The History Of Education by Ellwood P. Cubberley (epub e reader .txt) 📖

devoted almost all his energies during the period he remained in office. From the first, high attainment in some branch of knowledge, and the ability to advance that knowledge, was placed ahead of mere teaching skill. The most eminent scholars in all lines were invited to the new “chairs,” and when it opened (1810) its first faculty represented the highest attainment of scholarship in German lands. From the first the instruction divested itself of almost all that characterized the school. The lecture replaced the classroom recitation, and the seminar, in which small groups of advanced students investigate a problem under the direction of a professor, was given a place of large importance in the institution. Original research and contributions to knowledge marked the work of both students and professors, the object being, not to train teachers for the schools, but to produce scholars capable of advancing knowledge by personal research.

Even more than at Halle, the institution was a place where professors and students worked to discover truth, uninfluenced by any preconceived notions and unmindful of what older ideas might be upset in the process.

The value of such pioneer work for university scholars everywhere is not likely to be overestimated.

 

SPECIALIZATION IN UNIVERSITY INSTRUCTION EMPHASIZED. Specialization in some field of knowledge soon came to be the ruling idea, and this proved exceedingly fruitful in the years which followed. There Bopp developed the study of comparative grammar on the basis of the Sanskrit. There Dietz founded Romance philology. Ritschl turned his students to the study of Latin inscriptions to reconstruct the past. Lepsius began the study of Egyptology with a spade. Niebuhr’s Roman History (1811) was the institution’s first fruit, and his successor, Ranke, showed his students how to study history from the sources. Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Lotze made over philosophy. Fechner and Wundt began there the study of experimental psychology. Stahl and von Savigny created new standards in the study of law. M�ller introduced the microscope into the study of pathological anatomy. Schultze systematized zo�logy. Liebig, who had opened at Giessen (1824) what was probably the first chemical laboratory in the world open to students, was drawn to Berlin and created there a new chemistry. Still later, Helmholtz created there a new physics.

 

The effect of all this on the expansion of the work of the philosophical faculty was marked. The new philological and historical sciences, the biological sciences, and the mathematical sciences, were all greatly expanded in scope, and the new philosophical faculty, evolved out of the old arts faculty (p. 554), now attained to the place of first importance in the university—a position it has ever since retained. Law and medicine were also given a new direction and emphasis, and even the teaching of theology was greatly improved under the specialization in instruction and the freedom in teaching which now became the rule.

 

The effect on the other German universities was marked. Some of the older institutions (Erfurt, Wittenberg, Cologne, Mainz) died out, while new foundations (Breslau, 1811; Bonn, 1818; Munich, 1826) after the new model, took their place. Those that continued were changed in character, [18] and a new unity was established throughout the German university world. By 1850 exact scientific research, in both libraries and laboratories, and a sober search for truth, had become the watchword of all the German universities. In consequence they naturally assumed a world leadership, and were frequented by students from many lands. Especially has the United States been influenced in its university development by the large number of university teachers who received their specialized training in the German universities [19] during the latter half of the nineteenth century.

The lecture, the seminar, laboratory investigation, research, the doctorate, and academic freedom in study and teaching are distinctive contributions to our university development drawn from German lands, and superimposed on our earlier English-type college. The founding of Johns Hopkins University, at Baltimore, in 1876, on the German model, marked the erection of the first distinctively research university in America.

 

A TWO-CLASS STATE SCHOOL SYSTEM CREATED. We thus see that Prussia by 1815, clearly by 1825, had taken over education from the Church and made of it an instrument of the State to serve State ends. For the masses there was the Volksschule, superseding the old religious vernacular school and clearly designed to create an intelligent but obedient and patriotic citizenship for the Fatherland, and in this school the great majority of the children of the State received their education for citizenship and for life. This was for both sexes, and was entirely a German school.

Attendance upon this school was made compulsory, and beyond this some continuation education early began to be provided (Rs. 274, Section 6; 275

d; 276, Section 15). Within the past half-century continuation education, especially along vocational lines, as we shall point out in a subsequent chapter, has received in German lands a very remarkable development. To insure that this school should serve the State in the way desired, Teachers’ Seminaries, for the training of Volksschule, teachers, were from the first made a feature of the new state system.

 

[Illustration: FIG. 173. THE PRUSSIAN STATE SCHOOL SYSTEM CREATED

Compare with Fig. 269 and note the difference between a European two-class system and the American democratic educational ladder.]

 

For those who were to form the official and directing class of Society—a closely limited, almost entirely male, intellectual aristocracy—education in separate classical schools, with university or professional training superimposed, was provided, and this type of training offered a very thorough preparation for a small and a carefully selected class. Out of this class the leaders of Germany for a century have been drawn. [20] For this classical school also the universities were early directed to prepare a well-educated body of teachers. The Prussian plan was followed in all its essentials in the other German States, so that the drawing given (Fig.

173) was true for Germany as a whole, as well as for Prussia, up at least to 1914.

 

NEW NINETEENTH-CENTURY TENDENCIES MANIFESTED. In this early evolution of the Prussian state school systems we find two prominent nineteenth-century ideas expressing themselves. The first is the new conception of the State as not merely a government organized to secure national safety and protection from invasion, but rather an organization of the people to promote public welfare and realize a moral and political ideal. To this end state control of the whole range of education, to enable the State to promote intellectual and moral and social progress along lines useful to the State, became a necessity, and some form of this education, in the interests of the public welfare, must now be extended to all. Though France and the new American nation gave earlier political expression to this new conception of the State, it was in Prussia that the idea attained its earliest concrete and for long its most complete realization. Seeing further and more clearly than other nations the possibilities of education, the practical workers of Prussia, and after them the other German States, took over education as a function of the State for the propagation of the national ideas and the promotion of the national culture. Of this development Paulsen says: In the nineteenth century Germany took the lead in the educational movement among the nations of Europe. The German universities have become acknowledged centers of scientific research for the whole world…. In the domain of primary and technical education Germany has also become the universal teacher of Europe.

 

But it must not be forgotten, in this connection, that the German people had been the pupils of their neighbors during a greater length of time and with greater assiduity than any other European nation.

Thus, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Germany imported the culture of Humanism from Italy. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries she introduced the modern courtly culture and language of the French people, besides giving admission, since the middle of the eighteenth century, to the philosophy, science, and literature of English middle-class society. Lastly, since the end of the eighteenth century, the Germans have yielded themselves to the influence of the Hellenic spirit with greater fervor than any other nation.

 

The second nineteenth-century idea which early found expression in the Prussian State, and one which became a dominant factor during the latter half of the century, was the idea of utilizing the schools, as state institutions, to promote national ends—to unify and nationalize peoples.

National self-consciousness here first found concrete expression, and with wonderful practical results. From a geographical expression, consisting of nearly four hundred petty self-governing cities, principalities, and states, and some fourteen hundred independent noblemen and prelates, before the Napoleonic wars, their close found the German people free from serfdom, united in spirit, and organized politically into thirty-eight modern-type States. In 1870, largely as a result of the nationalizing efforts of government and education, working hand in hand, an Imperial Empire of twenty-two States and three Free Cities was formed. The struggle for national realization, begun by Prussia after 1807, and with education as the important constructive tool of the State, has since been copied by nation after nation and has become the dominant force of modern history.

To awaken a national self-consciousness, to acquire national unity, and to infuse into all a common culture has supplanted the humanistic cosmopolitanism of the eighteenth century and become the dominant characteristic of nineteenth-century political history. In this Prussia led the way.

 

THE PERIOD OF REACTION. Through the period preceding the Wars of Liberation (1813-15), and afterward for a few years, an educational zeal animated the Government. The schools during this period were free on the one hand from politics and on the other from minute official regulation.

As one writer well stated: [21]

 

It was difficult to decide whether the schools derived their importance from the life which surged around them, or whether their importance was due to their intrinsic power, very carefully fostered by the state authorities…. There was spirit and life in Prussia; there was much activity and liberty in contriving, with little outward parade. Any foreigner, visiting Prussia, might observe that the vitalizing breath of government, like the spirit of God, was acting upon the whole people.

 

Napoleon was finally vanquished at Waterloo (1815) and sent to Saint Helena, and the Congress of Vienna (1815) remade the map of Europe. In doing so it forgot that the people wanted constitutional government, instead of a return to absolute rulers. It restored old thrones, rights, and territories, and inaugurated a policy of political reaction which increased in intensity with time and dominated the governments of continental Europe until after the middle of the century. Under the lead of the Austrian minister, Metternich, and by “third-degree” methods, the so-called Holy Alliance [22] of continental Europe suppressed free speech, democratic movements, political liberties, university freedom, and liberalism in government and religion. The governments in this Alliance redirected and restricted the people’s schools, as much as could be done, to make them conform in purpose to their reactionary ideas. In consequence, the development of popular education in Germany, as well as in France and other continental lands, was for a time checked. The great start obtained by Prussia and the German States before 1820, though, was such that what had been done there could not be wholly undone. In France, Spain, the Italian Kingdoms, the Austrian States, and Russia, on the other hand, what had not been developed to any extent could be prevented from developing, and in these lands popular education was given back to the Church to control and direct. In England, also, though for other reasons there, the Church retained its control over elementary education for half a century longer.

 

CHANGE IN THE SPIRIT OF THE SCHOOLS. The King of Prussia, Frederick William III (1797-1840), though he had given full adherence to the movement for general education during the