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

differing groups of the Greek City-States, and from time to time in the case of later Swiss and temporary European national groupings, but the union into a substantial and permanent Federal State of a number of separate States which still retained their independence, and with provision for the expansion of this national Union by the addition of new States. This federal principle in government is probably the greatest political contribution of the American Union to world development. In the twentieth-century conception of a League of Nations it has borne still further fruit.

 

In the third place, the different American States changed their old Colonial Charters into definite written Constitutions, each of which contained a Preamble or Bill of Rights which affirmed the fundamental principles of democratic liberty (R. 251). These now became the fundamental law for each of the separate States, and the same idea was later worked out in the Constitution of the United States. These were the first written constitutions of history, and have since served as a type for the creation of constitutional government throughout the world. In such documents to-day free peoples everywhere define the rights and duties and obligations which they regard as necessary to their safety and happiness and welfare.

 

Finally, the Federal Constitution provided for the inestimable boon of religious liberty, and in a way that was both revolutionary and wholesome.

At the beginning of the War for Independence the Anglican (Episcopal) faith had been declared “the established religion” in seven of the Colonies, and the Congregational was the established religion in three of the New England Colonies, while but three Colonies had declared for religious freedom and refused to give a preference to any special creed.

This religious problem had to be met by the Constitutional Convention, and this body handled it in the only way it could have been intelligently handled in a nation composed of so many different religious sects as was ours. It simply incorporated into the Federal Constitution provisions which guaranteed the free exercise of their religious faith to all, and forbade the establishment by Congress of any state religion, or the requirement of any religious test as a prerequisite to holding any office under the control of the Federal Government. The American people thus took a stand for religious liberty at a time when the hatreds of the Reformation still burned fiercely, and when tolerance in religious matters was as yet but little known.

 

IMPORTANCE OF THE RELIGIOUS-LIBERTY CONTRIBUTION. The solution of the religious question arrived at was only second in importance for us to the establishment of the Federal Union, and the far-reaching significance to our future national life of the sane and for-the-time extraordinary provisions incorporated into our National Constitution can hardly be overestimated. This action led to the early abandonment of state religions, religious tests, and public taxation for religion in the old States, and to the prohibition of these in the new. The importance of this solution of the religious question for the future of popular education in the United States was great, for it laid the foundations upon which our systems of free, common, public, tax-supported, non-sectarian schools have since been built up. How we could have erected a common public-school system on a religious basis, with the many religious sects among us, it is impossible to conceive. Instead, we should have had a series of feeble, jealous, antagonistic, and utterly inefficient church-school systems, chiefly confined to elementary education, and each largely intent on teaching its peculiar church doctrines and struggling for an increasing share of public funds.

 

How much the American people owe to the Fathers of the Republic for this most enlightened and intelligent provision, few who have not thought carefully on the matter can appreciate. To it we must trace not only the great blessing of religious liberty, which we have so long enjoyed, but also the final establishment of our common, free, public-school systems.

The beginning of the new state motive for education, which was soon to supersede the religious motive, dates from the establishment with us of republican governments; and the beginning of the emancipation of education from church domination goes back to this wise provision inserted in our National Constitution.

 

This national attitude was later copied in the state constitutions, and as a preamble to practically all we find a Bill of Rights, which in almost every case included a provision for freedom of religious worship (Rs. 251, 260). After the middle of the nineteenth century a further provision prohibiting sectarian teaching or state aid to sectarian schools was everywhere added.

 

V. THE FRENCH REVOLUTION SWEEPS AWAY ANCIENT ABUSES

 

NEW DEMANDS FOR REFORM THAT COULD NOT BE RESISTED. More than in any other continental European country France had, by 1783, become a united nation, conscious of a modern national feeling. Yet in France mediaeval abuses in both State and Church had survived, as we have seen, to as great an extent almost as in any European nation. So determined were the clergy and nobility to retain their old powers, not only in France but throughout the continent of Europe as well, that progressive reform seemed well-nigh impossible. The work of the benevolent despots had, after all, been superficial. By the last quarter of the eighteenth, though, a progressive change was under way which was certain to produce either evolution or revolution. The influence of the American experiment in nation-building now became pronounced. In 1779 Franklin took a copy of the new Pennsylvania Constitution with him to Paris, and in 1780 John Adams did the same with the Massachusetts Constitution. Frenchmen instantly recognized here, in concrete form, the ideas with which their own heads were filled. In 1783 Franklin published in France a French translation of all the American Constitutions, and the National Constitution of 1787 was as eagerly read and discussed in Paris as in New York or Philadelphia or Boston. America appeared to the French of that stormy period as an ideal land; where the dreams of Rousseau about the social contract had been transformed into realities. Two years later the cahiers of the Third Estate demanded a written constitution for France. The French, too, had aided the American Colonies in their struggle for liberty, and French soldiers returning home carried back new political ideas drawn from the remarkable political progress of the new American Nation. By 1788 the demand for reform in France had become so insistent, and the condition of the treasury of the State was so bad, that it was finally felt necessary to summon a meeting of the States-General—a sort of national parliament consisting of representatives of the three great Estates: clergy, nobility, and commons—which had not met in France since 1614.

 

[Illustration: FIG. 153. THE STATES-GENERAL IN SESSION AT VERSAILLES

(After a contemporary drawing by Monnet)]

 

Besides electing its representatives, each locality and order was allowed to draw up a series of instructions, or cahiers (+R. 252+), for the guidance of its delegates. These cahiers are a mine of information as to the demands and hopes and interests of the French people, [33] and it is interesting to know that the cahiers of nobility, clergy, and commons alike included, among their demands, the organization of a comprehensive plan of education for France. [34]

 

FRANCE ESTABLISHES CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT. The States-General met May 5, 1789, and soon (June 20) resolved itself into the National or Constituent Assembly. Terrified by the uprisings and burnings of ch�teaux throughout France, on the night of August fourth, in a few hours, it adopted a series of decrees which virtually abolished the Ancien R�gime

of privileges for France. The nobility gave up most of their old rights, the serfs [35] were freed, and the special privileges of towns were surrendered. Later the Assembly adopted a “Declaration of Rights of Man and of the Citizen” (R. 253), much like the American Declaration of Independence. This declared, among other things, that all men were born free and have equal rights, that taxes should be proportional to wealth, that all citizens were equal before the law and have a right to help make the laws, and that the people of the nation were sovereign. These principles struck at the very foundations of the old system.

 

Soon a Constitution for France, the first ever promulgated in modern Europe, was prepared and adopted (1791). This abolished the ancient privileges and reorganized France as a self-governing nation, much after the American plan. Local government was created, and the absolute monarchy was changed to a limited constitutional one. Next the property of the Church was taken over by the State, the monasteries were suppressed, and the priests and bishops were made state officials and paid a fixed state salary. The Jesuits had been expelled from France in 1764; and in 1792 the Brothers of the Christian Schools were not allowed longer to teach. Among other important matters, the Constitution of 1791 declared that: There shall be created and organized a system of public instruction common to all citizens, and gratuitous, with respect to those branches of instruction which are indispensable for all men.

 

Up to this point the Revolution in France had proceeded relatively peacefully, considering the nature of the long-standing abuses which were to be remedied. In August, 1792, the King was imprisoned, and in January, 1793, he was executed and a Republic proclaimed. [36] Then followed a reign of terror, which we do not need to follow, and which ended only when Napoleon became master of France.

 

BENEFICENT RESULTS OF THE REVOLUTION. The French Revolution was not an accident or a product of chance, but rather the inevitable result of an attempt to dam up the stream of human progress and prevent its orderly onward flow. The Protestant Revolts were the first great revolutionary wave, the Puritan revolution in England was another, the formation of the American Republic and the institution of constitutional government and religious freedom another, while the French Revolution brought the rising movement to a head and swept away, in a deluge of blood, the very foundations of the mediaeval system. Along with much that was disastrous, the French Revolution accomplished after all much that was of greatest importance for human progress. The world at times seems to be in need of such a great catharsis. Progress was made in a decade that could hardly have been made in a century by peaceful evolution. The old order of privilege came to an end, mediaevalism was swept away, and the serf was evolved into the free farmer and citizen. One fifth of the soil of France was restored to the use of the people from the monasteries, and an additional one third from the Church and nobility. The new principles of citizenship—Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity—were for France revolutionary in the extreme, while the assertion that the sovereignty of a nation rests with the people rather than with the king, here successfully promulgated, ended for all time the “divine-right-of-kings”

idea for France. After political theory had for a time run mad, the organizing genius of Napoleon consolidated the gains, gave France a strong government, a uniform code of laws, [37] and began that organization of schools for the nation which ultimately meant the taking over of education from the Church and its provision at the expense of and in the interests of the nation.

 

THE NATIONAL IDEA EXTENDS TO OTHER LANDS. The reform work in France, together with the examples of English and American liberty, soon began to have their influence in other lands as well. People everywhere began to see that the old r�gime of privilege and misgovernment ought to be replaced. Other countries abolished serfdom, introduced better laws, and made reforms in the abuses of both Church and State. French armies and rulers carried the best of French ideas to other lands, and, where the French rule continued long enough,