So much for education in the ancient world.  It was limited, of course, by the extraordinary expense of hand copied books.  In Germany, in the fifteenth century, a revolution occurred that changed all that.  By 1500, in German towns, people had become very interested in education.  “[A] public notice proclaimed: ‘Everybody now wants to read and write.’” (Coulson 1999 p65)  The post-Gutenberg supply-side revolution in printed books had created a demand for literacy.  Things would never be the same again.

Prior to the Reformation education in Germany was obtained mostly from church schools, but with the printing of books in German, people wanted to learn to read and write in German.  As church schools were not inclined to provide this vernacular instruction private schools jumped in to meet the demand, teaching reading, writing, and a little arithmetic to both adults and children.  Self-help books were published to assist people in acquiring literacy.  But many parents still wanted a Latin education for their children, so they started to agitate to obtain greater control of the church schools—in opposition to the church officials, who felt that the Church had the right to control education.

This reform of the schools was derailed by the Reformation.  Although many of the priests and nuns that staffed the church schools left the monastery life and others were forced out when the local nobles closed their monasteries, independent elementary schools eventually appeared to meet the demand, even greater after the Reformation than before.  Unfortunately, Martin Luther put a stop to this.  He felt that people could not be trusted to look after their own education and wanted to be sure that children were educated according to his own ideas of an orthodox education.  He called for the creation of a government-run education system.  In the subsequent competition between private and public education, attempts were made to close down the private schools, and a long political conflict ensued between state authorities and local governments and ordinary citizens.  The state authorities promoted a classical education, but local governments and their citizens wanted a vernacular education in German.  The top-down emphasis on Latin and the classics created a rift between the learned elite and the uneducated masses.

In France, the Reformation also posed a challenge to the status quo.  There was a real chance that, if the Reformation spread into France from Germany, the entire Catholic Church in the west would fall.  A strong French clergy was needed to defend the Church and to deal with the Church’s critics so Ignatius of Loyola founded in 1540 the Society of Jesus.  It would educate the young and serve the papacy.  The Jesuits undertook a massive reform of educational methods, introducing a grade system to keep children of similar ability and knowledge together and eliminating routine beatings of students.  But the rigid system developed by the Jesuits was not designed to prepare children for life and work, but to defend the Catholic church from its enemies, and its Ratio Studiorum, developed in 1600 to define a Jesuit education in detail, was still in force a century and a half later during the Enlightenment.  Meanwhile, a similar effort at control was implemented by the king, requiring any school to pass extensive royal review before approval.  Regional officials also wanted to control schools, mandating attendance at Catholic schools and catechism thereafter, with severe penalties for failure to conform that included transfer of children to foster families.

The educational issues in Reformation Europe resonate with our own time  Then as now, experts of all stripes were eager to use the educational system to stamp out children indoctrinated with their pet ideologies.  Then and now, parents seemed to be more interested than the experts in preferring a practical education for their children that focused on preparation for life and work.

The French Revolution marks the beginning of the modern era in education.  In France, the revolution ended the system of royal and church control over education.  The National Assembly determined to end the power of the church over the children of the republic and passed a law “making attendance at state-run schools mandatory.”  Teachers were mostly forbidden to teach Catholicism, and instead were taught to worship “Reason and the Supreme Being.”  Since nuns and priests were mostly forbidden from teaching, the supply of teachers was sharply reduced.  Parents did not appreciate the new state control and often kept their children at home.  Independent religious schools began to appear again.  In 1815 a group of philanthropists opened a monitorial school in Paris.  Using ideas imported from Britain, this school used older children to teach the younger ones.  It had the benefit of lowering teacher-student ratios, thus dealing with the teacher shortage, and lived by the old saying that to really learn something, it is necessary to teach it.  By 1819 there were 600 such schools in France, and by 1821, 1,500. (Coulson 1999 p100)  But with the return of the monarchy to power, a fierce attack was launched upon the monitorial schools, and indoctrination in Catholicism was mandated in all of France’s schools.  For the rest of the century, education would be highly politicized, and education was used as a weapon with which to bludgeon political opponents. (Coulson 1999 p104)  Under the republic, the schools were used to bludgeon the church, and under the monarchy and the Empire, they were used to bludgeon the republicans.

Whereas France entered the modern era with a top-down centralized education, in the United States a more decentralized system had developed.  Mass education had been accepted from the earliest days of the colonies and literacy had always been high.  In 1787, free male adult literacy was estimated at about 65 percent, and in the census of 1850 literacy was reported as 90 percent.  In the colonial times education was supported with a mixture of private and public funding.  In the rural areas government schools predominated: 

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©2005 Christopher Chantrill