"It is your duty to see that your daughter loves study and work, securing this by the promise of rewards or some other means of emulation. Above all you must take care not to give her disgust for study for fear that this may continue as she grows older. Let her not learn in her childhood what she should unlearn later in life." --Letter of St. Jerome to Leta, the wife of Toxolus, the son of St. Paula.


"The sum of education is right training in the nursery. The soul of the child in his play should be trained to that sort of excellence in which, when he grows up to manhood, he will have to be perfected." --Plato, Laws (Jowett), Vol. IV, p. 174. Scribner, 1902.


"The minds of children are most of all influenced by the training they receive at home." --Pope Leo XIII.

THE CHURCH AND FEMININE EDUCATION [Footnote 18]

[Footnote 18: The material for this address was gathered originally for the normal courses on the History of Education for many of the teaching sisterhoods in this country. In its present form it was the address to the graduates of St. Elizabeth's College, Convent Station, N. J., on the occasion of the celebration of the jubilee of the foundation of its teaching work.]

Lady Bachelors: I have had frequent occasions to address all sorts of bachelors on their graduation, of science and arts and letters and pedagogy, but this is my first opportunity to address ladies crowned, at least symbolically, with the laurel berries of the bachelorhood in art. We are apt to think of young ladies rather as masters of arts innumerable, and as needing no degree to attest their abilities. While I am glad, indeed, to address you as lady bachelors I do so with the fondest hope that you will all proceed to further degrees either academic or domestic and not remain in that nondescript class of bachelor-maids.

I should like to be able to tell you how much pleasure it gives me to have the privilege of addressing you on this Fiftieth Anniversary of the Foundation of St. Elizabeth's. There is an apt illustration of the Communion of Saints in your title as a college. Founded in honor of that noble, saintly American woman, Elizabeth Seton, {274} and yet called particularly after that Saint Elizabeth whom the Mother of the Lord set out to visit as the first act of her Motherhood of the Church, there always rises in my mind besides, the thought of that other Saint Elizabeth whom the Germans delight to call the dear Saint Elizabeth, who, though she died when she was scarcely twenty-four, has left a name undying in the annals of helpfulness for others.

This St. Elizabeth, whose name I recall with special willingness now that I see you ready to go out to do your world's work, lived in the midst of what has been until quite recent years the despised Middle Ages, out of which as little good might be expected as out of Nazareth in the olden time, yet she so stamped her personality on the world of her day that now the after-time, neglectful, as a rule, of the individual, so careless even of the world's (supposed) great ones, will not willingly let her name die. She is still with us as a great living force. They read a sketch of her life, I have heard, at the meeting of the Neighborhood House in New York within the last few months, as an incentive to that devotion to the needy that characterized her. She was a woman who thought not at all of herself, but all of others. As a consequence, mankind in its better moods has never ceased to turn to her. Evidently the formula for being remembered is to forget yourself. I am sure, however, that that has been brought home to you so well during your {275} years at St. Elizabeth's that it would, indeed, be bringing coals to Newcastle for me to say anything about it in the few minutes I have to talk to you.

What I have chosen to say to you refers to that higher Catholic education for women of which you are now going out as the representatives. I do it all the more readily because, through the kindness of your beloved teachers, I have had the privilege of co-operating a little in that education, for I appreciate that privilege very much.

Apparently a good many people cherish the idea that the Catholic Church is opposed to feminine education, or at least to the higher education of women as we know it now, and that in the past her influence has been constantly and consistently exerted against any development of this phase of human accomplishment. In the liturgy of the Church women are usually spoken of as the devout female sex, and it is supposed that the one effort of the Church itself, the unerring purpose of ecclesiastical authorities, was to prevent women from becoming learned lest they should lose something of their devoutness. Apparently it is forgotten that some of the greatest devotees in the Church, the saintly women who were held up to the admiration and emulation of their sisters in the after-time, women like St. Catherine of Sienna, St. Angela Merici, St. Jane Frances De Chantal and, above all, St. Teresa, {276} were eminently intellectual women as well as models of devotion.

This same idea as to the Church deliberately fostering ignorance has been quite common in the writings of certain types of historians with regard to other departments of education, and those of us who are interested in the history of medicine have been rather surprised to be told that, because the Church wanted to keep people in readiness to look to Masses and prayers and relics and shrines for the cure of their ailments,--and, of course, pay for the privilege of taking advantage of these,--the development of medicine was discouraged, the people were kept in ignorance and all progress in scientific knowledge was hampered. It is, indeed, amusing to hear this when one knows that for seven centuries the greatest contributors to medical science have been the Papal physicians, deliberately called to Rome, many of them, because they were the great medical scientists of their day, and the Popes would have no others near. For centuries the Papal Medical School was the finest in the world for the original research done there, and Bologna at the height of its fame was in the Papal States.

With so many other presumptions with regard to the position of the Church towards education, it is not surprising that there should be a complete misunderstanding of her attitude toward feminine education, an absolute ignoring of the realities of the history of education, which show {277} exactly the opposite of anything like opposition to be true. I have had a good deal to do in laboring at least to correct many false ideas with regard to the history of education, and, above all, with what concerns supposed Church opposition to various phases of educational advance. I know no presumption of opposition on the part of the Church to education that is so groundless, however, as that which would insist that it is only now with what people are pleased to call the breaking up of Church influence generally, so that even the Catholic Church has to bow, though unwillingly, to the spirit of the times and to modern progress, that feminine education is receiving its due share of attention. Most people seem to be quite sure that the first serious development of opportunities for the higher education of women came in our time. They presume that never before has there been anything worth while talking about in this matter. Just inasmuch as they do they are completely perverting the realities of the history of education, which are in this matter particularly interesting and by no means lacking in detail.

Whenever there is any question of Church influence in education, or of the spirit of the Church with regard to education, those who wish to talk knowingly of the subject should turn to the period in which the Church was a predominant factor in human affairs throughout Europe. This is, as is well known, the thirteenth century. The {278} Pope who was on the throne at the beginning of this century, Innocent III, is famous in history for having set down kings from their thrones, dictated many modifications of political policy to the countries of Europe whenever secular governments were violating certain great principles of justice, and in general, was looked up to as the most powerful of rulers in temporal as well as in spiritual affairs. A typical example of the place occupied by the Church is to be seen when Philip Augustus of France repudiated his lawful wife to marry another. Pope Innocent set himself sternly against the injustice, and the proud French King, at the time one of the most powerful sovereigns of Europe, had to take back the neglected wife from the Scandinavian countries, the distance and weakness of whose relatives would seem to make it so easy for a determined monarch to put her aside. When King John in England violated the rights of his people, Innocent put the country under an Interdict, released John's subjects from their allegiance and promptly brought the shifty Plantagenet to terms. The Pope at the end of the century, the great Boniface VIII, was scarcely less assertive of the rights of the Church and of the Papacy than the first of the thirteenth-century Pontiffs. While he was not so successful as his great predecessor in maintaining his rights, the policy of the Church evidently had not changed. Most of the Popes of the interval wielded an immense influence for good {279} that was felt in every sphere of life in Europe in their time.

Now it is with regard to this period that it is fair to ask the question, What was the attitude of the Church toward education? Owing to her acknowledged supremacy in spiritual matters and the extension of the spiritual authority even over the temporal authorities whenever the essential principles of ethics or any question of morals was concerned, the Church could absolutely dictate the educational policy of Europe. Now, this is the century when the universities arose and received their most magnificent development. The great Lateran Council, held at the beginning of the century, required every bishop to establish professorships equivalent to what we now call a college in connection with his cathedral. The metropolitan archbishops were expected to develop university courses in connection with their colleges. Everywhere, then, in Europe universities arose, and there was the liveliest appreciation and the most ardent enthusiasm for education, so that not only were ample opportunities provided, but these were taken gloriously and the culture of modern Europe awoke and bloomed wonderfully.

Some idea of the extension of university opportunities can be judged from the fact that, according to the best and most conservative statistics available, there were more students at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge to the population of the England of that day, than there are {280} to the population of even such an educationally well provided city as Greater New York in the present year of grace 1910. This seems astounding to our modern ideas, but it is absolutely true if there is any truth in history. The statistics are provided by men who are not at all favorable to Catholic education or the Church's influence for education. At this same time there were probably more than 15,000 students at the University of Bologna, and almost beyond a doubt 20,000 at the University of Paris. We have not reached such figures for university attendance again, even down to the present. Students came from all over the world to these universities, but more than twenty other universities were founded throughout Europe in this century. The population was very scanty compared to what it is at the present time; there were probably not more than 25,000,000 of people on the whole continent. England had less than 3,000,000 of people and, as we know very well by the census made before the coming of the Armada, had only slightly more than 4,000,000 even in Elizabeth's time, some two centuries later.

Here is abundant evidence of the attitude of the Church towards education. Now comes the question for us. What about feminine education at the time of this great new awakening of educational purpose throughout Europe? If we can find no trace of it, then are we justified in saying that if the Church did not oppose, at least she did not {281} favor the higher education for women. Let us see what we find. The first university in our modern sense of the word came into existence down at Salerno around the great medical school which had existed there for several centuries. Probably the most interesting feature of the teaching at Salerno is the fact that the department of the diseases of women in the great medical school was in charge of women professors for several centuries, and we have the books they wrote on this subject, and know much of the position they occupied. The most distinguished of them, Trotula, left us a text-book on her subject which contained many interesting details of the medicine of the period, and we know of her that she was the wife of one professor of medicine at Salerno and the mother of another. She was the foundress of what was called the school of Salernitan women physicians, using the word school in the same sense in which it is employed when we talk of a school of painters.

This is all the more interesting because the University of Salerno was mainly under monastic influence. Originally the schools in connection with the school of medicine were founded from the great Benedictine monastery of Monte Cassino not far away. The first great teacher of medicine at Salerno, Constantine Africanus, whose influence was dominant in his own time and continued afterwards through his writings, became a Benedictine monk in his early middle age. The {282} preparatory schools for the medical courses at Salerno were largely in the hands of the Benedictines. The university itself was under the influence of the Archbishop of Salerno more than any other, and the one who did most for it, the great Alphanus, had been a Benedictine monk. Ordinarily this would be presumed to preclude any possibility of the development of a great phase of education for women, and especially professional education for women at the University of Salerno. Just the contrary happened. The wise monks, who knew human life and appreciated its difficulties, recognized the necessity, or at least the advisability, for women as medical attendants on women and children, and so the first great modern school of medicine, mainly under monastic influence, had the department of women's diseases in the hands of women themselves.

In Naples women were allowed to practise medicine, and we have some of the licenses which show the formal permission granted by the government in this matter. An almost exactly similar state of affairs to that thus seen at Salerno developed at Bologna, only there the university was founded round the law school, and the first women students were in that school. When Irnerius established his great lectureship of Roman Law at Bologna, to which students were attracted from all over Europe, he seems to have seen no objection to allow women to attend his courses, and we have the names of his daughter {283} and several other women who reached distinction in the law school. As the other departments of the University of Bologna developed we find women as students and teachers in these. One of the assistants to the first great professor of anatomy at Bologna, Mondino, whose text-book of anatomy was used in the schools for two centuries after this time, was a young woman, Alessandra Giliani. It is to her that we owe an early method for the injection of bodies in such a way as to preserve them, and she also varnished and colored them so that the deterrent work of dissection would not have to be carried on to such an extent as before, yet the actual human tissues might be used for demonstrating purposes.

As the result of the traditions in feminine education thus established women continued to enjoy abundant opportunities at the universities of Italy, and there is not a single century since the thirteenth when there have not been some distinguished women professors at the Italian universities. Nearly five centuries after the youthful assistant in anatomy of whom we have spoken, whose invention meant so much for making the study of medicine less deterrent and dangerous, came Madame Manzolini, who invented the method of making wax models of human tissues so that these might be studied for anatomical purposes. Made in the natural colors, these were eminently helpful. In the meantime many women professors of many subjects had come and gone at {284} the Italian universities. In the thirteenth century there was a great teacher of mathematics who was so young and handsome that, in order not to disturb the minds of her students, she lectured from behind a curtain. It is evident that the educated women of the Middle Ages could be as modest as they were intelligent and thoughtful of others, quite as much as if they had devoted their lives to gentle charity and not to the higher education. Women physicians, educators, mathematicians, professors of literature, astronomers, all these are to be found at the universities of Italy while the Church and the ecclesiastics were the dominating influences in these universities.

Unfortunately the spread of this feminine educational movement from Italy to the west of Europe was disturbed by the Héloïse and Abélard incident at the University of Paris, and as all the western universities owe their origin to Paris, they took the tradition created there after Abélard's time, that women should not be allowed to enter the university. When, however, three centuries later, the Renaissance brought in the new learning, the schools of humanism independent of the universities admitted women on absolute terms of equality with men, and some of the women became the distinguished scholars of the time. The Church's influence is plainly to be seen in this, and the women took part in plays given in Greek and classic Latin before the cardinals and prominent ecclesiastics, and everywhere the {285} feeling developed that, if women wanted to have the higher education of the humanities or, as it was then called, the New Learning, they should have it. This feminine educational movement spread all over Europe. Anne of Bretagne organized a school at the French Court for the women of the court, and such women as Mary Queen of Scots, Margaret of Navarre, Renée of Anjou, Louise La Cordiére are a few of the French women of the Renaissance who attained distinction for broad culture and education at this time.

Spain, too, had its women of the Renaissance. One of the first of them was Isabella of Castile, whose assistance to Columbus was no mere accident, nor due so much to personal influence exerted on her, as to her own broad interest in the things of the mind in her time. Her daughter Catherine, who became Queen of England, was deeply educated, while her daughter, Queen Mary of England, knew the classics and especially Latin very well. During her time in England many of the nobility of the higher classes were distinguished for education. Lady Jane Grey preferred to study Greek to going to balls and routs, and sacrificed hunting parties for her lessons under Roger Ascham, in the great Greek authors. Queen Elizabeth knew Greek and Latin very well. The famous Countess of Arundell at this time was a distinguished scholar. Margaret More is a bright example of opportunities for the higher education given and taken in the lower classes of {286} the nobility of the England of her time. One thing we can be sure of in the England of that time, if the Queen and the highest nobility were interested in education and devoted their time to it so sedulously and successfully, then without doubt those beneath them in rank did so likewise. The upper classes are not alone imitated in things unworthy, but also in what is best if they only provide the good example.

To anyone who knows the history of the Church, however, these incidents in feminine education will not be surprising. Every time, as a rule, that there has been a great new awakening in education, women, too, have demanded the right to have their share in it, and the Church, far from discouraging, has always helped to provide educational opportunities. When in the ninth century Charlemagne reorganized the education of Europe, or, at least, reinstituted it for his people, the women of the Palace had their opportunities to attend the Palace school as well as the men. That Palace school was a very wonderful travelling university, wandering wherever the Court went. It was at Aix, it was probably at Paris for a time; when Charlemagne went down to Italy it went with him and seems to have held some sessions even while he was in Rome; there is a tradition of its existence while he stayed one winter in Verona. Though the teachers in it were monks, for Charlemagne and Alfred, the great, broad-minded rulers, who did so much for {287} their people, had no illusions about the high place that the monks held in life in their time, women were taught at the schools as well as men. Charlemagne and Alfred were in the best possible position to know who were the best teachers in their time, and they turned with confidence to the monks. People generally, and, above all, their great rulers, knew nothing of the condemnation of the monks in the Dark Ages which came a thousand years after their time; from people who knew nothing about them and who had even less sympathy with them. They both knew them and sympathized with all they were doing, therefore their cordial encouragement of them. Their attitude was eminently justified by the fact that the monks were broad enough, in spite of their monastic habits and their supposed lack of appreciation for women, to take up to a great extent even the teaching of women. There are letters from the women of the court of Charlemagne written to Alcuin and to other teachers of the time, which show how interested were the women in the school work.

This is not surprising if we recall that, when Benedict founded the monks of the west, who were to provide the homes where culture was to be maintained and the classics preserved for us and education gradually diffused, his sister St. Scholastica did the same thing for the women as her brother was doing for the men. Anyone who knows the story of the Benedictine convents for {288} women and the books there produced, plays, stories, even works on medicine and other sciences, will realize how much was accomplished for the higher education of women in these institutions in unpromising times. The women who wanted to follow the intellectual life were given the opportunity and many of them did excellent work. Within the last year I have written and published sketches of the lives of St. Hildegarde, who wrote books on medicine in the twelfth century, and of Hroswitha, the nun of Gandersheim, who wrote Latin comedies in imitation of Terence in the tenth century. These serious literary and scientific writings by women in what is usually presumed to be the darkest period of the so-called Dark Ages, and preserved for us out of the wreck and ruin that came down on nearly everything produced in those times, shows us very clearly how much more than we have been accustomed to think these women of the Middle Ages were interested in the intellectual life. Books are written only when there are readers and appreciation for them, and the interest of contemporaries and the hope of future interest as an incentive.

Of course, even before the foundation of the Benedictines we have a great living example of the encouragement of the Church for the higher education of women. It came at a time and under circumstances that furnish abundant evidence of how much the Church appreciates and is ready to encourage education and how precious she realizes {289} it is for her children. When the first nation was converted as a whole to Christianity, when the Irish people came over under the Apostolic Patrick's wonderful missionary zeal, the first thing that was done in this first Christian nation was to found schools. Ireland became the Island of Saints and of Scholars. While the barbarians had overrun Europe and destroyed the schools there, Ireland became the home of the best teachers in the world and men flocked to her from all over Europe.

These schools, however, were not reserved for the men, but abundant opportunities were also afforded women for scholarship and for culture of every kind. Only second in importance to St. Patrick's great school at Armagh during the first century in the history of Ireland as a Christian nation was St. Brigid's school at Kildare. We know from Giraldus Cambrensis, now better known as Gerald the Welshman, that, in his travels in Ireland centuries afterwards, but before the destruction of Kildare, he saw many wonderful evidences of the intellectual life of that institution. Above all, he saw a famous copy of the Holy Scripture so beautifully illuminated that he thought it the finest book in the world. His description would show us that if this copy of the Scriptures which Gerald saw was not the book of Kells as some have ventured to suggest, it was at least a copy not unlike that famous illuminated volume which is, perhaps, the most {290} beautiful book that ever came from the hand of man. The arts and the crafts evidently were studied and practised as well as book-learning at Kildare, and Brigid's influence brought to her at her college of Kildare, literally thousands of the daughters of the nobility of Ireland, of England and of portions of the Continent, attracted by her sanctity and her scholarship and the wonderful intellectual and artistic work that was being accomplished there.

With these facts in mind it is easy to see that the Church, far from opposing in any way the higher education for women, has not only encouraged but actually patronized it whenever there is a demand for it on the part of any generation in history. Feminine education comes and goes, so though in less markedly cyclical fashion does masculine education. Just what the law behind these cycles is we do not know as yet. One thing is sure, now that another cycle of interest has come to feminine education in the world, the Church is not only willing but anxious to give her children the benefit of it, and the growth of the higher education among Catholics for Catholic young women in America in the last decade is the best evidence of this. Our teaching Sisterhoods in this country have nobly lifted themselves up to the occasion demanded, and we may well be proud of our Catholic colleges for women. Personally I know what is being done at some half a dozen of them, and I have no hesitation {291} in saying that they are giving a better, solider, though perhaps, a less showy education than their secular rivals. Of your work at St. Elizabeth's I have had such personal information as makes me realize how thorough are the efforts to provide every possible opportunity for higher feminine education and how successful they are.

Only less absurd than the notion that the Church is in any way opposed to feminine education is the thought that seems to be in many people's minds in our day, that the Church would prefer to keep woman in the background and does not want her to do great influential things when those are demanded of her. The feeling seems to be that only modern evolution has brought such opportunities for women to exert the precious humanitarian influence that is sometimes possible for her. How much those who talk thus forget the history of the Church if they ever knew it, but also of feminine influence in the world, is very clear from even a short resume of feminine achievements in Christian times. Whenever there has been a great movement in the Church that meant much for the men and women of a time, beside the man who initiated it, if she was not, indeed, the initiator herself, stood a great woman only a little less significant in influence, as a rule, and sometimes even greater than he. In the conversion of the first people to Christianity, beside St. Patrick stood St. Brigid. In the foundation of the monks of the west that {292} great institution that meant so much for the Church and for Europe, beside St. Benedict stood St. Scholastica, his sister, doing and organizing for the women of her time and succeeding generations, what her brother did for the men. When, in the newer dispensation of the foundation of the Mendicant Religious Orders, St. Francis came to bring a great new message to the world, beside him and only a little less influential than he in his lifetime, and saving his work for its genuine mission after his death, came St. Clare. When the tide of the religious revolt spreading down from Germany, was pushed back in Spain, beside St. Teresa, for here the greater protagonist of the movement was a woman, stood St. John of God. When St. Francis De Sales came to do his great work for education and for the uplift of the better classes, beside him and scarcely less influential than he in every way, was St. Jane Frances De Chantal. In the great new organization of modern charity under St. Vincent De Paul beside that wonderful friend of the poor whose work is the underlying impulse of all modern organized charity in the best sense of that much abused term, stood the modest and humble but strongly beautiful woman, the foundress of the Sisters of Charity, Madame Le Gras. Even in the nineteenth century with the newer organizations of education demanded by changed conditions, when such foundations as those of the Sacred Heart and of the Sisters of Notre Dame {293} came into existence, men and women co-operated in these works and only now are we realizing to the full the sanctity of such women as Blessed Madame Barat or the Venerable Julie Billiart and their adviser and friend, Father Varin, the Jesuit.

Nor was it only in connection with work accomplished by men or initiated by them that we find women doing great work. It must not be forgotten that many of the religious orders which are accomplishing fine work in every line of helpful endeavor, often hundreds of years after their foundations, in conditions very different from those in which they were established, originated in the minds of women and had their constitutions worked out practically without any help from men, and often, indeed, against the judgment of men. The world of our day is not prone to appreciate at its proper worth these great works of women who took for an aim in life unselfish purpose, rather than any more personal ambition. It must not be forgotten, then, that the first settlement worker of modern times, the dear St. Elizabeth of Hungary, is one of the great influences that will never die. The cathedral erected in her honor within a few years after her death is the most beautiful monument to woman anywhere in the world. What St. Elizabeth was to the thirteenth century, St. Catherine of Sienna was to the fourteenth. Without her influence and her place in it, it would be impossible to {294} understand the history of that century, though sometimes history has been written without a mention of her. In the fifteenth century came Joan of Arc, in the sixteenth and seventeenth some of the brave women who founded great humanitarian works in connection with the early missionaries in this country. Everywhere in history you find Catholic women accomplishing great things.

After all, this is only what is to be anticipated from what is symbolized and prefigured in the story of the foundation of the Church. When the Son of God came as the Redeemer of Mankind, beside Him in His life and mission, the highest of mortals in the influence that she was to have over all succeeding generations, stood the Woman, whose seed was to crush the serpent's head, the Mother from whom He had chosen to take His human flesh. The Mother of the Messiah became the Mother of the infant Church and the Mother of all Christians ever since. Surely this was given for a sign not to be contradicted in the after-time. As the Mother beside the Son, so was woman ever to stand as the most precious influence in the work of Christianity. As the great scheme of redemption was dependent on her consent, so ever was woman to be God's greatest auxiliary in the accomplishment of good for humanity.

You can understand, then, that when I say to you graduates of St. Elizabeth's, go out and fulfill your missions, whatever they may be, I mean {295} that you shall be ready to take up any work for which your education and your training fit you, and God grant it may bring you such opportunities for good as have been exemplified in the lives of so many Catholic women all down the ages. There is nothing more than this that I could say to you. Our mother Church, far from wanting to keep women in the background, has always accorded them full and equal rights in their own domains and, above all, has given them absolute independence in the religious organizations as far as that is compatible with effective co-operation in good work. You may be sure, then, that any work that you find to do worthy of you, and that you take up whole-heartedly, will have not only her blessing but you shall find every encouragement. The glorious examples of the Catholic women of the past, educated, intellectual women, some of whom like St. Teresa, St. Catherine of Sienna, St. Jane Frances De Chantal and St. Brigid are high among the greatest intellectual women that ever lived, will be your guiding stars, and if you keep them in mind you shall not go wrong. Remember that we expect much and we have a right to expect much of the women graduates of our Catholic Women's Colleges--you have a great mission, you have put your hand to the plow, do not look back,--onward and upward. God's in his world and all's well. Only our co-operation is needed.

ORIGINS IN AMERICAN EDUCATION

"Libenter homines id quod volunt credunt."
--Caesar, Bell. Gall., iii:8.

[Men believe readily what they want to.]


"Great additions have of late been made to our knowledge of the past; the long conspiracy against the revelation of truth has gradually given away .... It has become impossible for the historical writer of the present age to trust without reserve even to the most respected secondary authorities. The honest student finds himself continually deserted, retarded, misled by the classics of historical literature." --Preface of "Cambridge Modern History."

ORIGINS IN AMERICAN EDUCATION [Footnote 19]

[Footnote 19: The material for this address was collected for a lecture on the History of Education for the Sisters of Charity of Mount St. Vincent's, New York, and the Sacred Heart Academy, Kenwood, Albany, N. Y. Subsequently it was developed for an address to the parochial school teachers of New Orleans and for the summer normal courses of St. Mary's College, South Bend, Ind., and St. Mary's College, Monroe, Mich. Very nearly in its present form the address was delivered in a course at Boston College in the spring of 1910.]

Here in the United States we have been somewhat amazingly ignorant of our brother Americans of Mexico and of South America. Our ignorance has been so complete as to have the usual result of quite intolerant bigotry with regard to the significance of what was being done in these Spanish-American countries. A distinguished ex-president of one of our American universities said in his autobiography, that a favorite maxim of his for his own guidance was, "The man I don't like is the man I don't know." If we only know enough about people, we always find out quite enough about them that is admirable to make us like them. Whenever we are tempted to conclude that somebody is hopelessly insignificant then what we need to correct is our judgment by better knowledge of them. For most Americans, for we have arrogated to ourselves the title of Americans to the exclusion of any possible share {300} in it of our South American brethren, Spanish America has been so hopelessly backward, so out of all comparison with ourselves, as to be quite undeserving of our notice unless it be for profound deprecation.

Fortunately for us in recent years our knowledge of Spanish America has become larger and deeper and more genuine, and as a consequence there has been less assumption of knowledge founded on ignorance. Every gain in knowledge of Spanish America has raised Spanish America and her peoples in our estimation. Not long since at a public dinner the president of a great American university said, "We have only just discovered Spanish America." This is literally true. We have thought that we knew much about it, and that that much showed us how little deserving of our attention was Spanish America, while all the while a precious mine of information with regard to the beginnings of the history of education, of literature, of culture, nay, even of physical science on this continent, remained to be studied in these countries and not our own. Our scholars are now engaged in bringing together the materials out of which a real history of Spanish America can be constructed for their fellow-Americans of the North, and their surprise when it is placed before them is likely to be supreme. In the meantime there are some phases of this information that, I think, it will be interesting to bring together for you.

Josh Billings, writing as "Uncle Esek" in the Century Magazine some twenty-five years ago, made use of an expression which deserves to be frequently recalled. He said: "It is not so much the ignorance of mankind that makes them ridiculous as the knowin' so many things that ain't so." We have a very typical illustration of the wisdom of this fine old saw in the history of education here in America as it is being developed by scholarly historical research at the present time. The consultation of original documents and of first-hand authorities in the history of Spanish-American education has fairly worked a revolution in the ideas formerly held on this subject. The new developments bring out very forcibly how supremely necessary it is to know something definite about a subject before writing about it, and yet how many intelligent and supposedly educated men continue to talk about things with an assumption of knowledge when they know nothing at all about them.

Catholics are supposed by the generality of Americans to have come late into the field of education in this country. Whatever there is of education on this continent is ordinarily supposed to be due entirely to the efforts of what has been called the Anglo-Saxon element here. At last, however, knowledge is growing of what the Catholic Spaniards did for education in America and as a consequence the face of the history of education is being completely changed. Every {302} advance in history in recent years has made for the advantage of the Catholic Church. Modern historical methods insist on the consultation of original documents and give very little weight to the quotation of second-hand authorities. We are getting at enduring history as far as that is possible, and the real position of the Church is coming to light. In no portion of human accomplishment is the modification of history more striking than with regard to education. There was much more education in the past centuries than we have thought and the Catholic Church was always an important factor in it. Nowhere is this truth more striking than with regard to education here in America in the Spanish-American countries.

Professor Edward Gaylord Bourne, professor of history at Yale University, wrote the volume on Spain in America which constitutes the third volume of "The American Nation," a history of this country in twenty-seven volumes edited by Professor Albert Bushnell Hart, who holds the chair of history at Harvard University. Professor Bourne has no illusions with regard to the relative value of Anglo-Saxon and Spanish education in this country. In his chapter on "The Transmission of European Culture" he says: "Early in the eighteenth century the Lima University (Lima, Peru) counted nearly two thousand students and numbered about one hundred and eighty doctors (in its faculty) in theology, civil and canon law, medicine and the arts." Ulloa {303} reports that "the university makes a stately appearance from without and its inside is decorated with suitable ornaments." There were chairs of all the sciences and "some of the professors have, notwithstanding the vast distance, gained the applause of the literati of Europe." "The coming of the Jesuits contributed much to the real educational work in America. They established colleges, one of which, the little Jesuit college at Juli, on Lake Titicaca, became a seat of genuine learning." (Bourne.)

He does not hesitate to emphasize the contrast between Spanish America and English America with regard to education and culture, and the most interesting feature of his comparison is that Spanish America surpassed the North completely and anticipated by nearly two centuries some of the progress that we are so proud of in the nineteenth century. What a startling paragraph, for instance, is the following for those who have been accustomed to make little of the Church's interest in education and to attribute the backwardness of South America, as they presumed they knew it, to the presence of the Church and her influence there.

"Not all the institutions of learning founded in Mexico in the sixteenth century can be enumerated here, but it is not too much to say that in number, range of studies and standard of attainments by the officers they surpassed anything existing in English America until the nineteenth {304} century. Mexican scholars made distinguished achievements in some branches of science, particularly medicine and surgery, but pre-eminently linguistics, history and anthropology. Dictionaries and grammars of the native languages and histories of the Mexican institutions are an imposing proof of their scholarly devotion and intellectual activity. Conspicuous are Toribio de Motolinia's 'Historia de las Indias de Nueva España,' Duran's 'Historia de las Indias de Nueva España,' but most important of all Sahagun's great work on Mexican life and religion."

Indeed, it is with regard to science in various forms that one finds the most surprising contributions from these old-time scholars. While the English in America were paying practically no attention to science, the Spaniards were deeply interested in it. Dr. Chança, a physician who had been for several years physician-in-ordinary to the King and Queen and was looked upon as one of the leaders of his profession in Spain, joined Columbus' second expedition in order to make scientific notes. The little volume that he issued as the report of this scientific excursion is a valuable contribution to the science of the time and furnishes precious information with regard to Indian medicine, Indian customs, their knowledge of botany and of metals, certain phases of zoology, and the like, that show how wide was the interest in science of this Spanish physician of over four hundred years ago.

After reading paragraphs such as Professor Bourne has written with regard to education in Spanish America, how amusing it is to reflect that one of the principal arguments against the Catholic Church has been that she keeps nations backward and unprogressive and uneducated--and the South American countries have been held up derisively and conclusively as horrible examples of this. Even we Catholics have been prone to take on an apologetic mood with regard to them. The teaching of history in English-speaking countries has been so untrue to the realities that we have accepted the impression that the Spanish-American countries were far behind in all the ways that were claimed. Now we find that instead of presenting grounds for apology they are triumphant examples of how soon and how energetically the Church gets to work at the great problems of education wherever she gains a position of authority or even a foothold of influence. Instead of needing to be ashamed of them, as we have perhaps ignorantly been, there is a reason to be deservedly proud of them. Their education far outstripped our own in all the centuries down to the nineteenth, and the culture of the Spanish-Americans, quite a different thing from education, is deeper than ours even at the present time. It is hard for North America to permit herself to be persuaded of this, but there is no doubt of its absolute truth.

It is only since the days of steam that the {306} English-speaking races in America have come to possess a certain material progress above that of the Spanish-American countries. Bourne says:

"If we compare Spanish America with the United States a hundred years ago we must recognize that while in the North there was a sounder body politic, a purer social life and a more general dissemination of elementary education, yet in Spanish America there were both vastly greater wealth and greater poverty, more imposing monuments of civilization, such as public buildings, institutions of learning and hospitals, more populous and richer cities, a higher attainment in certain branches of science. No one can read Humboldt's account of the City of Mexico and its establishments for the promotion of science and the fine arts without realizing that whatever may be the superiorities of the United States over Mexico in these respects, they have been mostly the gains of the age of steam."

While we are prone to think that a republican form of government is the great foster-mother of progress and that whatever development may have come in South American countries has been the result of the foundation of the South American republics, Professor Bourne is not of that opinion and is inclined to think that if the Spanish Colonial Government could have been maintained at its best until the coming of the age of steam or well on into the nineteenth century, then the South American republics would have been serious {307} rivals of the United States and have been kept from being so hampered as they were by their internal political dissensions. His paragraph on this matter is so contradictory of ordinary impressions, here in the United States particularly, that it seems worth while calling attention to it because it contains that most precious of suggestions, a thought that is entirely different from any that most people have had before. He says:

"During the first half-century after the application of steam to transportation Mexico weltered in domestic turmoils arising out of the crash of the old régime. If the rule of Spain could have lasted half a century longer, being progressively as it was during the reign of Charles III; if a succession of such viceroys as Revilla Gigedo, in Mexico, and De Croix and De Taboaday Lemos, in Peru, could have borne sway in America until railroads could have been built, intercolonial intercourse ramified and a distinctly Spanish-American spirit developed, a great Spanish-American federal state might possibly have been created, capable of self-defense against Europe, and inviting co-operation rather than aggression from the neighbor in the North."

Lima was the great centre for education in South America, and Mexico, in Spanish North America, was not far at all behind. The tracing of the steps of the development of education in Mexico emphasizes especially the difference between the Spaniards and the Englishmen in their {308} relation to the Indian. Bishop Zumaraga wanted a college for Indians in his bishopric, and it was because of this beneficent purpose that the first institution for higher education in the New World was founded as early as 1535. At that time the need for education for the whites was not felt so much, since only adults as a rule were in the colony, the number of children and growing youths being as yet very small. Accordingly, the College of Santa Cruz, in Tlaltelolco, one of the quarters of the City of Mexico reserved for the Indians, was founded under the bishop's patronage. Among the faculty were graduates of the University of Paris and of Salamanca, two of the greatest universities of Europe of this time, and they had not only the ambition to teach, but also to follow out that other purpose of a university--to investigate and write. Among them were such eminent scholars as Bernardino de Sahagun, the founder of American anthropology, and Juan de Torquemada, who is himself a product of Mexican education, whose "Monarquia Indiana" is a great storehouse of facts concerning Mexico before the coming of the whites, and precious details with regard to Mexican antiquities.

Knowing this, it is not surprising that the curriculum was broad and liberal. Besides the elementary branches and grammar and rhetoric, instruction was provided in Latin, philosophy, Mexican medicine, music, botany (especially with {309} reference to native plants), the zoology of Mexico, some principles of agriculture, and the native languages. It is not surprising to be told that many of the graduates of this college became Alcaldes and Governors in the Indian towns, and that they did much to spread civilization and culture among their compatriots. The English-speaking Americans furnished nothing of this kind, and our colleges for Indians came only in the nineteenth century. It is true that Harvard, according to its charter, was "for the education of the Indian youth of this country in knowledge and godliness," but the Indians were entirely neglected and no serious effort was ever made to give them any education. It was a son of the Puritans who said that his forefathers first fell on their knees and then on the aborigines, and the difference in the treatment of the Indians by the English and the Spaniards is a marked note in all their history.

During the next few years schools were established also for the education of mestizo children, that is, of the mixed race who are now called Creoles. In fact, in 1536 a fund from the Royal Exchequer was given for the teaching of these children. Strange as it may seem, for we are apt to think that the teaching of girls is a modern idea, schools were also established for Indian girls. All of these schools continued to flourish, and gradually spread beyond the City of Mexico itself into the villages of the Indians. As a {310} matter of fact, wherever a mission was established a school was also founded. Every town, Indian as well as Spanish, was by law required to have its church, hospital and school for teaching Indian children Spanish and the elements of religion. The teaching and parish work in the Indian villages was in charge of two or more friars, as a rule, and was well done. The remains of the monasteries with their magnificent Spanish-American architecture, are still to be seen in many portions of Mexico and of the Spanish territories that have been incorporated with the United States, in places where they might be least expected, and they show the influence for culture and education that gradually extended all over the Mexican country.

In the course of time the necessity for advanced teaching for the constantly growing number of native whites began to be felt, and so during the fifth decade of the sixteenth century a number of schools for them came into existence in the City of Mexico. The need was felt for some central institution. Accordingly, the Spanish Crown was petitioned to establish authoritatively a university. Such a step would have been utterly out of the question in English America, because the Crown was so little interested in colonial affairs. In the Spanish country, however, the Crown was deeply interested in making the colonists feel that though they were at a distance from the centre of government, their rulers were interested in {311} securing for them, as far as possible, all the opportunities of life at home in Spain. This is so different from what is ordinarily presumed to have been the attitude of Spain towards its colonies as to be quite a surprise for those who have depended on old-fashioned history, but there can be no doubt of its truth. Accordingly, the University of Mexico received its royal charter the same year as the University of Lima (1551). Mexico was not formally organized as a university until 1553. In the light of these dates, it is rather amusing to have the Century Dictionary, under the word Harvard University, speak of that institution as the oldest and largest institution of learning in America. It had been preceded by almost a century, not only in South America, but also in North America. The importance of Harvard was as nothing compared to the universities of Lima and Mexico, and indeed for a century after its foundation Harvard was scarcely more than a small theological school, with a hundred or so of pupils, sometimes having no graduating class, practically never graduating more than eight or ten pupils, while the two Spanish-American universities counted their students by the thousand and their annual graduates by the hundred.

The reason for the success of these South American universities above that of Harvard is to be found in the fact that Harvard's sphere of usefulness was extremely limited because of {312} religious differences and shades of differences. This had hampered all education in Protestant countries very seriously. Professor Paulsen, who holds the chair of philosophy at the University of Berlin, calls attention to the fact that the Reformation had anything but the effect of favoring education that has often been said. The picture that he draws of conditions in Germany a century before the foundation of Harvard would serve very well as a lively prototype of the factors at work in preventing Harvard from becoming such an educational institution as the universities of Lima and Mexico so naturally became. He says, in "German Universities and University Studies": "During this period [after Luther's revolt] a more determined effort was made to control instruction than at any period before or since. The fear of heresy, the extraordinary anxiety to keep instruction well within orthodox lines, was not less intense at the Lutheran than at the Catholic institutions; perhaps it was even more so, because here doctrine was not so well established, apostasy was possible in either of two directions, toward Catholicism or Calvinism. Even the philosophic faculty felt the pressure of this demand for correctness of doctrines. Thus came about these restrictions within the petty states and their narrow-minded established churches which well-nigh stifled the intellectual life of the German people."

Because of this and the fact that the attendance {313} at the college did not justify it, the school of medicine at Harvard was not opened until after the Revolution (1783). The law school was not opened until 1817.

This is sometimes spoken of as the earliest law school connected with a university on this continent, but, of course, only by those who know nothing at all about the history of the Spanish-American universities. In the Spanish countries the chairs in law were established very early; indeed, before those of medicine. Canon law was always an important subject in Spanish universities, and civil law was so closely connected with it that it was never neglected.

When the charter of the University of Lima was granted by the Emperor Charles V, in 1551, the town was scarcely more than fifteen years old. It had been founded in 1535. Curiously enough, just about the same interval had elapsed between the foundation of the Massachusetts colony by the Pilgrims and the legal establishment of the college afterward known as Harvard by the General Court of the colony. It is evident that in both cases it was the needs of the rising generation who had come to be from twelve to sixteen years of age that led to the establishment of these institutions of higher education. The actual foundation of Harvard did not come for two years later, and the intention of the founders was not nearly so broad as that of the founders of the University of Lima. Already at Lima schools had been {314} established by the religious orders, and it was with the idea of organizing the education as it was being given that the charter from the Crown was obtained. With regard to both Lima and Mexico, within a few years a bull of approval and confirmation was asked and obtained from the Pope. The University of Lima continued to develop with wonderful success. In the middle of the seventeenth century it had more than a thousand students, at the beginning of the eighteenth it had two thousand students, and there is no doubt at all of its successful accomplishment of all that a university is supposed to do.

Juan Antonio Ribeyro, who was the rector of the University of Lima forty years ago, said in the introduction to "The University Annals for 1869" that, "It cannot be denied that the University of Peru during its early history filled a large role of direct intervention for the formation of laws, for the amelioration of customs and in directing all the principal acts of civil and private society, forming the religious beliefs, rendering them free from superstitions and errors and influencing all the institutions of the country to the common good." Certainly this is all that would be demanded of a university as an influence for uplift, and the fact that such an ideal should have been cherished shows how well the purpose of an educational institution had been realized.

The scholarly work done by some of these professors at Spanish-American universities still {315} remains a model of true university work. It is the duty of the university to add to knowledge as well as to disseminate it. That ideal of university existence is supposed to be a creation of the nineteenth century, and indeed is often said to have been brought into the history of education by the example of the German universities. We find, however, that the professors of the Spanish-American universities accomplished much in this matter and that their works remain as precious storehouses of information for after generations. Professor Bourne has given but a short list of them in addition to those that have already been mentioned, but even this furnishes an excellent idea of how much the university professors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Spanish America were taking to heart the duty of gathering, arranging and classifying knowledge for after generations. They did more in the sciences than in anything else. It is often thought that our knowledge of the ethnology and anthropology of the Indians is entirely the creation of recent investigators, but that is true only if one leaves out of account the work of these old Spanish-American scholars. Professor Bourne says:

"The most famous of the earlier Peruvian writers were Acosta, the historian, the author of the 'Natural and Civil History of the Indies'; the mestizo Garciasso de la Vega, who was educated in Spain and wrote of the Inca Empire and De Soto's expedition; Sandoval, the author of the {316} first work on Africa and the negro written in America; Antonio Leon Pinelo, the first American bibliographer, and one of the greatest as well of the indefatigable codifiers of the old legislation of the Indies. Pinelo was born in Peru and educated at the Jesuit College in Lima, but spent his literary life in Spain."

Of the University of Mexico more details are available than of Peru, and the fact that it was situated here in North America and that the culture which it influenced has had its effect on certain portions of the United States, has made it seem worth while to devote considerable space to it. The University was called the Royal and Pontifical University of Mexico, because, while it was founded under the charter of the King of Spain, this had been confirmed by a bull from the Pope, who took the new university directly under the patronage of the Holy See. The reason for the foundation of the university, as the men at that time saw it, is contained in the opening chapter of St. John's Gospel, which is quoted as the preamble of the constitutions of the university: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Him and without Him was made nothing that was made. In Him was Life, and the Life was the light of men." This they considered ample reason for the erection of a university and the spread of knowledge with God's own sanction.