Sturm, Johann

STURM, JOHANN. - Humanist and educationist, b. at Schleiden (Eifel) on 1 Oct. 1507, d. at Strasbourg on 3 March 1589.

A Catholic, he received a humanistic education at Liège (1521-23) with the Brethren of the Common Life; at Louvain (1524-29) in the Collegium trilingue and finally at Paris (1529-1537) in the Collège de France, where he also gave lectures in philosophy and philology, but, under the influence of Bucer, he went over to Protestantism. In 1537 he was appointed professor of rhetoric and dialectic at Strasbourg in the Collegium Praedicatorum and was given the task of reorganizing secondary education. Thus, in 1538, he founded a Gymnasium, which soon became and long remained the most celebrated of the Protestant humanistic schools.

He certainly did not create the type of the humanistic school, as some would have it, because he did nothing other than adapt the programs and teaching methods that he had learned from his first teachers, the Brethren of the Common Life; and he expressed his pedagogical concepts in his opening program: De litterarum ludis recte aperiendis (Strasbourg 1538). From the age of 5 or 7 onward, pupils had to attend the Gymnasium for another 10 years, in order to learn, within the bounds of the Trivium, first "latinitas pura", then "latinitas ornata", so as to reach the appointed goal of a "sapiens atque elegans pietas". But although nothing was neglected of what can nourish piety, knowledge and eloquence, the conception of the program proved too narrow and too much turned toward mere externals, as if style, correct language and the structure of the period were, if not everything, at least the principal part of instruction. The mania for imitating the Latin classics too closely, reduced then almost entirely to Cicero, gave rise to a Ciceromania, sharply taken up again by Erasmus and later wittily ridiculed by Rabelais. The cult of Latin, moreover, led on the one hand to the exaggeration of having the pupils perform the licentious comedies of Plautus and Terence, and on the other to leaving elementary arithmetic, geography, the natural sciences, foreign languages and, what is more deplorable, the national language entirely in the shade. Despite, however, these glaring imperfections, Sturm acquired a European fame, the Gymnasium was attended by several thousand pupils and served as a model for many schools established in the 16th-17th centuries. Subsequently a higher Gymnasium was added, where the arts, the sciences and also theology were cultivated more extensively; this in 1576 was raised by Maximilian II to the rank of Academy, solemnly inaugurated in 1578 by Sturm, appointed "rector perpetuus", who in 1579 set out its aims in his Epistolae academicae (Strasbourg 1579). The "rector perpetuus" nevertheless ended his career in 1581, when he was dismissed from his post because of the antagonism that he himself stirred up against himself with the intemperance of his character and of his style in the De emendatione Ecclesiae against the formalist Lutherans of Strasbourg, especially against Marbach, Pappus (cf. his 4 libelli, Antipappus, Strasbourg 1579-81), L. Osiander and Jakob Andrea (cf. his Epist. apologetica contra Andrea, Neustadt 1580). After that he retired to private life.

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