Put the Bible into a ploughman's language and you have created a problem: the ploughman must now be taught to read. Universal schooling was not a by-product of the Reformation. It was a necessity the Reformation created for itself.

The Reformation broke with a medieval pedagogy that reserved education largely for an aristocratic elite and for those bound for the church. Within a generation, colleges and seminaries were founded, parish schools were established and supported by the church, and in the leading Protestant cities they were free. By some accounts the spread of schooling in the sixteenth century was among the most rapid institutional expansions Europe had ever seen.

The reason was not a general enthusiasm for learning. It was theological, and it ran in a straight line.

Why the Reformation Had to Build Schools

Three Reformation convictions, taken together, make mass literacy unavoidable.

This is why the catechism and the parish school arrive together across Protestant Europe. They are two halves of one project, and neither works without the other.

Luther's Appeal to the Councilmen

In the spring of 1524 Luther published To the Councilmen of All Cities in Germany That They Establish and Maintain Christian Schools. It is one of the most consequential documents in the history of education, and it is barely known outside Lutheran circles.

He wrote it in a bad moment. The old church-run schools were collapsing as monastic endowments were dissolved, and a strain of enthusiasm within his own movement held that learning was worldly and the Spirit sufficient. Luther, who had given the Germans their Bible, had nothing but contempt for that argument. He addressed the civil authorities rather than parents, on the ground that parents were often unable or unwilling and that the magistrate had the resources.

His arguments were built from Psalm 78 and Deuteronomy 32 — that God commanded one generation to teach the next — and from the Fourth Commandment. He pressed that schools serve both church and commonwealth, producing preachers and also lawyers, physicians, and magistrates. And he argued that girls should be schooled as well as boys, which in 1524 was a genuinely radical claim.

He returned to the subject in 1530 with A Sermon on Keeping Children in School, this time aimed at the preachers, pressing them to persuade parents who were withdrawing sons for want of an obvious trade at the end of it.

The response can be measured. In the 1520s alone more than fifty city councils invited Melanchthon to help them found schools.

Melanchthon, the Teacher of Germany

Luther supplied the argument; Philip Melanchthon supplied the curriculum. He drew up school ordinances, wrote the textbooks in Greek and Latin that a generation of German students learned from, reorganised universities, and trained the teachers. His contemporaries called him Praeceptor Germaniae — the teacher of Germany — and the title was earned.

The pattern he set is worth noticing, because it is what makes a movement durable. The Reformation did not merely produce a great generation. It produced a school system that produced the next generation, and the one after that.

Calvin's Academy at Geneva

Geneva had been trying to found a university for two centuries, with attempts in 1420 and 1429 that came to nothing. It succeeded only after Calvin set his hand to it.

The Academy, next to St. Pierre Cathedral, had two levels: the schola privata, a college for the general education of the city's youth, and the schola publica, a seminary for training ministers. Public records of 17 January 1558 record its establishment with three chairs — theology, philosophy, and Greek. The lower school began classes that autumn and the seminary in November. The building was dedicated on 5 June 1559 before six hundred people in St. Pierre. Calvin raised the money himself, much of it from expatriates.

The growth was extraordinary. The public school had seven grades and enrolled 280 students in its first year. The seminary reached 162 within three years. By Calvin's death in 1564 there were 1,200 students in the college and 300 in the seminary. Both were tuition-free, and historians have described them as forerunners of modern public education.¹

Then came the expansion that reveals the underlying conviction. A law faculty was established by 1567, and after the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre of 1572 the constitutional scholar François Hotman taught there, alongside Denis Godefroy — giving Geneva one of the earliest legal faculties in Switzerland. Beza was asking for prayer for a medical department by 1567, though it was not successfully established until the following century. This is the Calvinistic view of Christian influence in all areas of life, worked out in a course catalogue: the academy was not a seminary with extras attached but a school for the whole of life.

Hall makes a point about this that is easy to miss. Of all the major Protestant Reformers, none other is credited with founding a university that lasted for centuries.²

A School in Every Parish

The most ambitious plan of the century came out of Scotland, from the same six men who wrote the Scots Confession. Their First Book of Discipline of 1560 proposed a school attached to every parish church, a college in every notable town, and support for poor but able students to continue to university — a national system of education, in a poor country, proposed the same year the country changed its religion.

It was never funded as written, because the nobility kept the church lands that were meant to pay for it. But it set an expectation that Scottish acts of parliament returned to across the next century and a half, and it is a large part of why a small and poor nation came to be disproportionately literate, and why Scots turn up out of all proportion in the intellectual history of the following two centuries.

That Old Deluder

The Puritans carried the conviction to New England and legislated it. Boston Latin School was founded in 1635, Harvard in 1636 — supported in part by families contributing a peck of grain a year, the college corn. Massachusetts required parents to see that children could read in 1642, and when that proved insufficient, passed in 1647 the law that has been known ever since by its opening words:

It being one chief project of that old deluder, Satan, to keep men from the knowledge of the Scriptures, as in former times keeping them in an unknown tongue…

Every township of fifty households was to appoint someone to teach the children to read and write. Every township of a hundred was to set up a grammar school able to prepare youth for the university. Towns that neglected it for more than a year paid a fine of five pounds to the nearest school that had complied.

Read the preamble again, because it names the enemy precisely. Satan's project is to keep men from the Scriptures, and his older method was to keep the Scriptures in an unknown tongue. That is a direct reference to the Latin Bible, written into colonial statute a century after Tyndale was strangled and burned. The men who passed this law understood the schoolhouse as the second half of what Tyndale had begun at the printing press.

Similar laws followed across New England. Yale was founded in 1701 for public employment in church and civil state; Princeton followed in 1746 out of the Log College of the Presbyterians. The pattern of a college founded by a church to train ministers, and then educating a whole society, repeats across the colonies.

What Was Actually New

Precision matters here, because the claim is often overstated in Protestant retellings.

The Reformation did not invent the university. Bologna, Paris, Oxford, and Cambridge are medieval Catholic foundations, and the scholastic curriculum the Reformers were trained in was the church's own achievement. Luther, Calvin, Melanchthon, and Knox were all products of institutions the medieval church built. Nor did the Reformation invent the school; cathedral, monastic, and chantry schools existed for centuries.

What was new was the conviction that everyone must be taught — the ploughman's son and the daughter as well as the lord's heir — that this is a public responsibility rather than a private privilege, and that the reason is theological rather than economic. Education ceased to be the preparation of a clerical class and became the equipping of a priesthood of all believers. That shift, not the founding of any particular institution, is the Reformation's contribution.

Cautions and Counterarguments

The aims were catechetical before they were humanistic. These schools existed to produce Christians who could read Scripture, obey the law, and serve church and commonwealth. Reading modern ideals of free inquiry back into them is anachronistic.

Practice lagged behind principle. Luther argued for schooling girls; the schools that resulted usually gave them less, and for a shorter time. Scotland's parish school plan went largely unfunded for decades. Geneva's numbers are impressive for a city of its size and should not be read as national coverage.

Catholic education did not stand still. The Jesuits, founded in 1540, built one of the most effective school systems in Europe within a generation, in part in response. Competition, not Protestantism alone, drove much of the expansion.

The humanists were already at work. Erasmus, Vives, and the northern humanists had been arguing for educational reform before Luther posted anything, and the Reformers drew on them freely. The Reformation gave those arguments a theological engine and a mass constituency; it did not originate them.

The defensible claim is narrower than the triumphant one and stands up better. The Reformation took an existing humanist reform programme, gave it a reason that reached every household in Christendom, and turned schooling from the privilege of a class into the duty of a community. We are still living on that inheritance, in countries that have long forgotten why the schools were built.

Further Reading