Lectures on the History of Education, with a Visit to German Schools (Volume 2) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 45 LECTURE V. THE JESUITS AS EDUCATORS. In the last lecture we brought down our history to the times when schools on Protestant principles had become firmly established in Germany, and presented before you John Sturm, as the typical schoolmaster of the sixteenth century. Words before and in preference to things. Latin before any other language, even the mother tongue. Cicero before any other Latin author. These were the distinctive features of the Sturmian system, a system which, as we saw, sacrificed almost everything else to secure these objects, and demanded on an average twelve years of a boy's life for the purpose. It is not very long since nearly the same might have been said of Eton as I have just said of Strasburg. The success of the Protestant schools, aided as they were by the influence of the Reformers, and energetically carried on by such men as Trotzendorf, Neander, Sturm, and many others, began before long to excite the earnest attention of the Catholic party, who saw that if they were to hold their own at all it must be by doing what their assailants were so actively doing, establishing schools and infusing a new spirit into them. The old cloister schools were well nigh asleep, their inefficiency was become a bye-word. These must be thoroughly waked up and others of a different type founded. To this purpose the Jesuits devoted themselves with remarkable zeal and with a success so striking that they soon outstripped their competitors in the race, doing, in fact, what these talked about but did not really do. Mr. Quick does not overstate the matter when he says, " With characteristic sagacity and energy they soon seized on education as a stepping-stone to power and influence, and with their talent for organization ttey framed a system of schools which d...