School

SCHOOL. - An institution born from the impossibility in which families find themselves of providing on their own that degree of instruction and culture required by the social circumstances in the midst of which they live. As these circumstances become more demanding with the rise in the level of civil and cultural life and the progress of letters, arts and sciences, the number of schools also tends to increase, and the various types into which they necessarily become differentiated increase as well. And since the school exists not only for instruction, but also and above all for formation and for life, it is natural that interest in the school on the part of civil and religious authority should also grow, and with that interest their intervention and their supervision. Intervention and supervision that ought to be harmoniously fused together, since the subject to be instructed and educated as a citizen and as a religious is one and the same (v. EDUCAZIONE); whereas in the course of history there have occurred, and still occur, meddling, coercion and mistrust that are out of place and injurious to the fundamental rights of the individual and of the family.

A rapid glance at the various fortunes undergone by the school will help to better understand the value of the important problems that gather around the school question.

I. THE SCHOOL AMONG THE MOST ANCIENT PEOPLES

Leaving aside the "primitives," for whom one cannot properly speak of true schools, although a rudimentary hint may perhaps be seen in the initiation (v.) to which boys and girls are subjected in the period of passage from childhood to adolescence, among other peoples a fine and varied flourishing of them can instead be observed. Characteristic is the almost universal fact that the education of the young remains centered in the family, considered the center of civil and social life, while the State, wherever it established its schools, generally aims to integrate and develop family education, without claiming at all to replace it.

Among the Babylonians and Assyrians, even without precise information about school organization, it is known what the subjects of instruction were that formed the culture of the "magi" or sages. These included almost all fields of knowledge: history, geography, astronomy, astrology, mathematics, medicine, theology. From study, even though reserved to persons of high caste, to priests and magi, no intelligent person was excluded, and such a person could freely attain that degree of culture which was required for access to the public offices of the State. Women and the common people, on the other hand, were generally excluded from instruction. A center of particular cultural activity was Babylon, where the king maintained in his palace a higher school of advanced studies, and the pupils there were kept at the expense of the State and at the end of the three-year course diligently examined by the sovereign (Daniel and his companions, carried into exile to Babylon in 606 B.C., were in fact educated in this school in all the sciences of the time). Among the Persians, the care of the State with its schools took the place of family education for the period from 7 to 25 years, where the intellectual and religious part of the lower course was followed by the higher course for military and civil formation. Whoever did not aspire to the exercise of public functions could freely instruct himself under private teachers. The Persian priests, called magi or sages for their vast culture, must also have had great priestly schools. The Egyptians, who always held knowledge in great esteem, had numerous and well-developed schools, but only the sons of priests and warriors, the two privileged classes, to which alone the government of the State was entrusted, were admitted to them. Instruction was imparted exclusively by the priests, and the schools were housed in the temples. Higher instruction was directed above all to the technical and professional field (scribes, engineers, architects, physicians). Those who possessed science most deeply and completely (literature, natural sciences, medicine, philosophy and music) were the priests, with their own schools, who also studied theology profoundly (famous were the theological schools of Heliopolis, Memphis, Hermopolis and Thebes, which created the various theogonies and raised or lowered their divinities according to their theories). To religion also belonged magic, much studied from the most ancient times, and divination, especially in the aspect of oneiromancy (let one recall the episodes of Moses and of Joseph sold into Egypt).

The Chinese, among whom, more than among any other people, all social life was centered on the family, held to be the basis of the entire religious, moral and civil life of the nation, considered the school as the continuation and perfection of domestic instruction in the traditions and customs of the ancestors. The State possessed an organic system of schools of different grades of instruction, founded, maintained and directed by the State, and open to all male citizens. And whoever aspired to the government of the people had to undergo, at the end of higher studies, the State examinations, very burdensome and difficult. However, families and private individuals could also open and direct schools; the State school was obligatory only for those who were preparing for public employments and offices; and anyone who had studied privately could also present himself for the State examination.

The Japanese had the Chinese script only in 207 A.D., imported there by a Chinese man of letters; until that time the majority of them were entirely ignorant of it. King Mommu in 701 established a University in Tokyo and numerous national schools and colleges in every province, also dictating the regulations proper to each grade of school, thus creating a system of national education. Whoever, after the first schools, wished to study particular disciplines (Chinese classics, political science, jurisprudence, etc.) had either to pass on to the University or to make use of private teachers; likewise the sons of merchants, farmers and artisans, who could not attend the colleges and schools of the nobles, had to resort to private instruction.

The Indians did not have State schools for preparation for public offices, as the Chinese, Egyptians and Persians did; they did, however, have lower and higher schools (practically all in the hands of the priestly caste of the Brahmins, the first of the four castes of which Indian society was composed), which were divided into two categories: some were reserved for the children of the priestly caste, the others served the sons of the two castes of warriors and farmers, or merchants; the latter had an essentially religious purpose (knowledge of the sacred books). At first higher instruction, quite well organized in numerous colleges, which soon were transformed into a kind of University, was the privilege of the Brahmins; but little by little, as the teaching of literature, medicine, jurisprudence, astrology and astronomy was added to the religious subjects, members of the warrior and artisan castes could also participate in the schools.

Among the Hebrews, who formed a people clearly distinct from all others for its theocratic conception of the State, family education and instruction imparted by the parents long prevailed, or, in families of the upper class, by pedagogues who remained all their lives in the house of their pupils. Only after the return from the Babylonian captivity did the successors of Ezra erect schools in the principal cities, in which literature, religion and the national laws were taught. The scribes or learned men formed a special class with a special profession and became the ordinary teachers in the synagogues and in the elementary schools opened beside them. Hellenism increased the desire for ever greater instruction, and the schools multiplied. The House of the Book, established in Jerusalem by the head of the Great Sanhedrin, Samuel ben Setah, in 104 B.C., as a model of State elementary schools, had little following; and only in 94 A.D. was there a decree of obligatory elementary instruction, and the order to establish schools in every even small city. After the dispersion the Israelites erected synagogues and schools in all places where it was possible for them; and their Academies, during the Middle Ages (Toledo, Granada, Cordoba, etc.) had periods of true splendor.

In Greece, the Spartans implemented an absolute scholastic monopoly on the part of the State. The school organization that was traced back to Lycurgus (d. 889 B.C.) aimed to form valiant soldiers, because, as a small aristocratic minority (the Spartiates), in the face of the other peoples of Laconia, the Spartans could not maintain dominion over them without a great military superiority. Therefore the child belonged to the State: after seven years of strict family upbringing he passed into the public institutions of education, maintained by the State under teachers and educators appointed and supervised by the State. The girls too belonged to the State, which attended to their education in order to form them into vigorous and strong women and mothers. Among the Athenians, on the other hand, the political Constitution of Solon (ca. the end of the 6th century B.C.) gave much importance to instruction and education, but imposed neither official programs nor obligatory s.

compulsory. Everything, on the other hand, was left to private initiative; parents were free to choose the school and the teacher they preferred; nor were teachers trained or paid by the State; but free competition prevailed, based either on the fame of the master or on the lower price to be paid for lessons. In this free, but complete, school organization, the young man was instructed for 8 or 9 years, passing through the various grades of teaching, and at 16 he entered the "gymnasium," the only official and compulsory school, with teachers and inspectors appointed and paid by the State; there, however, almost exclusively physical culture was taught and practiced in order to prepare the pupils directly for military life.

Nor did the Romans, until the end of the Republic, have official schools and programs; for a long time the family itself attended, under its own responsibility, to the instruction of the children; and the first schools, it seems, were not opened until toward the end of the 3rd century B.C., and were naturally private schools, run by more educated slaves. They were called ludi, that is, amusement, recreation, to indicate their function as a supplement to domestic education, and the teacher was called ludi-magister; they were held at some family's house or in a less frequented corner of a temple or of some public building. The conquest of Greece poured into Rome a great number of Greek teachers of grammar (a name that included grammar properly so called, mathematics, geometry, astronomy and music), of rhetoric (which trained in the art of speaking and formed orators) and of philosophy, who offered their teaching to families; so that, alongside the first schools, of elementary grade, there were secondary and higher schools, which to grammar, rhetoric and philosophy added also medicine and jurisprudence. These schools too were left to the free initiative of private individuals, without any interference by the State: "maiores nostri disciplinam puerilem nullam, aut destinatam legibus, aut publice expositam, aut unam omnium, esse voluerunt" (Cicero, De Republica, IV, 3). There was, it is true, in 92 B.C. a censorial edict against the new schools conducted by the Greeks; but this happened not against freedom of teaching, but to temper the aberrations that recent novelties brought to the "mos maiorum."

Under the Empire teachers enjoyed many privileges and immunities. Vespasian was the first to pay some teachers with public money; Hadrian was lavish with this kind of subsidy and furthermore founded in Rome the first Universities, the "Athaeneum Romanum," a spacious school building in the form of an amphitheater, where teachers, lacking school buildings of their own, could gather their pupils without expense; Marcus Aurelius founded in Athens a series of chairs of philosophy and rhetoric, with teachers paid by the State; Alexander Severus created in Rome new school premises placed at the disposal of private teachers, instituted new chairs of medicine, architecture, etc., and allocated scholarships in kind for poor students; Constantine founded a university at Constantinople, that is, an organic complex of schools and chairs for secondary and higher education. The municipalities everywhere followed the example of the emperors, creating municipal schools with salaried teachers; indeed the emperor Gratian, in order to prevent injustices, fixed by law the fee owed by the municipalities to grammarians and rhetoricians, entering it in the budget among obligatory expenses. If not rarely these municipal schools became an occasion for some more direct interference by the State, they nevertheless always left the field free for independent schools, founded and maintained by private individuals and directed by more select personnel and therefore preferred by families.

II. CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS UNTIL THE FALL OF THE EMPIRE

This full freedom of teaching also allowed Christians to embrace the career of teachers; there were, in fact, teachers who suffered martyrdom, not condemned because they were private teachers, but for refusing to renounce their faith. St. Cassian, martyr, was a teacher at Imola; Flavian, a martyr in Africa, was a grammarian; Origen began his career as a grammarian to help his family; and in the cemetery of St. Callistus the epitaph was found of a magister primus, or elementary teacher.

It was Julian the Apostate who first attempted to restrict freedom of teaching for Christian teachers, issuing the Edict of 362, by which he forbids them, if they persist in Christian beliefs, to keep school any longer. Then illustrious teachers stepped down from the chair, such as the rhetor Victorinus at Rome and the sophist Prohaeresius at Athens. But already two years later, in 364, Valentinian abrogated the law and restored freedom to Christian teachers: "Whoever by character and learning is worthy to teach, let him have the right to open a school" (Code of Theodosius, 13, 6, 3). This regime of freedom lasted in the West until the end of the Empire. In the East, on the other hand, Theodosius brought about the official monopoly of university teaching with the two Constitutions of February and March 425 (ibid., 14, 9, 3; 15, 1, 53), by which private professors were reduced to the simple office of domestic tutors ("inter privatos parietes"); and everyone, instead, had to attend the University founded by him and provided with 8 rhetoricians, 20 grammarians, 2 jurists and 1 philosopher. A century later, Justinian, in 529, concentrated all the law schools of the Empire in the three cities of Constantinople, Berytus and Rome, centralizing in his hands every didactic initiative as well and forbidding any form of teaching "to those who are troubled by the insomnia of paganism" (Code of Justinian, 1, 11, 2). But this reform, before it could consolidate itself, was swept away by the Lombard invasion.

At the same time the Church, for a more solid preparation of pagans for Baptism, had instituted the "catechumenates", in which the priest imparted instruction concerning the faith throughout the year, but especially during Lent. Any place, especially in the earliest times—sanctuaries, crypts, cemeteries, private houses, etc.—became a center of teaching. Now, many catechumenates were gradually transformed into "catechetical schools", which also admitted pagan pupils and had the purpose of giving, along with religious instruction, a general culture as well. Still more: some of these catechetical schools were transformed into academies or higher schools, because Christians, finding themselves face to face with heresy and with the highest and most elaborate pagan science, understood that the ultimate effort had to be attempted to give Christianity a philosophical, literary and cultural foundation that could place it on a par with any pagan teaching and serve to defeat the numerous enemies who fought it and made it an example in school, in books and in daily sarcasms. The most celebrated example of these higher schools is the Christian Didascalcion of Alexandria, founded, according to more recent studies, by Origen in 202 on the commission of Bishop Demetrius and which replaced the catechetical school of Pantaenus. There the professors taught, alongside the sacred sciences, Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy, physics, astronomy, grammar and rhetoric, drawing abundantly from the classical pagan authors; the study of Sacred Scripture crowned the instruction. Since in other cities too an equal need was felt for a scientific demonstration of the truth of the faith, the Church founded other similar institutions; and thus there arose the Academies of Caesarea, Antioch, Jerusalem, Edessa, Smyrna, Nisibis and Rome.

III. CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS IN THE EARLY MEDIEVAL PERIOD

The void left by the dissolution of the Roman Empire (476) caused the entire care of public instruction to pass to the Church. Several kinds of schools may be noted:

1. Presbyterial or parochial schools

Where Christianity counted almost the whole, or at least the majority, of the population, purely Christian schools had already been opened for elementary studies, in which children learned, besides religion and liturgical chants, also reading, writing and the elements of calculation. These schools, naturally, multiplied as those of the pagans declined, until in many places they remained the sole beacon of instruction. A Council held in Italy in 443 ordered priests to gather into their houses the children of the surrounding area in order to give them suitable instruction. Before and after this Council, parochial schools must have been numerous in Italy and borne good fruit, if the Council of Vaison, Orange and Valence in 529 established that priests with the care of souls should admit into their house young lectors who had no wife, in order to instruct them as good fathers instruct their children, « secundum consuetudinem, quam per totam Italiam satis salubriter teneri cognovimus » (Hefele-Leclercq, II, pp. 1111-12). The young lectors were then free to follow the ecclesiastical career or to embrace matrimony. The same is prescribed by the Council of Constantinople of 680.

2. Episcopal or cathedral schools

The parochial schools did not go beyond the subjects taught in elementary schools; but higher schools were also needed, with a more suitable and deeper teaching. On the other hand, the preparation of the clergy demanded that studies be carried out in a worthy manner. Thus there arose beside the bishop's see the so-called episcopal schools, great seminaries and universities, intended especially for candidates for the priesthood, but increasingly attended also by laymen. One of these schools had already been created by St. Augustine at Hippo; another existed at Imola, where St. Peter Chrysologus did his studies; others still at Paris, Poitiers, Clermont, etc. The Second Council of Toledo (531) prescribed their foundation, adding that the pupils, upon reaching the age of 18, were to be asked, in the presence of the bishop and the clergy, whether they preferred the priesthood or marriage (Mansi, VIII, p. 785). The bishop himself had control of the school, and under him stood the immediate superior, called magister scholae, and it was divided into schola minor (elementary) and schola maior, which either comprised only the courses of the trivium or carried out the full program of the trivium and quadrivium, crowned by the study of Sacred Scripture and pastoral theology.

3. Canonical schools

Where the cathedral did not exist, the canons themselves of the local church established their own schools, on the model of the episcopal ones, which therefore took the name of collegiate and canonical schools and acquired a more secular than ecclesiastical character. Later they merged with the episcopal ones.

4. Monastic schools

The greatest burden of public instruction, however, was borne by monastic schools, first in the East, where most of the Fathers of the Church and ecclesiastical writers received their education, and then in the West, especially through the work of the Benedictine monasteries, which spread rapidly throughout Europe. They had an "internal" school (schola claustri) intended for the religious and an "external" school (schola canonica or externa), separated from the former and placed among the dependencies of the monastery, in order to avoid unnecessary communications with the monks who devoted themselves in a particular way to study, prayer and work. The head of the school was called magister scholae or capiscola or proscolus and, at the end of the 9th century, scholasticus. The programs of the two schools were more or less the same: trivium or quadrivium. In parallel with the male monasteries, the female ones too must have had their schools, and the English Council of Cloveshoe (747) orders that not only bishops and abbots, but also abbesses should take particular care to have the study of letters cultivated in their religious communities (Hefele-Leclercq, III, p. 907).

IV. CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS IN THE CAROLINGIAN ERA

In addition to reorganizing the Palatine School, intended particularly for princes and nobles, who were preparing for military life and the government of the people, Charlemagne issued many ordinances aimed at promoting or reorganizing parish, episcopal and monastic schools. In the Epistola de colendis litteris, addressed between 780 and 800 to the bishops and abbots, he urges them to impart literary instruction to all those who were able to learn, according to each one's capacity; more explicitly, in the Capitulary of 23 March 789 he ordered that in every bishopric and monastery schools be founded for children and that well-emended textbooks be used (cf. MGH, Capitularia, I, pp. 72 and 79). The bishops complied, and in the first half of the 9th century many councils in France, Germany and Spain also reminded parents of the duty to have their children educated. In Italy the Roman Council of 846 prescribed that all bishoprics and the parish churches subject to them should have their schools, and this because they had learned that in some places teachers were lacking and the study of letters was neglected.

In this period there were also state schools; indeed, in the Capitulare ecclesiasticum primum of Lothair in 825, promulgated at the great assembly of the Kingdom of Italy, held in the fields of Olona (Pavia), the neglect that had prevailed in many places was lamented and those who had received from the State the charge of teaching were ordered to apply themselves with the greatest care so that the pupils might acquire the culture required by the times. Indeed, the seats of the schools were also fixed, listing the cities that were to send pupils to each of them: Pavia, Ivrea, Turin, Cremona, Florence, Fermo, Verona, Vicenza, Cividale del Friuli (cf. MGH, Leges, I, p. 249). Moreover, the French episcopate itself, assembled at the Sixth Council of Paris (823), earnestly besought the emperor Louis the Pious to follow his father's example and to found by his own authority public schools in at least three of the most convenient places of the Empire (Mansi, XIV, p. 599).

V. SCHOOLS FROM THE 9TH TO THE 13TH CENTURY

From the second half of the 9th century to the end of the 11th there is a rather profound and ever-widening languishing of the schools, due to the very grave political, social and religious crisis that followed the disintegration of the Carolingian Empire. But as soon as, toward the end of the 11th century, social and religious conditions permitted it, the Church found herself in her place of honor in reviving and promoting the schools to their former vigor and splendor. Important are the scholastic provisions of the Third Lateran Council (1179); the Church has the duty, as a "pia mater," to attend to the instruction of poor children; therefore every cathedral was to assign a suitable subsidy to a teacher so that instruction, open to both clerics and laymen, provided they were poor, would be free; for the rich there remained the convenience of being educated in the family or in private schools or in the schools of the monasteries; to all persons, moreover, ample freedom was given to open schools, provided they were suitable and had requested the due license; teachers were free from taxes and no fee was to be exacted for the conferring of this license to teach (Mansi, XXII, p. 227). The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) reaffirmed the prescription, adding that also in non-cathedral churches that had sufficient revenues a suitable teacher was to be appointed by the bishop for free instruction (Mansi, XXII, p. 999).

As a consequence of this pontifical scholastic legislation the parochial and episcopal schools flourished again and multiplied; the monastic ones too, despite the decadence of those Benedictine ones, received new fresh and youthful vigor from the Cluniacs, the Cistercians, the Dominicans and the Franciscans. But all these schools, in which classical teaching prevailed, were no longer enough to satisfy the new desires for an instruction more in keeping with the flourishing of industries and commerce and the renewed revival of civil life. Therefore, beginning in the 13th century, a notable development of private schools can be observed, which had truly never been entirely lacking even in the period of decline, but were now becoming more numerous and more attended. From them arose the communal schools, first in the small centers and then in the larger cities. Often, in fact, private schools were poorly sustained economically due to the scarcity of pupils; on the other hand, not everyone could attend the episcopal or monastic schools, which were too distant and inconvenient; therefore, from the beginnings of the 14th century several Communes claimed to consider the teacher as any ordinary municipal employee and thus to intervene in the organization of the schools; to subject them to their inspection; sometimes it also happened that many private schools were municipalized and lost their didactic, disciplinary and economic freedom. Alongside or in place of communal schools there were also guild schools, when particular guilds subsidized them.

VI. THE UNIVERSITIES

The wide diffusion of knowledge, brought about especially by the movement imparted to studies by Scholasticism, from its first period of formation in the 9th-11th centuries, to that of its evolution in the 12th century and especially to that of its greatest splendor in the 13th century, led to the creation of those institutions of higher learning which today are called Universities, but which then bore the name of "Studium" and later of "Studium generale." The models for the others were those of Paris and Bologna. In this happy and fruitful movement too, the predominant role of the Church was not lacking. There are those who in this new flourishing of higher studies would like to see a movement of emancipation from religious dominion, a kind of substitution of lay corporations for the clerical schools of the chapters, canons and abbeys, and they attribute to some of the founders rather skeptical and rationalist theories. The truth, however, is different: the university movement did emancipate itself, it is true, from the cloistral and episcopal schools that were no longer sufficient, but it passed under the care and jurisdiction of the universal Church, represented by the Pope. Indeed the presence, or in any case the understanding and cooperation, of a universal body such as the Church greatly facilitated the recognition of the academic degrees granted to students, who came from the most diverse countries to the same University. And it is worthy of note that of the 52 universities erected before 1400, at least 29 owed their foundation to the Pope; and another ten were founded either by papal diploma alone or by papal and imperial (or princely) diploma together.

VII. THE SCHOOL IN THE RENAISSANCE PERIOD

The Renaissance continued along the same path marked out by the preceding century, and the school in its organization did not have to undergo very notable upheavals. However, the number of schools increased greatly; greater prominence was given, indeed a preponderant part, to classical studies, with a tendency to concede an almost absolute dominion to the Trivium over the Quadrivium, with a breath of freshness through the master's lesson and the choice of readings, far removed from that rather textbook-like knowledge in which the preceding school had too often become mired. Thus there arose erudite masters, expert orators and learned churchmen, enlivened by a breath of serene and understanding humanity. Nor were physical exercises neglected, suited to forming a healthy, free, agile body with a healthy mind open to the new contingencies of life.

And the Church, besides directly founding numerous institutes, continued to exhort and encourage the study of literature and languages (at the Council of Vienne in 1312, p. cs., the Pope ordered the erection of chairs of Hebrew, Chaldean and Arabic at Rome, Bologna, Paris, Oxford and Salamanca; in Spain Cardinal Ximenes added to the University founded by him the College of the three languages: Latin, Greek, Hebrew). And it was assisted by the work of the religious Orders, which on the whole followed their glorious traditions.

The advent of the "reformation" brought no innovations in the scholastic field; it did not create schools nor give birth to elementary instruction, which existed, as has been mentioned, from the first centuries of the Church; rather, at the outset it brought quite considerable harm to culture, because it caused the cloistral, episcopal and parochial schools to disappear in the territories where it took place, without being able or knowing how to replace them, provoking the bitter regrets of Luther himself, of Melanchthon and of the most illustrious reformers. The "reformation" furthermore left as a legacy to the following centuries certain baneful principles, whereby the schools became handmaidens of the civil authority and princes intruded into them with their laws and prescriptions, no longer contenting themselves, as before, with merely giving impulse or support to initiatives that sprang from religious authorities or from private individuals.

VIII. THE SCHOOL IN THE PERIOD OF THE CATHOLIC REFORMATION

The damages caused by the Protestant "reformation" stimulated the zeal of the Church to quicken the pace for that "Catholic reformation" which had already begun well before the Lutheran secession. The Council of Trent earnestly recommends to priests that they concern themselves in a particular way with children, calling together all the persons and institutions capable of restoring new value to Christian schools. These were to be re-established where they had disappeared; strengthened where they had remained languishing; directed by pious and learned teachers; every church was to have a teacher for the free teaching of grammar to all, poor and rich; the religious Orders that intend to occupy themselves and already do occupy themselves with instruction are to be favored and encouraged; Catholic universities must grow in number and keep themselves free from contact with heretics and uphold their ancient prestige.

The response to these injunctions was full and timely, especially through the work of the new religious Institutes, dedicated with all their zeal to teaching: the Barnabites, the Piarists, the Somaschi and above all the Jesuits with the numerous colleges opened everywhere. The humanistic tradition was preserved, there was a clear and well-defined program, carried out with the best suggestions of experience, and thus was created the model that more or less would also be applied by modern schools of a classical character. Meanwhile at Pavia there were two famous and renowned university colleges: the Collegio Borromeo, founded by St. Charles, and the Collegio Ghislieri, founded by St. Pius V.

IX. THE S IN THE 17TH AND 18TH CENTURIES

In this period the school was enriched with new recruits, new types and new methods more suited and adapted to circumstances. There was a very notable contribution from new religious Institutes, not only male but also female: Oratorians, Brothers of the Christian Schools, etc.; Ursulines of various branches, Sisters of the Company of Mary, Visitandines, etc. The tendency to replace Latin with the national language was ever more widely put into practice, both as a medium for transmitting instruction and as a subject in its own right for study and practice; with this innovation, in certain respects, bold and at the time also contested, it opened the way to technical, commercial and industrial education. Another novelty: the laicity of teaching in the sense of religious institutes (no longer of priests, but of laymen only, e.g., the aforementioned Brothers of the Christian Schools) so that they could devote themselves entirely to the school without being distracted by the cares of the sacred ministry; the creation of teacher-training institutes for the preparation of future masters and mistresses; the founding of their own professional schools to prepare future farmers, merchants, industrialists, artisans; and also of evening or Sunday schools to cultivate the workers and artisans, occupied during the week with their labors. A quite particular merit in this enrichment belonged to Fr. N. Barré of the Minims and to St. John Baptist de la Salle, founder of the Brothers of the Christian Schools. An extraordinary gain, moreover, was had by female education extended to all the girls of the nobility and of the common people, with the consequent better formation of the family.

Toward the end of the 18th century there is accentuated not only the number of schools called public or State schools, and the study of the relations that education has with social and political life and also with the development of the economic life of the nation; but the Enlightenment theories and those of Rousseau, especially in the application made of them by the French Revolution, led to a violent reaction against every private school, especially against those kept by the Church, and claimed the monopoly of instruction for the State, which, even if it did not entirely neglect religious education, would nevertheless subject it to its programs and its supervision.

X. THE SCHOOL IN THE 19TH AND 20TH CENTURIES

In this period the school makes tireless progress, exploiting, perfecting and expanding the systems and the results obtained in the preceding century, and enriching them with new experiences; the interest of the public authorities in instruction increases, as does the effort to spread it among all and everywhere with the intervention and helpful support of governments. But there also advances, insidious and violent, the monopolizing will of States, which leave nothing untried in order to succeed in claiming for themselves everything that has a relation to the school. The monopoly of the Napoleonic period is succeeded by that of the States "restored" or newly arisen from the incessant conflicts among peoples, then by that of governments hostile to religion or even simply "lay", or "liberal", or "progressive", which, distorting the meaning of words and the facts of history, caused the renewed suppressions of schools maintained by religious institutes; they proclaimed and proclaim the unshakeable supremacy of the "neutral" or "lay" school, abolishing so-called "private" schools or burdening them with restrictions and conditions such as to make life difficult for them, or at least depressing their effectiveness and preventing their assistance out of a sense of ill-concealed and unacknowledged fear. Well known are the struggles undertaken against the school monopoly and in favor of "private" or "confessional" schools (and won in whole or partly overcome) in Belgium, Holland, England, Spain, France, Italy, India. All this succession of events has created the problem of freedom of teaching and of freedom of the school, sometimes resolved with partial solutions, but not always yet with that clarity which excludes every suspicion, every distrust and every ulterior motive.

The Church's teaching on this problem has never failed, to the comfort of Catholics and to the clarification of ideas. It is enough to cite the documents of Pius IX, epist. Quem non sine of 14 July 1864 as well as proposition 48 of the Syllabus, of Leo XIII, the allocution Summi Pontificatus (20 Aug. 1880); the encyclicals Nobilissima (2 Feb. 1884); Quod multum (22 Aug. 1886); Charitatis (19 March 1894); of Pius XI, the encyclical Divini illius magistri (31 Dec. 1909); see also CIC, can. 1374 and the sources cited there. - See plate X.

Celestino Testore