and under the direction of princes, cities, and religious leaders did the same in Protestant lands. Educational opportunity for girls expanded slowly in these centuries. Some new religious orders of women in Catholic Europe offered schooling for girls. A large number of female religious convents educated Catholic girls as long-term boarders. Parents sent a girl to a convent for several years for an education that included singing, sewing, and good manners. She emerged educated, virtuous, and ready to marry. Some girls decided to remain as nuns, sometimes to further their educations. Indeed, professed nuns living in convents had a higher literacy rate and were consistently better educated than laywomen. Church organizations also sponsored charity schools for poor girls in which they learned the catechism, vernacular reading and writing, and sewing. The situation was similar in Protestant Europe.

Although Martin Luther (1483–1546) strongly endorsed schooling for both boys and girls, the Protestant Reformation did not result in greater educational  opportunity for girls and probably not for boys. Churches in Protestant lands did provide some free education in Sunday Schools and charity schools, and parents emphasized home Bible instruction. Girls in wealthy families often had tutors in both Catholic and Protestant Europe. Enlightenment philosophes began to attack church schools and, to a limited extent, the humanistic Latin curriculum, in the eighteenth century. They offered an alternative vision. They wanted the state, not churches, to organize schools, appoint teachers, and regulate studies. Children should study the national vernacular language as well as Latin and national history. The state should ensure that children were taught good morals based on fundamental ethical truths, because good morals were essential for the well-being of society. But schools should not teach religious doctrine. Enlightenment school reformers put greater emphasis on practical skills, and they sometimes argued for increased schooling for girls. Finally, they

wanted to provide more free elementary education for the population as a whole but stopped short of endorsing universal education. However, very little changed, because rulers gave only half-hearted support for educational change.

Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Education

In the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries, national governments introduced much change into the

schools. Governments across western Europe decreed that all children, boys and girls, must go to school to a certain age, which was gradually raised. The schooling was not extensive; the elementary curriculum consisted of reading, writing, arithmetic, and, outside France, religion. Governments provided more, but never enough, schools and teachers. Nevertheless, the children of the working classes, the peasantry, and girls as a whole made impressive gains across western Europe in the nineteenth century. For example, a French law of 1882 required schooling for all boys and girls between the ages of six and thirteen. As a result, literacy rates in France for the whole population, men and women, rose from 60 percent in 1870 to 95 percent in 1900. Eastern Europe and Russia lagged behind but still made progress. State governments took control of schools from the churches but continued to teach Catholic or Protestant religious doctrine except in France. They added vernacular literature and national history in the secondary school without eliminating Latin. However, the secondary school classical curriculum remained the privilege of the children

of the upper and professional classes and the only path to the university.

Late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century state schools pursued cultural, national, social, and ideological goals as well. Every national school system taught one version of the national language, that of its most accomplished authors, even though most children spoke regional dialects. They taught patriotic national history. For example, Italian schools, after the unification of the peninsula under one government in 1870, made a national hero of Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–1882), the irregular military leader of the struggle for unification. Students across Europe wrote essays on patriotic topics. Governments believed that the primary purpose of universal elementary schooling was to raise honest, hardworking, useful citizens, devoted to family and country, but who would not rise above their station in life. The use of schools to teach political and social values reached its most extreme form in the schools of the Communist Soviet Union (1917–1991), Fascist Italy (1922–1943), and Nazi Germany (1933–1945). The ideology of the state, militarism, devotion to country, and loyalty to the regime were the order of the day in their schools. The most important innovations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were several kinds of nonclassical secondary schools. At the highest level they combined limited ancient language instruction with considerable scientific and technical education. The graduates seldom went on to the university, but could attend advanced technical schools. Some countries developed nonselective secondary schools that offered vocational and practical training for workers who would basically follow instructions. These practically oriented schools were modern variations of the vernacular literature and commercial arithmetic schools of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance although there does not seem to be a direct link. The educational system that most emphasized technical education was that of the Soviet Union. After the 1917 Russian Revolution, the Communist government of the 1920s discarded the previous curriculum of humanistic studies and religious education in favor of life education that attempted to teach children about farming and trades by having them care for plants and animals and by operating tools. By the 1930s the Soviet school system concentrated on turning out the engineers, technicians, and workers needed by a country moving from a rural economy to one of heavy industrialization directed by the central government. Although Soviet education never succeeded in creating a classless educational system—sons and daughters of Communist officials, members of the government, and professional classes enjoyed more educational benefits than others—it greatly increased and improved education for the sons and daughters of the working class and peasantry. It also expanded educational opportunity in science, medicine, and engineering for women.

Despite the innovations, western European education remained divided into two streams through the first two-thirds of the twentieth century and remained to some extent into the early twenty-first century. The classical secondary school continued to educate the upper classes of Europe, even though classical Latin no longer had practical use beyond a limited number of scholars. But pedagogues and national leaders, with a few exceptions, believed that learning ancient languages and literatures best enabled boys and some girls to realize their potential. They believed that the classical curriculum benefited the student regardless of his or her future career because it developed the individual. The concept was called Bildung (cultivation) in German, culture générale in French, and liberal education in English. It was a modern version of the goals of Greco-Roman and Renaissance education.

Of course, the classical curriculum of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had practical rewards as well. Only the graduates of the classical secondary school went on to universities and won high civil service positions. They could enter the professions of law, medicine, and theology and lead the nation. The classical secondary schools continued to select and serve a privileged elite.

A series of democratic reforms swept across European state education between the 1960s and the 1990s. They were designed to give all students some kind of secondary school graduation certificate and to increase the number of university or university-level students. They also tried to dilute the social exclusivity of the classical secondary schools and to break their monopoly on elite education. The reforms aimed at making it possible for more sons and daughters of the working classes to enter university and become leaders of the nation. It remains to be seen what the long-term effects will be.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PRIMARY SOURCES

Humanist Educational Treatises. Edited and translated by Craig W. Kallendorf. Cambridge, Mass., and London; Harvard University Press, 2002.

Quintilian. The Institutio oratoria of Quintilian. With an English translation by H. E. Butler. 4 vols. 1920. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, and London: Heinemann, 1958–1960.

SECONDARY SOURCES

Blackburn, Gilmer W. Education in the Third Reich: A Study of Race and History in Nazi Textbooks. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985.

Bonner, Stanley F. Education in Ancient Rome: From the Elder Cato to the Younger Pliny. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977.

Brizzi, Gian Paolo. La formazione della classe dirigente nel Sei- Settecento: I seminaria nobilium nell’Italia centro-settentrionale. Bologna: Il Mulino, 1976.

Farrell, Alan P. The Jesuit Code of Liberal Education: Development and Scope of the Ratio Studiorum. Milwaukee, Wis.: Bruce, 1938.

Grendler, Paul F. Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning, 1300–1600. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.

Grew, Raymond, and Patrick J. Harrigan. School, State, and Society: The Growth of Elementary Schooling in Nineteenth-

Century France: A Quantitative Analysis. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991.

Holmes, Larry E. The Kremlin and the Schoolhouse: Reforming Education in Soviet Russia, 1917–1931. Bloomington: Indiana  University Press, 1991.

Kennedy, George A. A New History of Classical Rhetoric. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994.

Marrou, Henri-Irénée. A History of Education in Antiquity. Translated from the French. 3rd ed. by George Lamb. New York:

Sheed and Ward, 1956.

Martin, Christopher. A Short History of English Schools, 1750–1965.Hove, U. K.: Wayland, 1979.

Melton, James Van Horn. Absolutism and the Eighteenth-century Origins of Compulsory Schooling in Prussia and Austria. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Riché, Pierre. Education and Culture in the Barbarian West, Sixth through Eighth Century. Translated by John J. Contreni.

Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1976.

Strauss, Gerald. Luther’s House of Learning: Indoctrination of the Young in the German Reformation. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.

Williams, George L. Fascist Thought and Totalitarianism in Italy’s Secondary Schools: Theory and Practice, 1922–1943. New York: P. Lang, 1994.

Paul F. Grendler

Education in Europe- 2

From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment

The Renaissance created an educational revolution by adopting a classical curriculum for its Latin schools. This happened in Italy in the fifteenth century and in the rest of Europe in the sixteenth century. Renaissance Latin schoolmasters discarded the medieval curriculum, with a handful of exceptions at the primary school level, in favor of the works of Virgil, Cicero, Terence, Julius Caesar (c. 100–44 B.C.E.), and other ancient authors. Most were Latin; Greek authors were introduced as teachers of Greek became available. These ancient authors taught grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy, which together comprised the studia humanitatis (humanistic studies) based on the standard ancient authors in Latin and, to some extent, in Greek. The classical humanistic curriculum remained the core of Latin education for the elite of Europe well into the twentieth century.

The Latin that Renaissance students learned was very different from the clear and functional but seldom elegant medieval Latin. Renaissance students learned to write Latin in the ornate and complex style of Cicero, as found in his Epistolae ad familiares (Letters to friends) and his speeches, which had been unavailable in the Middle Ages. Humanist pedagogues sought guidance on ancient education from the Institutio oratoria (Institutes of oratory) of the Roman teacher of rhetoric Quintilian (c. 35–100 C.E.). Italy adopted the classical Latin curriculum in the fifteenth century, and the rest of Europe followed in the sixteenth.

 The Renaissance humanistic curriculum promised more than learning to read and write like the ancients. Italian and northern European humanists argued in a series of pedagogical treatises that reading the classics would teach boys, and a few girls, wisdom as well as eloquence. The classics would inspire readers to live honorably and well. If well instructed, they would do what was morally right and would be loyal to family, city, and country. The goal was humanitas, the knowledge of how to live as cultivated, educated members of society. However, the Renaissance humanists papered over a basic contradiction. Western European Christianity viewed salvation after death as the ultimate goal of life. But ancient pagan authors as Cicero, Terence, and Virgil did not teach readers

to love enemy and neighbor and to seek union with God. The texts of ancient Greek and Rome emphasized education for this life. They endorsed worldly ambition so long as it was achieved by legitimate means, and they featured acts judged sinful by European Christians. Nevertheless, Renaissance educators convinced themselves that the classics and Christian doctrine taught an identical morality of honesty, self-sacrifice for the common good, perseverance, and family and civic responsibility. The restoration of the pagan classics inserted a secularism into European schooling that never disappeared, however much Catholic teaching orders and Protestant schoolmasters emphasized religious doctrine and practice. From the Renaissance onward, the classical secondary school was the center of European elite education. Educational leaders and probably the majority of society believed that learning ancient languages and literatures offered examples of the highest human culture in the original language, developed mental discipline, and imparted good moral and civic values.