General country school regulations

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The Prussian general school regulations of August 12, 1763 were passed under Frederick the Great and formed the basis for the development of the Prussian elementary school system .

Frederick II of Prussia (the great)

After the expansion of the urban school system in Germany since the Reformation , development came to a standstill into the 18th century, also due to the devastation of the Thirty Years' War. The obligation to attend school was introduced on a trial basis in various regions: in Saxony-Gotha in 1642, in Württemberg in 1649, and in Brandenburg in 1662 for Kleve-Mark. But education was not a priority and there was a lack of money to pay for school buildings and teachers. Despite many schools being established, the edict of King Friedrich Wilhelm I of September 28, 1717 , who tried to improve it with the Principia regulativa of July 30, 1736, also failed. The first teacher seminars and church initiatives carried out by Johann Friedrich Hähn prepared the ground for the general country school regulations, which were mainly developed by the reform-oriented theologian and pedagogue Johann Julius Hecker . Hecker was in the tradition of Halle Pietism . After Hecker had won the trust of Friedrich Wilhelm I in the 1730s as a preacher and school inspector of the Potsdam military orphanage , he found a good hearing and support from Friedrich after he founded the first practice-oriented secondary school in 1748 and the first Prussian teachers' college in 1749 the big one.

Contrary to many representations, the regulations did not yet contain the consistent compulsory school attendance , but with the invitation to attend school it was one of the last preliminary stages to compulsory. Despite all the progress made in the regulation, teachers' salaries remained meager in the following years, state funding for the education system rose only marginally and progress in the school system continued to be based, as a rule, on the private initiative of church officials such as Hecker, aristocrats, merchants or even landlords like the Brandenburg citizen Friedrich Eberhard von Rochow , who set up model schools. It was not until the following decades that the development of the school system experienced a clearly state-shaped progress , which is also viewed critically, as, for example, the enforcement of compulsory schooling established the state's monopoly on education and arose from the interest in healthy recruits.

Extract from the general country school regulations:

First and foremost, We want all of Our subjects, whether they be parents, guardians or masters who are responsible for bringing up the young, their own children, boys or girls who are entrusted to their care, if not earlier, at most from the fifth year of their age send to school, continue with it properly into the thirteenth and fourteenth years and keep them at school until they have not only grasped the essentials of Christianity and finished reading and writing, but can also give questions and answers about what to be taught to them according to the textbooks prescribed and approved by our consistories.

See also: School system , pedagogy , German education system , list of important educators

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Peter Neugebauer: Absolutist State and School Reality in Brandenburg-Prussia . Berlin 1985, p. 171, books.google.de
  2. ^ Horst F. Rupp : School / school system . In: Theologische Realenzyklopädie , Volume 30: Samuel - Seele . 1999, pp. 591-627.