ABSTRACT
In 1834 a witness before a committee of the House of Commons said that many elementary schoolmasters in Prussia came from the ranks “of non-commissioned officers, organists and half-drunken people”. This was a fair description, and it must be added that the situation in Prussia was no worse than in other parts of Germany. A predominant part was played by the churches in elementary education throughout most of the nineteenth century, and they collaborated with the state authorities in order to discourage and even suppress intellectual initiative in the training colleges. This policy was reflected in a Cabinet Order issued by Frederick William III to Altenstein, his Minister of Education, in 1822, in which he reminded the latter that instruction in these colleges was to be kept within narrow limits, for “otherwise there arises the well-founded anxiety that, instead of restricting themselves to the rudimentary instruction of young people, elementary schoolmasters will mould their own inadequate or perverted knowledge according to their own judgment, will spread it among the children and give a wrong direction to their straight and open minds”. It was equally characteristic that Eichhorn in 1844 ordered that the books used by training college students were to be restricted to a mere handful and that books at the disposal of the teachers were to be checked by inspectors. In 1854 Karl Otto von Raumer issued important regulations for the training colleges, in which it was laid down, for example, that music was to serve only as an aid to religion and that literature, limited to that of Germany, was to be studied only for its moral lessons. Further decrees were published by Falk in 1872, to which reference was made in the previous chapter. These were an advance on earlier ones, since they stressed the need to develop “independnce of observation and thought”. The system as a whole, however, retained, in practice, many of its earlier characteristics, though by this time, as will be seen, the position of the churches in relation to elementary education had changed. Moreover, the training colleges (Lehrerseminare) continued to recruit their pupils only from the elementary schools, a fact which, 56more than any other, served to circumscribe and degrade the profession.
