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In the Middle Ages, the Catholic church opened schools of its own, some to train priests and others to focus more on grammar and the liberal arts. Though education grew to be technically separate from the church, the Catholic church continued to have a widespread influence on education.
Martin Luther said, “In my judgment there is no other outward offense that in the sight of God so heavily burdens the world, and deserves such heavy chastisement, as the neglect to educate children.” Luther’s educational philosophy centered in the home, but he eventually supported state cooperation in education. He saw the state’s role as helpful with compulsory attendance and financing, but he still insisted on a fundamentally Christian education with the Scriptures at the center. With the Renaissance came a revived interest in learning, and schools became more accessible to the common man. Many schools were still associated with the Catholic church. Elementary schools, secondary schools, and universities slowly spread.
As learning became more and more available, it also became more and more secularized, and Scripture lost its central place in most schools. Among the few noteworthy exceptions were the Brethren schools.
In the late Middle Ages and leading up to the Reformation, John Wycliffe, William Tyndale, and others risked their lives to provide the common people with the Bible in their own language. Christian schools sprang up by the hundreds, and many met in secret to teach people to read the Scriptures in their native tongue. The spread of the Scriptures in the people’s native tongue would soon prove integral to the Reformation.
In the wake of the Reformation, Christian schools were no longer uncommon in Europe. According to some historians, during the sixteenth century France had more than two thousand evangelical Protestant Christian schools, organized and populated largely by the French Huguenots.
In spite of the horrible persecution the Huguenots faced during the Catholic Counter-Reformation, they did not relent in giving their children a firmly Christian education. As an affront to the spread of Protestantism through Christian schools, the Jesuits established their own schools to indoctrinate children with Catholicism. Across Europe, the Protestants were slowly ousted, and the Jesuits took over.
The Jesuits’ educational influence was felt not only in France but also in other countries, such as Austria, the Netherlands, and even Canada and America. Surviving the CounterReformation were some Pietistic Christian schools, mostly in northern Europe, influenced largely by John Comenius of Moravia and August Francke of Prussia.
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