Martin Luther
[Editor's note: This story originally was published by Real Clear Education.]
By Korey Maas
Real Clear Education
Martin Luther is remembered as one of the most influential theological reformers, or rebels, of the early 16th century, responsible for inaugurating the Protestant tradition and thus dividing western Christendom. Less well-known is his influence on educational reform. Some of his proposals are now so commonplace they’re taken for granted. Others, implemented but now largely abandoned, deserve reconsideration and revival.
Broadly accessible and publicly funded schools have so become the norm that fewer than 10 percent of American children in grades K-12 attend private schools. Even more universal in the modern west is the conviction that girls as well as boys, can and should, enjoy the advantages of formal education. To the era into which Luther was born, however, the potential benefits of publicly funded and nearly universal education were far from obvious. Given the needs of a largely agricultural economy, many thought that sending children to school rather than keeping them home to work was an expensive and unnecessary luxury. There was, simply put, no expectation that most children would ever attend school.
It was in this context that Luther wrote “To the Councilmen of All Cities in Germany, That They Establish and Maintain Christian Schools,” his enormously influential 1524 open letter on education. One measure of his appeal’s success is the flood of invitations — from more than 50 city councils in the 1520s alone — which extended to his reforming colleague, Philip Melanchthon, to found such schools in their town.
As important as this dramatic expansion of educational opportunities was the kind of education provided in the schools encouraged by Lutheran reformers. Luther himself was well aware that too many of his contemporaries — not unlike our own — viewed education in grossly utilitarian terms, as serving no other aim than the “ability to make a living.” Rather than encouraging narrowly specialized vocational training, he advocated a return to the classical liberal arts cultivated by the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Christians. “You parents,” he wrote, “cannot prepare a more dependable treasure for your children than an education in the liberal arts.”
In calling for the revival of a classical liberal arts education, Luther echoed and amplified the emphases of those Renaissance humanists who had already been inspired for two centuries by classical antiquity to rethink and reform curricula and pedagogy. Like his fellow humanists, Luther marveled that the education pursued by the ancient Greeks didn’t merely prepare students for a particular occupation, but made them “fit for everything.” Though hardly hostile to career preparation, Luther believed a proper education in the liberal arts should aim beyond well-trained hands to well-furnished minds and well-ordered souls.
Citizens educated in this fashion, Luther was convinced, were a necessary component of an ultimately well-ordered society. As he explained in his appeal to the German city councils:
The welfare of a city consists not alone in gathering great treasures and providing solid walls, beautiful buildings, and a goodly supply of guns and armor. Nay, where these abound and reckless fools get control of them, the city suffers only the greater loss. But a city’s best and highest welfare, safety, and strength consist in its having many able, learned, wise, honorable, and cultivated citizens.
For good reason, Luther continues to be remembered primarily as a theologian. But his lasting impact on schooling ought not to be forgotten. And although he was hardly alone in influencing the direction of western education, modern assumptions about the benefits — for individuals and society alike — of universal, coeducational, and publicly-funded education unmistakably reflect Luther’s own, then-novel ideas. In the face of certain utilitarian trends in contemporary education, it may be time to revive his consistent emphasis on that most “dependable treasure” found in the classical liberal arts.
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