The History of Education Part 50

Soon a Const.i.tution for France, the first ever promulgated in modern Europe, was prepared and adopted (1791). This abolished the ancient privileges and reorganized France as a self-governing nation, much after the American plan. Local government was created, and the absolute monarchy was changed to a limited const.i.tutional one. Next the property of the Church was taken over by the State, the monasteries were suppressed, and the priests and bishops were made state officials and paid a fixed state salary. The Jesuits had been expelled from France in 1764; and in 1792 the Brothers of the Christian Schools were not allowed longer to teach. Among other important matters, the Const.i.tution of 1791 declared that:

There shall be created and organized a system of public instruction common to all citizens, and gratuitous, with respect to those branches of instruction which are indispensable for all men.

Up to this point the Revolution in France had proceeded relatively peacefully, considering the nature of the long-standing abuses which were to be remedied. In August, 1792, the King was imprisoned, and in January, 1793, he was executed and a Republic proclaimed. [36] Then followed a reign of terror, which we do not need to follow, and which ended only when Napoleon became master of France.

BENEFICENT RESULTS OF THE REVOLUTION. The French Revolution was not an accident or a product of chance, but rather the inevitable result of an attempt to dam up the stream of human progress and prevent its orderly onward flow. The Protestant Revolts were the first great revolutionary wave, the Puritan revolution in England was another, the formation of the American Republic and the inst.i.tution of const.i.tutional government and religious freedom another, while the French Revolution brought the rising movement to a head and swept away, in a deluge of blood, the very foundations of the mediaeval system. Along with much that was disastrous, the French Revolution accomplished after all much that was of greatest importance for human progress. The world at times seems to be in need of such a great catharsis. Progress was made in a decade that could hardly have been made in a century by peaceful evolution. The old order of privilege came to an end, mediaevalism was swept away, and the serf was evolved into the free farmer and citizen. One fifth of the soil of France was restored to the use of the people from the monasteries, and an additional one third from the Church and n.o.bility. The new principles of citizens.h.i.+p--Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity--were for France revolutionary in the extreme, while the a.s.sertion that the sovereignty of a nation rests with the people rather than with the king, here successfully promulgated, ended for all time the "divine-right-of-kings"

idea for France. After political theory had for a time run mad, the organizing genius of Napoleon consolidated the gains, gave France a strong government, a uniform code of laws, [37] and began that organization of schools for the nation which ultimately meant the taking over of education from the Church and its provision at the expense of and in the interests of the nation.

THE NATIONAL IDEA EXTENDS TO OTHER LANDS. The reform work in France, together with the examples of English and American liberty, soon began to have their influence in other lands as well. People everywhere began to see that the old regime of privilege and misgovernment ought to be replaced. Other countries abolished serfdom, introduced better laws, and made reforms in the abuses of both Church and State. French armies and rulers carried the best of French ideas to other lands, and, where the French rule continued long enough, these ideas became fixed. In particular was the _Code Napoleon_ copied in the Netherlands, the Italian States, and the States of southern and western Germany. The national spirit of Italy was awakened, and the Italian liberals began to look forward to the day when the small Italian States might be reunited into an Italian Nation, with Rome as its capital. This became the work of nineteenth-century Italian statesmen. For the first time in Spanish history, too, the people became conscious, under French occupation, of a feeling of national unity, and similarly the national spirit of German lands was stirred by the conquests of Napoleon.

A const.i.tution was obtained in Spain, in 1812, and between 1815 and 1821 all of Spain's South American colonies--Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Venezuela--revolted, became independent, and set up republics with const.i.tutional governments, some of the larger ones based on the federal principle, as in the United States. Brazil similarly freed itself from Portugal and set up a const.i.tutional and federated monarchy, in 1822. The Kingdom of Naples obtained const.i.tutional government in 1820, and Sardinia in 1821. In 1823, when Spain with Austria's aid prepared to reconquer the Spanish South American Republics, President Monroe transmitted to the American Congress his message in which he declared that any attempt on the part of European nations to suppress republicanism on the American continent would be considered by the United States as an unfriendly act. This has since been known as the _Monroe Doctrine_. In 1829 Greece obtained her independence from Turkey, and in 1843 a const.i.tutional form of government was obtained.

IMPORTANT CONSEQUENCES OF THE DEMOCRATIC MOVEMENT. Since the closing decades of the eighteenth century, when democratic government and written const.i.tutions began, the sweep of democratic government has become almost world wide. Nation after nation has changed to democratic and const.i.tutional forms of government, the latest additions being Portugal (1911), China (1912), Russia (1917), and Germany (1918). New English colonies, too, have carried English self-government into almost every continent. The World War of 1914-18 gave a new emphasis to democracy, and there is good reason to believe that government of and by and for the people is ultimately destined to prevail among all the intelligent nations and races of the earth.

With the development of democratic government there has everywhere been a softening of old laws, the growth of humanitarianism, the wider and wider extension of the suffrage, important legislation as to labor, a previously unknown attention to the poor and the dependents of society, a vast extension of educational advantages, and the taking over of education from the Church by the State and the erection of the school into an important inst.i.tution for the preservation and advancement of the national welfare.

These consequences of the onward sweep of new-world ideas we shall trace more in detail in the chapters which follow.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1. Show the importance, for human progress, of each of the meanings of the new eighteenth-century liberalism, as enumerated on pages 471-72.

2. How do you explain the lack of any permanent influence on Spanish life of the work of the benevolent despots in Spain?

3. Show the liberalizing influence of the rise of scientific investigation and economic studies, for a nation still oppressed by mediaevalism and bad government.

4. Enumerate the new sciences which arose in the eighteenth century.

5. Indicate the importance of the freedom of the press in the development of English political liberty.

6. Explain how the religious-freedom att.i.tude of the American national const.i.tution conferred an inestimable boon on the States in the matter of public education.

SELECTED READINGS

In the accompanying _Book of Readings_ the following ill.u.s.trative selections are reproduced:

247. Dabney: Ecclesiastical Tyranny in France.

248. Voltaire: On the Relation of Church and State.

249. Rousseau: Extract from the Social Contract.

250. Buckle: Changes in English Thinking in the Eighteenth Century, 251. Pennsylvania Const.i.tution: Bill of Rights in.

252. Clergy of Blois: _Cahier_ of 1779.

253. France: Declaration of the Rights of Man.

QUESTIONS ON THE READINGS

1. Explain why ecclesiastical tyranny should have awakened such a spirit of rebellion in France (247), and not in Spain or in Italian lands.

2. Just what att.i.tude toward religion is shown in the extract from Voltaire (248)?

3. Bolshevists in Russia and in America talk to-day as did Rousseau in the Social Contract (249). Compare the justification of each with the eighteenth-century France of Rousseau.

4. What do all the changes enumerated by Buckle (250) indicate as to the spread of general education, irrespective of schools, among the English people?

5. Compare the Pennsylvania Bill of Rights of 1776 (251) with that of your own present-day state const.i.tution,

6. Just what type of educational provisions, and what administrative organization, did the recommendations of the Clergy of Blois (252) contemplate? Indicate its shortcomings for eighteenth-century France.

7. Compare the main ideas of 251 and 253.

SUPPLEMENTARY REFERENCES

Dabney, R. H. _The Causes of the French Revolution_.

Taine, H. A. _The Ancient Regime_.

CHAPTER XX

THE BEGINNINGS OF NATIONAL EDUCATION

I. NEW CONCEPTIONS OF THE EDUCATIONAL PURPOSE

THE STATE AS SERVANT OF THE CHURCH. With the rise of the Protestant sects we noted, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and for the first time since Christianity became supreme in the western world, the beginnings of a state connection with the education of the young. The Protestant reformers, obtaining the support of the Protestant princes and kings, had successfully used this support to a.s.sist them in the organization of church schools as an aid to the reformed faith. Luther, it will be recalled (p. 312), had made a strong appeal to the mayors and magistrates of all German lands to establish schools as a part of their civic duties (R. 156), and had contended that a solemn obligation rested upon them to do so. The Dutch Provinces had worked closely with the Dutch Protestant synods (p. 334) in ordering schools established and in providing for their financing; Calvin had organized a religious City-State at Geneva (p. 330), of which religion and learning had been the corner-stones; the Scottish Parliament, by the laws of 1633 and 1646 (p. 335), had ordered schools for Scottish children in connection with the churches; and in the Scandinavian countries and in Finland the beginnings of a connection with the State had also been made (p. 315). Finally, in the new Ma.s.sachusetts Colony the laws of 1642 and 1647 (p. 366) had, for the first time in the English-speaking world, ordered that children be taught "to read and understand the principles of religion and the capital laws of the country" (p. 364), and that schools be established by the towns, under penalty if they refused to do so. In all Protestant lands we saw that the reformers appealed, from time to time, to what were then the servants of the churches--the rising civil governments and princ.i.p.alities and States--to use their civil authority to force the people to meet their new religious obligations in the matter of schooling.

The purpose of the schooling ordered established, however, was almost wholly religious. Ma.s.sachusetts, in ordering instruction in the "capital laws of the country," as well as reading and religion, had formed a marked exception. In nearly all lands the rising state governments merely helped the Protestant churches to create the elementary vernacular religious school, and to make of it an auxiliary for the protection of orthodoxy and the advancement of the faith. Even in the new state school systems of the German States--Saxony, Wurtemberg (p. 317), Brunswick, Weimar, Gotha--the elementary schools established were for religious rather than for state ends. This condition continued until well toward the middle of the eighteenth century.

THE NEW STATE THEORY OF EDUCATION. After about the middle of the eighteenth century a new theory as to the purpose of education, and one destined to make rapid headway, began to be advanced. This theory had already made marked progress, as we shall see, in the New England Colonies, and had also found expression, as we shall also see in a later chapter, in the organizing work of Frederick the Great in Prussia. It was from the French political philosophers of the eighteenth century, though, that its clearest definition came. They now advanced the idea that schools were essentially civil affairs, the purpose of which should be to promote the everyday interests of society and the welfare of the State, rather than the welfare of the Church, and to prepare for a life here rather than a life hereafter.

After about 1750 a critical and reformatory pedagogy rapidly began to take shape in France, and the second half of the eighteenth century became a period of criticism and discontent and reconstruction in education, as well as in politics and religion.

This criticism and discontent in France was greatly stimulated by the decline in character and influence of the Jesuit schools. Unwilling to change their instruction to meet the needs of a changing society, their schools had become formal in character (R. 146), and were now engaged chiefly in stilling thinking rather than in promoting it. In consequence the schools had fallen into disrepute throughout all France. The Society, too, in the eighteenth century, came to be a powerful political organization which strove to dominate the State. So bad had the situation become by 1762, that the different parliaments in the provinces and in Paris had formulated complaints against the Jesuits and their schools, [1]

and, in 1764, the king was induced to suppress the Order. [2] This decline in influence and final suppression of the Society gave rise to some rather remarkable pedagogical literature, which looked to the creation of a system of state secondary schools in France to replace those of the Jesuits.

The outcome was the rise of a new national and individual conception of the educational purpose. This was destined in time to spread to other lands and to lead to the rise of complete state school systems, financed and managed by the State and conducted for state ends, and to the ultimate divorce of Church and State, in all progressive lands, in the matter of the education of the young. Teachers trained and certificated by the State were in time to supplant the nuns and brothers of the religious congregations in Catholic lands, as well as teachers who served as a.s.sistants to the pastors in Protestant lands and whose chief purpose was to uphold the teachings and advance the interests of the sect; citizens were to supplant the ecclesiastic in the supervision of instruction; and the courses of instruction were to be changed in direction and vastly broadened in scope to make them minister to the needs of the State rather than the Church, and to prepare pupils for useful life here rather than for life in another world.

II. THE NEW STATE THEORY IN FRANCE

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 154. ROUSSEAU (1712-78)]

THE FRENCH POLITICAL THEORISTS. The leading French political theorists of the two decades between 1760 and 1780 now began to discuss education as in theory a civil affair, intimately connected with the promotion of the welfare of the State. The more important of these, and their chief ideas were:

1. _Rousseau._ The first of the critical and reformatory pedagogical writers to awaken any large interest and obtain a general hearing was Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The same year (1762) that his _Social Contract_ appeared and attacked the foundations of the old political system (p.