Conclusion

Abstract

In the imperial era schoolteachers and left-wing liberals in Prussia viewed the confessional school under the supervision of school inspectors who were clergymen as an anachronism in a modern society. Its survival defied their expectation that demographic mobility and urbanization would increase the confessional mixture of the school enrollments and disproved their contention that the imperatives of national and social integration should make interconfessional schooling the goal of every modern state. Disheartened and demoralized after years of striving in vain to achieve their pedagogic ideal, the leaders of the Prussian Teachers’ Association could not easily admit or accept the reasons for their failure. After the enactment of the school law of 1906, they contrived an explanation—“they wanted to fight Social Democracy through the law”—that obscured their inability to influence public opinion and the programs of the major parties and obviated a more probing investigation of why the political conflicts over the school question stretching over half a century ended with a law that made confessional schooling the rule. The alarm of the governing class over the growth of the Social Democratic party affected the fate of school reform in Prussia far less than the experience of introducing the changes at the height of a religiopolitical conflict that deepened the divisions within the nation. The circumstances in which the interconfessional schools were opened in the 1870s gave them the reputation of being a “Kulturkampf institution” and this unfortunate association of school reform with Kulturkampf politics remained in the consciousness of both Catholics and Protestants for years to come. Although the Ministry of Education under Adalbert Falk formulated a moderate and prudent policy for establishing interconfessional schools gradually with some consideration to the pedagogic benefits of the innovation, the liberals who agitated for the reform and the city officials who introduced it were more radical and were motivated by political objectives as well as by educational interests. The campaign for school reform became entangled in the political battle that zealous Kulturkdmpfer waged against the Catholic church and the Center party. The introduction of interconfessional schooling did not have popular consent.