New Type Of School Research Articles

The Grammarians’ Funeral?

THE POSITION of Latin in secondary schools has been a controversial question for over 150 years; it has now been made an urgent one by the reorganization of education that has been taking place in most European countries since the Second World War. The purpose of this article is to examine the present status of the subject, to discuss the aspects of reorganization that are affecting it, and to comment, as far as is possible, on the future role of Latin in the reorganized secondary schools. In the Romance countries and in Germany and Holland it would be true to say that Latin has maintained more of its traditional prestige as a subject studied by the intellectual elite than in the Scandinavian countries or in England. It is of course notoriously difficult to make any generalizations about the latter, a country where it has been said with justice that, every school is an exception to a rule that has never been precisely formulated. On ne saurait trop exalter l'importance sociale des lettres classiques. Ce sont elles qui ont assure depuis des siecles la suprematie intellectuelle de la France.'' This eulogy of the classics that appeared in an official French directive of the mid-nineteenth century would be taken with a pinch of salt by most Frenchmen today; nevertheless the French ideal of 'culture generale' has, throughout its long history, emphasized the training of the intellect through the agency of classics and mathematics. It was thought that Latin and Greek should be studied not only for their content and their aesthetic value and because they were the inspiration of much French literature, but also because the learning of the languages afforded training in precision and clear thinking. Such was the prestige of the sections of the lycee that specialized in a combination of classics and mathematics that they continued to attract the most able pupils in France until the reorganization of 1965. In Germany, the humanistic ideals of von Humboldt have continued to influence the curriculum of the German Gymnasium. Despite its recognition of the need to expand a technological education, the Rahmenplan of 1959 still saw the academic Gymnasium as awakening and preserving the intellectual strength grown out of a cultural heritage. It recommended that the most able children should be selected at the age of Io to enter a new type of school, the Studienschule, which was to have a classically biased curriculum. Although this proposal was never adopted, the German universities continue to receive a disproportionate number of entrants from the classical secondary schools. A similar popularity has been enjoyed by the classical schools of Spain, Holland, Belgium and Italy. This has been further increased in Italy and (until the passing of la loi de l'omnivalence of 1964), in Belgium, 2) by the fact that only this type of school gave admission to all, or virtually all, university faculties.

Svensk folkehøjskole og Grundtvig

Svensk folkehøjskole og Grundtvig

New Types of Schools in Germany and Their Curricula in Mathematics

In many European countries, public instruction has either been changed or else completely transformed since the war. In some cases, as in France, this change has taken the form of a reversion to the humanities, the classic side. In others, as in Austria, the shift has been toward the modern scientific one. What is happening in Russia is beyond our knowledge. But even in the recently created border countries, people are ardently at work devising new types of schools. On every side, one hears of the reorganization of the curriculum.