Introduction

Abstract

This study of the elementary school in Prussia began with the question of why the largest state in the German Empire, which had a government that was preoccupied with social and national integration and a political culture that was deeply affected by the ideology of nationalism, had a public elementary school system that served to reinforce religious particularism through its confessionally divided organization and its confessionally oriented textbooks and instruction. Confessional schooling remained the predominant form of elementary education for Catholics and Protestants in the Prussian state throughout the nineteenth century despite the changes that came in the wake of national unification, industrialization, and urbanization. Neither the secular school nor the interconfessional school providing a common educational experience for all children without distinction as to church affiliation ever took hold. The interconfessional school (the so-called Simultanschule), in which the Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant religions were taught to the pupils of each faith in separate classes as one subject in an otherwise religiously neutral curriculum, was the pedagogic ideal of a large number of schoolteachers in Prussia. They saw it as a means of diminishing church influence in the schools as well as promoting tolerance and social harmony in a confessionally segmented nation. When a school law was enacted in 1906 after more than fifty years of political controversy over the school question and abortive school bills, it categorized the interconfessional school as the exception to the rule. A legal seal was put on the prevailing practice of having children and teachers of one and the same faith in a school. Although the confessional public school under the supervision of school inspectors who were clergy by vocation appeared to the schoolteachers to be an anachronism in a modern society, it survived the revolution of 1918 and the efforts of the Socialists to abolish the instruction of religion in the schools. In the Weimar Republic the Social Democrats did not succeed in establishing a secular school system for the entire nation, and no more successful were the German Democrats who sought to make the interconfessional school the only legally valid norm.