Table Of ContentINTERNATIONAL STUDIES IN EDUCATION AND SOCIAL CHANGE
General Editor: Professor E. J. King
Forthcoming Titles in the Series
BARON, G
The Politics of School Government
BOUCHER, L
Tradition and Change in Swedish Education
The Western European Idea
in Education
by
VERNON MALLINSON, M.A.
Professor Emeritus of Comparative Education
at the University of Reading
PERGAMON PRESS
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Copyright © 1980 V. Mallinson
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in
any form or by any means: electronic, electrostatic,
magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
First edition 1980
Reprinted 1981
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Mallinson, Vernon
The Western European idea in education.
(International studies in education and
social change).
1. Education - Europe
2. Comparative education
I. Title II. Series
370.19'5'094 LA622 79-40852
ISBN 0-08-025208-7
Printed in Great Britain by A. Wheaton & Co. Ltd., Exeter
For
EMERITUS PROFESSOR C. H. DOBINSON, C M G
Good European and good friend.
Preface
This book has grown from seminars and tutorials held over the last few
years with students drawn from both the Graduate School of Contemporary
European Studies and from the School of Education of the University of
Reading. It starts from the premiss that, whilst the idea of Western Euro-
pean unity is in no sense new, it must in the context of the present world
situation take on an entirely new dimension and so become of greater
significance than ever before. In the author's view the study of education
on a comparative basis must provide the only reliable guide to what different
countries and different generations have meant at different times by that
teasing and often misused word, culture. It is also the author's belief that
only history can enable us properly to understand how educational ideals
have been located and then transformed to be made to work to further the
cultural aspirations of a given people. That, in brief, is the burden of the
present exercise.
It is hoped that the book may make an appeal to the general public
anxious to know where, culturally, Western Europe stands, and how in
consequence it can be expected to react to challenge and change from
both within and beyond its own confines. The book should also have
something to offer to students in secondary and tertiary education who
are beginning to include European Studies on their programmes. It seeks
to enlighten (and thereby encourage) both students specifically training
to become teachers and practising teachers and administrators by making
them more acutely aware of the causes of present difficulties and dis-
content, as well as pointing the way ahead to securing viable solutions.
I am particularly indebted to my colleague, Professor Raymond Wilson,
for his careful reading of the manuscript and for making several important
suggestions for improvement; to a number of students who helped in
devising most of the diagrams; to my former secretary, Yvonne Lowe, for
her unfailing patience in meeting my sometimes near-impossible demands.
June 1979 Vernon Mallinson
ix
CHAPTER 1
The Concept of Western European Unity
1
When we speak of Europe as a whole we are speaking of an area which is
roughly the size of the USA, less than half the size of North America, and
less than a quarter of the size of Asia. Similarly, though population figures
can show great density in particular countries, the total population is no
more than roughly 480 millions, or a quarter of that of Asia as a whole.
When we exclude those territories over which the Soviet Union may be
said to have control, then we are concerned with an assortment of separate
nation-states — a kind of societas societatum — whose total population
figures do not exceed some 300 million.
Yet this very Europe, if we consider it globally, is at the geometric
centre of the modern world and at the natural crossroads of all main sea
and air routes. Of all the continents it has the longest coastline, more ports,
and the densest network of water communications. It is the only continent
to be completely free from desert areas. It is deeply indented by the seas,
traversed by mountains and rivers which are easily crossed, and almost
naturally compartmentalised into areas which, being neither too large nor
geographically cut off from one another, can freely communicate yet retain
their own individuality — a society of societies, to translate my earlier
phrase.
The climate is generally temperate if often unpredictable, and this,
together with Western Europe's peculiar geographical features, has favoured
from the very beginnings of Western European man a full exploitation of
available natural resources. The relative ease with which this conquest of
nature has been achieved, allied to the sharp lessons administered by un-
intelligent or unplanned exploitation, has taught him that to be success-
fully the measure of all things exacts a high degree of personal initiative
and expertise. He has had to learn to respect the beneficence of nature and
1
2 The Western European Idea in Education
in the process has developed a subtle awareness of the relationship which
must always exist between the end result and the amount of effort and in-
genuity expended to achieve that result. Hence his adaptability, his cease-
less questing curiosity and his inventiveness. And so the nations of Western
Europe today have come to form a reservoir of capabilities unique in the
world, and an economic power potential superior to that of the whole of
the Soviet Union and very nearly equal to that of North America.
André Siegfried, in an interesting article entitled The Spirit and Founda-
tions of European Civilisation, points out that Western European man has
become Homo economicus above all else and draws a clear distinction
between attitudes in other continents where "the expectation of nature is
either too easy or too difficult", and where there is in consequence "a danger
of falling into a state of excessive optimism or complete discouragement". 1
We can take his arguments still further by stressing how unique is Western
European man in several other respects. Leaving aside for the time being
the important fact that it was he who first developed the idea of the
human race, of the dignity of man and of man's worth as an individual,
it is important to stress that it was he who discovered the whole world,
who exploited it, awakened it, spread the benefits (not always with happy
results) of his form of civilisation, and then diplomatically withdrew to his
own European fastness without once over the many centuries involved
being threatened, circumscribed or ruled by a non-European power. A
further peculiarity is that nowhere else in the world has a large number of
nation-states been able to live in close geographical proximity and close
association the one with the other without any single one of them losing
its identity or the whole being swept into some imperial principle (e.g. the
USA or the USSR).3
The most astonishing fact of all, however, is that the men who made
Western Europe what it is today were of Eastern rather than of Western
origin. And when Charlemagne attempted to weld together a Holy Roman
Empire his peoples were already an extraordinary mixture of the oriental
and the nordic, basing their religion and culture on values drawn from the
1 The Year Book of Education, 195 7, London, pp. 31-7.
2 It is to be noted that the present idea of a European Community is simply
that of a pooling of all possibilities and potentialities. There may be a European
Parliament but Europe will essentially remain - in De Gaulle's historic phrase - a
Europe des États.
The Concept of Western European Unity 3
Near East, community-minded even though individualistic, all with con-
flicting tendencies yet already conscious of the marked differences between
their general way of life and that of their nearest eastern neighbours. By
the eleventh century, if there was no political cohesion as such, there was
at least a spiritual union based on the practice of Christianity. By the end
of the twelfth century, under the pontificat of Innocent III (1198-1216),
dubbed the "souzerain of Europe", mediaeval European civilisation could
be said to have reached its peak. All that was now needed was for Islam to
bar the way to the East to provoke a more practical sense of identity of
purpose amongs the "Europeans" qua Europeans and so precipitate still
greater dynamism in the direction of maritime adventure, exploration and
scientific discovery.
2
It is thus fascinating and at the same time highly instructive to recall how
centuries ago ideas for some form of European community were first tried
out, lost to view, and then resurrected in the period between the two
world wars, finally to come to fruition in the aftermath of the Second
World War. If we consult a map of Western Europe we immediately note
that it can be divided into four distinct regions with a fifth one shut in, as
it were, by the other four. The four "enclosing" regions are those of
France and the British Isles, of the German Hanseatic League, of the
Danube basin, and of the Mediterranean. The fifth region is sometimes
designated as that of the five rivers since it owes its identity and develop-
ing prosperity on the one hand to the Po-Saone-Rhone limiting boundary,
and on the other to the important conjuncture of the Moselle, Rhine and
Scheldt, the Scheldt estuary most opportunely directly facing that of the
River Thames. This fifth (or middle) region came into political existence
with the partitioning of Charlemagne's empire by the Treaty of Verdun
of 843. It then comprised those parts of Europe known today as Northern
Italy, Switzerland, Franche-Comté, Provence, Savoy, Burgundy, Lorraine,
Alsace, Luxemburg, the Rhineland, Belgium and Holland. Over the cen-
turies rival French, German and Italian forces disputed these territories
amongst themselves so that finally only four clearly distinct national
states were to emerge: Switzerland, Luxemburg, Belgium and Holland.
4 The Western European Idea in Education
Between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, however, and parti-
cularly during what came to be known as the Burgundian period, this
"middle" region achieved a period of prosperity which led to the growth
of a powerful merchant bourgeoisie - all turning on the fact that the Low
Countries (today Belgium and Holland) now formed the nub of the main
European trade routes, as well as being at the crossroads of the Germanic
and Latin cultures. Even as early as A.D. 700 Flemish merchants had
regularly traded with Venice, Syria and Constantinople. By the tenth
century Liège already enjoyed cultural and commercial relations with
Poland. By the thirteenth century, as methods of commerce became more
sophisticated, Flanders and Brabant in particular became a highly urbanised
region, importing wool from England and exporting Flemish cloth in
quantity to Germany and Russia from whence came in return mainly
Russian wax and furs. The result was that long before the might of France
or that of the various German states could assert itself, strong independent
merchant cities had been established in Northern Italy, Switzerland, the
Moselle area, the Rhineland and the Low Countries. The commercial city
quickly became a focal point of political power. The new merchant bour-
geoisie won charters of privilege from their supposed noble overlords for
their respective commercial centres. They established the principle of
communal autonomy. And as they recognised and skilfully exploited their
strength, so did they bring this "middle" region to live in a happy balance
between absolute sovereignty and representative government.
Such were the beginnings from which came the idea of European urban
civilisation which was progressively to replace the outmoded feudal system.
And the pattern so surely established itself that the "key" towns of Western
Europe were firmly fixed for some 500 years. Nor was there to be much
marked change over that period either in the machinery of government or
in the methods of agriculture and industry. Processes of law were now first
clearly delineated, courses of study in the universities determined, the
hierarchical structure of the church from the Pope downwards to parochial
level fixed (until Pope John XXIII summoned his Vatican Council in 1960).
From such beginnings also came the first glimmer of an idea for some kind
of concerted European (trade) policy. The Emperor Charles V (1500-58),
himself a native of Ghent, was quick to grasp the possibilities for the
whole of his empire of promoting and developing his "middle" region, and
in 1548 (by the Convention of Augsburg) he declared that the seventeen
The Concept of Western European Unity 5
provinces now comprising the area should be "one indivisible and in-
alienable block". He re-named them the Circle of Burgundy, gave them
the status of an independent sovereign state, and incorporated them into
the Holy Roman Empire.
Unfortunately for the rest of Western Europe, the union was to be
short-lived, firstly because of the abdication of Charles V in 1555, and
secondly because of the intransigence of his son Philip II (1527-98) who
had inherited the provinces along with the throne of Spain. Philip II
lacked both the vision to grasp the importance to the rest of Europe of the
Circle of Burgundy, and the intelligence to temper his religious zeal to
cope with the independent-minded merchant classes by now firmly estab-
lished in their urban strongholds. From the bitter struggles which ensued,
merging into the Thirty Years' War (1618-48), that country which we
today call Holland (or the Netherlands) finally emerged as an independent
nation-state. The then so-called Spanish Lowlands (today Belgium) eventu-
ally passed out of the hands of Spain to the house of Austria which, along
with France, had by now carved up the remainder of the territory.
Yet dreams of a unified Europe still persisted. The German mathema-
tician and philosopher, Leibnitz (1646-1716), urged that a lasting peace
in Europe could be achieved if based on the formulation of an international
law, and was cheered in his last and neglected years by the publication of
the Abbé de Saint Pierre's Projet pour rendre la paix perpétuelle en Europe
(1713), a project which, in its basic essentials, was to be taken up some
200 years later by the creation of the League of Nations. Another French-
man, Montesquieu (1689-1755), who spent lengthy periods of time
visiting other countries in Europe for the purpose of observing their cus-
toms and institutions, apart from extolling England as the model for the
ideal state (which by his definition should offer the maximum of freedom
with the maximum of security), also viewed the state as a moral entity. He
equally claimed that "the laws of education ought to be relative to the
principles of government", and his Esprit des Lois (1748) claimed that
laws, in their widest sense, are the necessary relationships which spring
from the nature of things. There was such a thing as a "Natural Law"
which had to be obeyed, and just as individuals in any one given state must
learn to bear with one another, respecting the opinions of others as being
as valid as their own, so must the various states seek amongst themselves
a necessary harmony. There must be a Society of Nations, larger than any
