Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/343

 Martin Bucer on Education 339 larly, Sturm insisted that the teachers in his school should know what was covered in the classes below their own, that they might not endeavor to teach that for which pupils had not been prepared by previous instruction. Bucer laid on the teacher the duty of observing the talents of his pupils and assigned to the paedonomi the duty of choosing for a child the calling to which he was suited by nature. Sturm wrote as follows: 'It is the duty of an industrious teacher and master to see to what art the nature of each pupil may be suited.' 55 Also, like Bucer, he would have removed from the schools boys unfit for learning. 53 The elementary schools of Bucer's plan are, it is evident, like the elementary schools established at Strassburg early in his career there, for the teaching of reading and writing and the doctrines of the Church. His great emphasis not only on religious teaching for its own sake, but on the permeation by it of the whole system of instruction, even to gymnastics, is like what we are familiar with in Sturm's ideal of eloquent and learned piety as the end of instruction. Bucer's high estimate of education as the basis of the civic structure is found in writings composed by Sturm after the death of Bucer. He declared that 'the best and most splendid armories of states are the schools of philosophers.' 57 He puts religion as the most important part of philosophy, and then inquires: 'What is so necessary, after the cultivation of religion, as the house, the family home, and the paternal seat of each man?' The proper care of these is called economy, and that part relating to the management of things out-of-doors is agriculture. This high place for agriculture reminds us of Bucer's interest in it. Sturm's pupils were not, so far as we know, instructed in farming farther than by the reading of Cato and Varro, 58 but the school at Strassburg did not com- pletely represent the ideal preparation for life, but chiefly its literary side. After agriculture Sturm puts ethics, law, politics, medicine, and the art of war. The emphasis on these, and 65 Sturm, De Liter arum Ludis Recte Aperiendis, caput 5 (in Vormbaum, Evangelische Schulordnungen, Giitersloh, 1860, p. 657). A complete edition of the works of Sturm is a desideratum. 66 Leges Scholae Lauinganae (Vormbaum, p. 743). 57 Ib., p. 726. 68 Ib., p. 732.