German Humanism as a Pedagogical Movement

Connections — Impulses — Ideals

In its Agenda, The Logic of its Development, and its literary expression, European Renaissance Humanism was a movement for pedagogical reform, whose goal was to improve the cultural and social life of humanity (humanitas). The German word for education, Bildung, has its origins in theology and contains elements of religious mysticism; we must keep these connotations at a distance when considering early modern educational theory and practice. The Renaissance model for the improvement of the self, mediated through the symbolic language of literature — a conception of humanity, therefore, as manifest in speech and behavior — more closely resembles the English conception of education than the myth of Bildung in German idealism. What pioneers like Petrarch (1304–74) and Leonardo Bruni (ca. 1370–1444) represented, how humanistic studies (studia humanitatis) were designed, and what determined educational practice at the schools of northern Italy all derived from a fundamental anthropological distinction between the primal, quasi-bestial nature of man and the highest qualities deemed worthy of man. One could acquire these qualities through the cultivation of independent thinking and a new social personality. Humanism was at first committed almost solely to inculcating the elementary tools for using language effectively. The modern training in reason (ratio) and oratory (oratio) developed in yoke with the theory that each individual can achieve human perfection only through knowledge (eruditio) and that the project of civilizing society requires the consensus and discourse of its educated members.

As the result of active Italian-German cultural exchanges, early modern pedagogy in Germany bore the stamp of a naturalized Italian humanism. Since the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, wealthy students had been traveling to Italy to study law and medicine; by the seventeenth century less affluent young people as well, serving as travel companions and tutors, could acquaint themselves firsthand with Italian cultural centers and universities. Biographical documents, such as the letters of the Nuremberg patrician Willibald Pirckheimer (1470–1530), reveal that students took intense interest, beyond their formal studies, in the newly printed works of ancient Roman and Greek authors.