Contributions of Christianity: Education

Universal Public Education

There are 347 references to teaching in the NIV Bible, 48 of them in the writings of Paul. Many of the earliest converts to Christianity were Jewish, and they brough their value for education with them. More importantly, in Matthew 28:19-20, Jesus commanded his followers to teach.
At the end of the first Century or the beginning of the second, an "instruction manual" called the Didache appeared. About the same time, Ignatius, a bishop of Antioch, urged that children be taught the Holy Scriptures and a skilled trade. Soon, the Christian Church was setting up formal schools with a strong literary emphasis. While these schools focused on the teaching of Christian doctrine, they added some other subjects. These Christian schools were the first to teach both sexes in the same setting, in contrast to Roman schools, which tended to educate only boys from the privileged classes. This is not to say that boys and girls were treated equally. Ancient biases had not been overcome completely, but the Middle Ages did have well-educated women, including: Lioba (ca 700-782), Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim (932-1002) Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), Brigitta of Sweden (1303-73), Catherine of Siena (1347?-89), Christine of Pizan (14th Century) and Queen Isabella of Spain (1451-1504).

From the fourth to the tenth centuries, cathedral and episcopal schools were maintained by bishops. Students were not only taught Christian doctrine but also grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmatic, music, geometry and astronomy.

In 1549, Martin Luther wrote and published the Small Catechism in response to his discovery that the common people were no longer being given proper instruction by parish priests. Luther stressed that the cultivating of the human mind was essential "because people needed to understand both the word of Scripture and the nature of the world in which the word would take root." He advocated a state school system "to incude vernacular primary schools for both sexes, Latin secondary schools and universities, and that children be compelled to attend." (Schmidt, 178-179.) Luther introduced the idea of the public school.
Philipp Melanchthon (1497-1560), a coworker of Luther's, persuaded the civic authorities to implement the first public school system in Germany. The organization of these schools was largely the accomplishment of Johannes Bugenhagen, pastor of St. Mary's Church. Fifty years later, JohnComenius (1592-1670), a bishop of the Moravian Brethren, opened a school at Fulneck in Moravia.

John Calvin also advocated a system of universal education. His plan included a "system of elementary eduation in the vernacular for all, including reading, writing, arithmetic, grammar and relgion, and the establishment of secondarl schools for the purpose of training citizens for civil and ecclesiastical leadership." (Schmidt, 177)
Jophann Sturm (1507-89), a Lutheran layman, introduced graded levels to education in order to motivate the students. Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852), the son of a Lutheran pastor, introduced the idea of Kindergarten.


Universities


Joseph Reither, former New York University historian, states that "Universities were the creatio of the Middle Ages." (Kenndey, 51). While the Greeks and Romans had what they called universities, and the Chinese and Muslims had institutions of higher learning, these did not fit Rashdall's generally accepted definition of university: a scholastic guild, whether of masters or students engaged in higher education and study. Because Greek and Roman scholars considered manual labor to be fit only for slaves, they did not test their theories. The empricial method spread because monks and nuns in the Middle Ages were used to work. They tested their theories and innovated. The universities of the Middle Ages were concerned more with innovation than they were with imparting received wisdom (Stark, 52-53).

History does not connect the modern university to the schools of the Greeks and Romans. History points to St. Benedict of Nursia (480-543?) who founded the Benedictine order's first monastery at Monte Cassino, Italy in 528. His chain of monasteries palced great value on the literary treaures both of antiquity and Christianity.

It is from this lineage that the first true universities arose in the 12th and 13th Centuries. The University of Bologna (Italy - 1158) became the mother of universities in Italy, Spain, Scotland, Sweden and Poland. The University of Paris (France - 1200) became the mother of universities in Portugal, Germany and Austria. Cambridge University became the mother of Harvard in America. All of these were staffed by members of holy orders, and it was in these same schools that science was born (Stark, 53 and Schmidt, 186-187).

According to Donald Tweksbury in The Founding of American Colleges and Universities Before the Civil War, 92% of the 182 colleges and unviersities were founded by Christian denominations, incuding Harvard, College of William and Mary, Yale, Brown, Princeton, Northwestern University at Evanston, IL; Columbia Univeristy (King's College), Univeristy of Kentucky, Univeristy of California (Berkeley), Univeristy of Tennessee, Dartmouth. Even the University of Pennsylvania, which was not started by a denomination, was greatly influenced by evanggelist George Whitefield (Kennedy, 52).

Specialized Education

Christians were also closely involved in the development of education for groups who were (at best) ignored by others. Abbe Charles Michel de l'Eppe, Thaomas Gallaudet and Laurence Clerc developed an inaudible language in order to provide a means by which deaf people could hear the gospel of Christ. Gallaudet, a Congregational clergyman, opened the first school for the deaf in the United States in Hartford, CT. He also established a college, known today as Gallaudet University, in Washington, DC.

Louis Braille, who developed the system still used to allow the blind to read, attended mass regularly.

Frank Laubach was a missionary to the Philippines. He also developed a literacy training program that has been used around the world for more than 60 years to teach the illiterate how to read.

Christian missionaries have established schools in the remotest jungles, converted unwritten languages into writing and taught reading and writing to the natives (Kennedy 56).


Conclusion


While some might suggest that even without Christianity, education would have eventually developed anyway. That's an unlikely possibility and purely speculative. It could just as easily be argued that without Jesus Christ and the Church, education would still be reserved for wealthy sons. This evidence shows that education did develop in association with Christianity. The scholar who seeks to "kill" Christianity commits matricide.





Sources


Bloomfeld, Samuel L. Is Public Education Necessary? (Boise: The Paradigm Co., 1985), p. 10


Kennedy, D. James, What if Jesus Had Never Been Born? (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1994) pp. 40-56.


Rashdall, H. , The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, vol. 1, part 3, 1895, p. 82.


Schmidt, Alvin J., How Christianity Changed the World, (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2001.) pp 170-193.


Stark, Rodney, The Victory of Reason, (New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2005.) pp. 52-53.