Abstract
The Latin essay “
Keywords
Comparative education, like other academic disciplines, has its own historical narrative. That usually starts with the research program published by the French revolutionary, military officer, journalist, and writer on educational matters Marc Antoine Jullien in 1817 (Fraser, 1964). But there is a treatise comparing school education in two different national settings that appeared about 20 years earlier – the Latin essay “
Despite the “official” historiography of comparative education the treatise of Hecht was never totally forgotten. After scarce remarks in the 19th century (Anzeige kleiner Schriften, 1801: 374–375; Heydenreich, 1893: 147; Niemeyer, 1829: 180) 20th-century reception, or rather, mentioning began around 1960. Hermann Ody (1959: 66), historian and comparativist of education, and particularly, writer on Victor Cousin, evidently had a copy of the essay available and used it in his book on the educational encounter of England, France, and Germany since the beginning of the 19th century. US-comparativist William Brickman (1960: 7) very probably came across the part of the text that is preserved in the New York Public Library as he wrote:
Another type of eighteenth century study of comparative education…was…by Hecht. Published in 1795 at Freiburg (sic!) this Latin work examined comparatively the schools of England and Germany. For the most part it was a descriptive analysis, but the author made some efforts of comparison.
From Ody the name of Hecht came into the work of the re-founder of comparative education as an academic discipline in West Germany, Hilker (1962: 16–17), and name dropping spread to the German comparative education literature (e.g. Hartmann, 2009: 44; Hausmann, 1966: 903; Liu, 2008: 20; Merkel, 1998: 158; Rakhkochkine, 2003: 127; Treptow, 2010: 152). Brickman’s remarks were repeated in the English language literature (Postlethwaite Ed. 1988). There are also French (Giraud, 1975), Spanish language (Rodriguez, 2008), and Polish (Kula/Pechowa, 2011) references to Hecht, but it is evident that none of the authors since Ody and Brickman had actually looked into Hecht’s text. Though nearly the whole essay of Hecht is preserved in the Scottish National Library at Edinburgh, the hint given by Brickman did not provoke a larger reception in Great Britain.
Now, a fully edited version of Hecht’s essay in the original Latin form, and in annotated German and English translations, is available and gives us a chance to reassess its status in the canon of early texts on comparison (Lenhart, 2015). That the text was not re-edited earlier in Germany is due to the fact that the only remaining copies of the original school programs in German public libraries were in East Germany, at Leipzig and Weimar. The discipline of comparative education in the former German Democratic Republic was focused on contemporary issues: education in socialist countries, education in capitalist countries, education in West Germany, and education in developing countries – with special interest in refuting all convergence theory approaches. The comparison of former historical developments of education was not a central topic. It is probable that all East-German comparativists, like most of their counterparts in the West, did not know Hecht’s essay. The library systems of the two German entities were not totally inaccessible by the respective other side, but West Germans wanting to do research in the East had to go through an application and permission procedure. Also, the internet and thus, online public access catalogs, were not available before unification. So the few western comparativists who knew about the existence of the text did not try to access it. A further impediment was the Latin language of the essay – few comparativists today have a sufficient command of the ancient language.
In his treatise, Hecht compares the education in English so-called public schools, especially that of Eton and Westminster, with the education in German urban Latin or grammar schools.
The primary approach is a comparative analysis of English and German textbooks. Hechtius, as he refers to himself in Latin texts, focuses primarily on Latin and Greek grammar books, dictionaries, and excerpts and commentated editions of works by ancient Roman and Greek authors. He also looks at textbooks for religion, history, and geography. It seems at first to be odd that no manual on mathematics and for the natural sciences was included in the comparison. The reason for this is the pure classic curriculum of the public schools of Hecht’s time (Carleton, 1965; Lyte, 1911) where the sciences were taught only in private lessons. Westminster School as late as 1883 introduced the first “non-classic curriculum” and erected in 1905 the first building dedicated to teaching the modern sciences (Westminster, 2014).
In the late 1770s, the English King George III, at the same time, the Duke of Brunswick-Luneburg, had sent some 80 textbooks in use at the royal schools of Westminster and Eton to the Gottingen philologist Christian Gottlob Heyne, who was ordered to review these books and find out which of them could be used for improving the quality of teaching and learning in the Latin schools of the Hannover territories in Germany. In 1780, Heyne published an article about these books (Heyne, 1780), which gave Hecht the opportunity to compare them to the German schoolbooks available at his large Freiberg/Saxony school library.
Hecht sought additional information regarding characteristics of school organization, curricula, and teaching methodology in English Public Schools from German secondary literature, and compared these aspects of education with his own practical experiences in a German grammar school. Hecht underlines the spirit of competition in English public schools as a stimulus for continuous work. He especially looks at school discipline, and regards England in particular, at the liberal socialization that took place beyond the realm of school. Though not yet using the term, he conceptualizes the idea of “national character”. This result of education in and out of school is, for him, like an “iron cage”. Hecht’s fateful drawback concerning the concept seems to stem from the fact that he was the first author in comparative education studies but apparently never left his home state of Saxony.
Hecht was not only a teacher, but also a learned classical philologist. He is also familiar with the European humanist tradition in education. So he knew the founder of English “Hellenism”, Richard Bentley, and the leading proponents of German philological “Neo-humanism”, like Gesner, Ernesti, and Heyne. However, Hecht was not influenced by the philosophical-idealist neo-humanism of, for example, Wilhelm von Humboldt. Concerning inner German-school development, Hecht’s text can be read as the depiction of an alternative non-Prussian way to forming a national German education system.
Hecht does not yet have an elaborated theory of comparison. The comparative approach of John Stuart Mill was still half a century ahead. But the Freiberg principal presents similarities and differences. He explains the common traits of the English public and the German grammar schools in the European humanist tradition. For him, the differences in the results of education originate in the liberal English out-of-school education, e.g. the deliberate fostering of the freedom of opinion and expression. For the text book analysis, he even develops some detailed comparative criteria.
Hecht’s text offers several aspects for criticism. First, the title of his treatise is too all-embracing. He does not actually compare two (though not yet fully stabilized) education systems; there is no discussion of the lower elementary schools, the English charity schools, the German schools run by sextons, or of the traditional schoolmasters organized in guilds or by craftsmen as a concurrent job. Nothing is said about the education of girls. The public schools of his time were elite schools. Many students were from aristocratic families: “In the second half of the century Eton supplanted Westminster as the training ground for parliament and the state service” (Lawson and Silver 1973: 199). Hecht takes these privileged schools as typical for English grammar schools and he does not know what education was like in a normal not-so-prominent English grammar school. The academies of the English dissenters that represent the modernization push in English education of his time are not mentioned. Beyond the textbooks his sources are too limited. Hecht gets nearly all his information from the reports of German travelers (Küttner, 1791–1796; Wendeborn, 1785), one of these books was even written in the fictional form of a letter series.
With the exception of learning competition, Hecht does not focus on international “borrowing and lending” in education (Phillips and Ochs, 2004; Steiner-Khamsi and Waldow, 2011). So, for him, England is not a reference society which sets the standards for schools, nor is the German school situation a model entity that – as some international observers in 19th century proposed – should be imitated. Implicit in Hecht’s argumentation is the concept of educational trans-nationality (today, for example, spelled out in terms of transnational educational spaces). He sees in the education of his time three dimensions: the influence on educational policies of transnational royal families, the importance of Latin as the common trans-national European medium of communication among learned humanists and scientists, and the persistence of the tradition of the European classic-humanist curriculum. Early modern Europe had nations and states, but it did not yet know nation states. For Hecht, the Germans are still a nation in the ancient meaning, but the English are on their way to becoming, or already are, a state nation and England/Great Britain is a nation state. Thus, comparative education starts with Hecht’s essay in a social-historical situation, where the old transnational order of nations and states is being transformed into the new international order of nation states.
Footnotes
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