STURM, JOHANN. - Humanist and pedagogue, born at Schleiden (Eifel) on 1 Oct. 1507, died at Strasbourg on 3 March 1589.
A Catholic, he received a humanist education at Liège (1521-23) under 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 lectured on philosophy and philology. Under the influence of Bucer, however, he turned to Protestantism. In 1537 he was appointed professor of rhetoric and dialectic at Strasbourg in the Collegium Praedicatorum and was entrusted with reorganizing secondary education. Thus in 1538 he founded a Gymnasium, which soon became and long remained the most celebrated of the Protestant humanist schools.
He was certainly not the type of humanist school that some would have him be, for he did nothing more than adapt the curricula and teaching methods he had learned from his first teachers, the Brethren of the Common Life; and he set forth his pedagogical ideas in his opening address: *De litterarum ludis recte aperiendis* (Strasbourg 1538). From the ages of five or seven onward, pupils were to attend the Gymnasium for a further ten years, with the aim of mastering, within the bounds of the Trivium, first “latinitas pura,” then “latinitas ornata,” in order to reach the goal of “sapiens atque elegans pietas.” Yet while nothing was neglected that might nourish piety, learning, and eloquence, the conception of the curriculum proved too narrow and too focused on externals, as if style, correct language, and periodic structure were, if not everything, at least the principal part of instruction. The mania for imitating the classical Latin authors too slavishly, reduced almost entirely to Cicero, gave rise to a “Ciceronianism” later taken up by Erasmus and wittily ridiculed by Rabelais. The cult of Latin moreover led, on the one hand, to the exaggeration of having 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 most deplorable—the national language entirely in the shadows.
Despite these glaring defects, however, Sturm acquired a European reputation; the Gymnasium was attended by several thousand pupils and served as a model for many schools founded in the 16th and 17th centuries. Later an upper Gymnasium was added, where the arts, sciences, and even theology were cultivated more extensively; in 1576 this was raised by Maximilian II to the rank of Academy, solemnly inaugurated in 1578 by Sturm, who had been named “rector perpetuus” and who in 1579 set forth its aims in his *Epistolae academicae* (Strasbourg 1579). The “rector perpetuus,” however, ended his career in 1581, when he was dismissed from office because of the antagonism he had aroused against himself through the vehemence of his character and style in *De emendatione Ecclesiae* against the formalist Lutherans of Strasbourg, especially Marbach, Pappus (cf. his four pamphlets, *Antipappus*, Strasbourg 1579-81), L. Osiander, and Jacob Andreae (cf. his *Epist. apologetica contra Andreae*, Neustadt 1580). After this he retired into private life.