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1. Origins
Any attempt to specify a starting point for the history of educational institutions is necessarily arbitrary. This is due to the uneven and contingent distribution of early historical sources across time and space, as well as to the fuzziness of the term ‘educational institutions.’ Broadly speaking, the term refers to a set of rules that govern the aims and activities of the adult generation in socializing the young generation into more or less age-graded roles. Knowledge about how to profit from the extended period of human infancy in order to further physical and moral cognitive development must have been part of the everyday wisdom of the older generation long before precepts concerning education appeared in religious texts. And even after the introduction of educational institutions in a more narrow sense of the term (schools), these rule-sets governing everyday socializing educational practice remained of prime importance since these formal institutions were highly specialized and, for centuries to come, reached only a small minority of a population.
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The boundaries between religious or general cultural practice and educational practice and the respective institutions in these fields are not clearly marked. Thus, for ancient Jewish education the basic set of texts is identical with the literature guiding religious practice: the Pentateuch, the oldest part of the Old Testament, i.e., the books Moses 1–5. Of course, those parts of the text referring directly to education are clearly recognizable as such but, obviously, their interpretation (e.g., in the Talmud) depends on the religious context and vice versa (Schwenck 1996, pp. 153–77).
For example, we are most familiar with an educational practice that is not primarily channeled through educational institutions in the narrow sense of the term but rather builds on participation in cultural, social, and political activities in a highly dynamic society, namely that prevailing in ancient Greece during the classical period (for the following, see Marrou 1948, Schwenck 1996). This does not hold, of course, for Sparta, where the male child left the family at the age of 7 years to join a state-controlled educational system for the next 12 years bent on producing fearless and obedient warriors.
Athens at that time had not developed a public system of schools; military training of 2 years’ duration was introduced only in the late fourth century BC. Education of the young (boys) was the responsibility of the family, which availed itself of the services of private teachers. Boys of fathers having full citizenship had the right, at age 10 years, to be present at most cultural events. Although the works of the poets and historians were available in writing and many of the (male) citizens must have been literate to be able to fulfill their public duties, Greek culture of the classical period was to a large degree an oral culture. Festivals, the theater, and competitions in presentations of dance, music, poetry, drama, and athletics provided ample opportunity to familiarize the young generation with the rich heritage of Greek civilization. This experience was understood to be more than a means to achieve esthetic refinement; it exposed the young to reflections on human destiny and justice, concepts of virtue, models of conduct and of good governance. It was preparation for citizenship and moral education. Physical education and music education, too, were considered fundamental for the formation of the free citizen. Especially the former was seen as part of the preparation for military service, and the communes were responsible for providing and controlling localities for athletic activities. The growing prestige of the Panhellenic games may, however, have served to weaken the nexus with military training.
Many elements of the (nonformal) curriculum of the classical period reappeared in the curriculum of the public schools provided by the larger communes during the Hellenistic era, normally dated from 338 BC when Philipp II of Macedonia defeated Athens and their confederates in the battle of Chaironeia. In both periods the curriculum is strictly oriented towards general as opposed to vocational education. The adult role emulated in the schools is not that of the skilled professional but that of the citizen potentially responsible for different general tasks in and for his community and in need of general moral as well as cognitive competences.
Educational institutions of a more restricted vocational orientation had already been introduced long before the apex of Greek civilization in the Sumerian city states of the third millenium BC. These were highly differentiated societies facing complex administrative challenges and had important trading relations. To document and control their diverse activities they needed systems of book-keeping for the different administrative fields and functions. Considering the state of development of the sign system for writing, mastering this task required systematic learning. Consequently, writing schools for trainees of the administration were established (Feldbusch 1988, pp. 1473ff ). Comparable institutions specializing in the education of scribes, administrators, and probably also artisans had already existed in ancient Egypt (Craig 1981, Adick 1992, pp. 164ff ).
The Hellenistic system of post-elementary education which prospered not only in the Greek communes but also in many regions bordering on the Aegean and Mediterranean Seas, and which functioned in the eastern part of the empire until the fall of Byzantium in 1453, is important for further developments during the Middle Ages in Europe in several respects: it provides the context in which early Christian concepts of education are developed in close contact with classical pre-Christian educational theory. The curriculum of the Enkyklios Paideia Septem Artes liberales remains a point of reference in the debate on the contents and objectives of postelementary education, even gaining in importance with the growth of first-hand knowledge of the classical texts in central and western Europe.
2. The Middle Ages
The cathedral schools first founded towards the end of the eighth century and spreading throughout the Carolingian Renaissance provide evidence of this type of long-term curricular continuity (Verger 1986). Although their primary purpose was the education of the clergy via an in-depth study of the Holy Scripture, they also introduced their students to a version of the trivium grammar, rhetoric and—around the end of the tenth century—dialectic. Thus, these schools offered a relatively broad general education, including the study of classical nonreligious texts, as a basis for the professional preparation for the clergy. Some of these schools developed into universities in the first half of the thirteenth century, the largest and, with respect to the quality of its liberal arts and theological faculty, perhaps the most important among them the University of Paris, which attracted large numbers of students from England, the German-speaking regions of Europe and Italy. Among its famous teachers were Albertus Magnus (1240–48), Bonaventura (1248–57) and Thomas of Aquino (1252–58 and 1268–72) (Verger 1986, p. 421). Their names, like Duns Scotus, Roger Bacon and Occam, also point to the importance of the Christian orders, foremost among them Dominicans and Franciscans, as centers of the rich intellectual life and scholarly learning of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The attractiveness of the University of Paris was comparable to that of law schools in northern Italy (e.g., Bologna and Pavia), which served as models for the rest of Europe. The hierarchical relation between professional schools of theology, law (Orleans) or medicine (Montpelier) at the top and the ancillary and preparatory functions of the liberal arts faculty, typical of the university up to the end of the eighteenth century, is already discernible in some of the French cathedral schools of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. This may have helped to preserve the idea that higher education should be more than just a rather restricted professional training. When, by the late Middle Ages, much of the knowledge acquired in classical antiquity and preserved in the centers of learning of the eastern part of the Roman Empire had been recovered, this offered the opportunity to widen the scope of scholarly learning to approximate the full range of the classical liberal arts curriculum by including parts of the quadrivium: arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. To be sure, this was already the vision of Alcuin—teacher and close counselor of Charlemagne, learned author of textbooks on the seven liberal arts and very active in the propagation of cathedral schools in the early ninth century. In most of the French cathedral schools, however, teaching of the liberal arts seems to have been restricted to the trivium.
When the first German universities were founded in the second half of the fourteenth century (beginning with Prague in 1348), they followed the organizational pattern developed in the older European universities: the liberal arts faculty was by far the largest but ranked lowest. The faculties of theology and law enjoyed the highest prestige and the best remuneration of their teachers. In most of these universities, however, the arts faculties covered the full range of the arts, including natural science on the basis of Aristotle’s writings (Paulsen 1919, Vol. I, Ruegg 1993 1996, Vol. 1).
The larger and more successful European universities were international in the composition of their student bodies and teaching faculties, which, of course, was rendered possible by the use of Latin as the lingua franca of higher learning. Students were attracted by famous teachers and these, too, traveled much in search of better conditions for their work. Thus, knowledge spread fairly quickly, but was accessible only to that small minority who mastered the medium of communication. Schools that could have trans- mitted the necessary skills were small and widely dispersed. Demand for this type of instruction was low for a host of reasons. Until the end of the eighteenth century there was no clear demarcation between the respective functions and objectives of schools and universities.
By the end of the fourteenth century, most European towns of some importance had one or more schools. They were attached either to a parish, a convent, or a chapter, or directly sponsored and controlled by the communes. The latter form, with the supervision of the town’s council, seems to have prevailed in Germany. But here, too, the relation between school and church remained a tight one. In many cases the minister of the church was himself the teacher or he may have acted as rector of the school, responsible for the selection of a teacher who, in turn, chose his own teaching assistants. The pupils were taught in two or more groups formed on the basis of age and learning progress. The main objective of the town school was to teach the pupils to read and to write Latin. It seems remarkable that these schools took in not only the children of well-to-do families but sometimes also a sizable proportion of poor children living on charity (Paulsen 1919, Vol. I, 18ff ).
3. The Humanistic Movement And The Reformation
Around the turn of the sixteenth century, universities and schools were shaken by two interdependent events: the humanistic movement, originating in the Italian Renaissance, and the Reformation (Ruegg 1993/1996, Vol. 2). The humanistic movement was a polemic revolt against the culture and learning of the Middle Ages, which it condemned as a dark, narrow, uninspired, mechanistic, unnatural and bookish educational tyranny; and it was a movement for a fresh reading of the poets and philosophers of classical antiquity in their original language—Greek, Latin, Hebrew—a re-reading freed from the pressure to prove this literature’s compatibility with Christian values and dogma. It was, last but not least, a plea for a study of (human) nature, unfettered by the authority of classical literature (for a contrasting evaluation, compare Paulsen 1919, Vol. I, Chaps. 3–5 and Garin 1964, pp. 25ff ).
The movement’s immediate effect on the schools seems to have been rather limited, depending on the conditions encountered locally: the prestige of the classical languages was raised, new textbooks written or recommended by devotees of the movement were introduced, some schools hired a poet to teach the basics of Latin poetry and eloquentia. In a small number of schools, Greek was introduced as a new subject. The long-term effects, on the other hand, were important to both schools and universities: The curriculum of the liberal arts faculty was considerably extended to include Greek language and literature which was, like Latin literature, to be represented in a fairly wide selection of poetry philosophical, historical, mathematical, and other scientific texts. Most arts faculties also offered courses in Hebrew. This increase in service functions opened teaching positions for humanists and doubtless raised the prestige of the arts faculties. In the larger schools created in the course of the sixteenth century by combining several smaller Latin schools, too, Greek was offered as a new subject; in some of them even an introductory course of Hebrew was taught. Several of these larger academic schools in fact covered areas of knowledge that were traditionally part of the curriculum of higher education
As for the effects of the Reformation on the development of educational systems, only two aspects will be mentioned here: it supported the relatively fast spreading of literacy in the mainly Protestant areas of northern Europe (the concept of universal priesthood combined with the accessibility of the sources of faith translated into the vernacular to every literate person). Sweden seems to have been most successful in this respect. Already in the seventeenth century, admission to full church membership was tied to the ability to read. Prussia was the first state to initiate steps towards compulsory elementary education early in the eighteenth century. Other Protestant states followed suit early in the nineteenth century. Fairly reliable quantitative data on the development of attendance at primary schools and on the spreading of literacy are available only for the decades from about 1830 onwards. In both respects, they show a considerable advantage for the Protestant territories (Flora 1975, Flora et al. 1983).
In central Europe, in particular, the Reformation changed the relation between the university and the polity. The universities became part of a territorial state with a distinctly denominational character that assumed control over the reorganization of the religious system and of the educational institutions still closely connected with it. This process entailed a loss of autonomy on the part of the universities, a loss which increased with the growth of the central state administration This is clearly visible in the Protestant territories, where the ruling dukes and princes were actively engaged in the process of reorganizing the universities and of creating a new type of academic school (Landesschule, Furstenschule), financed directly by the state and recruiting its students more or less statewide. The control of the elementary schools, financed by the communes with few additional resources provided by the state, remained mostly in the hands of the church. Towns continued to be responsible for the establishment and financing, mostly via fees, of Latin schools or different types of intermediate schools without foreign language instruction for children of well-to-do families (Leschinsky and Roeder 1976). To remit (partly) fees for motivated pupils from poor families seems to have been widely practiced.
In England, the impact of the Reformation on school development may have been even stronger than in central Europe: ‘modernization of the educational system dates from the Reformation. It was during this period—from the early mid-sixteenth to the midseventeenth century—that grammar schools were established in most market towns, with separate school buildings being erected and teaching being developed as a profession, and a systematic approach to the structuring of the content of education … took root’ (Simon 1987, p. 93).
Despite the changes observable in the schools and universities during the sixteenth century, they still had more in common with their precursors of the late Middle Ages than with the modern system of education which slowly evolved at the end of the eighteenth century and which developed with increasing rates of change and growth from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards. The main function of the university still is the transmission of a cultural tradition legitimized by traditions. Where such traditions were not established as in the case of Protestant theology, this led to bitter and fruitless quarrels between adherents of dissenting factions of Protestantism, who had their strongholds in different universities.
There seems to have been little room for creative minds in the fields of philosophy, mathematics, and natural science. Descartes, Spinoza, Newton, and Leibnitz stayed out of its bounds. Hopes for the progress of knowledge and for innovations with the potential of improving the lot of mankind concentrated not on the university but on the Academy, an association of men of proven ability, especially in mathematics, science, and technology (Stichweh 1984, pp. 67ff ). That the academies established in Germany did not pose a threat to the position of the universities is mainly due to the fact that the latter, from the start of the eighteenth century, had embarked on the road to an ambitious reform.
4. Reforming The University
The University of Halle, founded in 1694, acted as forerunner and model in this development. It succeeded in attracting a number of outstanding teachers, among them August Hermann Francke, one of the heads of the Pietistic movement and an original pedagogical thinker, Christian Thomasius, a jurist influenced by Grotius and Pufendorf, who also taught and published in the German language, Christian Wolf, mathematician and an eminent advocate of rationalistic philosophy, who also published textbooks in German, and J. S. Semler, a theologist (1752–91) who was among the first to introduce the historical– critical method into the study of the Holy Scripture. The curriculum of the faculty of philosophy was extended to include history, geography, mathematics, and the natural sciences; the law school offered lectures on, among others politics and natural law. Halle clearly pointed the way to a modern university that was no longer just a teaching institution but had begun to accept systematic research as a major function and service to society.
The second model university of the eighteenth century was that at Gottingen, founded in 1734. Its focus was on the modern disciplines: political sciences, history, law, mathematics, and natural sciences; however, it was equally important for the development of the study of the civilizations and literature of classical antiquity. Lectures were given regularly in German. There existed something like a common understanding that it was an obligation of the university to extend knowledge in the respective disciplines by doing original research. Like A. H. Francke in Halle, both Gesner and Heyne, the dominant figures in the field of classical studies in Gottingen, were influential in improving the preparation of teachers and the educational practice in schools.
Whereas in France the universities and colleges of the Ancien Regime were suppressed by imperial order in 1793 and, in their stead, a series of professional schools were organized (Verger 1986), universities in Germany consolidated their dominant position in higher education and succeeded in safeguarding a sphere of autonomous decision making in the organization of their teaching and research. The pattern of the further development throughout the nineteenth century and beyond was already clearly discernible in the conceptual framework elaborated by Fichte, Schleiermacher and W. v. Humboldt for the foundation of the Berlin university in 1810: the traditional ranking of the faculties was to be abolished; a central role was ascribed to philosophy, in the sense that a philosophical spirit ought to pervade work in all fields of study. The mission of the university was defined as science in the service of truth, i.e., doing research to extend the boundaries of knowledge. This mission explicitly included the students. They were expected, fairly early in the course of their studies, to choose topics of interest where they could do original work on a restricted scale, the results of which were to be presented and discussed in the seminar. The seminar provided a new setting for teaching and learning, adapted to the new mission of the university: a regular meeting of a professor with his more advanced students for the purpose of discussing original research presented either by the professor or by a student.
A growing specialization of both teachers and students and the formation of sub-disciplines was one important effect of these developments, regarded as ambivalent by those concerned with the preparation of teachers for academic secondary schools, that profession to which most students of the philosophical faculty aspired (Paulsen 1919, Vol. II, pp. 259–78). For a comparative perspective on the ‘transformation of higher learning … expansion, diversification, social opening, and professionalization in England, Germany, Russia and the United States’ see Jarausch (1982).
5. Schooling In The Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries
The first decades of the nineteenth century were not only a period of change for the universities. They also saw the evolution of the dominant type of academic secondary schools (Gymnasium), the curriculum of which centered on the classical languages Latin and Greek and, to a lesser degree, on mathematics and German, without completely neglecting the study of history, geography, and science. Relations between secondary schools and universities were clearly articulated with the introduction of the final examination (Abitur) and the examination of teachers qualifying for employment (Muller and Zymek 1987). Parallel developments are observable in France with the evolution of the Lycee and the introduction of the Baccalaureat in 1820.
With respect to the development of elementary education, wide regional variations in the actual enrollment of that age group for which compulsory education was mandated are observable in the first half of the nineteenth century. The highest proportions of enrollment around 1820 was reached in Saxony, totaling more than 80 percent. An average for the whole of Prussia in 1816 was ( probably over-) estimated at 60 percent. Three decades later, the least developed province of Prussia topped this mark with 70 percent of the age group under compulsory schooling actually enrolled. Obviously, there must have been a rather steady growth of the provision of elementary education over the period (Leschinsky and Roeder 1976, pp. 137ff ). The expansion of the provisions for teacher training seems even more remarkable: 17 new seminars for the education of elementary school teachers were established during the period, raising the total number to 38. Their yearly output of qualified teachers seems to have been sufficient to meet the growing demand.
In England, compulsory attendance was not introduced until the final decades of the nineteenth century. But there, too, a rapid increase in literacy throughout the century is to be observed, much of it due to the willingness of working-class parents to pay for the education of their children in one of the many local private schools, which they often preferred to the cheaper schools established by the churches or by associations crusading for the education of the lower classes, as Thomas W. Laqueur contends (Stone 1976, pp. 192ff ).
6. The Emergence Of Educational Systems
At the start of the twentieth century, coherent systems of education emerged in the more developed European nations. The elementary schools no longer stood apart from the rest of the system, but developed their function as feeder institutions for the secondary schools. Within the secondary system or between secondary and primary schools, new types of schools were established, varying in curricular focus prestige and entitlements conferred upon them. Well into the twentieth century, the classical academic secondary school with its clear focus on Latin and Greek languages and literature—lycees, colleges in France, grammar schools and, of course, the small number of highly prestigious boarding schools, the so-called ‘Public Schools,’ in England, and the Gymnasium in Germany—succeeded in defending its top position. Below this type ranked secondary schools that did not offer Greek or neither Latin nor Greek but, instead, taught modern languages and reserved more hours of instruction for the sciences: enseignement special in France, higher-grade schools in England, Realschulen, Oberrealschulen, Realgymnasien in Germany. Many of these schools emerged owing to the activities of local pressure groups convinced that the classical curriculum did not meet the educational needs of their children. The ambitious blueprints for their modernized curricula, integrating elements of vocational and of general education, however, had already been proposed from the second half of the seventeenth century onwards (Leschinsky and Roeder 1976, pp. 168–208). Some of these types of secondary schools eventually achieved parity with the classical academic secondary schools—if not in prestige, at least in entitlements to matriculation (Prost 1969, Muller et al. 1987, Muller and Zymek 1987). Central and regional bureaucracies, responsible for the development and functional control of the system, were expanded early in the nineteenth century in France and Germany. This happened considerably later in England, where an effective substitute had been developed in the form of the Royal Commissions ‘with the brief of examining and making recommendations for the reform of all levels of education’ (Muller et al. 1987, p. 88). Curricular frameworks and standards of examinations for different types of schools and teacher training were specified by the central administration, traditionally leaving most leeway for curricular decisions on the level of the individual school in England. The inclusion of females had progressed considerably throughout the nineteenth century, although parity was not achieved until the second half of the twentieth century.
7. A Global Model Of Schooling
In reviewing the long-term evolution of educational institutions in the more developed countries of western, northern and central Europe and in the USA, one gains the impression that, despite national peculiarities and the weight of regional traditions, the systems emerging at the turn of the twentieth century are basically similar in structure and functioning. They seem to represent what has more recently been termed a ‘global model of schooling.’ The thesis that we are witnessing the ‘formation of a world educational system’ (Adick 1995) implies that the dynamics fueling the development of systems of mass education presupposes the existence of the modern nation state and the concept of citizenship but that it is to an important degree transnational. This thesis has received substantial support in empirical research conducted by John W. Meyer, one of its principle proponents, and his collaborators (Meyer et al. 1992). Thus, an analysis of constitutions enacted since about 1870 shows that practically all of them include statements concerning the individual right of access to education and the authority and obligation of the state to provide and regulate the educational institutions (Boli-Bennet in Meyer and Hannan 1979). The Prussian constitution of 1794 (Allgemeines Landrecht) can, at least in some respects, be cited as an important early precursor of these later developments. A study of primary school curricula enacted between 1920 and 1986 also reveals a high degree of communality with respect to, e.g., the subjects taught, hours of instruction per subject, and basic changes in the content of subjects across a large sample of countries (Meyer et al. 1992). Further support comes from case studies of educational developments in colonial and postcolonial West Africa (Adick 1992, 1995) that document autochthonous initiatives in the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to establish a school system for the native population. The problem of whether the curriculum should cultivate native African traditions or emulate the best international models was, and still is, openly debated (see Reichmuth (1995) for the influence of Christian and Muslim communities on education in Nigeria and Wiegelmann (1999) for the development of schooling in Francophone Senegal, with special attention to the problem of the language of instruction, afflicting many of these countries).
More recently, the evolution of a global model of schooling has been actively promoted by international agencies: OECD’s ‘Reviews of National Policies for Education’ are based upon a continuously refined set of common criteria and standards used in the evaluation of national educational systems. The European Union, too, may induce a further rapprochement between educational systems of member states; mutual recognition of qualifications certified in schools and universities can be viewed as a step in this direction. Large international quantitative studies of school achievement presuppose communalities in the curricula of primary and secondary schools, their success in constructing achievement tests, developed in international groups of researchers and valid in countries otherwise different, offers proof that such communalities exist in fact; and decisions of national educational administrations taken in reaction to test results may again push the trend towards globalization.
To be sure, the global model still leaves room for variation between countries, e.g., with respect to ensuring elite education for minorities of high achievers, in the degree of comprehensiveness of higher secondary education, in the organization of different types and levels of vocational and higher education, and in the importance assigned to specific subjects like, for example, religion.
A final remark addresses the problem of large gaps in the global model: both the quality and the inclusiveness of educational provisions are far below accepted international standards even on the level of primary education in a number of developing countries, despite considerable progress achieved in the decades between 1960 and 1980. The report prepared for the 1990 ‘World Conference on Education for All’ presents a long list of deficiencies in, e.g., equity of access, completion of primary cycle preparation of teachers, quality of instruction, availability and quality of instructional materials, and managerial competences of personnel at the central, regional, and school level (Lockheed and Verspoor 1990). The recommendations, elaborated in the report, for action to overcome these deficiencies may have been effective in some countries. In others, the situation may well have deteriorated further in the course of the 1990s. This, at least, is the impression gained from a survey of the conditions of primary schools conducted in 14 of the least-developed countries in 1995 (Postlethwaite 1998). In significant parts of our world primary education for all still constitutes a vision rather than a reality.
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