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

of first importance was added to the effective energies of mankind, and a basis for the education of all was laid, for the first time, in the history of the world.

 

Christianity came at just the right time not only to impart new energy and hopefulness to a decadent ancient civilization, but also to meet, conquer, and in time civilize the barbarian hordes from the North which overwhelmed the Roman Empire. A new and youthful race of German barbarians now appeared upon the scene, with resulting ravage and destruction, and anarchy and ignorance, and long centuries ensued during which ancient civilization fell prey to savage violence and superstition. Progress ceased in the ancient world. The creative power of antiquity seemed exhausted. The digestive and assimilative powers of the old world seemed gone. Greek was forgotten. Latin was corrupted. Knowledge of the arts and sciences was lost. Schools disappeared. Only the Christian Church remained to save civilization from the wreck, and it, too, was almost submerged in the barbaric flood. It took ten centuries partially to civilize, educate, and mould into homogeneous units this heterogeneous horde of new peoples.

During this long period it required the strongest energies of the few who understood to preserve the civilization of the past for the enjoyment and use of a modern world.

 

Yet these barbarian Germans, great as was the havoc they wrought at first, in time contributed much to the stream of our modern civilization. They brought new conceptions of individual worth and freedom into a world thoroughly impregnated with the ancient idea of the dominance of the State over the individual. The popular assembly, an elective king, and an independent and developing system of law were contributions of first importance which these peoples brought. The individual man and not the State was, with them, the important unit in society. In the hands of the Angles and Saxons, particularly, but also among the Celts, Franks, Helvetii, and Belgae, this idea of individual freedom and of the subordination of the State to the individual has borne large fruit in modern times in the self-governing States of France, Switzerland, Belgium, England and the English self-governing dominions, and in the United States of America. After much experimenting it now seems certain that the Anglo-Saxon type of self-government, as developed first in England and further expanded in the United States, seems destined to be the type of government in future to rule the world.

 

It took Europe almost ten centuries to recover from the effects of the invasion of barbarism which the last two centuries of the Roman Empire witnessed, to save itself a little later from Mohammedan conquest, and to pick up the lost threads of the ancient life and begin again the work of civilization. Finally, however, this was accomplished, largely as a result of the labor of monks and missionaries. The barbarians were in time induced to settle down to an agricultural life, to accept Christianity in name at least, and to yield a more or less grudging obedience to monk and priest that they might thereby escape the torments of a world to come.

Slowly the monasteries and the churches, aided here and there by far-sighted kings, worked at the restoration of books and learning, and finally, first in Italy, and later in the nations evolved from the tribes that had raided the Empire, there came a period of awakening and rediscovery which led to the development of the early university foundations, a wonderful revival of ancient learning, a great expansion of men’s thoughts, a great religious awakening, a wonderful period of world exploration and discovery, the founding of new nations in new lands, the reawakening of the spirit of scientific inquiry, the rise of the democratic spirit, and the evolution of our modern civilization.

 

By the end of the eleventh century it was clear that the long battle for the preservation of civilization had been won, but it was not until the fourteenth century that the Revival of Learning in Italy gave clear evidence of the rise of the modern spirit. By the year 1500 much had been accomplished, and the new modern questioning spirit of the Italian Revival was making progress in many directions. Most of the old learning had been recovered; the printing-press had been invented, and was at work multiplying books; the study of Greek and Hebrew had been revived in the western world; trade and commerce had begun; the cities and the universities which had arisen had become centers of a new life; a new sea route to India had been found and was in use; Columbus had discovered a new world; the Church was more tolerant of new ideas than it had been for centuries; and thought was being awakened in the western world to a degree that had not taken place since the days of ancient Rome. The world seemed about ready for rapid advances in many directions, and great progress in learning, education, government, art, commerce, and invention seemed almost within its grasp. Instead, there soon opened the most bitter and vindictive religious conflict the world has ever known; western Christian civilization was torn asunder; a century of religious warfare ensued; and this was followed by other centuries of hatred and intolerance and suspicion awakened by the great conflict.

 

Still, out of this conflict, though it for a time checked the orderly development of civilization, much important educational progress was ultimately to come. In promulgating the doctrine that the authority of the Bible in religious matters is superior to the authority of the Church, the basis for the elementary school for the masses of the people, and in consequence the education of all, was laid. This meant the creation of an entirely new type of school—the elementary, for the masses, and taught in the native tongue—to supplement the Latin secondary schools which had been an outgrowth of the revival of ancient learning, and the still earlier cathedral and monastery schools of the Church.

 

The modern elementary vernacular school may then be said to be essentially a product of the Protestant Reformation. This is true in a special sense among those peoples which embraced some form of the Lutheran or Calvinistic faiths. These were the Germans, Moravians, Swedes, Norwegians, Finns, Danes, Dutch, Walloons, Swiss, Scotch, Scotch-Irish, French Huguenots, and the English Puritans. As the Renaissance gave a new emphasis to the development of secondary schools by supplying them with a large amount of new subject-matter and a new motive, so the Reformation movement gave a new motive for the education of children not intended for the service of the State or the Church, and the development of elementary vernacular schools was the result. Only in England, of all the revolting countries, did this Protestant conception as to the necessity of education for salvation fail to take deep root, with the result that elementary education in England awaited the new political and social and industrial impulses of the latter half of the nineteenth century for its real development.

 

The rise of the questioning and inferring spirit in the Italian Renaissance marked the beginnings of the transition from mediaeval to modern attitudes, and one of the most important outgrowths of this was the rise of scientific inquiry which in time followed. This meant the application of human reason to the investigation of the phenomena of nature, with all that this eventually implied. This, slowly to be sure, turned the energies of mankind in a new direction, led to the substitution of inquiry and patient experimentation for assumption and disputation, and in time produced a scientific and industrial revolution which has changed the whole nature of the older problems. The scientific spirit has to-day come to dominate all lines of human thinking, and the applications of scientific principles have, in the past century, completely changed almost all the conditions surrounding human life. Applied to education, this new spirit has transformed the instruction and the methods of the schools, led to the creation of entirely new types of educational institutions, and introduced entirely new aims and methods and purposes into the educational process.

 

From inquiry into religious matters and inquiry into the phenomena of nature, it was but a short and a natural step to inquiry into the nature and functions of government. This led to a critical questioning of the old established order, the rise of new types of intellectual inquiry, the growth of a consciousness of national problems, and the bringing to the front of questions of political interest to a degree unknown since the days of ancient Rome. The eighteenth century marks, in these directions, a sharp turning-point in human thinking, and the end of mediaevalism and the ushering in of modern forms of intellectual liberty. The eighteenth century, too, witnessed a culmination of a long series of progressive changes which had been under way for centuries, and the flood time of a slowly but steadily rising tide of protest against the enslavement of the intellect and the limitation of natural human liberties by either Church or State. The flood of individualism which characterized the second half of the eighteenth century demanded outlet, and, denied, it rose and swept away ancient privileges, abuses, and barriers—religious, intellectual, social, and political—and opened the way for the marked progress in all lines which characterized the nineteenth century. Out of this new spirit was to come the American and the French Revolutions, the establishment of constitutional liberty and religious freedom, the beginnings of the abolition of privilege, the rise of democracy, a great extension of educational advantages, and the transfer of the control of the school from the Church to the State that the national welfare might be better promoted thereby.

 

Now arose the modern conception of the school as the great constructive instrument of the State, and a new individual and national theory as to both the nature and the purpose of education was advanced. Schools were declared to be essentially civil affairs; their purpose was asserted to be to promote the common welfare and advance the interests of the political State; ministers of education began to be appointed by the State to take over and exercise control; the citizen supplanted the ecclesiastic in the organization of education and the supervision of classroom teaching; the instruction in the school was changed in direction, and in time vastly broadened in scope; and the education of all now came to be conceived of as a birthright of the child of every citizen.

 

Since the middle of the nineteenth century a great world movement for the realization of these new aims, through the taking-over of education from religious bodies and the establishment of state-controlled school systems, has taken place. This movement is still going on. Beginning in the nations which were earliest in the front of the struggle to preserve and extend what was so well begun by little Greece and Imperial Rome, the state-control conception of education has, in the past three quarters of a century, spread to every continent on the globe. For ages a Church and private affair, of no particular concern to government and of importance to but a relatively small number of the people, education has to-day become, with the rise and spread of modern ideas as to human freedom, political equality, and industrial progress, a prime essential to the maintenance of good government and the promotion of national welfare, and it is now so recognized by progressive nations everywhere. With the spread of the state-control idea as to education have also gone western ideas as to government, human rights, social obligations, political equality, pure and applied science, trade, industry, transportation, intellectual and moral improvement, and humanitarian influences which are rapidly transforming and modernizing not only less progressive western nations, but ancient civilizations as well, and along the lines so slowly and so painfully worked out by the inheritors of the conceptions of human freedom first thought out