Release date is 2025-11-08

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"Grundzüge der Geschichte der Pädagogik" by C. A. Funke is a textbook on the history of education written in the early 20th century. The work surveys educational thought and institutions from antiquity through the medieval period and into modern developments, with strong emphasis on moral-religious aims and the organization of schools. It profiles key figures, doctrines, and school types while keeping a practical eye on teacher formation. The tone is concise, didactic, and oriented to the needs of trainee teachers and school officials.

The opening of the work starts with editorial and preface notes explaining updates to match ministerial guidelines and a contents map spanning pre-Christian to contemporary schooling. It first diagnoses obstacles in pagan education, then contrasts Sparta’s state-forged discipline with Athens’ more balanced humanistic program, and profiles Pythagoras and Socrates as seminal shapers of method and moral purpose. Roman education is outlined from its family-centered roots to later decline, punctuated by maxims from Cicero, Seneca, Quintilian, and Juvenal. Judaism’s monotheism is presented as directing home and prophetic schooling toward obedience to God, leading into Christian education’s universal aim, the catechumenate, Alexandrian catechetical schools, and the formative guidance of Basil, Chrysostom, Jerome, and Augustine. Institutional chapters follow on parish, Benedictine, and cathedral schools; Charlemagne’s reforms and palace school; Rhabanus Maurus’s leadership at Fulda; the rise of cathedral, monastic, mendicant, urban, and rural schools (including Küsterschulen) and the Brothers of the Common Life. The section closes with brief treatments of medieval pedagogical writers—Vincencius of Beauvais, Gerson, and Mapheus Vegius—and begins Vittorino da Feltre before the excerpt breaks off. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

Originally published: Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1907