Note 41 — Chapter XXXV · (Continued) LUTHER’S ATTITUDE TOWARDS SOCIETY AND EDUCATION

In the Introduction to the Weimar edition of the writing “An die Radherrn” (15, 1899, p. 9 ff.) we read: “It is very characteristic of the reformer’s attitude to the question of education in his day that he does not, as we might expect, give the preference to these German elementary schools in which we can see the beginnings of the national schools, but, whilst admitting their claims, insists emphatically on the need of a classic training.” “To characterise the writing in question as ‘of the utmost importance for the development of our elementary-school system’ (“Mon. Germ. Pædag.” III, iii.) is to be unfair to it.”