STURM, JOHANN. – Humanist and educationalist, born at Schleiden (Eifel) on 1 October 1507, died at Strasbourg on 3 March 1589.
A Catholic, he received a humanistic education at Liège (1521–23) among the Brethren of the Common Life; at Leuven (1524–29) in the Collegium trilingue; and finally in Paris (1529–1537) at the Collège de France, where he also lectured in philosophy and philology. Under the influence of Butzer, however, he converted to Protestantism. In 1537 he was appointed professor of rhetoric and dialectic at Strasbourg in the Collegium Praedicatorum and was charged with reorganizing secondary education. Thus, in 1538, he founded a Gymnasium, which soon became, and for a long time remained, the most famous of the Protestant humanist schools.
He certainly did not create the model of the humanist school, as some would have it, since he did no more than adapt the curricula and teaching methods that he had learned from his first teachers, the Brethren of the Common Life; he expressed his pedagogical ideas in his inaugural program: De litterarum ludis recte aperiendis (Strasbourg 1538). From the age of 5 or 7 onward, pupils were to attend the Gymnasium for a further 10 years, with the aim of learning, within the confines of the Trivium, first « latinitas pura », then « latinitas ornata », in order to attain the proposed goal of a « sapiens atque elegans pietas ». Yet, although nothing that might nourish piety, knowledge, and eloquence was neglected, the conception of the program proved too narrow and too directed toward mere outward form, as though style, correct language, and the structure of the sentence were, if not everything, at least the principal part of education. The mania for imitating the Latin classics too closely, which were subsequently reduced almost entirely to Cicero, gave rise to a Ciceronianism, harshly attacked by Erasmus and later wittily ridiculed by Rabelais. The cult of Latin also led, on the one hand, to the excess of having pupils perform the licentious comedies of Plautus and Terence, and, on the other, to leaving entirely in the shadows elementary arithmetic, geography, the natural sciences, foreign languages, and, what is most deplorable, the natio-
nal language. Despite these glaring shortcomings, however, S. acquired a European reputation; the Gymnasium was attended by several thousand pupils and served as a model for many schools established in the 16th and 17th centuries. Later, an Upper Gymnasium was added, where the arts, the sciences, and theology were cultivated more extensively; in 1576 this was raised by Maximilian II to the rank of an Academy, solemnly inaugurated in 1578 by S., who had been appointed « rector perpetuus » and who set forth its purposes in 1579 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 that he himself aroused against him through the intemperance of his character and style in De emendatione Ecclesiae, directed against the formalist Lutherans of Strasbourg, especially Marbach, Pappus (cf. his 4 libelli, Antipappus, Strasbourg 1579–81), L. Osiander, and Giacomo Andrea (cf. his Epist. apologetica contra Andrea, Neustadt 1580). After this, he withdrew into private life.