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A Book on Education in Luther’s Wittenberg

A Book on Education in Luther’s Wittenberg

Last updated on: April 8, 2026 at 7:50 am by Gene Veith

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A Book on Education in Luther’s Wittenberg 2026-04-08T07:50:52-04:00 Gene Veith

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Right by St. Mary’s Church, “the Mother Church of the Reformation,” is the school house where the educational renaissance that accompanied the Reformation was put into practice. Recently, the so-called “Old Latin School” was acquired and renovated by a partnership of the Independent Evangelical Lutheran Church of Germany, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, and Concordia Publishing House.

It is now the site of the International Lutheran Center, where visitors to the Luther sites can learn about what Luther believed, travelers can stay in the heart of Wittenberg, and scholars can study the Reformation in its extensive research library.

Concordia Publishing House has just published a book about the history of the school entitled The History of the Gymnasium and Educational Institutions of Wittenberg . It was written in 1830 by the then-headmaster, Franz Spitzner, who chronicled the life of the school from its beginnings to his own time. Spitzner’s book is translated into English by–who else?–Matthew Carver. (See my praise of this stellar Lutheran translator, a master of Latin, German, and English.)

I was asked to write a preface about the education described in the book, due to my interest in classical Lutheran education. Robert Kolb was asked to write another preface about the school in relation to the history of the Reformation, due to his being one of “the most respected scholars of the Reformation.”

Spitzner’s history is interesting for several reasons. It describes what may be the first “classical Lutheran school.” It would have its ups and downs, including problems that today’s educators will relate to: student misbehavior, faculty squabbling, helicopter parents four hundred years before helicopters were invented, and constant money problems.

Those money problems were resolved, though, when Prussia conquered Saxony, bringing Wittenberg into the kingdom of Friedrich Wilhelm III, the nemesis of confessional Lutherans. Not only did he force Lutherans and Calvinists into one state church, the “Prussian Union,” his educational reforms had the effect of undoing the classical approach in schools. Not only did his University of Berlin become the model for the modern “research university,” with its specialization and its application of “science” to all disciplines (including theology), he turned primary and secondary schools into “practical” training centers. Children were tested, then, based on their scores, channeled into various vocational tracks. The top performers, though, destined for the university and the professions, were still sent to the “Gymnasium,” which remained mostly, though not entirely, classical.

Spitzner was happy to be brought into this system, which came with generous financial subsidies, allowing him to finally pay his faculty what they were worth, but, while this changed his school, he worked hard to keep its classical and Christian distinctives.

It turns out that both my essay and that of Robert Kolb are available in full in the Amazon preview feature. I’ll give you the opening of my contribution and then link you to the rest of it:

Education in the Wittenberg Latin School

THIS history of the Latin school in Wittenberg was written in 1830 by Franz Spitzner, who was rector of the school at the pinnacle of its success. After centuries of struggle, the king of Prussia, Frederick William III—the nemesis of confessional Lutherans—became the school’s patron in 1817 and made it part of his sweeping educational reforms. In writing a chronicle about his school, Spitzner gives us an important record of the history of Western education.

Spitzner cites evidence that Wittenberg had a schoolmaster and thus presumably a school as early as 1371. Records are scant for those days, but medieval town schools mostly taught basic literacy and a little Latin. Elector Frederick the Wise evidently turned the institution into a Renaissance-style “high school” when he founded the city’s university.

The university at Wittenberg played a prominent role, of course, in the Reformation, but the contribution of the city’s Latin school to what Spitzner charmingly calls the “Correction of the Church” was when its schoolmaster Georg Mohr threw in with the iconoclasts and enthusiasts who, in Spitzner’s words, “rejected all human learning and insisted on knowledge only from inner light and immediate divine revelation.” With this conviction, the schoolmaster “cried vehemently from the schoolhouse to the people in the churchyard, admonishing the residents and citizens in the strongest terms to keep their children and relatives out of the school.”

Mohr was the first head of the school whom Spitzner was able to identify, so it was not a propitious beginning for a schoolmaster to tell the citizens of Wittenberg that they should reject human learning and not send their children to his school.

Martin Luther came out of hiding at Wartburg Castle, at great risk to his life, precisely to prevent the Church from being corrected by people like Schoolmaster Mohr, who was soon removed from office. For Luther, human learning is very important, the inner light is the worst possible source of knowledge, and divine revelation can only be found by reading and studying a Book.

Luther thus made education a priority, not just for clergy but also for laypeople. He urged not just churches but also cities to open schools at all levels, for women as well as men. Thus Wittenberg had a maidens’ school that was under the same auspices as the Latin school but met in a separate building. (See Spitzner’s appendix for his account of the school for girls.)

In his education project, Luther enlisted the help of his colleague Philip Melanchthon, one of the greatest classical scholars of the Renaissance, who devised a curriculum and an educational structure that would prepare a student for advanced studies in the university. This type of secondary school was called a Gymnasium, named for the Greek institutions that trained young men both physically and intellectually. (The English language would take the word in the athletic sense, while other European languages would take the word in the intellectual sense.)

With the Reformation, the Wittenberg Latin school became a gymnasium. “Concerning the manner in which instruction was carried out in those days, only so much can be said, given the total loss of all information on the subject,” says Spitzner. “It was presumably the same as that which Melanchthon prescribed for other Latin city schools.” The gymnasium took several different forms, with early versions having only four classes and later versions having nine or more.

The Wittenberg Latin school started with four classes but soon settled on six. Whereas U.S. schools number the grade levels consecutively, with first grade being lowest, followed by second grade, third grade, etc., classes in the gymnasium, as referred to in this book, are numbered in reverse and in Latin. The lowest grade is sixth (Sexta), then fifth (Quinta), then fourth (Quarta), then third (Tertia), then second (Secunda), and finally first (Prima), then on to university.

Also, the Wittenberg Latin school was, as the name signifies, a Latin school. Not only did it teach Latin, but classes also were conducted in Latin, teachers lectured in Latin, and students wrote in Latin, gave speeches in Latin, and discussed in Latin. Johann Sturm, the rector of the notable gymnasium in Strassburg, insisted that children should even play in Latin.

Far from being a dead language, Latin was the common language of Europe. Not only was it the language of the Church, but it also was the language of all the professions—law, medicine, government, and academia. In practice, it was the lingua franca of business and trade. Virtually all books on virtually all topics were written in Latin, including most of the available literary texts. Latin was the lingua franca of Europe. A young man who learned Latin from the Wittenberg school could attend the University of Paris without knowing French and take a position with the king of England without knowing English. Not that everyone knew Latin, of course, but middle-class families saw fluency in that language as a prerequisite for their sons’ success and social mobility. [Keep reading. . . ]

Photo: The International Lutheran Center at the Old Latin School by Tilman2007, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Classical Lutheran Education

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HIstory of the Wittenberg Latin School

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