EDUCATION

EDUCATION. European preuniversity education from 1500 to 1789 underwent three major developments. First, Renaissance humanists created the classical Latin curriculum, which dominated schools throughout these centuries. Second, church institutions, both Catholic and Protestant, took leading roles in organizing schools and providing teachers for the vast majority of schools from the late sixteenth century onward. Third, Enlightenment school reformers of the eighteenth century attacked the church's role in education and proposed state schools as an alternative. Their proposals did not win acceptance until after 1789.

THE ORGANIZATION OF SCHOOLING IN 1500

Renaissance Europe inherited from the Middle Ages an uncoordinated and diverse structure of schools. Different kinds of schools competed with or complemented each other. One way to understand them is to note their sponsors—that is, the institution, entity, or person that governed or paid the expenses for a school. A single schoolmaster created an independent school, the equivalent of a "private school" in the twenty-first century. He typically opened a one-room school in his home or rented quarters. There he taught neighborhood pupils whose parents paid him fees to teach their sons. His only qualifications were his teaching skill and his ability to persuade parents to send their children. The teacher might possess a university degree, which meant facility in Latin and acquaintance with higher learning in rhetoric, philosophy, law, or theology. Or he might be only slightly better educated than his pupils.

The tutor was another independent schoolmaster. He lived and taught in the home of a noble or wealthy merchant or visited the household daily. In both cases he taught only the children of the household or two adjacent households. A few tutors were the constant guides and companions, at home or in travel, to single boys or youths of considerable wealth and social standing.

Other independent masters presided over their own boarding schools that housed, fed, and instructed children sent to them. This independent master became a substitute father to his charges. He taught boys in the classroom, chided their manners at table, and improved their morals throughout. At least parents hoped this happened. Some of the most famous humanistic schools of the Italian Renaissance operated by such famous pedagogues as Vittorino Ramboldoni da Feltre (1373/78–1446/47) and Guarino Guarini of Verona (1374–1460) were independent boarding schools.

The endowed school was an independent school that endured beyond the lifetime of a single teacher or founder. A wealthy individual left a sum of money for a school. Endowment income paid the master's salary and rent for a schoolroom or building where boys learned for free. In England before the Protestant Reformation, the master of an endowed school often had to be a priest so that he could celebrate daily a mass for the repose of the donor's soul. Schoolboys learned reading, Latin, and sometimes chant. A large endowment could create a boarding school in which boys both studied and lived. An inadequate endowment might mean that boys had to pay supplementary fees. Sometimes endowed schools became municipal schools when the town council paid additional expenses and took over direction.

One group of endowed schools, the English public schools, occupied a unique place in the life of England. Despite the name, they were expensive private schools. The Renaissance and Reformation era saw the foundation of the most prestigious: seven boarding schools—Winchester (founded 1382), Eton (1440), Westminster (late sixteenth century), Shrewsbury (1552), Harrow (1571), Rugby (1576), and Charterhouse (1611)—and two day schools, St. Paul's, founded by the English humanist John Colet (1467–1519) in 1508, and Merchant Taylors (1561). But England added many more public schools over the centuries. The public schools educated boys from the highest ranks of society, many of whom went on to the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. The public schools of England produced a large number of clergymen, army officers, and members of government and became even more important in English life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The local civil authority, such as the town council, might sponsor a school. The town government chose and paid the master, sometimes imposed curricular directives, and sent a visitor to see that teacher and pupils performed satisfactorily. Sometimes municipal schools were free. But they never enrolled all the school-age boys of the town, and they seldom taught girls. The town government typically supported only one or two municipal teachers, who taught perhaps 50 or 60 percent of the town's school-age boys. Often the town permitted the municipal teacher to collect fees from the students to augment his modest salary. Universal public education, with or without fees, did not exist and only gradually won acceptance in the nineteenth century.

A third kind of school was the church school. An ecclesiastical authority or institution, such as a bishop, a cathedral chapter of canons, a monastery, or even the parish priest, opened a school. They were not numerous until the Protestant and Catholic Reformations of the sixteenth century created church schools, which dominated the educational landscape in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Regardless of its sponsorship, the actual school was usually modest. It normally consisted of a single teacher instructing a group of boys of varying ages and abilities, anywhere from a half dozen to thirty, in a single room. If the teacher had forty pupils or more, he might have an assistant who drilled the younger boys in their lessons, such as Latin conjugations and declensions. The schoolroom might be in the teacher's home or a rented room outside it. It is unlikely that the school had an outdoor area for play or physical exercises. Drinking water and food had to be brought in. If the schoolroom had a stove, each pupil might be required to bring a stick of wood on cold days.

Only a minority of boys and a tiny minority of girls aged six to fifteen attended school. Probably about 28 percent of boys attended formal schools in Florence, Italy, in 1480, and 26 percent of boys attended formal schools in Venice in 1587. The girls' percentage was low, probably less than 1 percent. About 20 to 25 percent of boys and less than 5 percent of girls attended school in sixteenth-century England. About 40 percent of boys received enough schooling to become literate in the town of Cuenca (in Castile, Spain) in the sixteenth century. And perhaps 12 percent of Polish males attended school in the 1560s.

School attendance closely followed the hierarchies of wealth, occupation, and social status. Sons of nobles, wealthy merchants, and professionals, such as lawyers, physicians, notaries, high civil servants, university professors, and preuniversity teachers, were much more likely to attend school than sons of craftsmen, artisans, small shopkeepers, wool workers, laborers, and servants. The primary reason for the different schooling rates was that schooling almost always cost money. The social and occupational expectations of parents offered additional reasons.

Boys were far more likely than girls to attend school. They needed schooling, especially Latin schooling, to qualify for leadership positions in society. But such positions and all the learned professions were barred to women. Hence few parents believed that daughters needed formal education. Some girls received informal teaching at home, but the number is impossible to estimate.

Urban dwellers were more likely to attend school than those who lived in the countryside or in farming villages, because more teachers were available in towns and cities. Rural areas had few resources to dedicate to schooling and few available teachers. The distances that students might have to walk to get to school and the exposure of the schoolroom to the elements, a serious consideration in northern Europe, also helped explain the lower schooling rate of rural children. In theory, schools taught all year. Of course numerous saints' days and civic holidays, long vacations at Christmas and Easter, and Carnival before Lent broke up the schedule. So did the need to work in the fields during harvest. And extremes of summer heat and winter cold shut down schools or kept children home.

THE CLASSICAL CURRICULUM OF THE RENAISSANCE

The most significant event in European schooling in these centuries was the adoption of a classical curriculum for the Latin schools in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Medieval Latin schools taught a mixture of manufactured verse texts of pious sentiments, grammar manuals and glossaries, and limited material from ancient classical texts. Renaissance humanists discarded the medieval curriculum in favor of the works of Virgil (70–19 B.C.E.), Cicero (106–43 B.C.E.), Terence (186/185?–159 B.C.E.), Julius Caesar (100–44 B.C.E.), and other ancient authors. These authors taught grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy, the famous humanistic studies that imparted virtue and eloquence to the free person, or so the Renaissance believed. Students learned to write Latin in the ornate and highly rhetorical style of Cicero's Epistolae ad familiares (Familiar letters), which was very different from the clear, functional, and sometimes graceless medieval Latin. They studied Virgil and Terence for poetry and Caesar and Valerius Maximus (fl. c. 30–40 C.E.) for history. Humanist pedagogues sought guidance on Latin rhetoric and ancient pedagogy generally from the Institutio oratoria (Institutes of oratory) of the ancient Roman teacher of rhetoric Quintilian (c. 35–c. 100). Italy adopted the classical Latin curriculum in the first half of the fifteenth century, and the rest of Europe followed in the early sixteenth century.

Attending a Latin school to learn classical Latin was the prerequisite for every professional career because Latin was the language of law, medicine, science, and theology into the eighteenth century and sometimes beyond. To mention one example among many, Isaac Newton (1642–1727) wrote his masterpiece, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687; Mathematical principles of natural philosophy) in Latin. All students who wished to go to the university had to learn Latin because the lectures, texts, disputations, and examinations were conducted in Latin. And even after Latin ceased to be the universal language for learning, pedagogues and parents believed the study of Latin and Greek grammar prepared the mind for any intellectual endeavor. Latin and Greek literature also conveyed high purpose and lofty moral sentiments that society and parents wanted leaders to emulate.

Social and intellectual consequences of the classical curriculum. The adoption of a classical humanistic curriculum had profound consequences. The division of European education into a classical Latin curriculum for the leaders of society and professionals and a vernacular education for the rest (see below) made schooling the key to social hierarchy. Certainly social divisions existed before the adoption of the classical curriculum and would have continued without it. But now a Latin classical education was crucial for anyone wishing to obtain or hold a certain position in society. Even a bright child could not learn Latin without long and difficult study. And only parents possessing a certain amount of income could afford the fees to send a son and occasionally a daughter to Latin schools for many years and to forgo the assistance and income that a working child brought to the family. From the Renaissance through the eighteenth century and beyond, the classical curriculum defined the academic secondary school, which divided the upper and middle classes from the working class. At the same time, using a classical education as the gateway to advancement also meant that boys, and later girls, of poor and humble origins might advance through merit if they could obtain a Latin education. Free Latin schools eventually became available to some children.

The adoption of a curriculum based on reading the ancient works was a remarkable but strange decision with far-reaching consequences. The ancient world, culturally Greek, spiritually pagan, and politically united under a militaristic Rome, differed greatly from modern European civilization, which was Christian and politically divided into numerous states. Yet Europe's intellectuals and political leaders decided that future leaders of society should study the classics of ancient Rome and Greece in order to become eloquent and morally upright. They did not change their minds until the twentieth century.

The classical curriculum also imparted a secular spirit to European schooling. Even though western European civilization was profoundly otherworldly in its ultimate goal, the Latin classical curriculum emphasized education for this life. Neither Cicero, Virgil, nor any other ancient pagan text urged men and women to do what was morally right in order to enjoy union with the Christian God in the next world. Of course Renaissance educators were convinced that Christianity and the classics taught an identical morality of honesty, self-sacrifice for the common good, and perseverance. But the classics did not teach one to love either enemy or neighbor. Even though Catholic religious orders and Protestant divines added considerable religious content to the classical curriculum, the secular spirit of the classical curriculum remained a significant part of European education far beyond the Renaissance.

VERNACULAR SCHOOLS

Vernacular schools also existed in every region of Europe. Indeed all of Europe had two school systems, classical Latin and vernacular, throughout these centuries. For example, in the major commercial city of Venice, half the boys in school attended vernacular schools in 1587 and 1588. They taught reading and writing in the vernacular and often commercial mathematics to boys (and a small number of girls) destined for the world of work. This curriculum emerged from the practical experience and lay culture of the merchant community. Vernacular schools probably underwent little change during the Renaissance and beyond. Since church and state authorities did not hand down directives for vernacular schools, the teachers, who were almost always modest independent masters, taught what they pleased. Hence the children learned to read from the same adult books of popular culture that their parents enjoyed. Indeed Venetian boys sometimes brought from home popular vernacular texts that parents wanted them to learn to read. The vernacular textbooks were a diverse lot, ranging from medieval saints' lives to Renaissance chivalric romances. Obviously they imparted conflicting moral values. Students would read about heroic saints who endured martyrdom for Christ, then read about knights who killed for revenge and ladies who committed adultery for love. Italian vernacular schools also taught advanced commercial mathematical skills and elementary bookkeeping. Vernacular schools in other parts of Renaissance Europe taught arithmetic but not the rest of the commercial curriculum of Italian vernacular schools.

German vernacular schools were called Winkelschulen ('backstreet' or 'corner schools') because they were located in out-of-the-way places, such as the back room of a shop or the attic of a crowded home, in larger towns or cities. There male and female teachers of modest backgrounds taught boys and some girls basic literacy and elementary arithmetic for small fees. The name also indicates the attitude of authorities, who saw them as unsupervised schools teaching questionable doctrines. A Prussian government evaluation of 1768 saw Winkelschulen as lacking method and discipline and as potential sources of depravity. The self-appointed teachers varied widely: members of dissident religious sects, unemployed preachers, would-be clergymen, artisans, injured soldiers, and women. Despite official disapproval, they continued through the eighteenth century and beyond in German states because they offered a service to a segment of the population that had little or no other access to schooling. Other European countries also had modest vernacular schools but on a more regular basis and enjoying better reputations.

PRINTING AND THE EXPANSION OF EDUCATION

Printing aided education by making available multiple copies of textbooks. The use of movable type began about 1450, and by the 1480s and 1490s publishers were producing significant numbers of reading primers and manuals of Latin syntax (the construction of sentences according to the rules governing the use of words) and morphology (the inflected forms of words). No longer would students have to rely on handwritten manuscripts available only to the teacher or to wealthy students. As the cost of printed books declined drastically in the sixteenth century, it is possible that most pupils had the resources to own a grammar manual and primer. Whether they did or not is impossible to determine.

Historians sometimes believe that more and cheaper printed books stimulated an increase in education and literacy. Rather, four factors working together probably increased the amount of schooling by 1600 and beyond: (1) inexpensive printed books, (2) greater availability of free or inexpensive schooling, (3) the desire of students and parents for more education, and (4) society's willingness to reward those who took the trouble to learn.

THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION AND EDUCATION

Martin Luther (1483–1546) argued for universal compulsory education, at least at the elementary level. And when German princes embraced the Reformation, Lutheran clergymen drafted new arrangements for the church and state that almost always included a Schulordnung ('school order'). Protestant school orders firmly placed the state (prince or city council) in charge of the schools. By the 1560s and 1570s Protestant school orders created a relatively integrated set of schools, beginning with an elementary school to teach reading and writing. Abler students advanced to a higher school, which taught Latin, and the most gifted and socially privileged to an advanced secondary school, which led to university. The goals were twofold: (1) to train future clergymen and administrators of the state; and (2) to impart to a larger fraction of the male population enough reading and writing to function at an appropriate station in life. The students studied the same classical curriculum taught in Catholic lands along with a great deal of catechetical instruction in Lutheran Christianity. Protestant Germany and nearby border regions, such as Strasbourg, had some excellent secondary-level Latin schools.

It appears that the number and possibly the quality of schools increased during the age of the Protestant Reformation in Germany. But the Protestant Reformation did not mark the beginning of modern schooling. The goals were high, the results often modest. The level of instruction was not always elevated. The schools still often charged fees, which poor parents could not afford. Sometimes parents could not even provide the stick of wood that a child was expected to bring for the school fire in winter. A school seldom enrolled all the boys in the village, and enrollments waxed and waned according to the work seasons. Even though the state was supposed to organize and direct schools, the Winkelschulen continued.

Nevertheless, the Reformation did provide some interesting developments. In 1560 the Scottish Calvinist leader John Knox (1513–1572) called for a system of parish schools in Scotland that developed over the next two hundred years. Legislation required landowners to appoint a schoolmaster for each parish, to pay him a small salary, and to build a schoolhouse. Parish schools enrolled both boys and girls, although girls' education emphasized reading and sewing rather than the broader range of academic skills imparted to boys. All children had to pay small fees, but the church or community paid the fees of poor children. Although parish schools were less numerous in remote and poorer regions of Scotland than in the affluent lowlands, it was a rudimentary national system of elementary education. By the eighteenth century Scotland had one of the highest schooling rates, especially for girls, in Europe.

Despite such local successes as Scotland, it seems unlikely that the Protestant Reformation made education more available than did Catholic Europe. Indeed because Protestantism abolished religious orders, it did not enjoy the access to the extensive networks of new schools that the religious orders of the Catholic Reformation provided. Nor can the thesis that Protestantism created a permanent expansion of schooling and literacy so that every individual could read the Bible be supported on the basis of current research. The only example in which the Protestant Reformation achieved almost total reading literacy occurred in Sweden in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. There the state Reformed (Lutheran) Church undertook to teach the entire population, male and female, how to read. Thanks to great effort and governmental threats (such as refusing permission to marry to those who failed to learn to read), the effort succeeded. It was an impressive achievement but unique. Nothing comparable occurred anywhere else in Protestant or Catholic Europe.

RELIGIOUS ORDER EDUCATION IN CATHOLIC EUROPE

The new Catholic Reformation religious orders of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries altered the educational landscape of Catholic Europe. The Society of Jesus (founded in 1540) and other religious orders that followed its pedagogical example created new schools and sometimes took control of existing municipal schools. Because they did not charge fees, the new schools of the Jesuits, Piarists, and other orders expanded educational opportunity and dominated education in Catholic countries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Jesuit schools. The Jesuits had not intended to become educators. But in December 1547 the city government of Messina, firmly nudged by the Spanish viceroy who ruled Sicily for Spain, petitioned Ignatius Loyola (1491–1556) to send ten Jesuits to Messina, five to teach and the rest to undertake spiritual and charitable activities. The city government promised food, clothing, and a building. Recognizing this as an intriguing opportunity and knowing that one did not refuse a viceroy, Loyola managed to send seven Jesuits, including some of the ablest scholars of the young order. According to the agreement with the city, the Jesuit fathers would teach nine classes. In effect they created a classical Latin elementary and secondary school along with higher studies in philosophy. The city would erect a building, the people of Messina would support the Jesuits through freewill offerings, and the viceroy would also help. The school formally opened in October 1548. It was an immediate success, as two hundred boys enrolled by December. The school averaged an enrollment of about three hundred boys in the next two decades.

Free instruction largely explained the instant success of the Messina school. The Jesuits inaugurated the first systematic effort to provide free education for several hundred boys in a town, something entirely new for Italy and Europe. The opportunity must have seemed heaven-sent to boys and their parents. In addition the Jesuit fathers were learned scholars and teachers. Many other Jesuit schools followed.

The Jesuit schools offered the same Latin curriculum that the Italian humanists of the fifteenth century had created and that Desiderius Erasmus (1466?–1536) and other northern humanists promoted. But they made several additions: prayers, religious training, and insistence that the boys attend mass, confess, and communicate; better pedagogical organization, including imaginative teaching techniques; and higher subjects, like philosophy, logic, mathematics, and theology.

The Jesuit schools soon refined their goals. Beginning in 1551 they phased out the introductory class that taught beginning reading and writing and the rudiments of Latin grammar. A boy had to learn these before entering a Jesuit school. And the Jesuits decided to concentrate their energies on those likely to stay in school for many years. With this decision, partly provoked by a shortage of teachers, the Jesuits narrowed their educational mission chronologically and socially: they taught the Latin humanities to upper- and middle-class boys aged ten to sixteen. Since the Jesuits followed the policy of free education until the nineteenth century, they sought and received financial support from wealthy lay or ecclesiastical leaders of the community and sometimes from the town government. The growth in the number of Jesuit schools was extraordinary. There were about 35 schools worldwide in 1556, 121 in 1575, 245 in 1599, 293 in 1607, 444 in 1626, 578 in 1679, 612 in 1710, and 669 in 1749. All but a few were in Europe, with the largest number in France and Italy.

A handful of Jesuit schools in large Italian cities, such as Rome and Milan, taught several hundred boys between the ages of ten and sixteen and a few older students. Jesuit schools in France, Germany, and Portugal often taught five hundred to fifteen hundred students. The largest and best-known Jesuit schools taught university-level philosophy, mathematics, and physics to the older and brighter students. At the same time the vast majority of Jesuit schools enrolled only one hundred to two hundred students who studied, under four or five teachers, the Latin humanities curriculum and religious instruction.

The Jesuit schools appealed to the community at large with their public programs. Students at Jesuit schools in Spain and Portugal began to give public performances with scenery, stagecraft, and music of Latin tragedies, both sacred and secular. They also presented what might be called achievement days, in which students orated, recited, and debated before parents and dignitaries of the city. The schools of other Catholic Reformation teaching orders, such as the Barnabites (Clerics Regular of St. Paul) and Somaschans (Clerics Regular of Somascha), did the same.

Schools for nobles. Boarding schools limited to boys of verified noble lineage were a feature of the stratified society of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Princes and others founded boarding schools for noble boys who mixed with their peers from different parts of Europe. They entered between the ages of eleven and fourteen and might stay until the age of twenty. The schools for nobles supplemented the standard Latin curriculum with lessons in singing, dancing, designing fortifications, French, and above all, horsemanship. These schools cost a great deal. Ranuccio I Farnese (1569–1622, ruled 1592–1622), duke of Parma and Piacenza, founded a famous school for nobles in 1601 in Parma and gave the Jesuits direction of the school in 1604. It had a peak enrollment of 550 to 600 boys between 1670 and 1700, then began to decline. The Jesuits were the teachers in many noble schools and boarding schools with upper-class boys. Other religious orders followed their lead but to a lesser extent. Some schools for nobles also developed in Protestant lands.

France. In the early sixteenth century many French towns established Latin classical schools open to the boys of the town and staffed by teachers who had imbibed the Renaissance humanistic curriculum at Paris. Then the crown in the early seventeenth century encouraged the Jesuits and other orders to establish schools in the kingdom. Through financial subsidies or royal command, King Henry IV (ruled 1589–1610) persuaded the religious orders to take direction of the town schools. Sometimes the towns agreed because the schools were going poorly. The town could not provide enough funding, teachers were in short supply, enrollments were declining, academic standards were falling, and the students were disorderly. Under the protection of the crown, the new religious orders of the Catholic Reformation became the schoolmasters of France.

Numerous towns across France replaced their secular schoolmasters with the Jesuits, the French Congregation of the Oratory, and the Doctrinaires (Secular Priests of the Christian Doctrine). They established some remarkable schools. In 1603 Henry IV gave the Jesuits a château in the town of La Flèche in the Loire Valley. Le Collège Henry IV at La Flèche (usually just called La Flèche) began with that gift. The king provided additional financial support in the following years and strongly encouraged members of his court to send their sons there. The school was an instant success, boasting an enrollment of twelve hundred to fourteen hundred students, of whom three hundred were boarders, in a few years. La Flèche's most famous pupil was René Descartes (1596–1650). Entering in 1606, Descartes spent nine years there, the first six studying Latin grammar, humanities, and rhetoric, the last three studying philosophy, which included mathematics, physics, and Galileo's telescope discoveries. Although he eventually rejected the philosophy learned there, Descartes in 1641 strongly endorsed La Flèche for the excellence of its instruction, its lively students from all over France, and the spirit of student equality the Jesuits fostered.

The Collège de Clermont (1560–1762), renamed the Collège Louis le Grand in 1682, was the Jesuit school in Paris. It enrolled boys aged twelve to twenty. The number of students steadily rose from fifteen hundred (including three hundred boarders) in 1619 to twenty-five hundred to three thousand students (including five hundred to six hundred boarders) in the late seventeenth century.

Students in the Jesuit schools and probably in most Latin schools in both Catholic and Protestant Europe were placed and promoted according to their achievement, not their ages. This meant that boys of many ages might be in a single class. For example, the rhetoric class at the Collège de Clermont in Paris had 160 pupils (obviously taught by more than one teacher) in 1677. One pupil was ten years old, three were eleven, eight were twelve, fifteen were thirteen, thirty-five were fourteen, thirty-seven were fifteen, twenty-five were sixteen, twenty-eight were seventeen, six were eighteen, two were nineteen, and one was twenty. While the rhetoric class normally took two years to complete, some pupils may have required more time.

Jesuit schools in Europe, Asia, and the Americas followed the program of studies minutely organized in the society's Ratio Studiorum (Plan of studies) of 1599. It prescribed texts, classroom procedures, rules, and discipline. The Ratio Studiorum frowned on corporal punishment; if unavoidable, a non-Jesuit should administer it. Other Catholic religious order schools offering Latin education often copied Jesuit educational procedures to greater or lesser degree.

Piarist schools. Not all schools of the religious orders taught a Latin curriculum to middle- and upper-class boys. The Basque priest José Calasanz (c. 1557–1648) had the revolutionary idea of offering comprehensive free schooling to poor boys when he opened his first "pious school" in the working-class area of Trastevere, Rome, in 1597. The first pious school accepted only pupils presenting certificates of poverty issued by parish priests. It aimed to educate poor and working-class boys so they might earn a living in this life and attain salvation in the next. The school offered free instruction in vernacular reading, writing, and arithmetic plus some Latin to bright boys, an early attempt to combine the vernacular and Latin curricula. It also furnished books, paper, pens, ink, and on occasion food to needy pupils. Calasanz established a religious order, the Clerics Regular of the Mother of God of the Pious Schools (usually called the Piarists) in 1621 to carry on his work. In time the Piarists dropped the certificate of poverty as a prerequisite for enrollment and accepted students from the middle and upper classes. But they continued to see the poor as their primary student constituency. Their schools enabled poor boys to move up the social ladder, those who learned Latin into professional positions. The Piarists had over two hundred schools, the majority in Italy and Spain and a smaller number in central Europe, in 1784.

EDUCATION FOR GIRLS

Boys and girls almost always attended separate schools in both Catholic and Protestant Europe. A large number of female religious convents educated Catholic girls as long-term boarders. Parents sent a girl to a convent for several years to be educated and to learn sewing and manners. She emerged educated, virtuous, and ready to marry. Some girls decided to remain as nuns. Indeed professed nuns living in convents had a higher literacy rate and were consistently better educated than laywomen.

Church organizations also offered charity schools for poor girls. For example, in 1655 the papacy contributed funding to hire numerous female teachers to staff free neighborhood schools for girls in Rome. Each schoolmistress taught vernacular reading and writing to any number, from a handful to more than seventy girls. These schools lasted until the Kingdom of Italy seized Rome in 1870. Catholic Europe also had an abundance of catechism schools (called Schools of Christian Doctrine), which taught the rudiments of Catholicism and a limited amount of reading, on Sundays and numerous religious holidays, to boys and girls in separate classes. Protestant Europe also had catechism classes or Sunday schools, about which less is known. And numerous clergymen lacking benefices, livings, or parishes in both Protestant and Catholic Europe supported themselves as schoolmasters.

THE ENLIGHTENMENT

Until the eighteenth century, central governments played no direct role in schooling, with the partial exception of state-church collaboration in some small German Protestant states. In the middle of the eighteenth century, educational reformers, strongly influenced by Enlightenment views, began to argue that church schools should be eliminated and the state should become the directing force in education.

State education and attacks on church schools.

Enlightenment reformers, who always came from the upper ranks of society, believed that the absolutist state could and should improve men and women through reform from above. They accepted the psychology of John Locke (1632–1704), educated at the public school of Westminster and at Oxford University, who published two influential works on education, An Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690) and Some Thoughts concerning Education (1693). He held that the child was a tabula rasa ('blank slate') on which anything could be written. Thus the right early education would impart useful skills and would form the child with proper values, which included good manners and deference to authority. Children so formed would become useful and loyal citizens; if wrongly educated, they would not. Hence the central government, rather than the church or local authorities, should control schools and choose the teachers. Numerous Enlightenment figures echoed or expanded Locke's views.

The attack on church education began in Catholic countries just as the ruling classes in Catholic Europe began to find fault with the most famous of the church schools, those of the Jesuits. For example, enrollment at La Flèche dropped to four hundred, of whom two hundred were boarders, by 1760. The reformers launched a general attack on the Society of Jesus for many reasons, of which their domination in education was one. The Jesuits were expelled from Portugal in 1759, from France in 1764, and from Spain in 1767. Their schools (105 in France) were closed or assigned to other religious congregations. Bowing to pressure from governments, the papacy suppressed the society in 1773. But needing to maintain educational institutions for their Catholic subjects, Frederick the Great (1712–1786) of Prussia and Catherine the Great (1729–1796) of Russia, neither of whom was Catholic, rejected the papal bull and welcomed the Jesuits in their realms.

State authorities across Europe also confiscated numerous church buildings and properties during the last years of the eighteenth century and in the nineteenth century, further weakening the capacity of church groups to support schools. Governments seldom succeeded in eliminating church schools in either Catholic or Protestant lands. But they seriously weakened churches as rivals to the central state governments as the chief force in schooling.

Numerous eighteenth-century school reformers filled with Enlightenment views fanned across Europe, offering schemes to replace church schools and to change preuniversity education. They offered advice to any ruler who showed an interest, however fleeting, in school reform. Their plans had many similarities, because they came from a common stock of Enlightenment principles and because the reformers borrowed from each other, helped by the fact that Europe's educated classes all read and spoke French.

The educational reform plan of Louis-Renéde Caradeuc de la Chalotais (1701–1785) attracted the most attention. As royal attorney for the parlement of his native Rennes, La Chalotais published an influential work against the Jesuits and their schools, Comptes rendus des constitutions des jésuites

(Report on the Constitution of the Jesuits) in 1761–1762. In 1763 he published his Essai d'éducation nationale, ou plan d'études pour la jeunesse (Essay on national education; or, a plan of studies for youth). Much of the treatise reiterated views held by others, but he added something new, the idea of national education.

La Chalotais's plan had several parts. He advocated the teaching of French while not eliminating Latin. He wanted children to learn national history, another difference from the classical schools. The state should ensure that children were taught good morals based on fundamental ethical truths, because good morals were essential for the well-being of society. La Chalotais allowed that churches might teach religion, but outside of the school. He also believed that girls should be educated, albeit with the substitution of needlework and like skills appropriate to their gender for some of the studies of boys. The most important part of the treatise was his belief that schools were a national concern, and therefore the state should organize schools, regulate studies, appoint teachers, and provide school buildings. This was revolutionary at a time when governments left the regulation of schools to local authorities and church institutions. But he did not advocate universal education; he thought there already were too many collèges, that is, secondary schools. Too many would entice working-class parents to send their children, who would become secretaries, thus depriving society of men for the manual trades, recruits for the navy, and other useful workers. Most Enlightenment reformers agreed; Voltaire (1694–1778), for example, congratulated La Chalotais for proposing to limit the number of collèges. La Chalotais even thought elementary education should not be too extensive: it was enough that some people learned how to use tools, he wrote.

Enlightenment school reformers held a hierarchical view of society that limited their commitment to universal education. Most other Enlightenment educational reformers agreed with La Chalotais on his major points. State schooling should be free for lower-class boys but limited to elementary education, ending at the ages of ten to twelve. Otherwise they would aspire to rise above their station, thus depriving society of their labor and upsetting the right order of things. By contrast, the sons of the ruling classes should avoid state elementary schools and continue to study with tutors or attend elite schools. They should go on to secondary schools, including boarding schools, with their classical Latin and Greek curriculum.

Rulers in France, Prussia, Austria, Bavaria, Russia, Spain, Piedmont, Sweden, and elsewhere showed interest in reforming schools. Numerous reformers gave them advice; for example, Denis Diderot (1713–1784) advised Catherine the Great of Russia, and Étienne Bonnet de Condillac (1715–1780) advised the duke of Parma. They all agreed that the state, not the church, should control education and that education should aim to produce good citizens by teaching good morals. They wanted limited universal education, a contradiction in terms.

The results were negligible. Rulers promulgated sweeping school reform proposals but failed to support their proposals by providing more lay teachers, teacher training, school buildings, or even textbooks. Nor did they change the religious orientation of schools. Rulers offered halfhearted support for educational change because they feared that universal education would upset the social order. Most education remained in the hands of church institutions, except for the banished Society of Jesus.

Frederick the Great, king of Prussia from 1740 until his death in 1786, was typical. Declaring that uneducated citizens were like animals, he promulgated sweeping new school regulations for Prussia in 1763 and then forgot about them. Part of the reason was his fear that, if rural children learned more than reading and writing, they would run off to the city for higher occupations. The state needed peasants, laborers, and soldiers.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), in his novel Émile ou de l'éducation (Emile, or about education) of 1762 offered the most radical educational approach. Totally opposed to Locke's views that basic ideas could be implanted in a boy and that he should be raised for a specific role or occupation in society, Rousseau believed the child should be allowed to develop his or her unique nature. Rousseau saw the child not as a small adult but as a developing person. He would postpone moral training until later and raise the child independently of religious doctrine or the influences of civilization. Rousseau's book stimulated great discussion but had no discernible influence on contemporary education. Not until the French Revolution, the Napoleonic era (1789–1815), and the nineteenth century as a whole did some of the proposals from the school reforms of the eighteenth century come to fruition, and then only slowly.

CONCLUSION

Education was an integral part of the intellectual life and social fabric of Europe. Education divided the population into an educated elite, a middle group who received vernacular educations, and an unschooled or little-schooled third group. From their first days in the classroom children received different educations according to the social and economic position of a child's parent, usually the father, a child's intended position in society, and a child's gender. Education enabled some academically gifted individuals to rise.

From the Renaissance onward the classical secondary school was the center of European elite education. Educational leaders and probably the majority of society believed that learning ancient languages and literatures developed mental discipline and offered examples of the highest human culture in the original language. Skills learned in Latin classes shaped rhetorical patterns, moral attitudes, habits of thought, and even vernacular speech and writing. The study of Latin and Greek grammar developed mental discipline, while ancient Latin and Greek literature offered examples of the highest human culture in the original language. The classical curriculum also offered practical skills, since university education, law, the church, and government service required a knowledge of Latin. Children not destined for leadership roles attended vernacular schools. Despite the limitations, the organization and curricula of the schools of these centuries was surprisingly rich and varied.

See also Enlightenment; Humanists and Humanism; Jesuits; Latin; Religious Orders; Universities.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

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Secondary Sources

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Strauss, Gerald. Enacting the Reformation in Germany: Essays on Institution and Reception. Aldershot, U.K., and Brookfield, Vt., 1993. Includes several essays on schools in the German Reformation.

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PAUL F. GRENDLER