CHAPTER V - EDUCATION AND THE PRESS

Summary

Education, like every other department of European life, had been deeply affected by the French Revolution and its aftermath. All the European states had seen ancient institutions tumbled to the ground, ancient conceptions swept away; the only exceptions were Russia, remote in its eastern plains, and Great Britain, which in this, as in so many other ways, pursued its own course. In France, out of the debris of the old order had arisen the secular state-controlled ‘University’, founded by Napoleon in 1808 to direct secondary and higher education; nothing was done by the state for primary education until after the Restoration. In Germany academic learning took the place occupied in the other civilised countries of the West by political and economic life; there was nothing in other lands to compare with the German belief in education. In Prussia, in particular, the great revival after 1807 had produced the University of Berlin (1810), which set the standard of all nineteenth-century university work. The Gymnasium, or secondary school, was developed out of the old Latin school, and primary education was fostered on lines suggested by the Swiss teacher and theorist, Pestalozzi. When peace returned after 1815, there was a widespread interest in education, expressed both by statesmen and by theorists, in all European countries. Everywhere there was much to be done, more especially in the backward countries like Italy, the eastern provinces of the Habsburg empire, and Russia, and considerable efforts were made, though political reaction was often harmful to educational advance.