Gymnasium (school)

Gymnasium (school), in German education, traditionally a high school emphasizing classical languages and literature. The term was derived from the gymnasiums of ancient Greece, where youths met for exercise, conversation, and discussion. (For gymnasium as a place for athletics or sports, see Gymnastics.)

German Gymnasien were first organized during the humanistic movement of the early part of the 16th century. Schools existing at that time were either owned by the Roman Catholic church or staffed by clergy. These schools were devoted to the study, in Latin, of the traditional liberal arts, which consisted of the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, astronomy, geometry, and music). The influence of the humanistic movement resulted in the emancipation of schools from the teaching of the church. Meanwhile the Protestant Reformation, which favored secularization and uniformity of education, had begun.

The first Protestant school of the humanistic type was established at Magdeburg in 1524. The first general system of schools that provided for Gymnasien was that of Saxony (Sachsen), initiated in 1528. The most influential Gymnasium, that of Strassburg (now Strasbourg, France), was placed under the leadership of the German educator Johannes Sturm in 1538. In 1540 the Jesuit order established the first of numerous schools that differed from Gymnasien only in being under religious control. Rivalry between the Gymnasien and Jesuit schools, together with a decline in emphasis on humanism, was responsible for a decline in character of the Gymnasien. Instruction became very formal, with little attention given to the meaningful content of the literature studied. Late in the 17th century, however, members of the Pietistic movement were largely responsible for the formation of new nonclassical schools, designed for students who did not intend to enter the learned professions. The Prussian monarchy exerted a stimulating influence on education throughout the 18th century, but not until late in the century did a new humanistic spirit become infused into the German Gymnasien, under the influence of such men as the philosophers Johann Gottfried von Herder and Immanuel Kant and the poets and dramatists Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Friedrich von Schiller. During the 19th century, the rapid rise in importance of mathematics and the natural sciences influenced the curriculum of these institutions, but the study of classical antiquity continued to be the chief object of gymnasial teaching.

Just before World War I the curriculum of the Gymnasium was extensively modernized. Latin remained the basic subject, but Greek, long compulsory, was put on an elective basis, and a considerable part of the language instruction was devoted to French. The study of German included instruction in mythology, grammar, rhetoric, poetics, and reading of the Nibelungenlied, a medieval German epic poem, the works of Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe, and German translations of the plays of William Shakespeare. Mathematical subjects included arithmetic, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and analytical geometry. Instruction in natural science included descriptive natural history, botany, zoology, anthropology, mineralogy, physics, astronomy, chemistry, and physical geography. The history curriculum was so organized that each period was covered twice, once in the lower school and again in the upper school. Geography, religion, singing, drawing, and gymnastics constituted the remainder of the curriculum.

After World War I and especially since World War II, the Gymnasien have become less important in the general structure of German education. In East Germany, which followed the Soviet emphasis on technology, they all but disappeared. In West Germany, the term Gymnasium was applied to high schools that concentrated on mathematics and science, with Latin an elective subject, as well as to the classical and modern semiclassical schools.

In October 1990, West and East Germany united and became the Federal Republic of Germany.