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

the Great died in 1786. In the reign of his successors his work bore fruit in a complete transfer of all schools from church to state control, and in the organization of the strongest system of state schools the world had ever known. The year following the death of Frederick the Great (1787), and largely as an outgrowth of the preceding centralizing work with reference to elementary education, the Superior School (Oberschulcollegium) Board was established to exercise a similar centralized control over the older secondary and higher schools of Prussia. Secondary and higher education were now severed from church control, in principle at least, as elementary education had been by the “Regulations” of 1763 and 1765. The year following (1788) “Leaving Examinations” (_Maturit�tspr�fung_) were instituted to determine the completion of the gymnasial course. These, for a time, were largely ineffective, due to clerical opposition, but the centralizing work of this Superior School Board for the supervision of higher education, and the state examinations for testing the instruction of the secondary schools, were from the first important contributing influences.

 

In 1794 came the culmination of all the preceding work in the publication of the General Civil Code (_Allgemeine Landrecht_) for the State, in which, in the section relating to schools, the following important declaration was made:

 

Schools and universities are state institutions, charged with the instruction of youth in useful information and scientific knowledge.

Such institutions may be founded only with the knowledge and consent of the State. All public schools and educational institutions are under the supervision of the State, and are at all times subject to its examination and inspection.

 

The secular authority and the clergy were still to share jointly in the control of the schools, but both according to rules laid down by the State. In all cases of conflict or dispute, the secular authority was to decide. This important document forms the Magna Charta for secular education in Prussia.

 

During the decade which followed the promulgation of this declaration of state control but little additional progress of importance was accomplished, though the Minister of Justice, to whom (1798) the administration of Lutheran church and school affairs had been given, maintained a correspondence for some years with the King regarding “provisions for a better education and instruction of the children of citizens and peasants,” and stated to the King that “the object of reform is national education, and its field of operation, therefore, all provinces of the monarchy.” The King, though, a weak, deeply religious, and unimaginative man (Frederick William III, 1797-1840), who lacked the energy and foresight of his predecessors, did little or nothing. Under Frederick William III the State lacked vigor and drifted; the Church regained something of its former power; and the army and the civil service became corrupt. In 1806 a blow fell which brought matters to an immediate crisis and forced important action.

 

II. A STATE SCHOOL SYSTEM AT LAST CREATED

 

THE HUMILIATION OF PRUSSIA. At the close of 1804 France, by vote, changed from the Republic to an Empire, with Napoleon Bonaparte as first Emperor of the French, and for some years he took pains that Frenchmen should forget “Liberty and Equality” amid the surfeit of “Glory” he heaped upon France. The great nations outside France, fearful of Napoleon’s ambition and power, did not take his accession to the throne of France so complacently, and, in 1805, England, Sweden, Austria, and Russia formed the “Third Coalition” against Napoleon in an effort to restore the balance of power in Europe. Of the great powers of Europe only Prussia held aloof, refused to take sides, and in consequence enjoyed a temporary prosperity and freedom from invasion. For this, though, she was soon to pay a terrible price. Having humiliated the Austrians and vanquished the Russians, Napoleon now goaded the Prussians into attacking him, and then utterly humiliated them in turn. At the battle of Jena (October 14, 1806) the Prussian army was utterly routed, and forced back almost to the Russian frontier. Officered by old generals and political favorites who were no longer efficient, and backed by a state service honeycombed with inefficiency and corruption, the Prussian army that had won such victories under Frederick the Great was all but annihilated by the new and efficient fighting machine created by the Corsican who now controlled the destinies of France. By the Treaty of Tilsit (July 7, 1807) Prussia lost all her lands west of the Elbe and nearly all her stealings from Poland—in all about one half her territory and population—and was almost stricken from the list of important powers in Europe. In all its history Prussia had experienced no such humiliation as this. In a few months the constructive work of a century had been undone.

 

THE REGENERATION OF PRUSSIA. The new national German feeling, which had been slowly rising for half a century, now burst forth and soon worked a regeneration of the State. In the school of adversity the King and the people learned much, and the task of national reorganization was entrusted to a series of able ministers whom the King and his capable Queen, Louise, now called into service. His chief minister, Stein, created a free people by abolishing serfdom and feudal land tenure (1807); eliminated feudal distinctions in business; granted local government to the cities; and broke the hold of the clergy on the educational system. His successor, Hardenburg, extended the rights of citizenship, and laid the foundations of government by legislative assemblies. Another minister, Scharnhorst, reorganized the Prussian army (1807-13) by dismissing nearly all the old generals, and introducing the principle of compulsory military service. In all branches of the government service there were reorganizations, the one thought of the leaders being to so reorganize and revitalize the State as to enable it in time to overthrow the rule of Napoleon and regain its national independence.

 

Though the abolition of serfdom, the reform of the civil service, and the beginnings of local and representative government were important gains, nothing was of secondary importance to the complete reorganization of education which now took place. The education of the people was turned to in earnest for the regeneration of the national spirit, and education was, in a decade, made the great constructive agent of the State. Said the King:

 

Though we have lost many square miles of land, though the country has been robbed of its external power and splendor, yet we shall and will gain in intrinsic power and splendor, and therefore it is my earnest wish that the greatest attention be paid to public instruction…. The State must regain in mental force what it has lost in physical force.

 

His minister Stein said:

 

We proceed from the fundamental principle, to elevate the moral, religious, and patriotic spirit in the nation, to instil into it again courage, self-reliance, and readiness to sacrifice everything for national honor and for independence from the foreigner…. To attain this end, we must mainly rely on the education and instruction of the young. If by a method founded on the true nature of man, every faculty of the mind can be developed, every noble principle of life be animated and nourished, all one-sided education avoided, and those tendencies on which the power and dignity of men rest, hitherto neglected with the greatest indifference, carefully fostered—then we may hope to see grow up a generation, physically and morally vigorous, and the beginnings of a better time.

 

FICHTE APPEALS TO THE LEADERS. Still more did the philosopher Fichte (1762-1814), in a series of “Addresses to the German Nation,” delivered in Berlin during the winter [8] of 1807-08, appeal to the leaders to turn to education to rescue the State from the miseries which had overwhelmed it.

Unable forcibly to resist, and with every phase of the government determined by a foreign conqueror, only education had been overlooked, he said, and to this the leaders should turn for national redemption (R.

277). He held that it rested with them to determine whether you will be the end and last of a race … or the beginnings and germ of a new time, glorious beyond all your imaginings, and those from whom posterity will reckon the years of their welfare…. A nation that is capable, if it were only in its highest representation and leaders, of fixing its eyes firmly on the vision from the spiritual world, Independence, and being possessed with a love of it, will surely prevail over a nation that is only used as a tool of foreign aggressiveness and for the subjugation of independent nations.

 

With a fervor of emotion that was characteristic of a romantic age, impelled by a conviction that the distinctive character of the German people was indispensable to the world, and holding that what was necessary also was possible, Fichte made the German leaders feel, with him, that to reshape reality by means of ideas is the business of man, his proper earthly task; and nothing can be impossible to a will confident of itself and of its aim. [9]

 

[Illustration: PLATE 13. TWO LEADERS IN THE REGENERATION OF PRUSSIA JOHANN GOTTLEIB FICHTE (1762-1814)

Philosopher, university teacher

 

WILHELM VON HUMBOLDT (1767-1835)

Philosopher, scholar, statesman]

 

Fichte’s Addresses stirred the thinkers among the German people as they had not been stirred since the days of the Reformation, [10] and a national reorganization of education, with national ends in view, now took place. As Duke Ernest remade Gotha, after the ravages of the Thirty Years’

War, by means of education (p. 317), so the leaders of Prussia now created a new national spirit by taking over the school from the Church and forging it into one of the greatest constructive instruments of the State.

The result showed itself in the “Uprising of Prussia,” in the winter of 1812-13; the “War of Liberation,” of 1813-15; the utter defeat of Napoleon at the battle of Leipzig by Russia, Prussia, and Austria, in 1813; and again at the battle of Waterloo by England and Prussia, [11] in 1815.

Still more clearly was the result shown in the humiliating defeat of France, in 1870, when it was commonly remarked that the schoolmaster of Prussia had at last triumphed. The regeneration of Prussia in the early part of the nineteenth century, as well as its more recent humiliation, stand as eloquent testimonials to the tremendous influence of education on national destiny, when rightly and when wrongly directed.

 

THE REORGINATION OF ELEMENTARY EDUCATION. The first step in the process of educational reorganization was the abolition (1807) of the Oberschulcollegium Board, established (p. 564) in 1787 to supervise secondary and higher education, in order to get rid of clerical influence and control. The next step was the creation instead (1808) of a Department of Public Instruction, organized as a branch of the Interior Department of the State.

 

One of the first steps of the acting head of the new department was to send seventeen Prussian teachers (1808) to Switzerland to spend three years, at the expense of the Government, in studying Pestalozzi’s ideas and methods, and they were particularly enjoined that they were not sent primarily to get the mechanical side of the method, but to “warm yourselves at the sacred fire which burns in the heart of this man, so full of strength and love, whose work has remained so far below what he originally desired, below the essential ideas of his life, of which the method is only a feeble product.

 

“You will have reached perfection when you have clearly seen that education is an art, and the most sublime and holy of all, and in what connection it is with the great art of the education of nations.”

 

In 1809 Carl August Zeller (1774-1847), a pupil of Pestalozzi, who had established two Pestalozzian training-colleges in Switzerland and had just begun to hold