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were thorough and complete, and since the middle of the sixteenth century the Catholic Church, in morals and government, has been a reformed Church. Above all, attention was turned to education rather than force as a means of winning and holding territory. A rigid quarantine was, however, established in Catholic lands against the further spread of heretical text books and literature. Especially was the reading of the Bible, which had been the cause of all the trouble, for a time rigidly prohibited. [20]

 

Such, in brief, are the historical facts connected with the various revolts against authority which split the Roman Catholic Church in the sixteenth century. These have been stated, as briefly and as impartially as possible, because so much of future educational history arose out of the conditions resulting from these revolts. The early educational history of America is hardly understandable without some knowledge of the religious forces awakened by the work of the Protestants. To the educational significance and consequences of these revolts we next turn.

 

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

 

1. How do you explain the difference in the effect, on the scholars of the time, of the Revival of Learning in Italy and in northern lands?

 

2. How do you explain the serious church opposition to the different attempts of northern scholars to try to turn the Church back to the simpler religious ideals and practices of early Christianity?

 

3. Explain how opposition to the practices of the Church could be organized into a political force.

 

4. Explain the analogy of a heretic in the fifteenth century and an anarchist of to-day.

 

5. Assuming that the Church had encouraged progressive evolution as a policy, and thus warded off revolution and disruption, in what ways might history have been different?

 

6. How can the bitter opposition to the reading and study of the Bible be explained?

 

7. Show the analogy between the freedom of thinking demanded by Luther, and that obtained three centuries earlier by the scholars in the rising universities. Why were the universities not opposed?

 

8. Enumerate the changes which had taken place in western Europe between the days of Wycliffe and Huss and the time of Luther, which enabled him to succeed where they had failed.

 

9. Explain in what ways the Protestant Revolt was essentially a revolution in thinking, and that, once started, certain other consequences must inevitably follow in time.

 

10. Was it perfectly natural that the reformers should refuse to their followers the same right to revolt, and separate off into smaller and still different sects, which they had contended for for themselves? Why?

 

11. On what basis could Catholic and Protestant wage war on one another to try to enforce their own particular belief?

 

12. Compare the individualism of the Greek Sophists with that of the Protestant reformers. Did Greece attempt to deal with them in the same way?

 

SELECTED READINGS

 

In the accompanying Book of Readings the following selections are reproduced:

 

147. Wycliffe: On the Enemies of Christ.

148. Wycliffites: Attack the Pope and the Practice of Indulgences.

149. Council of Constance: List of Church Abuses demanding Reform.

150. Geiler: A German Priest’s View as to Coming Reform.

151. Luther: Illustrations from his Ninety-Five Theses.

152. Saint Thomas Aquinas: On the Treatment of Heresy.

153. Henry VIII: The English Act of Supremacy.

 

QUESTIONS ON THE READINGS

 

1. Was Wycliffe’s attack (147) as direct and fierce as Luther’s (151)?

 

2. Explain the difference in the results attained by the two attacks?

 

3. Was the challenge of Wycliffe’s followers on indulgences (148) any less direct than that of Luther (151)?

 

4. Does the list of items drawn up by the Church Council of Constance (149) indicate a general recognition of the need for extensive Church reform?

 

5. Try to state the possible change in the progress of human history and civilization, had the demands of the Council of Constance (149) been carried out in good faith.

 

6. Considering the nature of heresy at the time, does the extract from Thomas Aquinas (152) indicate a narrow or a liberal attitude?

 

SUPPLEMENTARY REFERENCES

 

* Adams, G. B. Civilization during the Middle Ages.

Beard, Charles. Martin Luther and the Reformation.

Beard, Charles. The Reformation of the Sixteenth Century in its Relation to Modern Thought and Knowledge. (Hibbert Lectures, 1883.)

Fisher, George P. History of the Reformation.

Gasquet, F. A. Eve of the Reformation.

Johnson, A. H. Europe in the Sixteenth Century.

Perry, George G. History of the Reformation in England.

CHAPTER XIII

EDUCATIONAL RESULTS OF THE PROTESTANT REVOLTS

 

I. AMONG LUTHERANS AND ANGLICANS

 

ULTIMATE CONSEQUENCES OF THE BREAK WITH AUTHORITY. That the Protestant Revolts in the different lands produced large immediate and permanent changes in the character of the education provided in the revolting States is no longer accepted as being the case. In every phase of educational history growth has proceeded by evolution rather than by revolution, and this applies to the Protestant Revolts as well as to other revolutions.

Many changes naturally resulted at once, some of which were good and some of which were not, while others which were enthusiastically attempted failed of results because they involved too great advances for the time.

Much, too, of the progress that was inaugurated was lost in the more than a century of religious strife which followed, and the additional century and more of suspicion, hatred, religious formalism, and strict religious conformity which followed the period of religious strife. The educational significance of the reformation movement, though, lies in the far-reaching nature of its larger results and ultimate consequences rather than in its immediate accomplishments, and because of this the importance of the immediate changes effected have been overestimated by Protestants and underestimated by Catholics.

 

The dominant idea underlying Luther’s break with authority, and for that matter the revolts of Wycliffe, Huss, Zwingli, and Calvin as well, was that of substituting the authority of the Bible in religious matters for the authority of the Church; of substituting individual judgment in the interpretation of the Scriptures and in formulating decisions as to Christian duty for the collective judgment of the Church; and of substituting individual responsibility for salvation, in Luther’s conception of justification through personal faith and prayer, for the collective responsibility for salvation of the Church. [1] Whether one believes that the Protestant position was sound or not depends almost entirely upon one’s religious training and beliefs, and need not concern us here, as it makes no difference with the course of history. We can believe either way, and the course that history took remains the same. The educational consequences of the position taken by the Protestants, though, are important.

 

Under the older theory of collective judgment and collective responsibility for salvation—that is, the judgment of the Church rather than that of individuals—it was not important that more than a few be educated. Under the new theory of individual judgment and individual responsibility promulgated by the Protestants it became very important, in theory at least, that every one should be able to read the word of God, participate intelligently in the church services, and shape his life as he understood was in accordance with the commandments of the Heavenly Father.

This undoubtedly called for the education of all. Still more, from individual participation in the services of the Church, with freedom of judgment and personal responsibility in religious matters, to individual participation in and responsibility for the conduct of government was not a long step, and the rise of democratic governments and the provision of universal education were the natural and ultimate corollaries, though not immediately attained of the Protestant position regarding the interpretation of the Scriptures and the place and authority of the Church. This was soon seen and acted upon. The great struggle of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in consequence, became one for religious freedom and toleration; the great struggle of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has been for political freedom and political rights; to supply universal education has been left to the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries.

 

SCHOOLS AND LEARNING BEFORE THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. After the rise of the universities, as we have seen, many Latin secondary schools were founded in western Europe, and a more extensive development of the cathedral and other larger church schools took place. Rashdall (R. 154) thinks that by 1400 the opportunity to attend a Latin grammar school was rather common, an opinion in which Leach and Nohle concur. After the humanistic learning had spread to northern lands these opportunities were increased and improved. In England, for example, some two hundred and fifty Latin grammar schools are known to have been in existence by 1500. In Germany, as we have seen (chapter xi), many such schools were founded before the time of Luther. These offered a form of advanced education, in the language of the educated classes of the time, for those intending to go to the universities to prepare for service in either Church or State, and for teaching. The Church had also for long maintained or exercised control over a number of types of more elementary schools—parish, song, chantry, hospital (chapter VII)—the chief purpose of which was to prepare for certain phases of the church service, or to enter the secondary schools.

These schools, too, were taught partly or wholly in Latin. In consequence, while Latin schools came to be rather widely diffused, schools in the vernacular hardly existed outside of a few of the larger commercial cities of the north. Even the burgh and guild schools (p. 205), established in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, were essentially Latin schools.

 

[Illustration: PLATE 6. EDUCATIONAL LEADERS IN PROTESTANT GERMANY

(From a painting dated 1543, by Lucas Cranach, a German contemporary of both men, and now in the Uffizi Gallery, at Florence) MARTIN LUTHER (1483-1546)

Professor of Theology at Wittenberg

 

PHILIPP MELANCHTHON (1497-1560)

Professor of Greek at Wittenberg]

 

In the commercial cities of the North, however, though often only after quite a struggle with the local church authorities, which throughout the Middle Ages had maintained a monopoly of all instruction as a protection to orthodoxy, different types of elementary vernacular schools had been developed to meet local commercial needs, such as writing-schools to train writers, [2] and reckoning-schools to train young men to handle accounts.

[3] Reading, manners, and religion were also taught in these schools.

Other city schools, largely Latin in type, but containing some vernacular instruction to meet local business needs not met by the cathedral or parish schools of the city, were also developed. Up to the time of the Protestant Revolts, however, there was almost no instruction in the vernacular outside of the commercial cities, nor was there any particular demand for such instruction elsewhere. If one wished to be a scholar, a statesman, a diplomat, a teacher, a churchman, or to join a religious brotherhood, he needed to study the learned language of the time,—Latin.

With this he could be at home with people of his kind anywhere in western Europe. The vernacular he could leave to tradesmen, craftsmen, soldiers, laborers, and the servant classes.

 

[Illustration: FIG. 92. TWO EARLY VERNACULAR SCHOOLS

GERMAN (From a woodcut, printed at Nuremberg, 1505) FRENCH (After a drawing by Soquand, 1528)]

 

These people, on the other hand, had practically no need for a written language, aside from a very small amount for business needs. Even here the sign of the cross would do. There were but few books written in the vernacular tongues, and these had to be copied by hand and, in consequence, were scarce and expensive. There were no newspapers (first newspaper, Venice, 1563) or magazines. Spectacles for reading were not known until the end of the thirteenth century, and were not common for two centuries

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