ABSTRACT
In 1517 Luther posted 95 theses about the evils of the Roman Catholic practice of indulgence on a church door and worried that nobody would read them. Instead, he changed the face of Western Europe. Historians have wondered how possibly one lowly monk could bring about so much change so rapidly. This book’s answer to the “How possibly” question is that history mimics nature. Just as evolution amplified the change in a single gene of U.S. red imported fire ant into a change in the entire ant colony, education—not schooling but education in the broad social sense—brought about the huge change in European culture. Karl Marx famously told workers that to transform the existing order they would have to seize the means of production. Martin Luther’s genius was to seize the new means of education, the printing press, and use it to transform The Three H’s—the heads, hands, and hearts—of the people at “the bottom.”
