§ 1. The curriculum bequeathed by the Renascence and stereotyped in the School Codes of Germany, in the Ratio of the Jesuits, and in the English public school system, was greatly influenced by the most famous schoolmaster of the fifteen hundreds, John Sturm, who was for over forty years Rector of the Strassburg Gymnasium. § 2. Sturm was a fine specimen of the successful man: he knew what his contemporaries wanted, and that was just what he wanted. “He was a blessed fellow,” as Prince Hal says of Poins, “to think as every man thought,” and he not only “kept the roadway” himself, but he also “personally conducted” great bands of pupils over it, at one time “200 noblemen, 24 counts and barons, and 3 princes.” What could schoolmaster desire more?
§ 3. But I frankly own that Sturm is no favourite of mine, and that I think that he did much harm to education. However, his influence in the schoolroom was so great that I must not leave him unnoticed; and I give some information, taken mainly from Raumer’s account of him, which is translated in Henry Barnard’s “German Teachers and[28] Educators.” I have also looked at the exhaustive article by Dr. Bossier in K. A. Schmid’s Encyklop?die (sub v.)
§ 4. John Sturm, born at Schleiden in the Eifel, not far from Cologne, in 1507, was one of 15 children, and would not have had much teaching had not his father been steward to a nobleman, with whose sons he was brought up. He always spoke with reverence and affection of his early teachers, and from them no doubt he acquired his thirst for learning. With the nobleman’s sons and under the guidance of a tutor he was sent to Liège, and there he attended a school of the “Brethren of the Life in Common,” alias Hieronymites. Many of the arrangements of this school he afterwards reproduced in the Strassburg Gymnasium, and in this way the good Brethren gained an influence over classical education throughout the world.
§ 5. Between the age of 15 and 20 Sturm was at Lyons, and before the end of this period he was forced into teaching for a maintenance. He then, like many other learned men of the time, turned printer. We next find him at the University of Paris, where he thought of becoming a doctor of medicine, but was finally carried away from natural science by the Renascence devotion to literature, and he became a popular lecturer on the classics. From Paris he was called to Strassburg (then, as now, in Germany) in 1537. In 1538 he published his plan of a Gymnasium or Grammar School, with the title, “The right way of opening schools of literature (De Literarum Ludis recte aperiendis),” and some years afterwards (1565) he published his Letters (Classic? Epistol?) to the different form-masters in his school.
§ 6. The object of teaching is three-fold, says Sturm, “piety, knowledge, and the art of expression.” The student should be distinguished by reasonable and neat speech[29] (ratione et oratione). To attain this the boys in his school had to give seven years to the acquirement of a pure Latin style; then two years more were devoted to elegance; then five years of collegiate life were to be given to the art of Latin speech. This course is for ten years carefully mapped out by Sturm in his Letters to the masters. The foundation is to be laid in the tenth class, which the child enters at seven years old, and in which he learns to read, and is turned on to the declensions and conjugations. We have for all classes the exact “pensum,” and also specimens of the questions put in examination by the top boy of the next class above, a hint which was not thrown away upon the Jesuits.
§ 7. Sturm cries over the superior advantages of the Roman children. “Cicero was but twenty when he delivered his speeches in behalf of Quintius and Roscius; but in these days where is there the man even of eighty, who could make such speeches? Yet there are books enough and intellect enough. What need we further? We need the Latin language and a correct method of teaching. Both these we must have before we can arrive at the summit of eloquence.”
§ 8. Sturm did not, like Rabelais, put Greek on a level with Latin or above it. The reading of Greek words is begun in the sixth class. Hebrew, Sturm did not himself learn till he was nearly sixty.
§ 9. With a thousand boys in his school, and carrying on correspondence with the leading sovereigns of his age, Sturm was a model of the successful man. But in the end “the religious difficulty” was too much even for him, and he was dismissed from his post by his opponents “for old age and other causes.” Surely the “other causes” need not have been mentioned. Sturm was then eighty years old.
§ 10. The successful man in every age is the man who[30] chooses a popular and attainable object, and shows tremendous energy in pursuit of it. Most people don’t know precisely what they want; and among the few who do, nine-tenths or more fail through lack of energy. But Sturm was quite clear in his aim, and having settled the means, he showed immense energy and strength of will in going through with them. He wanted to restore the language of Cicero and Ovid and to give his pupils great power of elegant expression in that language. Like all schoolmasters he professed that piety and knowledge (which in more modern phrase would be wisdom and knowledge) should come first, but like most schoolmasters he troubled himself mainly, if not exclusively, about the art of expression. As an abstract proposition the schoolmaster admits that to have in your head something worth saying is more important than to have the power of expression ready in case anything worth saying should “come along.” But the schoolmaster’s art always has taken, and I suppose, in the main, always will take for its material the means of expression; and by preference it chooses a tongue not vulgar or “understanded of the people.” Thus the schoolmasters with Sturm at their head set themselves to teach words—foreign words, and allowed their pupils to study nothing else, not even the mother tongue. The satirist who wrote Hudibras has stated for us the result—
“No sooner are the organs of the brain
Quick to receive and stedfast to retain
Best knowledges, but all’s laid out upon
Retrieving of the curse of Babylon.
...
And he that is but able to express
No sense in several languages
Will pass for learneder than he that’s known
To speak the strongest reason in his own.”[9]
[31]
§ 11. One of the scholars of the Renascence, Hieronymus Wolf, was wise enough to see that there might be no small merit in a boy’s silence: “Nec minima pueri virtus est tacere cum recte loqui nesciat” (Quoted by Parker). But this virtue of silence was not encouraged by Sturm, and he determined that by the age of sixteen his pupils should have a fair command of expression in Latin and some knowledge of Greek.[10] Latin indeed was to supplant the mother tongue, and boys were to be severely punished for using their own language. By this we may judge of the pernicious effects of following Sturm. And it is a mistake to suppose that the unwisdom of tilting at the vernacular was not so much Sturm’s, as of the age in which he lived. The typical English schoolmaster of the century, Mulcaster, was in this and many other ways greatly in advance of Sturm. To him it was plain that we should “care for that most which we ever use most, because we need it most.”[11] The only need recognized by Sturm was need of the classical languages. Thus he and his admirers led the unlucky schoolboy straight into that “slough of Despond”—verbalism, in which he has struggled ever since;
“Plunged for some sense, but found no bottom there,
So learned and floundered on in mere despair.”