Abstract » Ross
Cracow 2009
Educational Reform, Philosophy, and Irenicism
Alan ROSS
‘…a serious school sickness’: Territorial Fragmentation and Pedagogical Experimentation in Seventeenth-Century Lutheran Latin Schools
The fact that civic Latin schools employed scholars meant that their relationship to the guidelines of the territorial school ordinance was never going to be completely passive. On the question of which textbooks to use, the school ordinances were of little use anyway, and could not be, as they would have needed to be, updated constantly to keep up with the rapid pedagogical developments of the early seventeenth century. In a way, it was a self-perpetuating cycle. Schools needed scholars as rectors so they could navigate the ever-expanding body of pedagogical literature. Once appointed, these men would in turn publish their own ‘method’. In an environment where there was fierce competition between schools, rectors were published scholars and interference from the territorial government was marginal, it is no wonder that Middle Germany suffered from the schwere Schul=Krankheit (as a contemporary commentator called it) of methodological diversity and experimentation. In my paper, I will demonstrate the density of the intellectual network of schoolmen on the basis of maps and excerpts from from letter collections.
Join 