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Enlightenment, Reform, Reaction: The Schooling Revolution in Prussia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Extract

Of the revolutionary transformations that shaped the nineteenth-century European world, no one of them touched more directly the lives of the broad masses than did the development of the schooled society. The effecting of state-directed systems of compulsory elementary education (schooling) introduced into Europe the age of mass pedagogy. In Prussia and several of the German states where schooling began early in the century, and in France and England where it came a generation or two later, it produced changes in the structure of individual life and society that were both celebrated and feared. Even where schooling was not effected—as in Russia—the debate surrounding it was clamorous and often strident. Some believed it to be the fount of greatness, whether in politics, arms, or production. Others thought it would open the floodgates of social upheaval. Where schooling came to be effected, as well as where it was not, the questions surrounding it were at the center of political and social controversy.

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Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 1979

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References

1 Lawrence Stone, “Literacy and Education in England, 1640–1900,” Past and Present 42 (1969): 69.

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36 Quoted in R. F. Eylert, Charakter-Züge und historische Fragmente aus dem Leben des Königs von Preussen, Friedrich Wilhelm III, vol. 1, 3rd ed. (Magdeburg, 1843), pp. 321–22.

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57 Natorp to Vincke on Dec. 4, 1810, in Lichtenstein, “Krisenjahr,” pp. 101–2. Lancaster developed an instructional method known as the monitorial or mutual approach, by which a single instructor could teach a lesson to as many as a thousand children. He began by teaching the lesson to monitors who in turn relayed the lesson to the pupils. Natorp believed for a time that Lancasterian and Pestalozzian methods could be combined.

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61 Madame de Staël-Holstein, Germany (Boston, 1887), p. 129.

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63 Quoted in Heer, F., The Intellectual History of Europe, trans. Steinberg, J. (Garden City, N.Y., 1966), 2: 271.Google Scholar Goethe also used the imagery of a Babylonian Tower of Confusion to portray the “horrible influence which the damnable [Pestalozzian] system breeds.” Quoted in Lewisohn, L., ed., Goethe: The Story of a Man, 2 (New York, 1949): 238–39.Google Scholar

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