For more than a thousand years, education has been a matter for the church and Christians: monks from Ireland brought Christianity and thus monasteries to Central Europe. These monasteries quickly developed into beacons of education.
Rabanus Maurus, who was abbot of Fulda Monastery from 822 AD, stands out.He was abbot of the monastery of Fulda from 822 AD. Under him, the Fulda monastery school developed into the academic center of the Eastern Franconian Empire (which was roughly the size of West Germany before reunification) and attracted scholars from all parts of the continent.
Throughout the Middle Ages, the monastery school remained one of the most important educational institutions. Textbooks and manuals on the Christian faith were written here. Important Old High German writings such as the Hildebrandslied or the Merseburg spells were written down. But the monks also wrote documents and codices, to which many towns and villages can trace their first mention today.
At the time of Rabanus Maurus, the monastery library, one of the largest of its time in the world, must have grown to around 1000 manuscripts – until Protestant troops deported many of them to Kassel in 1632 (during the Thirty Years’ War) and the valuable parchment was largely recycled …
Rabanus, who was given the honorary title of “First Teacher of Germania” (primus praeceptor Germaniae) in the 19th century due to the wealth of his writings and the large number of his later important pupils, and his monastery in Fulda are representative of the ecclesiastical educational activities of these centuries. Financed by large estates and the income or levies collected from the farmers, they carried out unique work.
It was not until almost 300 years later that a non-ecclesiastical educational institution of significance emerged: the later University of Bologna. Barbarossa granted it legal autonomy with the “Authentica Habita” privilege (scholars’ privilege). Over the course of the 12th century, it became a university for the study of Roman law. Together with the second oldest university in Europe (Oxford, founded between 1096 and 1167) and the University of Salamanca in Spain, founded in 1134 by King Alfonso IX of León, it laid the foundations for the European university tradition. The University of Paris was also founded around 1150/1170. It was the first to consist of a corporation of students and professors from various disciplines.
From then on, there was a dualism of ecclesiastical and “free” (secular) elite educational institutions. The secular ones had the privileges of the rulers (legal autonomy and jurisdiction, academic freedom, protection when traveling, teaching qualifications for graduates), but were not dependent on them (having often been given a lot of land as a gift).
The monasteries remained important for a long time, above all because of their unique libraries.
In the countryside and far from the monasteries, the priests were usually the only ones with a school/academic education.
“Schools” in today’s sense – for children, for everyone! – did not exist.
Luther: Education for all!
We owe the school as we understand it today to Martin Luther. In 1523 – 501 years ago – he presented a model of his secular social doctrine for the first time with his “box order” for the municipality of Leisnig in Saxony. The name “Kastenordnung” is derived from the money box in which the municipal administration placed all the coins, i.e. the “cash box”. Ten secular heads were elected to manage the assets: two nobles, two councillors, three citizens and three farmers.
Luther prioritized the expenses that the town should pay: After the salary of the pastor and the sexton came “school” immediately, followed by “old and sick”, “orphans” and finally “buildings”.
In his “Caste Order”, Luther formulated the obligation to “shared public responsibility [for school education] based on faith”. In the first chapter, he cited what he considered to be the fundamental principles of action in the Bible as the basis for this. The prioritization of a municipal school as a subsidiary auxiliary institution of the family was completely unusual for the time. Luther commented: “For where a father is not able to educate his child alone, he takes a schoolmaster to teach him.” The individual fathers of the household should join forces and take the initiative themselves.
Luther was the first to call for schools for everyone. He was not concerned with learning and education in the modern sense – he wanted to make the Bible, which he had just translated into German, accessible to everyone and lead everyone to true faith.
Exactly 500 years ago, in 1524, Luther published an open letter “To the councillors of all cities in Germany, that they establish Christian schools and maintain them”. In it, he called for the establishment of schools in all cities so that all children could read, write and study the Bible.
We need new schools where the ancient languages are taught and which thus enable a critical approach to the biblical text. Boys and girls should be well educated in general, as the church and especially the state need capable and educated young people. It is now the task of the public sector to build these schools and the associated libraries and to finance them on a permanent basis.
Not only the clergy with a command of Latin should be able to understand the word of God, but everyone – in accordance with his equally new, revolutionary principle of the “priesthood of all believers”!
For Luther, 500 years ago it was no longer appropriate for only monasteries to run schools. He argued that the municipal authorities should take on this task.
This is why Luther’s 1524 pamphlet marks a historic turning point for education in German-speaking Central Europe: education for all, organized by the local people!
Education for every child, so that everyone can read the Bible in the original text and form their own opinion!
As a man of God, Martin Luther wanted to strengthen the faith:
So it behoves Christians to read the Holy Scriptures diligently as their own, only book, and it is a sin and a shame if we do not understand our own book and do not know our God’s language and word.
That is why it is even more of a sin and a harm if we do not learn the languages, especially since God now offers us people and books … and gives us what serves this purpose, and lures us to it, as it were, and wants us to open his book …
Luther therefore called for new schools where Greek and Latin were taught, thus enabling a critical approach to the biblical text.
But boys and girls should be well educated in the first place, as the state (and also the church) needed capable and educated young people. It is therefore also clear to the reformer that it is an important task of the cities “to establish and permanently finance these schools and the associated libraries”.
Luther’s Councilor’s Writings were quickly reprinted and supported in many places, especially by Philipp Melanchthon.
In 1524, the year of publication, Luther’s appeal led to the founding of “council schools” in Magdeburg, Gotha, Halberstadt and Nordhausen, in the following year also in Eisleben, then in Nuremberg, Erfurt, Speyer and many other cities.
Many of them still exist today as (state-funded) “Protestant grammar schools”. In the Protestant territories, they formed the cornerstone of the public school system, as the Reformation meant that the previous church schools there were transferred to sovereign or municipal administration. In the Catholic parts, on the other hand, the existing schools remained under the responsibility of the church.
The French Revolution of 1790 had completely expropriated the church in France and weakened it enormously. From 1801 onwards, but especially after the main Imperial Deputation of 1803, “secularization” (expropriation of the churches’ large estates) also followed in Germany until 1806, 280 years after Luther’s founding impulse. This marked the beginning of the end of all church responsibility for primary education in general.
In 1875, the last monasteries there – once the beacons of education – were dissolved.
Now “the state” had assumed responsibility for the schools. However, this “state”, the German Empire in 1875, consisted of 25 federal states in what is now Germany. There were – as today – many differences in the details of their regulations; since then, “state responsibility” has applied to school policy.
The constitution of the first democratic republic of 1919 cemented the jurisdiction of the now eighteen states, and in 1949 it remained so.
But it should be noted: In Germany, the state has only been responsible for education for about 215 years; before that, it was the church for a whole millennium…
