The Transformation of the World (172 page)

Schooling the World

The schooling of society was a European/North American program of the early nineteenth century that gradually became the goal of official policy worldwide. The school became a major tool for the state penetration of society and also a focus of civic commitment. The key issue was and is whether the state, local communities, or parents themselves should finance the running of schools. In the view of international organizations, school attendance and literacy rates are still today important indices of social development—hence of what, in the nineteenth century, used to be called a country's “level of civilization.” Three aspects came together in the school: the socialization aspect, or the shaping of personality and particular human types; the political aspect, essentially concerning the relationship between secular government and religious educational institutions; and the instructional aspect, or the securing and dissemination of knowledge. The insight that science, as a cognitive and productive power and a
vital social force, required well-run schools to train its future practitioners took the nineteenth century beyond the earlier threshold period of the scientific revolution. But the leading scientific countries of the age—Britain, France, Prussia/Germany, and the United States—differed considerably in the educational strategies they adopted. Nowhere did so much weight and government attention center on the secondary stage of education as in Germany (especially the pioneering lands of Prussia and Bavaria). This was the birthplace of the “humanistic gymnasium” with its enormous emphasis on Greek and Latin, which in the middle of the century was joined by a different type of high school catering more to the needs of technology and business. Standardized since the 1830s, the gymnasium provided the foundation for the rise of German science in the Kaiserreich from 1871 onward. In Britain, to take an example at the opposite extreme, various private schools certainly produced excellent results, but before the 1902 Education Act there was nothing that could be described as a secondary school
system
.
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Only in the military field was Germany at that time as much of an inspiration to the world as it was in education. This was also true of its universities.

3 The University as a Cultural Export from Europe

The Break with the Early Modern Period

The nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of the modern university in its three dimensions: (a) a training center that structures, preserves, and transmits knowledge; (b) a place for research or the generation of new knowledge; and (c) an agency of socialization, character formation, and self-discovery for young people after they complete their compulsory schooling. In most European countries, the reorganization of university training and scientific research preceded the reshaping of high schools. Educational systems were dynamized from the top down.

The university as an autonomous corporation of scholars was a time-honored institution characteristic of Latin Europe. Other civilizations such as the Chinese or Islamic had no less effective means of establishing and transmitting knowledge: monasteries, religious high schools, or academies (e.g., the Chinese
shuyuan
), where scholars would gather together informally. “Forums for rigorous intellectual debate” were not peculiar to Europe in premodern ages.
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In this diversity of scholarly cultures, the European university shaped in the Middle Ages stood out because it was relatively independent of external powers and constituted a space with its own laws. The Chinese state—to take an extreme counterexample—did not allow for a semiautonomous res publica of knowledge bearers. Either scholars were firmly integrated into the state apparatus (many as “compilers” at the Imperial Hanlin Academy in Beijing) or they congregated in semiprivate circles that the emperor viewed with suspicion. In China there were no legally protected corporations of scholars—still less ones
comparable to the English universities, which had their own political representatives in Parliament.

Such “premodern” conditions disappeared at various points in the nineteenth century—in China and Japan between 1870 and 1910, although for the time being private academies in Japan held their ground alongside the state school system, with a teaching program less strongly geared to the West. Only in the Islamic world did some of the old institutions—above all, the religious schools (madrasas) independent of the state—survive in a modified form; al-Azhar (“the Luminous”) in Cairo, a place of theological and legal learning dating back to the tenth century, is the oldest university in the world.
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The European university, by contrast, having undergone
fundamental
reform in the nineteenth century, spread all around the world. The modern university, as a place where secular knowledge is
produced
, arose after 1800 in close association with the emergence of nation-states in Europe, becoming in the last third of the century one of the basic institutions of the modern world. Its inventors and the place and time of the invention can be identified with precision: namely, a handful of aristocratic reformers (Freiherr vom Stein, Hardenberg) and idealist philosophers (Fichte, Hegel, Schleiermacher), in Berlin in the years after 1803 and especially 1806—when the near collapse of the Prussian state had left a power vacuum, suddenly opening up a space in which new unorthodox approaches were on offer to save the state and the nation. Although the modern university that came into being in those years, with Berlin University (founded in 1810) as its flagship, preserved many rituals and symbols from its medieval past, it was in essence a revolutionary invention in the Age of Revolutions.
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The new university brought with it a number of distinctive social types: for example, the Oxbridge “don” or the German
Ordinarius
, ruling in authoritarian fashion over institutes and flocks of assistants.
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New above all was the youthful “student,” who in Europe replaced an older type of the more or less ageless “scholar”; the consequences are still visible today. In some countries, the nonacademic observer becomes aware of the university's existence only when students call attention to themselves through political activity. The chain of association “students—young people—rebellion” was forged in the early nineteenth century. In Germany it was the student fraternities (
Burschenschaften
), first appearing in public in 1815, which made student protest a factor in politics. In the case of France, “the birth of students as a social group” has been dated to the three decades after 1814;
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they played a significant role in all the revolutions of the nineteenth century. Later, students and graduates of modern educational institutions became active in radical, and increasingly also nationalist, politics. A Russian student movement developed in the years after the Crimean War at the five universities of the time, although in its early stages it was tightly controlled; the first disturbances associated with it broke out in 1861.
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In India, students played a leading part in the mass actions of 1905 against the partition of Bengal—key events for the founding of Indian nationalism—and in the
Japanese colony of Korea they led the nationwide movement of March 1919 that mobilized more than two million people in anti-Japanese protests.
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In China, only two months later, student unrest linked to the Fourth of May Movement provided an anti-imperialist and cultural spark that ignited the next stage of the revolutionary process. In each of these cases, national universities had borrowed from Western models in which free space existed for the development of political consciousness.

Colonial Universities

Before 1800, universities of the European type had been founded elsewhere only in the New World. In Spanish America they were inserted into a system of church control over cultural life. Conditions were freer in those that sprang up in North America, already conspicuous by their number alone; the United States today has thirteen universities founded before 1800, compared with a mere two in England. In Canada there was clearly less interest. As for the non-Spanish Antilles, no effort was made to found independent universities; the sons of the Creole elite went to Europe for their higher education. In Portuguese America, there had been no high schools at all. The first university was established in Brazil only in 1922.

The founding of a college near Boston in 1636, named three years later after an ecclesiastical patron, John Harvard, set the English colonies across the Atlantic on their way to becoming the third growth center for universities alongside Europe and Spanish America. Yale, Princeton, and Columbia Universities, the University of Pennsylvania, and Rutgers University already existed before the American Revolution. Each had a character and organizational forms peculiar to itself, enjoying considerable independence from the political authorities; none of them adopted the Oxbridge model unaltered, and the influence of Scottish universities and Presbyterian/nonconformist academies was hardly less important. Common to them all was a relative impoverishment: John Harvard's generous legacy had been a great exception. The land donations that most of them received were in a part of the world where land was available in abundance and did not yet have much value. The early colleges had to raise their funds from a wide variety of sources, the main one being student fees. Teaching was on a very modest scale: probably no more than 210 professors were active in 1800 in all the North American colleges combined. Their main goal was the training of clerics, and preparation for other professions developed only slowly.
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The idea and practice of the university spread worldwide only after the middle of the nineteenth century. In the semiautonomous settler colonies within the British Empire, it became a matter of honor for the colonial authorities and municipal dignitaries to lay the foundations for a local university, even if for a long time there was no chance of departing from the great British models. Australia's first university came into being in 1850 in Sydney; New Zealand followed in 1869. As for Europe's “nonwhite” colonies, universities were created if they
seemed to fit the purpose of training indigenous personnel. The sons of colonial functionaries and settlers were sent to the mother country to complete their education. Not only were colonial universities starved of funds, they were unable to confer doctorates; Europeans always stood at the top of the academic hierarchy, irrespective of their individual talents. Even in Algeria, a comparatively old colony close to the metropolis, there was no full university until 1909, and the later renowned University of Hanoi, the most original French creation in the sphere of colonial education, had its launch only in 1919. Where a prestigious, high-quality university stood out amid the varied landscape of secondary and tertiary education, it was founded after the turn of the century, and in most cases after the First World War. In Egypt, a number of institutes of learning fused together in 1908 to form a (private) Egyptian University. In West Africa, the ideas that led to the founding of universities in the twentieth century were already being formulated by Africans after 1865; but it was only in the 1940s that capable universities were created in the British colonies of tropical Africa. The widest tertiary education in the colonies was offered by the American Philippines, where a state university along the lines of US agricultural and engineering colleges opened its doors in Manila in 1908; there were also a number of private universities, many of them run by missionaries.

A German-style system of higher education did not develop in a single colony; nor was the English model of democratically constituted, self-governing colleges in the loose overall framework of a university exported to Asia and Africa. Colonial universities had an authoritarian structure, and their curriculum largely depended on the metropolis and the special objectives of the colonial authorities. Sometimes tertiary education was dispensed with altogether. Dutch universities, especially the old “Rijksuniversiteit” of Leiden, contained important centers for Asian studies; very little research was conducted in Indonesia itself (in contrast to British India or French Indochina), and before the Second World War the Dutch did not think of satisfying the educational needs of an Indonesian elite. The fleeting vision of an “imperial science” in which all the talents of the empire would participate—an idea propagated under Lord Curzon's viceroyalty—had absolutely no counterpart in the Dutch colonies. Only in 1946, three years before independence, was a “Provisional University of Indonesia” launched with faculties of law, medicine, and philosophy—the germ of the later Universitas Indonesia.
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Scholarly Traditions and New Approaches in Noncolonial Asia

In the politically independent countries of Asia and Africa too, the adoption of European university models did not begin until the turn of the century. South Africa, even as a British colony, had had a larger number of educational institutions than any other African country, but the foundations of the university system that we see today were not laid there until after 1916. In the Middle East, Lebanon was a special case: higher education developed there earlier than
anywhere else in the region, though not on the initiative of the central Ottoman state but as missionary implants. In 1910 the Protestant American University of Beirut took shape out of a series of precursors, while the Université Saint-Joseph, run by French Jesuits, opened in the same year on the foundations of what had originally been a theological institute, later supplemented by a medical college whose degrees were recognized even by the secular state of the French Third Republic.
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The most important new creation in the Turkish part of the Ottoman Empire was the University of Istanbul (1906), successful at the fourth attempt, which was explicitly modeled on American and European universities and had a total of five faculties. In contrast to the Lebanese universities, the natural sciences occupied an important place in Istanbul right from the beginning.
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It marked a clear break with older Islamic institutions centered on law and religion; its precursors, rather, were the (often ephemeral) semiprivate circles in which individuals had grappled with Western knowledge and its relationship to the indigenous heritage.