The ambitious plans for universal, compulsory public education in all regions of Germany in the first half of the nineteenth century reflected the great expectations of German nationalists and liberals for the eventual establishment of political unity and cultural regeneration. In turn, these plans excited many educational reformers and teachers who hoped to be the heroes of this cultural and national rebirth.

A short time ago, when I began to write this piece on the historiography of education in the German Democratic Republic, i.e., East Germany, I intended to describe the research and writing of the history of education in that country, but also to criticize the intellectual isolation and ideological narrowness of East German scholars. The GDR remains one of the most impregnable bastions of firm ideological control and rigid censorship in a part of the world where free thought and expression are as rare as water in the Sahara. Marxism still stands for more than a slogan in East Germany. Indeed, the texts, articles and journals reflect this deep ideological commitment. For example, John Dewey receives considerably less attention than such Marxist heroes as W. G. Belinski, N. G. Tschernyschewski, and N. A. Dubroljobow, in the standard East German text. This, of course, reflects the Eastern (or Russian) orientation of East German scholarship as well as its ideological stance. In addition, articles invariably deal with a social class analysis of education. One finds virtually no mention of recent Western scholarship in either bibliographies, footnotes, or book reviews. In general, an apparently stultifying situation.

“German schools,” says Gerald Strauss near the beginning of Luther's House of Learning, “… are central to this book.” Certainly the vernacular schools are central to the argument of the book, for their inability to provide an effective religious education lies at the heart of Strauss' case that the German Reformation was a failure—at least in terms of the reformers' own aspirations. This argument, richly documented and persuasively presented as it is, is one that historians of the Reformation will find difficult to refute. Yet it is fair to say that the German schools themselves, as functioning institutions, are not extensively described in this book. For Luther's House of Learning is, to a large extent, history-from-above; the author's viewpoint tends to be that of the Lutheran intelligentsia—the magisterial reformers, the educated clerics they trained, and the sophisticated magistrates and bureaucrats who had absorbed their point of view. At the beginning of the book we are shown the pedagogical assumptions and religious and social aims of this intellectual elite. Then we see how its members created new institutions or tried to reshape existing ones in attempting to bring about a truly Christian society. Finally we are shown how their aspirations were thwarted by the inadequate tools through which they had to work—the mass of well-meaning but hopelessly underpaid and overworked village ministers and urban and rural German schoolmasters. It was the elite group of reformers who had defined the aims of the Reformation; it was the same group whose members, traveling grimly from village to village as they conducted their melancholy visitations, came to conclude that their undertaking had failed. From beginning to end the issue is seen primarily in their terms, and though Strauss forces us to recognize their failure he also registers his “deep and genuine sympathy for the reformers and their cause.”