The Wittenberg Old Latin School is one of the city’s heralded institutions for secondary education. It laid the groundwork for Western education and shaped the lives of countless students throughout the Reformation, the wars of religion, the rise of the Enlightenment, and the ascendancy of Prussian control. Learn more in this blog post adapted from The History of the Gymnasium and Educational Institutions of Wittenberg.
The spirit of that prevailing scholastic instruction in Germany before the Correction of the Church, arising solely from the church and designed strictly for her, consisted chiefly of repeated inculcation of liturgical prayers and chants and, if there were institutions that offered the opportunity for elementary scientific education, they were present only in very insignificant number. Of the old, strict teaching method of the cloister schools founded by Charlemagne, moreover, very few traces still remained. The ignorance that had for a long period spread throughout most of the German clergy certainly dominated even until the founding of the university of this city and environs. Thus it was that German boys who wished to acquire knowledge in certain fields in those days generally attended instructional institutions abroad, the most famous of which were in Italy and France. Several universities were established in Germany after their example during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as had already been founded in Heidelberg, Prague, and Vienna in the fourteenth century.
Even at the dawn of the seventeenth century, when the memory of those times had not entirely vanished, a very gloomy picture is not seldom drawn of the viewpoint prevailing among the clergy before the Reformation in comparison with the subsequent Enlightenment. Thus that learned professor of our university, Erasmus Schmidt, in his jubilee oration held in honor of the one hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Wittenberg Academy in the year 1602, presents a comparison of the three centuries during and after the Correction of the Church with respect to the sciences, and cites noteworthy testimonies concerning the limited education of earlier clergy. Apart from that, since the Divine Service was held only in Latin, it can be deduced that school instruction proper was not for the general populace, but more just served to provide the church with ministers of lower and higher orders. Hence if there were institutions of schooling in Wittenberg already at the close of the fourteenth century, they certainly acted only in the manner here described and achieved nothing remarkable up to the time of the Reformation.
Already with the close of the fifteenth century, the love for the sciences that had first been awakened in Italy spread more and more in Germany. Among the most notable promoters of this endeavor was Emperor Maximilian I. By introducing general civic peace, he not only gave Germany a time of rest so long desired but also sought to enliven scholarly learning and German poetic craft, and to that end called on Conrad Celtes, the most learned man of his time, to join him in Vienna. On the Rhine and the Elbe and in other parts of Germany, these efforts stirred a new zeal for scientific learning and spiritual education to an extent previously unknown, and in no era were so many German universities freshly founded than at the close of the fifteenth century and in the century following it.
The first and most important disseminators of this new scientific activity were men who, like Conrad Celtes, had laid the foundation of their learning in Italy, and through them the Greek language, until then entirely neglected in Teutonic lands, accrued more and more interest. Among these favorable omens, the elector of Saxony, Friedrich III (or the Wise), founded the University of Wittenberg, and here that which was previously done here and there on a smaller scale is said to have first blossomed to full maturity. It can certainly be rightly maintained that among the countless Hochschulen [institutions of high learning] established around that time in Germany, not one of them produced such a universal and simultaneously benevolent change as that in Wittenberg. How and by what instigations that university was first called into being has been frequently discussed but does not fit within our scope.
The Correction of the Church arising from that university certainly spread with lightning speed soon after its inauguration as the populace over a great swath of Europe came to its side. Yet it also paved the way for better and more careful instruction of the young, and the reformers themselves occasionally took interest in this need. Schools and other preparatory institutions were able to come into existence only gradually, however, since teachers able to impart beneficial instruction first had to be educated, and for some time there was doubt as to what belonged in the purview of the university and what should be left an exclusive property of the schools. Above all, Melanchthon, and Luther with him, made a zealous effort to support the freethinking ideas of various princes and rulers of cities toward the creation of gymnasia, and the scholastic arrangement recommended by him generally prevailed in the Evangelical parts of Germany even as his textbooks found their way into schools everywhere. To be sure, not everything Melanchthon undertook succeeded, but the spirit stirred up by him continued to have its effect, and even if this or that school failed and folded, time and again new ones eager to continue the development emerged to take their place.
Blog post adapted from The History of the Gymnasium and Educational Institutions of Wittenberg, English translation © 2026 Concordia Publishing House. All rights reserved.