Secondary School Reform in Imperial Germany

by James C. Albisetti

Overview

James C. Albisetti explores the wide-ranging debate in Imperial Germany over the reform of secondary education to meet the new demands posed by unification, industrialization, and urbanization.

Originally published in 1983.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691613635
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #772
Pages:	380
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 9.90(h) x 0.80(d)

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Secondary School Reform in Imperial Germany

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By James C. Albisetti

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1983 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05373-8

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CHAPTER 1

BILDUNG AND THE GEBILDETEN

Bildung consists not in the possession of facts, but in the possession of lively powers of judgment and action. Friedrich Paulsen

The simplest dunce who has an Abitur certificate in his pocket looks down on the great merchant or industrialist as a less gebildet man, and, what is worse, the latter often looks up to him. Gustav Völcker

Although its roots reached back to the Latin schools of the Middle Ages, the classical Gymnasium with which the Kaiser found so much fault in 1890 was essentially a product of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It was shaped by a combination of an educational ideal expounded by some of the leading figures in the flowering of German culture around 1800, including Herder, Fichte, and Goethe, with the growing intervention of the Prussian state in the educational system. In the course of the nineteenth century, the Gymnasium developed into the cornerstone of the educational systems of all the German states; especially in Prussia, Gymnasium pupils and graduates gradually obtained a wide variety of rights and privileges that enabled them to dominate the civil service and the professions.

Central to the educational philosophy behind the Gymnasium was the notion of "Bildung" as formulated in Germany in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As do its usual translations, "cultivation" and "education," Bildung referred to both the process and the result of a person's intellectual development. The early theorists of Bildung wanted to guarantee the individual freedom to develop his own talents to the greatest possible extent, and therefore resisted any equation of Bildung with training designed specifically for a future career. They generally viewed such practical instruction as symptomatic of a society based on hereditary estate rather than on human equality; they preferred that individuals not be forced into a mold by education for a trade until each had been given the opportunity to carry his Bildung as far as he could. Two overlapping conceptions of what the results of this process of Bildung would be coexisted in German thought at this time: whereas on the one hand the Romantic impulses behind the idea of each individual cultivating his innate talents suggested a broad diversity among the Gebildeten (those people with a completed Bildung), the roots of Bildung in the Enlightenment and neoclassicism pointed to all true Gebildeten sharing a common rationality, idealism, morality, and aesthetic sensibility.

In this opposition to an education based on one's hereditary estate, the ideal of Bildung contained a powerful democratic component. In German society of the early nineteenth century, however, where formal education for the overwhelming majority of the population amounted to learning only the rudiments of reading, writing, arithmetic, and religion in overcrowded one- or two-room schoolhouses, Bildung had an implicit bias in favor of the social groups whose leisure and money permitted them to pursue the cultivation of their talents and personalities. The new cultural ideal could and did serve as a weapon for elements in the middle class fighting against aristocratic privilege; indeed, many aristocrats came to accept Bildung as almost as important a measure of status as birth. Yet the ideal of Bildung in many ways was not "middle class" or "bourgeois" in the sense usually given to these terms; in its rejection of practicality and of purposeful work in the world in favor of a leisured cultivation of intellectual and aesthetic interests, Bildung stood in opposition to the values of the commercial and manufacturing classes. Within the German society of the time, the new ideal appealed most strongly to those groups that would later be known as the Gebildeten, civil servants and professionals.

This elective affinity between certain social groups and the ideal of Bildung became clear as the new educational ideal was institutionalized in the emerging state system of secondary schools. Throughout most of the eighteenth century, an interest in obtaining more thoroughly trained civil servants for the state had led many educational reformers to argue that the universities must be revitalized; as a concomitant, only young men who were "ripe" for university studies should be admitted.* In Prussia, the most important step in this direction was the introduction of the first Abitur examination in 1787. Although the examination was not obligatory for all Latin schools, and its successful completion was not yet required for entering the universities, the new regulation served to accentuate the differences between the larger schools whose pupils were able to pass the examination and the lesser ones that did not offer an adequate preparation. An important goal of the new regulation was to spur the conversion of such lesser Latin schools into more practically oriented Bürgerschulen. By this differentiation between schools for future merchants and artisans and those for future civil servants and professionals, the Prussian authorities sharpened an existing division within the middle classes.

The Abitur examination of 1787 included both Latin and Greek, but it did not associate these languages with the nascent ideal of Bildung. Only after the defeat of Prussia by Napoleon did Bildung, usually prefaced by the adjectives humanistic or classical, become synonymous with a secondary education centering on the study of the languages and literatures of ancient Greece and Rome. The man most responsible for the introduction of classical Bildung into Prussian secondary education was the aristocratic philologist and statesman Wilhelm von Humboldt. Although he served as the head of the education section of the Prussian Ministry of the Interior for only sixteen months in 1809–1810, Humboldt laid down the foundation for almost all the measures carried out by his successors. A firm believer in the exclusion of all practical training from schools designed to produce Bildung, Humboldt wrote in 1809, "If the two are mixed, Bildung becomes impure, and one ends up with neither wholly developed human beings nor fully integrated members of the separate classes." He saw the goals of formal schooling as being to "exercise the memory, sharpen the understanding, correct the judgment, and refine the moral sense"; the specialized knowledge and skills needed for the pupils' future employment would be obtained after leaving school. Contrary to the policy of his predecessors, Humboldt envisioned differentiation within the school system only in terms of the length of study; the Gymnasium would be the only secondary school, serving boys who did not expect to enter the universities as well as those who did.

In assigning a major role in the Gymnasium to the ancient languages, especially Greek, Humboldt showed himself to be a loyal disciple of the neo-humanist Friedrich August Wolf. The first German to call himself a student of philology and later a professor at the University of Halle, Wolf had been instrumental in transmitting to a generation of scholars and teachers the enthusiasm for ancient Greece that had conquered the German intellectual world in the late eighteenth century; his fame as the developer of many methodological innovations in the study of language gave great weight to his views on secondary education. Wolf offered two important reasons why Greek should be part of an education for Bildung: the study of its grammar helped develop formal mental discipline, and its literature presented the pupil with the best available examples of human culture in an original, unmixed form. Humboldt fully shared these beliefs, although he himself stressed the study of the Greek language as a pure, original expression of the human spirit more than did most of the neo-humanists. In no way did Humboldt conceive of instruction in the classical languages as preliminary training for future philologists; it was but the most important of many tools useful for the allgemeine, or general, Bildung of all pupils in the secondary schools. In addition to Latin and Greek, Humboldt's ideal Gymnasium would teach German, mathematics, physics, geography, history, and religion.

There was certainly an inherent contradiction in prescribing the means by which individuals should best develop their own talents; that Humboldt, who in the 1790s had written several essays on the limits of state power, should involve himself with the creation of a state system of secondary education testifies to the powerful sense of the need for a revolution from above in the truncated Prussia after 1807. However, even the urgency of the reform era could not transform an educational system overnight, and implementing the plans for the classical Gymnasium proved to be a slow and incomplete process. The first important step came in July 1810, after Humboldt had resigned his post, when a decree was issued regulating the certification of teachers for the Prussian secondary schools. Until then, the patrons of the individual institutions — municipalities, foundations, the state, the king, or a combination of these — had been free to choose their own teachers, often young pastors waiting for a parish. Under the new arrangements, the patrons would have to choose from a group of teachers who had passed an examination administered by the state if they wanted the schools to be considered as full-fledged Gymnasien. In accord with the views of both Humboldt and Wolf, the new examination concentrated almost exclusively on the candidate's scholarly qualifications to the neglect of his pedagogical abilities. At the time, when the philosophical faculties of the universities had not progressed far beyond offering an advanced secondary education and allgemeine Bildung, this lack of attention to teacher training posed no serious problems; but as the universities evolved more and more into institutions of research that produced scholars instead of teachers, this examination system, even with the changes made in the course of the nineteenth century, contained the seeds of undesirable repercussions on German secondary education.

The introduction of an obligatory curriculum for the Gymnasium, and an Abitur examination based on it, necessarily had to wait for the growth of a sufficient pool of qualified teachers. A recommended curriculum drawn up in 1812 by one of Humboldt's former subordinates, Johann Süvern, called for a ten-year Gymnasium, beginning after four years of elementary school, that would teach ten years of Latin and eight of Greek, with mathematics and German also receiving substantial amounts of class time throughout the course. This curriculum, which called for thirty-two hours of classes per week in every grade, came under fire even from Wolf as demanding too much of the pupils. Consequently, it was never universally adopted. Süvern also issued revised regulations for the Abitur examination in 1812,, which included six written and seven oral exercises. The severity of this examination continued the earlier policy of separating the Gymnasien from the lesser Latin schools: only ninety-one schools qualified as Gymnasien in the Prussia of 1818. Yet there was still a reluctance to exclude those who did not have an Abitur, especially aristocrats, from the university: an "unsatisfactory" grade on Süvern's Abitur did not prevent matriculation, and the universities themselves continued to offer separate entrance examinations to prospective students.

Only in the 1830s, under the direction of Johannes Schulze, who headed the department for the secondary schools under Minister of Education von Altenstein from 1819 to 1840, did this flexibility regarding the curriculum and the Abitur disappear. In 1834, after a rapid expansion of university enrollments had created what seemed to be an excess of educated men in Germany, Schulze closed off all paths to the university except the Gymnasium by making the Abitur a prerequisite for matriculation. Only three years later, after receiving complaints that the curriculum leading to the Abitur was too difficult, did Schulze present a revised plan, standardizing the Gymnasium as a nine-year school in six grades, with the three upper grades lasting two years each. As a student and friend of the philosopher Hegel, Schulze believed the Gymnasium should impart allgemeine Bildung, but he did not share as completely in the enthusiasm for ancient Greece as had the neo-humanists of the previous generation; in his curriculum, Greek lost time to Latin and French, which he introduced beginning in the fourth year. German and mathematics fell much further behind Latin and Greek in credit hours allotted, so that the classical languages together accounted for 46 percent of the classroom time. In order to guarantee the "harmonious" Bildung of all the pupils' talents, Schulze also decreed that promotion from one grade to the next would depend on the mastery of the material presented in all subjects.

Neither the curriculum nor the Abitur underwent any major changes between the 1830s and the 1880s. During the era of reaction following 1848, Ludwig Wiese introduced a slight increase in the time devoted to religious instruction and a small reduction for science. Wiese also moved the start of French from the fourth to the second year, so that pupils began Latin in Sexta, French in Quinta, and Greek in Quarta; but such minor adjustments did little to dislodge the ancient languages from their dominant role in the Gymnasium. The classical school retained its monopoly over preparation for the university until 1870, and for most fields even longer, so that it became in a certain sense a "practical" preparation for future lawyers, physicians, pastors, and teachers, even if it did not offer specialized preliminary training for these professions.

Several other characteristics of the classical Gymnasium are worthy of note in light of the later debate of the school question. The antipathy of the neo-humanists for anything even remotely tainted with practical training meant that the Gymnasium neglected the contribution that manual skills might make to Bildung; even drawing played at best a tertiary role in a Gymnasium education. The educational value of gymnastics and games also failed to impress the Prussian authorities, especially after Father Jahn's gymnastic associations were banned for their political radicalism in 1819. Although the Gymnasium's monopoly over preparing pupils for the universities meant that it would educate all higher civil servants, most of whom were lawyers, it did not offer much introduction to the political and social realities of German life; after 1819, the Gymnasium was supposed to prevent "immature judgments" about "current political conditions" by steering clear of the present in history instruction.

In the other German states, the evolution of secondary education in the early nineteenth century followed a wide variety of paths, but the final results were generally institutions not unlike the humanistic classical Gymnasium in Prussia. In the smaller northern states with only a handful of secondary schools, imitation of neighboring Prussia was virtually the only option open to the authorities. In the larger states, where neo-humanism had independent roots, greater diversity reigned: in Bavaria and Württemberg, for example, the old Latin schools continued to exist, offering a few years of Greek to boys interested in going on to four-year Gymnasien that were equivalent to the upper grades of the Prussian classical schools. The most important factor pushing the schools of the many states toward uniformity was the tradition of German university students attending several universities, often in different states, in the course of their academic work. Consequently, this made reciprocal recognition of the Abitur, and thus similarity in the curricula, a necessity.

By the time of Johannes Schulze's revision of the Abitur examination and of the curriculum in the 1830s, a Gymnasium education had already become an important source of social status. In rural districts, a town with a Gymnasium often served as something of a cultural center, with a concentration of university graduates as teachers and pupils drawn from the surrounding countryside. The close association of classical Bildung with the heroes of the German cultural revival lent a special prestige to being gebildet, beyond that usually associated with education. Bildung also acquired its practical advantages, especially in Prussia. Most important was the exclusive right of Gymnasium graduates to enter the universities and, after the required years of study, to take state examinations for the civil service, the ministry, medical and legal practice, and secondary teaching. In a society where neither industry nor politics yet offered significant opportunities for advancement and prestige, these professions, with their exercise of power over people rather than things, gave high status to former Gymnasium pupils. Over the years, the middle levels of the civil service also became the preserve of former Gymnasium pupils, as the authorities in various ministries took advantage of the selective mechanism existing in the schools to establish minimum educational requirements for their subordinates. Many of these privileges did not demand graduation from the Gymnasium, but only completion of six to eight years of schooling; boys received the privileges not so much because of what they knew as for the allgemeine Bildung that their years at a Gymnasium were presumed to have produced. In a society where the bureaucracy was held in such high esteem as in Prussia, even these subordinate positions conferred considerable prestige.

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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• Contents, pg. vii
• Acknowledgments, pg. ix
• Abbreviations, pg. xi
• Introduction, pg. 3
• One: Bildung and the Gebildeten, pg. 16
• Two: The Gymnasium in Imperial Germany, pg. 36
• Three: The “Demands of the Present”, pg. 59
• Four: The Overburdening of German Youth, pg. 119
• Five: Raising Young Germans, pg. 140
• Six: The Kaiser Intervenes, pg. 171
• Seven: The School Conference of 1890, pg. 208
• Eight: Reprise: The School Conference of 1900, pg. 243
• Nine: Comparisons and Conclusions, pg. 292
• Bibliography, pg. 315
• Index, pg. 357