there were whole stretches of country where a "people's school" was to be found within a circuit of every six miles. Small parishes even of five or six hundred souls were not without their village schools.[1] The Protestant historian Palacky stated that, while examining documents in the archives of Bohemia, he took note of all the teachers whose names he happened to come across, and found that about the year 1400 the diocese of Prague must have had at least 640 schools. Taking this for the average, the 63 dioceses then existing in Germany would have possessed the respectable number of over 40,000 elementary or primary schools.[2]
This conjecture may not be very accurate, but the evidence furnished by contemporary documents at least goes a great way to show that the number of schools was very large. The latter part of the Middle Ages was the time in which the burning zeal for learning led to the invention of the art of printing, and this art in turn still further increased the desire to learn and facilitated the work of education. In a pamphlet printed in Mentz, in 1498, it was said: "Everybody now wants to read and to write." In the light of such facts, who does not see the absurdity of the assertion of Compayré and other writers that the primary school, whether Catholic or Protestant, is the child of the Reformation?[3] Towards the end of the
- ↑ Ib., pp. 26-27.
- ↑ At present the number of elementary schools in Germany is less than 60,000; there were 56,563 in 1892.
- ↑ "In its origin, the primary school is the child of Protestantism, and its cradle was the Reformation." Compayré, History of Pedagogy, p. 112. – Similarly Professor Beyschlag of Halle.
