Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/497

 SOCIAL CONTROL 48I

a peculiar edge and a strange temper. During the Middle Ages state and church roughly divided the work of control, the one monopolizing the direct, the other the indirect means. The contrast of coercion and influence was symbolized in the maxim that the state has to do with the body, the church with the soul.

Under this arrangement the education of the young fell to the church. The clergy were granted a legal monopoly, and no lay teaching was allowed. But this was, after all, only a slen- der strand in the work of the church. Armed with other-world terrors she grappled boldly with the adult mind, and chose to preach rather than to teach. It mattered little that, at best, the poor were instructed in the catechism and the rudiments of reli- gion. If not by schools, then by her worship and ceremonial, the church managed to indoctrinate with her beliefs. The deli- cate art of creating in the child, by means of skillful suggestions, a lasting bias for the good, and a rooted prejudice in favor of righteousness, remained for later thinkers to discover.

The fate of higher education in the Middle Ages shows how loth is society to treat even the teaching of adults as a private affair. The early aggregations of masters and scholars at Paris and Oxford and Bologna came near to affording an open mar- ket for instruction. But the free dealing of the buyers and sellers of teaching was soon meddled with, and, by hook or crook, a regulative finger was laid on the windpipe of learning. By bulls, charters, or "licenses to teach," the old university which had originated independently alike of the civil and the papal authority was brought under the central organs of control. Moreover, the university itself became a close corporation, fitted in due time by its timid sense of responsibility and its conserva- tive temper to become a pillar of order.

With the Reformation the elementary schools received a prodigious impulse. From the advent of the reformers dates primary instruction in Scotland, Switzerland, Sweden, and Prot- estant Germany. The schools were necessary to Protestantism, for they stiffened private judgment against the authority of tra- dition. The appeal to the Bible as interpreted by the individual