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Whose House of Learning? Some Thoughts on German Schools in Post-Reformation Germany

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Christopher R. Friedrichs
Christopher R. Friedrichs*
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia
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Extract

“German schools,” says Gerald Strauss near the beginning of Luther's House of Learning, “… are central to this book.” Certainly the vernacular schools are central to the argument of the book, for their inability to provide an effective religious education lies at the heart of Strauss' case that the German Reformation was a failure—at least in terms of the reformers' own aspirations. This argument, richly documented and persuasively presented as it is, is one that historians of the Reformation will find difficult to refute. Yet it is fair to say that the German schools themselves, as functioning institutions, are not extensively described in this book. For Luther's House of Learning is, to a large extent, history-from-above; the author's viewpoint tends to be that of the Lutheran intelligentsia—the magisterial reformers, the educated clerics they trained, and the sophisticated magistrates and bureaucrats who had absorbed their point of view. At the beginning of the book we are shown the pedagogical assumptions and religious and social aims of this intellectual elite. Then we see how its members created new institutions or tried to reshape existing ones in attempting to bring about a truly Christian society. Finally we are shown how their aspirations were thwarted by the inadequate tools through which they had to work—the mass of well-meaning but hopelessly underpaid and overworked village ministers and urban and rural German schoolmasters. It was the elite group of reformers who had defined the aims of the Reformation; it was the same group whose members, traveling grimly from village to village as they conducted their melancholy visitations, came to conclude that their undertaking had failed. From beginning to end the issue is seen primarily in their terms, and though Strauss forces us to recognize their failure he also registers his “deep and genuine sympathy for the reformers and their cause.”

Type
Discussion
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 22 , Issue 3 , Fall 1982 , pp. 371 - 377
Copyright
Copyright © 1982 by History of Education Society 

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References

Notes

1. Strauss, Gerald, Luther's House of Learning: Indoctrination of the Young in the German Reformation (Baltimore, 1978), p. 20.Google Scholar

2. Ibid., p. 386, n. 43.Google Scholar

3. For the approximate population of seventeenth-century Braunschweig, see Moderhack, Richard, Braunschweigische Landesgeschichte im Überblick, 2nd ed. (Quellen und Forschungen zur Braunschweigischen Geschichte, vol. 23; Braunschweig, 1977), p. 162. For a general survey of Braunschweig's history and society in this era, see Spiess, Werner, Braunschweig im Nachmittelalter, vom Ausgang des Mittelalters bis zum Ende der Stadtfreiheit (1491–1671), 2 vols. (Braunschweig, 1966); the educational system is briefly surveyed in vol. 2, pp. 670–80. The emphasis here is strongly on Latin rather than German schools, as is also the case in the earlier studies by Friedrich Koldewey: Braunschweigische Schulordnungen von den ältesten Zeiten bis zum Jahre 1828, Band I: Schulordnungen der Stadt Braunschweig (Monumenta Germaniae Paedagogica, vol. 1; Berlin, 1886) and Geschichte des Schulwesens im Herzogtum Braunschweig von den ältesten Zeiten bis zum Regierungsantritt des Herzogs Wilhelm im Jahre 1831 (Wolfenbüttel, 1891).Google Scholar

4. The episode described here is reconstructed from documents in the Stadtarchiv Braunschweig: BIV 11/Nr. 168: Schulsachen 1556–1719, fols. 75–83 and fol. 93.Google Scholar

5. Ibid., passim, esp. fols. 77r–79v.Google Scholar

6. Ibid., fols. 75–83.Google Scholar

7. Ibid., fol. 77v.Google Scholar

8. Ibid., fols. 79r–81r.Google Scholar

9. The first decree, dated 21 June 1648 (ibid., fol 93r) merely restated that only two schools were authorized. This was clearly insufficient, since Schurdan continued his activities: among other things, he let his brother be identified to a potential bride as the new Schreibmagister's sibling (ibid., fol 75v). A second council decree of 22 September (ibid., fol 93r) specifically named Schurdan and ordered him to desist from any effort to interfere with the existing school arrangements.Google Scholar

10. Ibid., fol. 94v. This is a summation of the reports in fols. 95–105.Google Scholar

11. The seven Winkelschulen for which exact enrollment figures are given had a total of 33 boys and 70 girls, i.e. a total of 103 or an average of 14.7 children per school (ibid., fol. 101r). If these figures were representative of the Winkelschulen as a whole, the total enrollment in 1673 would have amounted to 574 pupils. By contrast, Conrad Popping reported that his father's school had had at most eight score (i.e. 160) pupils at the start of the seventeenth century, and that each of the franchised schools had between two and three score pupils, i.e. about 50 each, immediately after the Thirty Years War (ibid., fol. 82r). By 1673 the figures may have been closer to the pre-war level, but they are not likely to have exceeded it.Google Scholar

12. Ibid., fols. 96–105, passim.Google Scholar

13. Ibid., fol. 78r.Google Scholar

14. Ibid., fol. 82v, including marginal notations by the petitioner.Google Scholar

15. Neumann, Rudolf, “Das niedere Schulwesen der Reichsstadt Frankfurt a.M.,” in Festschrift zur Hundertjahrfeier der Musterschule (Musterschule-Elisabethenschule) in Frankfurt am Main, 1803–1903. (Frankfurt am Main, 1903), pp. 1–34; here pp. 9–15.Google Scholar

16. Eiselen, F., “Geschichte des deutschen Schulwesens in Frankfurt am Main bis zur Gründung der Musterschule,” in Festschrift zur Eröffnung des neuen Gebäudes der Musterschule (Frankfurt am Main, 1880), p. 8.Google Scholar

17. Frankfurt had over 20 franchised schools in the seventeenth century, but this did not prevent the emergence of numerous Winkelschulen as well: Neumann, , “Schulwesen,” p. 15. In Regensburg the Winkelschulen were still evident as late as 1806: Soss, Hans, “Das städtische Elementarschulwesen Regensburgs im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert,” Verhandlungen des historischen Vereins von Oberpfalz und Regensburg, 78 (1928), 1–106, here p. 31. See also Strauss, , Luther's House of Learning, pp. 23, 201; Strauss tells us (p. 316, n. 106) that for the city of Hannover he “pursued the conflict between school authorities, on the one hand, and private schools and burghers who supported them, on the other, into the eighteenth century,” but unfortunately he does not report his findings.Google Scholar

18. Ibid., pp. 201–2, 364 n. 181.Google Scholar

19. Johansson, Egil, “An Introduction to the Study of Literacy in Sweden,” in Jackson, Edward and Winchester, Ian, eds., Records of the Past: Exploring New Sources in Social History (Informal Series of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, no. 13; Toronto, 1979), pp. 207–39, here pp. 223–28.Google Scholar

20. In 1683 the city council of Nördlingen complained that parents were withdrawing their children from school at an age at which they had learned to recite the catechism by rote, but before they really understood it. To compensate for this, the council instituted mandatory Sunday catechism lectures for all children and young adults. (Stadtarchiv Nördlingen: Ordnungsbuch 1641–1688, fols 394b–396b). But there is no reason to assume that these mass lessons were any more effective in Nördlingen than elsewhere. (In Frankfurt am Main teachers and students alike attended mandatory Sunday catechism lectures with extreme reluctance; in 1683 disorder among the children became so acute that the preachers asked the city council to post soldiers to the church to help keep the children quiet: Neumann, , “Schulwesen,” pp. 17–18).Google Scholar

21. For characteristic examples, see Neumann, , “Schulwesen,” pp. 16–17, and Friedrichs, Christopher R., Urban Society in an Age of War: Nördlingen, 1580–1720 (Princeton, N.J., 1979), p. 232. See also Strauss, , Luther's House of Learning, pp. 181–82.Google Scholar